Upon further reflection, I was sinfully wrong to assume the hats would go Cora, Lydia, Allison. Clearly it would be Cora, Allison, Lydia.
The sharp click of her heels was enough to strike fear into the heart of any man.
Unfortunately, it would have no such effect on her girlfriends.
“Well?” Lydia said, hands on her hips, arriving at the holding cell. “What do you have to say for yourselves? Give me a single reason why I should post your bail.” She folded her arms and waited.
They burst into explanation at the same time.
“But the wolfsbane whiskey was a little-”
Lydia held up her hand and the torrent of words stopped.
“I might possibly have forgotten to give back a few strains of wolfsbane to my dad... and accidentally dropped them in whiskey... and then whoopsie-daisy taken the whiskey to Cora’s.”
Lydia pinched the bridge of her nose. “And why weren’t you drinking at home?” she asked without looking up.
Allison and Cora glanced at each other. A beat passed, heavy in the air, pushing down, until-
“I wanted puffy Cheetos,” Cora blurted.
Lydia looked unimpressed. “I know for a fact that you bought Cheetos yesterday.”
“Crunchy Cheetos, they’re completely different!”
Lydia looked at Allison flatly. “And you didn’t talk her out of it why?”
“I wanted Cheetos too,” she said sheepishly.
“We couldn’t drive because we’d been drinking,” cut in Cora, “and Derek wouldn’t give us a ride.”
“And you were working, so we had to walk,” Allison added.
“-And that’s when we met the dryad,” finished Cora.
Lydia’s attention caught at that. Her eyes narrowed. “In Settler Park, where you got arrested? You met a dryad there?”
Allison nodded eagerly. “Yeah, right there in the middle of town, being completely conspicuous.”
“You’re sober enough to use the word ‘conspicuous’ and yet you still got into a fight- you know what, not the point. What happened next,” she said with a sigh.
“I asked her why she was in the park when there’s a ton of forest right there. All she has to do is ask the Hale pack and she can move right in,” Cora said, voice getting grumpier with every word. “And she said that she wasn’t going to have anything to do with a pack that associates with hunters-”
“Which is when Cora took the first swing,” confirmed Allison. “I tried to tell her it wasn’t worth it, we should just go get the Cheetos-”
“-But then she yelled at Ally, something about about having a pet dog for a girlfriend-”
“Which is when I started fighting,” Allison said with a shrug.
Lydia massaged her temple. “Of course you did.”
“And the whiskey, it’s-” continued Cora, looking at Allison beseechingly.
“It’s- a lot,” said Allison, nodding. “It’s a lot of- it’s a lot. Of whiskey. So it was kind of hard to move? And before we could really get a hold of her, she started turning back into a tree-”
“-And I could hear the cops coming, so I tried to get Ally to leave with me-”
“I was totally going to go, but- I might have said something like ‘our girlfriend’s a banshee and she’s gonna yell at you’,”
“Then the stupid dryad asked if dating a banshee made us necrophiliacs-”
“-Which is so rude, so we went back to fighting the dryad. Except she didn’t look like a dryad anymore.”
Cora and Allison looked up at Lydia expectantly.
Lydia looked up at the ceiling and prayed for patience.
“So you got arrested for public intoxication and trying to fight a tree in Settler Park,” she finished. She sighed again. “Okay. I’ll bail you out. This time. Next time, let me defend my own honor.” She shook her head. “Necrophiliacs. That doesn’t even make sense.”
A few days later, a single tree in Settler Park had a sudden, terrible, and very localized infestation of termites.
The dryad was gone the week after.
