Page 11 of Moody as a Minotaur

Gage closed his eyes and lifted his hands. Magic whipped through the room like a hurricane, and when it died down, the usual tingling presence of magical energy had disappeared. I gulped.

That was unsettling. Unnatural. I shivered.

I wanted to shift into my minotaur form just to make sure I still could.

“There is no need to worry. This is temporary,” Gagereassured us as he shed his demonic form and returned to his normal human-looking form. “You can unlock the door.”

I wished we could have kept the door locked. I didn’t want the hunters waltzing in here, although I understood why blocking their entrance would be bad. The last thing we wanted was to pique their curiosity.

“Okay. Let’s talk about these humans.” Van nodded, but I could see by the way he tugged at his collar he didn’t like being disconnected from the magic in the community any more than I did. “Now that we know they are here?—”

The pub door was flung open, interrupting him. Hayden, our pack alpha, charged into the room with his mate Ryley on his heels. His eyes flashed as his wolf-side surged forward.

“What the fuck is going on?” Hayden demanded.

Van caught my eye and nodded, encouraging me to speak.

“Uh… some people checked into my motel today,” I mumbled. “They look like hunters.”

Hayden held up his cellphone. “Why the fuck didn’t you let me know, Van? I checked my text messages. My damn text messages!” he shouted. And, yeah, everyone knew our alpha hated texting, or anything else related to technology. “Do you know what I found? Nothing. There was nothing there.”

Every person in the room tilted their heads to the side to expose their necks. No one liked when an alpha was angry.

“You were on a weekend away with your mate,” Van explained. “We didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Yeah, well, fuck that.” Hayden rubbed his chest. “My pack magic has been going wild for hours. I could feel everyone’s damn fear. And what the hell happened to our magic? It’s missing. What did the hunters do?”

“Gage cleared the magical energy from the air for the night so the hunters couldn’t sense it,” Van explained.

“Well, I don’t like it,” Hayden grumbled. “It’s making my skin itch.”

“Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Remember? Like you taught me.” Ryley rubbed Hayden’s back. “You can see they’re all safe. I told you we should have called.”

“How would I have known they were safe over the phone? I needed to see them.” A growl punctuated his words. He tugged his mate into his arms and glared at Van. “Tell me about the fucking hunters.”

“Nothing’s happened. For now, it’s a matter of watching what we do in public while they are here to make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t.” Van swung his gaze away from Hayden to the rest of the people gathered. “We already do this anyway, so nothing needs to change. We interact with humans every day. We all have human neighbors and friends. There’s no need to worry about these three. Carry on as usual.”

“But what if they do?” Simon, a cat shifter who usually changed into a house cat and hid when things got dicey, muttered. “What if they record something? Or realize we’re supes? Or trick us into revealing ourselves?”

He was huddled in the corner with his dragon shifter mate, Ogden. The dragon usually had a flirtatious smileand a personality as bright as the colors he wore, but I didn’t doubt for a minute he would kill without a second thought to protect his mate. And right now, he looked seconds away from razing the town to the ground to make sure Simon felt safe.

Simon was also the chief security guard at my motel. He should have clocked in at the Tarbeck already, but I’d given him permission to come to the debriefing. He needed to hear this information, especially since the chances of him interacting with the three suspected hunters were greater than most people who’d gathered here.

When I’d first hired him, more than a few people had asked why I would choose a man known as the local scaredy-cat to be my security guard. And, yeah, I could see how people might think him a strange choice. But, other than an incident a few months ago where he lost his shit on the inflatable tube man, he did okay.

Simon didn’t know I knew he was the one who shredded the tube man.

Parker had called me when it happened and described, in vivid detail, how a black house cat stalked and destroyed the tube man. He’d seen it all unfold from his second-floor apartment down the street and, apparently, it’d been one of the strangest things he’d ever seen. Of course, he had thought the animal’s relentless determination was a sign it had a brain disease like rabies. Parker had been ready to go out and trap the cat and haul him off to the veterinary clinic in Aspen Bay. But luckily, I’d talked him out of going after Simon. That would have been a disaster. What if Simon had shifted infront of him to get away? Or started talking while he was in his cat form?

The last thing we needed was for Parker to see under the Eternal Magic’s glamour, shielding humans from magic. Where would I get my morning coffee if he left town?

Okay. Fine. My coffee supply wasn’t my major worry. And everyone in Willow Lake probably knew that wasn’t my primary concern when it came to Parker. But whatever. It didn’t change the fact that Parker couldn’t find out about supes. He just couldn’t.

What was I talking about?

Oh, right. Simon.

When Simon told me about the tube man being destroyed the next morning, the poor guy was shaking like Jello in an earthquake and could hardly talk. I figured he’d already punished himself enough, so he didn’t need me shitting on him too. I had let the incident slide.