“Yeah.” He gulped from his glass as Vance and I moved closer. Everyone in the bar was listening now. Including Davey, who’d started drying glasses that weren’t even wet, for an excuse to stay near. “Smelled them on my run this morning. Several places, in fact. Always together. Overlapping, kind of.”
“Well, that seems definitive, if odd,” Vance said. “Strays traveling together.”
Making a stray is illegal—comes with an automatic death sentence—so most strays are made by accident and born into our world in trauma. It’s disorienting, to say the least. Isolating, usually. Those who survive learn to keep to themselves, at least until they find a safe haven, like the Fat Cat.
“Maybethey were together.” I shrugged. “Or maybe one was following the other, and that’s why the scents overlapped.”
Davey tossed the towel over her shoulder. “Cats can’t track by scent.”
“I am aware,” I said with a smile. My sister was very proud of every nugget of shifter knowledge she’d accumulated. “But we can stalk each other, just like a human would.” Only much more effectively, with hyper-functional vision and hearing. “We won’t know what’s going on until I get a chance to talk to them. Doug, you let me know if you smell them again, okay?”
“Will do, boss.”
The late afternoon lull set in, and I stared out the window as the sun began to set, shining on trees across the highway, heavy with vibrant fall leaves. I wiped down the bar and confirmed the week’s liquor order with Davey, pausing to nod to customer after customer as the afternoon crowd headed out the door one by one, most of them on their way to pick up a night shift at the elevator factory or one of two local correctional facilities.
Shifters makereallyeffective prison guards.
Every last one of them called out, “Bye, Davey!” as they pushed through the door, making the little bell overhead jingle.
The night crowd arrived in fits and starts, keeping Davey, Vance, and me busy pouring shots, pulling drafts, and serving burgers. I smiled as I listened to the regulars greeting one another. As I watched them share well-worn booths and sit together at the bar. It wasn’t like this, at first.
Back when Titus assigned me the northern zone to run, this place was more like the wild west: every man for himself. Strays naturally found it hard to trust, and asking them to fall in line under a woman, when most of them had never even met a female stray, seemed like a Herculean task. But Vance was with me from the beginning—actually, he was herebeforeI got the job—and Tucker, my other local enforcer, came along shortly after that. In the beginning, Titus lent me several of his men from the south zone of the territory, but I sent them back after less than a week when I realized that I needed the citizens of the north zone to trustme, not a series of temps who didn’t know the area. Who could never love it or its residents like I did.
It took a while. But eventually, the Fat Cat became known as a sanctuary for strays in the area. Slowly, a real community began to form.
Still, no community is without its challenges.
Tucker arrived just after eight, and he took over behind the bar so Vance could go on his break. “All’s well up north,” he assured me. Tucker had spent the past day and a half in Kentucky, checking in with our two northernmost enforcers, updating our citizen roster—an electronic census database—and making sure our guys up there had everything they needed.
All of that could be done over the phone, but I’d learned quickly that face-to-face interaction was the best way to gauge my enforcers’ states of mind. And to maintain a positive relationship with them.
That, and Tucker liked the occasional isolation of a long drive, after a couple of weeks tending bar and busting the odd head. It gave him a chance to think.
“They managed to track down the new guy?” I asked.
Tucker nodded, his short, light brown hair catching the glow from the overhead fixture. “Turns out he’s new to the area, but he was infected more than a decade ago, so he doesn’t need to be debriefed. I added him to the database and emailed you his particulars.”
“Thanks.” I hadn’t checked my email in a few hours. Because Ihatedemail. “I’ll take a look and forward it to Titus.”
“Everything quiet here?” Tucker asked.
“So far, so good. Though Doug Myers reported a couple of new scents. A pair of them, most likely.”
“That’s interesting. New guys usually wander into the territory alone.”
“Yeah. We’re keeping an eye out.”
The bell over the door rang again, and I looked up as Cam Senet shuffled toward the bar. Though he was one of our younger regulars, he was walking like an old man that night, frowning, kind of hunched over. Looked like he’d just been kicked in the gut.
“Cam? How’s it going?” I asked while Tucker moved to the other end of the bar to pull a couple of drafts.
“Been better.” Cam slid onto a bar stool in front of me, running one hand through short-cropped brown hair, briefly exposing an old scar snaking over his scalp. “Tracy dumped me.”
“Well, shit. I’m sorry.” I pulled a shot glass from beneath the counter and turned to my sister. “Davey—”
“On it.” She was already tapping on her phone, her blue eyes narrowed at the screen.
The song playing on the jukebox in the corner ended abruptly, and a shout echoed from the other side of the room. “Hey! I paid for—”
