A Pac of His Own (ch. 10)

Chapter Ten

The hardest thing Will had ever done was to have to go back to work after he'd been kidnapped by monster hunters, but he felt like it was imperative his life try and get back to some semblance of normal, even if there was no possible way that he could ignore the fact that he now had four women sharing his bed on the regular.

Each of the women was doing their best to get along with one another, but there had been a few stumbling blocks at the start, most notably between Lacey and Freya, both of whom seemed to want to out alpha the other, up until it started to get on Will's nerves, and he'd shouted at both to be quiet for just two goddamn minutes. That had startled all of them, and since then, the arguments had been far more reserved and self-contained, staying closer to fixated on a single point of discussion rather than one woman being placed higher or lower than the other.

He sort of liked having four different women all vying for his attention, all eager to spend time with him, to take care of him, to make sure he was happy and satisfied. And since he'd made a point to tell them to get along, they'd started working together, with each of them trading off who would take the lead in any given situation, although Lacey seemed to still be the self-elected spokesperson for the four of them.

Will had also been surprised by the fact that his thigh had completely healed up from whatever branding they'd attempted to inflict him with, and there wasn't so much as even a tiny scar on his flesh, although the region where they'd branded him was pinker, and the hair that had grown back seemed a little less dark than the rest of the hairs covering his flesh. It wasn't sore or even tender. He still could tell it had gone through some regeneration, but there was no remainder of the damage that had been there just a few short days earlier.

But, as it turned out, being a werewolf didn't come with a monthly stipend that meant he could quit his job at the diner, and while there were four other people in his house now with which to split the bills, it also meant that the consumption on a lot of things had gone up as well, like food, power and hot water.

That meant it was back to the diner during his downtime.

It was the first Friday in February, and the snow hadn't let up one bit in Colorado, still walls and sheets of it, and it meant that the diner was more popular than ever, simply because of how close to campus it was. The girls would often come in and keep him company during his breaks, but they also knew well enough not to bother him when the orders were frantic, or the crowd was packed, and for a Friday night, the diner was stuffed to the walls. As always, there seemed to be a majority of women, and despite the fact that it was practically Antarctica outside, the girls from campus basically stripped down into summer wear as soon as they got inside of the diner, which sort of made Will laugh, because each time the front door of the diner would open, a sudden gust of cold air would sweep through the room, and all the girls would shiver, their nipples perking up through whatever clothes they had on, like a forest of chicken thermometers blooming across the diner. He certainly wasn't the only man who'd noticed either, because every guy in the diner would look up whenever they heard that door opening, as if they just couldn't help themselves.

And it being Friday night, lots of people were stopping in either just before they went out for another round of drinking, or because they'd started drinking too early and needed to sober up before they ended up puking away their entire memory of the evening in question. Will didn't mind, because when it was busy, he could just focus on the work in front of him instead of considering anything else that might be going on with his life.

They were packed in six to a booth, every single seat at the breakfast bar with one person on it, and the tables were limited by the number of chairs the diner could hold, because there wasn't a spare open space in the place. In fact, even the waiting area didn't have any excess space in it, and the guy running the counter was now just turning people away when they walked in the door, telling them it was going to be at least a half an hour wait, and they didn't even have space to sit in the waiting area, which meant people were starting to turn away. Will was starting to wonder if the guy who owned the diner would give Will a raise, because the place was never anywhere near as packed when he wasn't working there. Not that he figured the diner's owner would attribute the success to Will's cooking.

But it was on that Friday night (technically Saturday morning) when he noticed something odd happening, as at around 3:30, the population of the diner started to die down extremely quickly. It wasn't the typical end-of-night trickle, but almost like an orderly procession, each booth starting from the back, getting their check, paying their tab, and leaving. And each of them was leaving a 23% tip, the math of which they were doing ridiculously quickly, and in their heads, which might have been the strangest part of the entire exodus. It was turning into quite the profitable evening.

Odd, however, that

nobody

was coming in to replace them, though. Usually even on the shittiest winter nights, there were a few people milling about the diner through all the overnight shift into the morning shift. Yet, as people left, the diner simply became emptier and emptier, until Will and Billy were the only two people hanging around, and there weren't any customers at all to speak of.

"I don't like this, Will," Billy said to him, moving over to peer out one of the windows. "Sure, it's still snowing out there, but I can't remember a point since you started working here that the place has been

completely

without customers. Don't feel natural. Don't feel right."

"You're superstitious, Billy," Will laughed. "Besides, you can turn on the television now and watch whatever shitty thing you want to on Netflix, at least until a customer comes into the place. What's it going to be? The Circle?"

"They're between seasons. But a new season of Love Is Blind just dropped, so I'll probably put that on."

"Seriously? Again with that garbage?"

"Look, Will," Billy said, stretching his arms over his head. "I know you're literally turning away pussy with a pitchfork these days, but most of us, we don't get that sort of level of attention from even the Z-lister college coeds. We have to hope that someone can look past our flabby, doughy, slightly less than pretty exterior, and fall for the inner gem of a soul we hide beyond it."

"Billy, the last girl who showed some interest in you, you asked her if she'd, and I quote, 'show you her cans behind the dumpster.'"

"I said

please

."

"Yeah, not exactly romance and poetry, is it, Billy?"

Billy shrugged. "Not really my speed, though, is it, Will? I need a girl who's too upfront for her own good, too smart to get caught up in the subtle charades of masculine/feminine power struggles, able to see beyond the sort of petty squabbles about who promised what to whom and down to the core, inherent defining characteristics that make us...

us

."

"So, basically, someone who buys your bullshit hook, line and sinker, without pause or reservation?"

"The whole fucking package," Billy laughed, nodding. "If she sees through even a little bit of it, I'm totally fucked."

"Yeah, well, good luck with that, Billy," Will said as he started to take advantage of the empty diner to clean the place up a little bit, Billy helping over near the entrance even as he put on the start of the new season of 'Love Is Blind.' Normally they had to wait until just before five in the morning to do a cleaning pass, right after the college kids had crashed and just before the morning surge of long-haul truckers passing through on their way from point A to point B. But all of the people who'd tipped a high amount, they'd

also

cleaned their own tables before they left. They'd basically done almost all the work of bussing their own tables, while they were at it. Everything was in neat, organized piles.

It was creepy.

Still, it made it very easy to get the tables all cleaned up, and have the diner back into perfect shape again, or as good as they could get it, before they started watching television, Will reluctantly drawn in by the lure of junk food television.

About twenty minutes later, they were hip deep in the middle of an episode when the little bell on the door rang, and a young woman in her early twenties with one of the biggest shelves of cleavage Will had ever seen walked into the place. She was dressed in all black, a black corset, a black leather jacket over it, black leather hot pants with black fishnet stockings jutting out from it. Her skin was the sort of pale white that almost looked like untouched paper. Her hair was one of only two contrasts, a sort of blood wine red, dark and crimson, a rose in winter, surrounded by snow of her flesh. The other were her painted lips, a vibrant shade of lustrous scarlet, the exact shade to evoke thoughts of love and lust in nearly any man or woman. Her eyes were lined with heavy dark makeup, coal coloring over her cheeks. It was a look Will had heard described as goth more than once.

"You want a table or..." Will trailed off, as he watched the icy-skinned girl start to wander around the diner, not stopping at any one table, mostly checking the windows, looking under the tables, and checking the entrances and exits.

"Just two ways in and out?" she asked him, her voice lilting with a hint of Irish brogue in it.

"Three," Will said. "Front door, side fire exit, and there's a door and loading bay out back. Why do you ask?"

"Doing my job, kid," she said, as she peeked her head into the back, not actually going in but looking into the kitchen before she headed back to the front door, opening it, gesturing at someone outside to come on in.

The man who walked in next looked like he would've fit in at home on campus in any one of the professor's chambers. He was a short man dressed in a brown tweed suit, tan fabric in various earth tones, with black loafers, and a black vest on beneath the tan sport jacket, with a crimson-colored tie tucked into it as the only real stripe of color on the man's attire. His hair was jet black, but thinning on top, although it also looked like he was in need of a haircut. He had a pair of silver circular glasses over his eyes, and Will could see they were bifocals, one level for far distances and a second for reading, along the bottom portion of the glasses. The man wasn't strong or muscular, but a little portly, swollen around the midsection, clearly the result of too much fine dining and repeated liquor evenings. And yet, there was something dangerous and menacing about the man, like if he wanted to, he could burn the entire diner down without so much as lifting a finger. The strangest part of the man's entrance, however, was that the cold air hadn't come rushing in when he had, and the door had opened and closed without so much as the slightest shift in temperature.

"Ah, Colorado," the man said with amusement in his voice. "It's been so long since I've been back, I'm certain I've been entirely forgotten. You," he said, glancing at Billy, who was several years Will's senior. "Have you ever heard of a Professor Tom Osman?"

"Cannot say that I have, sir."

The man looked a touch crestfallen but shrugged it off within a moment or two. "No matter, I suppose. Time offers no favors for even the strongest and mightiest of us all. I'm not particularly concerned with such matters." He turned his attention over to Will, and suddenly Will felt as though whatever newfound confidence he'd recently gained was wilting away. "You are William Bowland, are you not?"

Will had never wanted to lie more in his entire life than in that moment, but he chose to tell the truth instead. "Yes, sir. Will, sir." He wasn't sure what to do, to stand, to sit, to offer the man a cup of coffee, and the nervousness must've shown on his face, because the man chuckled a little bit.

"Relax, Will," the man said, a coy smile upon his own lips. "If I'd have wanted you dead, Kelly here would've slit your throat before you'd ever laid eyes on either of us. No no, I'm here for something a great deal more complicated - an apology and a bit of an explanation. Perhaps we can sit and talk for a bit while your compatriot watches his television show and mine minds the doors?" He gestured towards the tables. "I assure you, there won't be anyone coming into the place while I'm here. I want our conversation to go undisturbed."

Will poured two cups of coffee and cut two slices of French Silk pie off the pie in the cooler counter, then stepped behind the counter, putting all four things on a tray, carrying it over to one of the booths, unloading them before taking the tray back over to the counter as the man took a seat at the booth, grabbing a cream container, pouring it into the coffee. "Don't like it black, huh?"

The man grinned, offering a little shrug. "I'm inconsistent. I try it different ways at different times and places. I'm glad to see you made yourself an offering matching mine. I'm already putting you out a bit by taking over the diner for an hour, but I figured our conversation was best had without prying eyes and ears."

"You still haven't even told me your name."

"Ah yes, let me start there. My name is Jonas Silversmith, although I am also known by the title of Red Joker, and sometimes less formally as the Dragonborn," he said, leaning back in his booth. "I am the one that people in our particular community call to, shall we say,

clean up messes

. And rather a doozy seems to have fallen into my lap out here in Colorado, through no fault of your own, I might add, which is part of the reason I told you that you did not need to worry."

"Oh, I'm guessing this is about the Halvorsens, that hunter family that kidnapped me and tortured me," Will said, taking a sip from his coffee. "Yeah, not exactly my finest day there. I'm guessing you know I didn't do the things they were accusing me of?"

"Will, a toddler with a My First Detective kit could've told them you didn't do it," Jonas sighed. "It wasn't like it was a massively complicated procedure. Hell, you were on

video

here at the

diner

during multiple instances of the crime in question. They might as well have been accusing you of assassinating John F. Kennedy."

"I didn't do that either," Will chuckled. "I think I've got an airtight alibi too, on account of me not having been born yet."

"Seems pretty watertight, so we'll concentrate our investigations on that one elsewhere," Jonas smirked. "No, it's been decided that since you weren't raised among your kin, someone from the Organization would need to step in and offer you a bit of personalized guidance, as well as an apology for the behavior the Halvorsens, who were, as you can imagine, completely out of bounds with their attack on you, since you were innocent."

"Wait, you mean if I

had

done anything...?"

"That's what I've come to talk to you about, Will," Jonas said. "It's a lot of ground to cover in a short period of time, but you deserve to be on the same level playing field as everyone else. So I'm here to tell you a little bit about what you can and can't do. Now, to start with, all of this is covered by something called the Predator Accords. According to the Predator Accords, as a werewolf, you are allowed to kill one criminal per season, should you wish, be they human or non. You may be asked to provide proof of the person's criminal activity, or you may not, but it's important to have it ready should your local Hunt Captain ask for it."

"Hunt Captain?"

"We'll get to him in a minute. Let me go over the broadstrokes first."

"Sure, okay."

"If you don't want to go hunting, that's okay! That's perfectly fine. Many of your kind are happy to just live quiet little lives without anyone knowing what they are," Jonas said, opening a sugar packet, pouring it into his coffee. "You wouldn't be alone in that pursuit. And not just werewolves, but vampires, shades, changelings... Many of the supernatural just want to be left alone and not hunt, but at the end of the day, anything from our world that isn't human is, at the end of the day, a predator, and is therefore ruled by the Accords."

"So, wait, there are vampires who are allowed to hunt and kill humans right here in Colorado?"

"There are," Jonas told him. "They mostly feed from prisons or from gang members. In fact, more than a few of them work in tandem with law enforcement, to solve particular problems that they just aren't equipped to handle on their own. If a particular criminal is just too difficult or untouchable, sometimes they'll even request someone from our side come in and hunt them. It can prove quite profitable, but they're certainly the more challenging hunts. If you felt the need to kill raging high within you, I'd simply contact your Captain and go and kill a local drug dealer or pimp, something small and manageable, an easy enough death to cover up. I tell you this as a favor, Will. All of us are sometimes subject to the needs of our more primal sides, and there is no shame in that. Anyway, to speak to your earlier point, a vampire can't help their nature any more than you or I can - they were born into this life and need to feed like anyone else."

"Wait, that stuff about the only way to become a vampire is to be bitten by one isn't true?"

Jonas sighed, shaking his head. "You know, if I'd have known Stoker was going to be such a pain in the ass, I'd have lopped his head off not long after Sir Henry Irving introduced me to him in the West End. No, vampirism can't be transmitted by a vampire's bite. They're born, live and die like any other creature on this planet, and that means they breed like any other paranormal creature. Vampirism can be a recessive trait, however, much like lycanthropy, which is why we sometimes get cases like yours, where supernatural creatures grow up outside of their own kind. In your case, it's more that your father's a pain in the ass, but I suppose he's done decent enough work in keeping the hunters from getting too far out of control. He and your mother were the Romeo & Juliet story that forced both the human hunters and the midwestern lycanthropes to the peace table, to agree to ratify the Predator Accords for the Central Northern American region, which had been a particularly difficult place to find common ground, until they spoke up."

"So if I'd done whatever they'd claimed I'd done, the Halvorsens could've done whatever they wanted to me?"

"They could've killed you, certainly," Jonas said, taking a fragment of the pie away from the main piece with his fork. "The humans deserve to live in peace just as much as we do, don't you agree?"

"Well, sure, but—"

"That's why the Predator Accords exist. They establish who can hunt and who can be hunted and under what specific conditions those hunts can take place," Jonas said before pushing the pie into his face. "This truly is marvelous. Anyway, what the Halvorsens did simply isn't cricket, as the expression goes, and as such, they're being handled."

"Hang on," Will said. "One of them, Freya Halvorsen, is with me now, so she shouldn't be—"

Jonas chuckled, shaking his head a little. "Don't insult me by thinking I haven't done my homework, young man. I know she helped your fledgling pack rescue you. She's also the one who reported the incident to the local human Hunt Captain, who elevated it up to me. Of course she's not going to be punished. She's been cleared of her involvement in their hunt of you, although I can't say the same for the other two. Odin's going to be held for full trial, and they're still trying to determine what level of malice the younger one, Lief, is going to be held accountable for."