“Wanderers? As in wandering wolves?”
Amil nodded. “Due to the demographic of Dingly Heath, we get a lot of older wolves wandering off from their homes. They shift and get confused, especially if they’re ill. It’s become a real issue recently because they keep going deeper into the woods. Isla’s asked HQ for more assistance at night because we keep finding them cold and exhausted the next morning.”
“Right,” Taylor replied, slouching back in the uncomfortable seat of the Vauxhall Astra.
Amil looked him up and down. “Seat belt,” he said, clicking his own into place.
A smirk tugged at the corner of Taylor’s mouth. “You’re very uppity, aren’t you? I can see why you pissed the wrong person off.”
Amil slammed the car into reverse so fast Taylor nearly ended up in the footwell.
Okay… sore subject.
He put his seat belt on, not because of Amil’s pouty little face, but because he was beginning to suspect he might actually be launched through the windscreen if he didn’t.
“Something you need to understand,” Amil said, turning out of the police station and onto the main stretch through the tiny town, “is that you need to mind your own business. Just come to work and do your job. I am not your friend, I have no interest in being your friend, and I swear to God, if you cause any problems for the sergeant, I will make your life a living hell.”
Taylor scoffed. “You seemed pretty interested earlier. Got the hots for sargie or something?”
Amil slammed on the brakes, making Taylor jolt forward with such force that the seat belt almost cheese-wired his throat.
“Fuck’s sake!” Taylor shouted, slapping the dashboard. “Are you actually a psychopath?”
“There’s a hedgehog,” Amil said quietly.
“What?” Taylor replied, giving the omega an incredulous look.
“There’s a hedgehog in the road. And if I wanted to kill you, I’d have undone your seat belt first.”
Taylor leant forward and looked out of the window. True enough, there was a tiny, spiky hedgehog crossing the road, right in front of a sign that read Hedgehogs Crossing.
“Oh,” he said, rubbing his neck.
Taylor slid out of the car and traipsed over to it. “Come on, little guy,” he said, scooping it up and placing it in a bush on the side of the road. It looked back at him, sniffed, then scamperedoff towards a little green hut that had rolled-up newspapers and hay sticking out of it. It had a tiny sign that read Hedgehog Hotel tacked to the top and what looked like a bowl of cat food under a tea towel awning.
Taylor pressed his lips together. Cute. Fuckingcute.
Amil gave him a wary look as he got back into the car.
“That your idea?” Taylor said, clicking his seat belt into place.
Amil shook his head. “Isla—I mean, the sergeant set them up. There’s a few around the town. She… she really likes wildlife.”
“Uh-huh,” Taylor said, trying not to smile. “And you like that.”
Amil bristled and began driving again. “Well, I’m not just going to run them all over, am I?”
The omega’s hostility was doing something funny to Taylor’s brain. Like he just wanted to keep poking andpokinguntil Amil erupted into a flaming ball of rage. He should stop. He should definitely stop, because pushing people’s buttons like that had never earned him any friends.
“Yeah, well…” he said, turning his gaze out of the window. “I guess hedgehog genocide wouldn’t be a good look for the place.”
Amil’s tour of Dingly Heath was perfunctory at best, and he pointed out the areas of interest with all the enthusiasm of an elephant forced to jump through hoops. They’d reached some sort of high street and had to drive extra slowly to avoid startling the locals as they drifted absentmindedly in and out of the road.
“Shop over there,” Amil said, jabbing a thumb towards a supermarket. It had crates and old tractor equipment outside, modified into vegetable troughs and storage bins. It looked like it was trying to be some sort of farmers’ market, but the adverts for compression socks and incontinence pads were ruining the look quite a bit.
“Pharmacist, in case you couldn’t tell.” Amil sighed, pointing to an old-fashioned shopfront that had massive glass jars filled with coloured liquid in the window. “We’ll be going there a lot.”
There was a long queue that went out of the door and ended at the bus stop some fifty metres down the road. It made Taylor shiver, because he’d been forced to go on a school trip to a replica Victorian era village when he was a kid, and he may or may not have tried to drink the water from the display. Needless to say, the shits he’d endured the following day had been traumatising.
