Town was quieter, late nights. The little bar was warm-looking, open door and a lot of music. Another night, Sid would make for a chair at the bar and a drink poured by people who were friendly because they lived in a small town, instead of just for tips. But it was getting close to Halloween, and drinking took a well-honed instinct and blunted it as deliberate as running a steel blade over wood. Sid liked her odds plenty, there were pockets in her jacket and pockets in her jeans - ritual salt in a plastic baggie, a wicked-looking knife with a hasp wrapped in string, even two silver bullets wrapped in paper and sewn into the corner of the bottom of her jacket. That shit, she didn't carry open. Silver bullets in a town that had wolves was like getting caught the wrong side of gang lines, stupid. But going without wasn't an option. Only needed a mirror for a reminder why not. Coming back to Halloween, sport, because Sid didn't linger real long on the messed up knot of scar-tissue that lined along her carotid, or the twisted lines of more of the same on her left forearm.
A lot of people felt a lot of things about Halloween. Filled the stores, acid-orange and spangled black, cut-outs to stick in windows. Witches, wolves, plastic fangs with painted blood. Almost made the side of the world that lived under dark, warm and fuzzy. Almost. Sid didn't think a lot about ways to make all the predators with teeth out late anything other than what they were. It wasn't that time of month, but Halloween was cheap PR and you could lose a real thing in a really good imitation. She wasn't looking, OK? She had the keys to the hunting, fishing store jammed in her back pocket and the smell of it still in her nostrils, like fresh sawdust and mothballs. Wasn't looking, didn't wanna see.
She was after coffee instead, the little shop jammed in under the newspaper, the one that smelled like hipster sweat and brewed java. Last time she'd done a circuit through Repose - long time, way past due - there wasn't a coffee stop. This one was jammed, heavy enough to make for a wait and crammed tables even with the night thick and dark outside enough to make anybody who had an actual home think about going back to it. Sid didn't sleep a lot this side of midnight, family habits.
She sat, at a little table kitty-corner to the window with her back against the wall until she felt it. Not hipster sweat, just the vague tweak in the back of her skull like a migraine saluting on its way in that meant someone in here wasn't cheap PR and plastic fangs but something that actually went spook in the night. Sid shrugged out of her jacket, let it sag against the back of her chair and the thick ropey scar at her throat visible in the low-buttoned henley underneath - that is, if you weren't looking at her tits.
Looked up, deliberate once her coffee cup was in hand. The pulse-beat was hard to ignore but it was like an alcoholic in AA; you didn't have to act on it. Looked up to blue hair. "You sitting?" There was only one free chair and it was opposite Sid at the table, and she nudged it out with one boot.
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