“Where is he today?”
“Says he has to meet with someone.” Tegan’s snowman began to take shape. Less like a three-ball snowman, more like a lump that might be a dragon. “I wanted to see his dragon form, but he really doesn’t like transforming into it. He has a flight license, though. We’ve had the sex and everything, but that’s the one thing he’s uncomfortable revealing.”
“Give him some time. Everyone’s got their little problems.” Emory’s sage expression fell and she grinned wickedly. “So, did I choose well or not? You like him, don’t you?”
Flushing a sudden crimson, Tegan lobbed what would have been a snow dragon at her friend, and missed entirely. “Look, he’s… okay, okay? I’m still waiting for the mass murderer to show up, but he doesn’t seem to have any tendencies that way. And if he did, I wouldn’t know, because I don’t even know what his stupid dragon form looks like.”
“Wow, you’re super hung-up over this. Just ask him if it’s bothering you that much. Issue solved. No need to make a big deal out of it.”
“He finds ways to shift the subject.”
“Just try harder. Be plain. Don’t pussyfoot around the subject. Whack him in the face with it until he’s screaming.”
“Thanks for that vivid description, Emory.” Tegan lobbed another chunk of powdery snow at Emory. This time it hit her knee.
“You’re getting better at those. Four more shots until you hit my face.”
“I have to check on my plants. They’re not having fun in the weather. I’d invest in those basement areas where you have all the plants being heated and backlit with UV so they grow. Better than relying on the weather being nice all around…”
Emory joined Tegan on her inspection of the allotment, and it took them about twenty minutes to reach it. To Tegan’s dismay, since the last time she’d checked, her grapes, which should have been fruiting by now, were gone. As if someone had walked into the allotment and plucked everything. In fact… she quickly inspected every plant. Hops—crushed, gone. Barley, stripped. Grapes plucked. Junipers vanished. Everything was affected.
“Fuck!” she bellowed the word, full of frustration, rage. “Someone’s been in my fucking garden. I was here two days ago, and everything was fine.”
“Shit…” Emory traced over the damage as well. “Why? Who’d do that in this town?”
Tegan desperately tried looking for something to salvage out of the ruins, something she could grow, but there was nothing viable. The only batches she had for her own drinks were already back in the house, while she waited for her ethanol to distill, her apples to ferment.
Damn it all to hell.
“Probably some of the idiot teenagers, thinking they’re being cool by wrecking other people’s hard work,” Emory said. “I’ll listen out, see if anyone’s boasting.”
Tegan sighed, but what else could she do at this point? The sheriff’s department probably wouldn’t put too much effort into tracking the vandalism. She cleared out the ruined plants, planning to visit the garden center at some point to get a new batch. And possibly install some cameras to watch over the patch as well. Maybe one of those fake gnome cameras or something.
Hard to feel particularly cheerful after that. It was… annoying. But she’d find a way to bounce back, preferably after binging some movies in the evening.
Just as she finished clearing away the last of the plants, a stranger passed the allotment and paused, looking at them for a moment. “Hey, excuse me, ladies, but you’ve been having trouble with the garden?”
Tegan examined the stranger, who had an intense, green-eyed gaze. “Yeah. Vandalism. You?”
“Same, same,” he drawled, waving vaguely to the left. “I was growing a whole bunch of tomatoes, and they’re all plucked. Some bastard making the rounds.” He spat on the ground, and Emory folded her arms, regarding him with interest.
“I haven’t seen you around before,” she said. “And I know pretty much everybody in this town.”
“Oh, I’m not in the town,” he said. “I live at Woodfort. Few miles off. But they don’t have good land for farming, and renting allotments here is real cheap, so…”
“Yeah. Makes sense.”
“Wait until I find the bastards.” He smiled thinly. “I’m Brian, by the way.”
Tegan and Emory introduced their names, and Emory seemed way too interested in this Brian. He was ridiculously handsome, for sure. The kind of handsome that had a wildness about it, and made her highly suspect that he was of the shifter quality. She stared at him harder, curious. If he was a shifter, what would he be doing with an allotment a few miles away?
Though obviously she shouldn’t be judging. Maybe this was just something they liked to do. Brian talked with them a little longer, but there was nothing much more for them all to say to one another. Emory, however, managed to glean a phone number from him at the end of it all.
Some positive things to come out of the destruction, Tegan supposed. Still, something about Brian looked familiar. Something in the way of his jaw structure, the eyes… she wondered if he was a dragon shifter, like Kieran.
Back home, Kieran had ordered some pizza, which they both happily munched through, while she recommended an old movie to him. Some rousing old western classic with lots of dramatic shootouts, and men staring with hard eyes into the distance.
“The old ones are the best,” Kieran said. “You made do with what you had back then, so there’s a lot more talent, I think.” Both of them picked through their sticky pizzas, and when Tegan brought up the plant incident after the movie, and the stranger that suffered the same problem, Kieran became… tense.
“What did the person say his name was?”
“Brian,” Tegan replied. “He didn’t look like a Brian to me, but that’s what he said. Someone smashed all his tomatoes.”
“What did Brian look like?”
“That’s the funny thing. He looked a little like you, so I guess he was probably a shifter. I mean, I didn’t ask, but there was something about him that made me think he wasn’t completely human.”
Kieran muttered something under his breath, before taking the empty pizza boxes and stacking them in the trash.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s…” He paused, chewing his bottom lip. “No, that’s a lie. It might be something.”
Intrigued, Tegan approached him to hear his every word better, grabbing lemonade from the fridge. “What is it?”
He stared at some point on the floor and said, “Remember when I told you that my family aren’t happy about me… gallivanting with humans and human places, rather than staying at home and being a good little dragon?”
“Vaguely.” She recalled the session, searched her memories for all of it. “You mentioned something about an older brother? Weird father?”
He tapped his foot in an anxious habit. “There’s a chance you may have met my brother. Who is not called Brian, but Broxar.”
“Knew the name didn’t suit him,” Tegan muttered. “You’re sure? Why would he even be here?”