Chapter 221
HANNAH
I had been to the large market at Ice Stone a few times with either Willa or my mates. I remembered it as a very big bustling place where you could buy virtually everything you wanted.
Now it looked like a ghost town. Several of the shops were locked. From inside I could see the shop owners peering out fearfully. The normally clean floors were littered with an odd assortment of crushed fruit, flowers, vegetables, fish and several other things.
Some of the stalls with wooden fronts had been vandalized. Signs were either in the gutters or leaned drunkenly on them. The heel of my shoes crunched on some scattered coins someone had forgotten to pick up.
Close to one of the flower stalls, a girl was on her knees with her hands in the mess on the floor, trying to sort out good fruits from the ruined ones.
By the looks of it, there was nothing to salvage.
"Those assholes did this?" Willa hissed. "This looks terrible."
"It has to be them," I replied. "I don't think anyone else can cause such chaos here."
Willa and I, with the guards trailing behind us, walked over to a small knot of people clustered around. They were apparently traders, judging by the aprons most of them wore.
"Hello," I said and immediately felt several pairs of eyes fixed on me. "Sorry to bother you all. But the Alpha sent me and his daughter to find out what's going on."
Relief on all those faces.
"Isn't she that girl?" One of them asked. By that girl, I could tell they meant the white wolf.
"Certainly is." Someone answered from the back.
"What happened here?" Willa asked.
A woman, with an apron two sizes too small for her large bosom spoke up. "We were all doing our business as usual when they came-"
"Big rough-looking men," the short man beside her interrupted.
The woman nodded. "Yes. Most of them had these weird masks on. The ones that didn't have beard and hair so long and tangled-"
"Even their own mothers wouldn't recognize them," the man said again.
"Yes. Maybe they didn't want us to get a good look at their faces. No one paid any attention to them until they started buying stuff and wouldn't pay. They just went around picking up stuff and walking off, cool as you please. And then Sam here walked up to one that looked like he was the leader-"
"A big stinking ugly fellow-"
"Yes. The man hit Sam in the face."
The short man shook his head sadly. "Punched his lights out."
He shifted to the side a little and we got our first glimpse of Sam. He looked a little dazed, sitting on a stool in the middle of his sympathising colleagues, his hands dangling limply between his legs. An ugly blue black bruise covered one side of his fleshy face.
"That has got to hurt," Willa said, wincing.
Sam raised his head, looked at her with watery eyes and then just resumed his former attitude. A woman hurried forward and began to dab some ointment on the bruise.
"Where are these men now?" I asked. "Have they come back?"
The big woman answered, "Just disappeared with the things they took."
"Stole," the man corrected. "They stole a whole lot of things from here. Crazy little bastards."
Another of the traders said in a tone of outrage, "They asked me for some money. I asked them why the hell I should give them any money. They were supposed to be buying stuff. They said it was protection money. That if I didn't pay, they would wreck my store. I told them to go right ahead."
"I guess they did?" Willa said, looking around at the vandalized stores.
"You bet. Started smashing everything they could lay their hands on like a bunch of madmen." He snapped. "This pack used to be safe but that merger with Breakstone pack is causing all this chaos. I knew from the beginning something like this would happen. Just didn't think it would happen to me."
"I'm sorry about your loss," I told them. "I'll tell all this to the Alpha and I assure you it won't happen again."
With their thanks echoing in our ears, Willa and I bowed to them and walked away.
"What now?" she said.
"I think we have to try to get a description of these men." I said. "Those traders couldn't see their faces so maybe we have to try others."
"Maybe they were wearing masks because they live in Ice Stone and they don't want anyone to recognise them."
"It's possible," I allowed. "Or they could have come from somewhere else entirely. Maybe there were one or two of them that weren't wearing masks and didn't have bushy beards. Let's ask around. We might get lucky."
But we didn't. We trudged around the whole market, and the areas the Alpha had told me had reported similar issues but the story was the same.
The men had either worn masks or had a lot of facial that made them almost unrecognisable.
"I'm exhausted," I told Willa after several hours of tramping about.
"I was about to say the same thing," Willa said. She pointed to a snack shop nearby. "I'm hungry too. Let's get some snacks."
It was nice sitting in the cool shade of the shop. It was packed full of the other traders from the market sitting in groups to discuss what had just happened.
Willa and I were through with a bag of chips each when my phone rang.
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