Druids had long held the responsibility of governing the supernatural community in both the U.S and Europe. They guarded the secrets of their own race quite obsessively from the outside world. This, I guessed, was why they felt they had to help keep the rest of us hidden. Help was the wrong word. That made it sound as though any of us had a choice in the matter. We didn’t.

The staying hidden from the outside world part had never been a problem for me. The part where they made us submit all of our personal information into their infamous rosters, well, that part had never sat well with me. We had been scamming their system for as long as I could remember, sometimes more effectively than others. My history with the druids was long, sordid, tempestuous, complicated, and ugly. And that was putting it mildly.

Having two druids walk into my shop was a disaster no matter how you looked at it. The fact that I happened to recognize these two in particular was much worse than just bad. It was an outright cluster-fuck. And, of course, it didn’t help that they both just happened to hate my guts. My palms itched badly. My hands just ached to hold a weapon at that moment.  I liked guns. Okay, I loved guns. They just felt right in my hands, the heavy weight of infinite comfort to me. Even the weight of one in a holster at my hip, back, or ankle just felt good to me. And firing one. Mmm, I loved that, too. The recoil was like an old friend. But they weren’t my favorite.

If it had been socially acceptable, or more importantly, legal, I would have had a two-handed axe strapped to my back, or even a two-handed sword. Ahh, but an axe was my favorite. A sword could behead, but an axe was made for it. And chances were, if I needed a weapon to kill something, that something needed to lose it’s head in order to die. I had a gun at my ankle, but with two angry druids invading my domain, what I longed for was an axe. I had one somewhat close by. It was strapped to the bottom of my desk, because paranoia could be called a religion to some of us. But going for it was really just a wistful fancy at this point. I couldn’t kill these druids. One did not kill a druid if one wanted to stay off the radar. A druid’s death would not go unnoticed or unexplored. And it would never go unavenged. Even those at the very bottom of the druid food chain were protected. It was a fact that if you were born supernatural, in any way, you wanted to be born druid. I had wished for the privilege more than once, even though I hated most of them.

I couldn’t decide if it was good or bad that they seemed to be as surprised to see me as I was to see them. One thing was for certain. It was damned unlucky.

Michael was the first to recover, cursing fluently. He was relatively short for a druid, no more than six feet tall. His coarse, light-brown hair was cut into a harsh buzz-cut, as though he wanted to fuss with it as little as possible. He pushed black shades to the top of his head, pinning me with his angry dark-brown eyes.

The other one, Mav, didn’t say a word. He just turned, punching a hole into the nearest wall. I was tempted to tell him he’d have to pay for that, but I really didn’t want to bother.

Mav was a few inches taller than his partner, but shared the same coloring. I seemed to recall that they were distant cousins.

“We could kill her now. We could just bury her in the desert,” Mav said to Michael, his back still to me. “No one ever has to know. We could just eliminate this can of worms, once and for all.”

I flashed a half-sneer at Michael, who’d never taken his malevolent gaze off of my face. “I’d love to see you try,” I told them both. I knew they’d never kill me. That kind of disobedience just didn’t happen in the druid world. And there was an order from higher up that I was not to be killed. Not to mention the little detail that they had no clue in the world how to actually get the deed accomplished. Taking all of that into consideration, I suddenly had an idea. Admittedly, it was not a great idea, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. Actually, the more I worked out the details in my head, I realized that it was a borderline terrible idea, but I was certain it would buy me some time. And time was what I needed. I would be the first to admit that I was a shameless runner, though even I knew that was nothing to be proud of. But running like a coward meant that I had developed some pretty extensive evasive skills over the years. I could work wonders with a head start. And no one knew better than I did that sometimes a head start had a price.

Michael was shaking his head at me slowly. “No, we won’t kill you-“ he began, but Mav interrupted him.

“Do you have any idea what he was like when you left?” Mav asked me, his eyes scary. “He was a mad thing for months. Did you hear what he did in the arena? No one even knew he had that in him. You made him into that! And when he gave up looking for you, he turned bitter, and we all suffered. We all had to pay because of your f**king games!” His voice was a growl by the end. I was taken aback when I saw that his eyes weren’t human any longer. I had always thought that Mav’s powers were limited to far below the level of the beastcall. “Are you even sorry for what you did?” he asked. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d given me a better opening than I could have maneuvered for myself. That was helpful.

I shrugged, giving him a pointedly bored look. “He got over it,” I told him. “I hear he’s doing more than fine. You’ve never had a younger Arch-“

Before I could finish, he was across the room, backhanding me. The blow knocked me off my feet. “Whore!” His voice was nearly a howl.

It took a lot more self-control than I cared to admit not to retaliate to both the blow and the word, but I made myself at least appear calm. “I hear he’s interviewing applicants to replace me nightly,” I dared to say, standing up to face him again. I saw the punch coming, and braced myself. The back of my head hit the wall at the back of the room. I saw stars.