Warnings: Graphic violence, Blood and Injuries, Death
Summary: South of France, May 1767. A large beast has been terrorizing the province of Gévaudan for nearly three years, preying on lone boys and girls tending their livestock. The press, idle since the end of the Seven Years’ War, loses itself in conjecture based on the witnesses’ descriptions. What is to blame? A pack of man-eating wolves, a lion, a hyena escaped from a zoo…?
Exasperated by the creature’s growing streak of victims and refusal to die, Louis XV dispatches Lexa Woods to the area. After all, who better than a monster hunter to kill a beast that bullets fail to slow down?
A chilly gust of October wind found its way through the open door, making several of the people assembled at the inn shiver. The temperatures had dropped nearly ten degrees since the week before, and more than one had yet to retrieve their warmer clothes from the back of their cabinets and drawers.
Lexa pushed away a lock of her hair that had been displaced in the process and refocused her attention on her soup and the idle conversations taking place around her.
All the regular patrons knew who she was by then, and after weeks of seeing her at the inn or in the fields, they had almost forgotten her presence. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said about all the beaters gathered for the large beat scheduled the next day. Most eyed her with suspicion and whispered about her behind her back—when they bothered to be discreet.
“Would you like anything else?” Monty asked as he passed by her table. “Some cider perhaps?”
“I’ll have a beer. Thank you,” she replied with a smile. He and Harper were good people. In another life, one where she wasn’t a monster hunter and they didn’t have an inn to run and a child to raise, they could have been friends.
Monty nodded and headed back to the counter, leaving Lexa to her thoughts. And to her solitude. She ought to have been used to it by then. A life spent chasing monsters hardly left time for relationships, and the odd woman who could have coped with Lexa’s extraordinary existence would have walked with a target on her back. Lexa had long accepted the cost of the life she had chosen for herself. Yet, on occasion, even the most battle-hardened heart experienced loneliness.
