Alice took a thin, shaky breath but didn’t move.
“What do they want?” she asked.
One of the Wolves opened its mouth. Lund turned to glare at it. “Shut up. Let me handle this.” She stepped forward, both hands held up in a placating, palms-out gesture. “Mr. Hollie has some stolen property. They just want it back. Like I said, think of them as the FBI. They just have a very… specific sort of criminal to chase.”
“I’m not a criminal,” Dylan said.
Lund glanced at him. “Your friend is,” she said. “Somerset North. I didn’t know half the things he was guilty of until my new associates here told me. I thought I knew everything, but it turns out he’d been keeping me in the dark. You too, I’m sure. But all Mr. Hollie has to do is give us what he took.”
She held her hand out expectantly.
“Go to hell,” Dylan told her.
She frowned at him. “Don’t make this difficult,” she asked. It sounded genuine. “No one has to get hurt today.”
One of the Wolves turned his head to look at her. The head cock was disconcertingly dog-like.
“We never said that,” he said, his voice mildly inquisitive.
“What?” Lund said.
“That would be a lie,” the Wolf explained as he stepped forward. “We don’t lie.”
Lund looked uncertain all of a sudden. “No,” she said. “Wait. That’s not what we agreed. You didn’t tell me that people were going to get hurt.”
The Wolf shrugged. “We assumed you knew.”
While they argued, Dylan nudged Alice’s foot with his boot. “When I run,” he said quietly, “follow me.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is some sort of joke or… or prank video. Something.”
Dylan grimaced. “Just run,” he said.
He was about to do just that when Lund suddenly stepped forward and put herself between them and the Wolves. She held one hand up to the Wolves to ward them off.
“Just let me talk to them,” she said. “I can make them understand.”
The Wolves stared at her and then glanced at each other.
“No,” the leader said.
Lund gawped at it for a second.
“That… this wasn’t the deal,” Lund stammered.
“It was,” the Wolf said.
Lund nodded. “I see. You aren’t the Otherworld’s FBI, are you?”
“We don’t know what that is.”
Lund took a deep breath and turned to pull an apologetic face at Dylan. “I can’t help you,” she said. “So… run!”
She pulled her gun and swung around to cover the Wolves. Dylan grabbed Alice’s arm and bolted. There was a restroom with a window in the back of the store. Dylan had noticed it when he’d arrived. It had been cracked open to let out the smell of shit and the smoke from the cigarette Verne had snuck.
Dylan’s soles squeaked on the tile floor as he dodged around the stands of sweets and chips. Alice lagged behind, a dead weight at the end of his arm.
“We can’t just leave her,” she protested. “They were… they weren’t people…”
