Predictability: Jo & Bela, gen, PG-13. For spn_women!
Title: Predictability
Author: slartibartfast
Pairing/Characters: Jo Harvelle; Bela Talbot
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Summary: Jo has worn the ring since she was a kid. In college, while Jo is living an almost-ordinary life, a friendly stranger comes to her with drinks, and Jo realises too late what she wants.
Recipient/Prompt: For karate0kat, prompt 'Bela tries to steal something from Jo'.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, more's the shame.
Note: Thank you scintilla10 and akeyoftime for being wonderful beta-readers. ♥
The ring was unremarkable, which was what made this whole thing so ridiculous. It was a slip of silver, unadorned except for a rune carved into the fragile metal, faint enough that Jo Harvelle failed to notice it for the first three years she wore it. To be fair, it was given to her at an age where the fantastic worlds built up in her mind were far more interesting than a trinket on her finger.
Then her dad had died and Jo had sat for forty-five minutes turning the ring in her hands and there, in the glint of the light, was carved a rune. It had seemed familiar and Jo knew she would've been able to find it in dad's old books but her mom had glared through red-streaked eyes and hadn't let her look it up, no matter how desperately Jo had asked. That door was locked, her mom had said, and Jo would do best to forget about it.
Jo had quietly put the ring back on after her fits of frustrated, hollow tears. That was the last time she had taken it off.
---
Jo should have guessed the woman wanted something the moment she started plying her with drinks. Unfortunately, Jo was a college student and her caution was less than it had once been, leaving her open and messy.
"My name's Bela," the woman had said, passing her a fruity drink that Jo drank out of politeness more than anything else. It was a dusky blue, just like the woman's eyes. "This is on me."
British, Jo noted. Her accent smoothed out a voice that would have been unremarkable under any other. Jo liked it and she liked the free drinks so she sat down on the empty stool at Bela's side. "I'm Jo," she said, offering up a smile that belied how hesitant she was to converse with a total stranger.
Jo's upbringing and its cautiousness towards the unknown held a strong influence over her, even here. But hey, so far that attitude had gotten Jo nothing but loneliness. Maybe that was a hint to change, open up.
Three drinks in, Bela must have noticed the grimace on Jo's face every time another blue drink slid her way across the dark wood bar. Two shot glasses filled with Tequila took their place and Jo grinned. "Much more my style," she admitted.
Bela raised an eyebrow and leaned forwards just this side of imperceptibly. "I wouldn't have thought you could hold your drink so well."
"Are you trying to get me drunk?" Jo asked. She said it dismissively, nothing but a joke, but her heart thudded an alarm. Her head was already filled with a pleasant haze and she would be at a disadvantage if this woman - this stranger, Jo reminded herself - tried to hurt her. Fuck, she shouldn't have let her defenses down. Hunters and their daughters were fucking magnets for trouble.
"I'm trying to make a friend," Bela said calmly, tipping her own tequila into her mouth. She didn't flinch at the taste. "It's difficult around here."
"Believe me, I know," Jo muttered. She hoped it was low enough that Bela didn't hear her. It was kind of pathetic. She drank her own shot and tried her best not to cringe.
---
There weren't many people that could drink Jo under the table, man or woman alike. She had grown up in a bar and she knew how to handle it, unlike most of her peers, and she'd had more practice than her mom would like. Jo could hold her alcohol but right now, swaying on her stool, she thought Bela might be winning.
Maybe she was saying all that aloud or maybe Bela was a psychic. Either way, Bela laughed. "Not everything's a competition, Jo."
"Liar," said Jo, who didn't really think that way at all. Competitions tended to have winners. So far, all Jo had seen in life was one loser after another. "Where are you going?" she asked in alarm when Bela stood up.
"I'm taking you home."
"No you're not," Jo said, pointing a finger unsteadily. "I knew you were gettin' me drunk for somethin'."
"Sweetheart," Bela said in a way that suggested she thought Jo was anything but that, "your home, not mine. Come on, you're sloshed. I don't want you throwing up on my shoes. They're new."
"I'm not that bad," said Jo, but she still stumbled on the way out of the bar.
This city was ugly in the day but at night, it lit up, literally and figuratively. Jo quickly discovered it was even better with a few drinks in her blood. Everything seemed as bright as day, all those pale and sparkling lights around her filling her gaze and intimidating her. She'd grown up somewhere so much smaller. This was nothing like home but wasn't that the point? To leave, to find her own feet, preferably away from hunters and that whole life. To find out who she'd be without demons breathing down her neck.
"Demons?" asked Bela.
Damnit, Jo really had to control her tongue better. "Yeah, you know. Demons of the past. Demons of a psychological nature." The words only slurred a little, and Jo smiled in triumph.
"Funny, I thought you might be talking about real ones," Bela said. "I hadn't realized."
She sounded utterly serious and Jo might have commented on it if she hadn't just realized where they were. Her dorm was up ahead, the blocks of student apartments looming overhead, uniform and boring. "How the hell do you know where I live?" she demanded.
Bela paused. "You told me. Earlier."
"No I didn't," Jo said, backing away abruptly. No way would Jo tell some stranger where she lived, no matter how many shots of tequila found their way into her stomach. She wasn't that much of an idiot. There was something going on here. Bela had come to her; Bela had spoken to her all night about nothing in particular; Bela had that look in her eye. The one that said to proceed carefully. The one born of the same life Jo led. "Get away from me."
"Jo, wait," Bela said, but Jo didn't.
When she looked back over her shoulder from the doorway of her place, Bela was gone. Jo didn't relax.
---
In the morning, rising groggily from the mess of her bed, Jo's heart stopped when she rubbed against the indented stretch of skin where her dad's ring had been.
The ensuing phone call to her mom did nothing to ease her headache. "Mom. Mom. Just listen. She knew about demons. She's a hunter, or a demon or something, okay? No, I didn't get hurt. She knows where I live. She called herself Bela. Might not be her real name, but can you check it out for me? Okay. No, Mom, I can't come home. I've got a test tomorrow. I can handle myself."
An hour later when her mom called back, Jo almost didn't bother climbing out from beneath her pile of blankets, a thin bundle of comfort between her and the rest of the overwhelmingly bright world. When it kept ringing, she snaked out her hand and answered it from inside her cocoon. "Yeah?"
Half an hour later, with her head pounding and her mouth dry, Jo left her room.
---
"How did you find me?"
The hotel was expensive and Jo, in her sweater and ratty jeans, felt entirely out of place. Bela looked like she'd been born and raised there, slotting perfectly into place with her shiny, expensive shoes and immaculate make-up.
Jo shrugged and folded her arms. "You stole off the wrong person. I know who you are."
"Yes, I hadn't counted on you being a hunter," said Bela, glancing down for just a second. "I saw that ring on you and supposed you to be nothing but a lucky little girl who happened to have something I wanted. I should have been more careful."
"I'm not a hunter," Jo snapped.
Bela raised an eyebrow. "Oh, really? And this, what you're doing now, that's not something a hunter would do at all. A hunter wouldn't find her enemy, perceived or otherwise, and track it down, and she certainly wouldn't come here with a knife and a gun."
"How did you-"
"I guessed," Bela said. "Honey, claiming not to be a hunter is a fairly thin excuse. You're just as predictable as one."
"I'm not a hunter," Jo insisted. "And I want my ring back."
"It's worth quite a lot of money," she said calmly, but Jo saw which way her eyes twitched. At least that narrowed it down. "Unfortunately for you, I'm not in the habit of giving things back to people who were stupid enough to lose them in the first place."
Jo pulled out her gun, the weight of it almost comforting in her hand. With her arm outstretched, it almost touched Bela's forehead. Her hand didn't shake. "Give me the ring."
"Then you know what it's worth," she said. "I would have thought you'd take better care of it."
Jo bit her tongue against the urge to say no, that wasn't the point. She didn't care about the money. If she said that, Bela would know. It would be obvious and Jo would be at a disadvantage, even with the gun an inch from Bela's brain. "Shut up and give me the ring. I'll shoot."
"No. You won't."
"You really wanna try me?" Jo snapped.
Bela grinned. "You really had no idea what you were wearing, did you? It's quite a catch, actually. I'm considering keeping it rather than selling it. It could come in quite useful."
Jo could have killed her. She could have shot her right through the head and been out of here long before the cops got close. She could have been so far from the scene and out of suspicion in less than ten minutes. She could have done it, except that she couldn't. "You talk too much."
"Sometimes," Bela said with a nod. She lifted a perfectly manicured hand and pushed the gun away; Jo's hand went lax by her side a second later without her mind's permission, even as the rest of her went tense with frustration. Bela smiled. "It's protection. I don't have to be wearing it for it to work. You might want to think again about trying that."
"I'll get it back," she promised. Bela waved a hand dismissively. Jo caught her wrist in mid-air and discovered with an overwhelming surge of satisfaction that the charm on the ring had absolutely no effect on punches.
Jo was gone before Bela could retaliate; she was far too busy stopping the torrent of blood from her nose landing on her rather expensive dress.
---
When Jo was nine, her neighbour stole her Barbie doll. They had been playing with it all day. Jo had taped little silver slips of foil wrapped around cardboard to give Barbie a knife just big enough to protect her from the one-eyed teddy bear that had kidnapped the rest of her toys and her neighbour bent it in half. She wouldn't apologise and Jo kicked her in the back of the knee just to watch her fall over; the girl's parents had been called and the fight had ended in tears and tantrums and Ellen's angry rants.
An hour later, Jo had noticed that her Barbie had disappeared from the pile of toys on the floor. Forty-three minutes after that, she gave up her thorough search of the house and realised that the neighbour must have taken it.
Her dad had taught her a lot. Most of all, he'd taught her to never rush in unless the coast was clear. Jo sat down with a pencil and a pad of rainbow paper and concentrated.
After school, she had a window of twelve minutes to get in and out of the house, give or take a few seconds; her neighbour's dad always took the family home via the bank after school on Thursdays. She was small enough to get in through the tiny kitchen window they left open and once in, she knew it would take five minutes at the most to find her Barbie. Her neighbour was ridiculously predictable in her habits.
That evening, she ran a pink comb through the doll's hair and smiled to herself so smugly that her mom caught a clue. "What have you been up to, Joanna Beth?"
"Nothing, Mom," she said as sickly-sweet as the ice-cream and caramel sauce put in front of her. "Just found my Barbie."
Jo didn't remember her neighbour's name or her face anymore, but she remembered how to work a flawless plan.
---
Bela wouldn't stick around for long. She wasn't stupid; she'd be out of the hotel before Jo had a chance to work out where she kept the ring. There wasn't much time to sit and plan but there was one trick that worked almost every time. Jo had read it in a book somewhere as a kid and had used it three times; twice at school, which was easy, and once at the Roadhouse, which wasn't. All three times she had gotten what she wanted and now wasn't going to be any different.
She strolled up to the hotel desk and noticed with approval that the guy was the same one as an hour ago. He recognised her and that made it easier. She asked if her cousin checked out yet and the man said no, but she'd called down to order a cab booked for one thirty. That was still thirty-five minutes away; Jo had time. She gave him an extra-wide grin and strode confidently towards Bela's floor.
When she was twelve she had learned how to make a smoke bomb through one of her dad's notes scrawled in a drawer. Her mom had evacuated the Roadhouse at the busiest time of night twice before she realised what Jo was doing. Times like those, it had been nothing but hilarious to watch drunken hunters stumble out into the snow. Times like these, it could make or break Jo's pending victory.
The dark smoke billowed dramatically from the canister and Jo stepped around the corner. She didn't have to wait long.
Alarms sang out like banshees and alarmed guests flooded into the hallway. Jo was hidden in the thick, acrid smoke as panicked people flowed past her towards the stairs and out of the building. She had to duck further back when one of the hotel staff bustled past her but there, just behind him, Bela was walking calmly from her room. She had a black handbag slung over her shoulder, the epitome of composed except for her sharp glances through the smoke. Jo watched with a pleased grin as Bela's hand dipped to unzip it.
She dropped a small blue box with rounded edges into the bag. It was the perfect size for a ring.
Ellen's bar had had a spate of thefts when Jo turned thirteen. It was never anything serious: a cheap watch, a penknife, spare change from a pocket. Nevertheless it had made the regulars twitchy and her mom had all but ripped out her hair in the stress of working out what asshole was doing it. One day, it had just stopped.
Jo had never told her mother it was her, but if her mom had noticed that all the expensive stuff was mysteriously found underneath tables the next morning, she had probably guessed.
---
Jo was ushered out of the lobby two minutes after Bela. She held the box in her hand, tightly as possible, the weight satisfying. She'd done it. She'd beaten the thief at her own game and she had her ring back. Bela walked straight across the parking lot without looking back, suspecting nothing, and Jo grinned.
While the hotel staff tried to calm the rabble, Jo paced off to one side and held the box flat in her palm. With one quick glance up, she flipped the lid open.
Inside it, folded neatly, was a note. Jo lifted it up. There was no ring beneath it.
Jo unfolded the note with hands tense enough to tremble. "Fuck." She looked up just in time to see a car pull away and Jo would bet anything that vehicle wasn't Bela's, either. The scheming bitch waved out of the tinted window.
In handwriting just as neat and bold as Bela herself, the note said:
You hunters are so predictable. I like you, Jo. Sorry about the ring. It's only business. See you around!
---
That night, after three bottles of beer and a pizza the size of New Jersey, Jo threw the note into the trash and packed up her bag.
She didn't need a ring to protect her. She didn't need something so small linking her to her dead dad. Bela was right about one thing; she was a hunter, or close enough. That was more of a link to him than a scrap of charmed silver could ever be. Its absence might have opened old wounds but she wouldn't sit at mope, feeling the gap on her hand where it once had been. Not when that was what Bela would expect.
Jo could sit around obsessing about this, like hunters so often do. She could spend weeks planning her revenge to get it back. She could waste her life worrying about old hurts and new absences. Or she could prove Bela wrong, be a hunter without the stale old predictability, and make her dad proud.
She dropped out of college and drove home the next morning.
Let Bela keep the ring; Jo had something so much better in store.
Author: slartibartfast
Pairing/Characters: Jo Harvelle; Bela Talbot
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Summary: Jo has worn the ring since she was a kid. In college, while Jo is living an almost-ordinary life, a friendly stranger comes to her with drinks, and Jo realises too late what she wants.
Recipient/Prompt: For karate0kat, prompt 'Bela tries to steal something from Jo'.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, more's the shame.
Note: Thank you scintilla10 and akeyoftime for being wonderful beta-readers. ♥
The ring was unremarkable, which was what made this whole thing so ridiculous. It was a slip of silver, unadorned except for a rune carved into the fragile metal, faint enough that Jo Harvelle failed to notice it for the first three years she wore it. To be fair, it was given to her at an age where the fantastic worlds built up in her mind were far more interesting than a trinket on her finger.
Then her dad had died and Jo had sat for forty-five minutes turning the ring in her hands and there, in the glint of the light, was carved a rune. It had seemed familiar and Jo knew she would've been able to find it in dad's old books but her mom had glared through red-streaked eyes and hadn't let her look it up, no matter how desperately Jo had asked. That door was locked, her mom had said, and Jo would do best to forget about it.
Jo had quietly put the ring back on after her fits of frustrated, hollow tears. That was the last time she had taken it off.
---
Jo should have guessed the woman wanted something the moment she started plying her with drinks. Unfortunately, Jo was a college student and her caution was less than it had once been, leaving her open and messy.
"My name's Bela," the woman had said, passing her a fruity drink that Jo drank out of politeness more than anything else. It was a dusky blue, just like the woman's eyes. "This is on me."
British, Jo noted. Her accent smoothed out a voice that would have been unremarkable under any other. Jo liked it and she liked the free drinks so she sat down on the empty stool at Bela's side. "I'm Jo," she said, offering up a smile that belied how hesitant she was to converse with a total stranger.
Jo's upbringing and its cautiousness towards the unknown held a strong influence over her, even here. But hey, so far that attitude had gotten Jo nothing but loneliness. Maybe that was a hint to change, open up.
Three drinks in, Bela must have noticed the grimace on Jo's face every time another blue drink slid her way across the dark wood bar. Two shot glasses filled with Tequila took their place and Jo grinned. "Much more my style," she admitted.
Bela raised an eyebrow and leaned forwards just this side of imperceptibly. "I wouldn't have thought you could hold your drink so well."
"Are you trying to get me drunk?" Jo asked. She said it dismissively, nothing but a joke, but her heart thudded an alarm. Her head was already filled with a pleasant haze and she would be at a disadvantage if this woman - this stranger, Jo reminded herself - tried to hurt her. Fuck, she shouldn't have let her defenses down. Hunters and their daughters were fucking magnets for trouble.
"I'm trying to make a friend," Bela said calmly, tipping her own tequila into her mouth. She didn't flinch at the taste. "It's difficult around here."
"Believe me, I know," Jo muttered. She hoped it was low enough that Bela didn't hear her. It was kind of pathetic. She drank her own shot and tried her best not to cringe.
---
There weren't many people that could drink Jo under the table, man or woman alike. She had grown up in a bar and she knew how to handle it, unlike most of her peers, and she'd had more practice than her mom would like. Jo could hold her alcohol but right now, swaying on her stool, she thought Bela might be winning.
Maybe she was saying all that aloud or maybe Bela was a psychic. Either way, Bela laughed. "Not everything's a competition, Jo."
"Liar," said Jo, who didn't really think that way at all. Competitions tended to have winners. So far, all Jo had seen in life was one loser after another. "Where are you going?" she asked in alarm when Bela stood up.
"I'm taking you home."
"No you're not," Jo said, pointing a finger unsteadily. "I knew you were gettin' me drunk for somethin'."
"Sweetheart," Bela said in a way that suggested she thought Jo was anything but that, "your home, not mine. Come on, you're sloshed. I don't want you throwing up on my shoes. They're new."
"I'm not that bad," said Jo, but she still stumbled on the way out of the bar.
This city was ugly in the day but at night, it lit up, literally and figuratively. Jo quickly discovered it was even better with a few drinks in her blood. Everything seemed as bright as day, all those pale and sparkling lights around her filling her gaze and intimidating her. She'd grown up somewhere so much smaller. This was nothing like home but wasn't that the point? To leave, to find her own feet, preferably away from hunters and that whole life. To find out who she'd be without demons breathing down her neck.
"Demons?" asked Bela.
Damnit, Jo really had to control her tongue better. "Yeah, you know. Demons of the past. Demons of a psychological nature." The words only slurred a little, and Jo smiled in triumph.
"Funny, I thought you might be talking about real ones," Bela said. "I hadn't realized."
She sounded utterly serious and Jo might have commented on it if she hadn't just realized where they were. Her dorm was up ahead, the blocks of student apartments looming overhead, uniform and boring. "How the hell do you know where I live?" she demanded.
Bela paused. "You told me. Earlier."
"No I didn't," Jo said, backing away abruptly. No way would Jo tell some stranger where she lived, no matter how many shots of tequila found their way into her stomach. She wasn't that much of an idiot. There was something going on here. Bela had come to her; Bela had spoken to her all night about nothing in particular; Bela had that look in her eye. The one that said to proceed carefully. The one born of the same life Jo led. "Get away from me."
"Jo, wait," Bela said, but Jo didn't.
When she looked back over her shoulder from the doorway of her place, Bela was gone. Jo didn't relax.
---
In the morning, rising groggily from the mess of her bed, Jo's heart stopped when she rubbed against the indented stretch of skin where her dad's ring had been.
The ensuing phone call to her mom did nothing to ease her headache. "Mom. Mom. Just listen. She knew about demons. She's a hunter, or a demon or something, okay? No, I didn't get hurt. She knows where I live. She called herself Bela. Might not be her real name, but can you check it out for me? Okay. No, Mom, I can't come home. I've got a test tomorrow. I can handle myself."
An hour later when her mom called back, Jo almost didn't bother climbing out from beneath her pile of blankets, a thin bundle of comfort between her and the rest of the overwhelmingly bright world. When it kept ringing, she snaked out her hand and answered it from inside her cocoon. "Yeah?"
Half an hour later, with her head pounding and her mouth dry, Jo left her room.
---
"How did you find me?"
The hotel was expensive and Jo, in her sweater and ratty jeans, felt entirely out of place. Bela looked like she'd been born and raised there, slotting perfectly into place with her shiny, expensive shoes and immaculate make-up.
Jo shrugged and folded her arms. "You stole off the wrong person. I know who you are."
"Yes, I hadn't counted on you being a hunter," said Bela, glancing down for just a second. "I saw that ring on you and supposed you to be nothing but a lucky little girl who happened to have something I wanted. I should have been more careful."
"I'm not a hunter," Jo snapped.
Bela raised an eyebrow. "Oh, really? And this, what you're doing now, that's not something a hunter would do at all. A hunter wouldn't find her enemy, perceived or otherwise, and track it down, and she certainly wouldn't come here with a knife and a gun."
"How did you-"
"I guessed," Bela said. "Honey, claiming not to be a hunter is a fairly thin excuse. You're just as predictable as one."
"I'm not a hunter," Jo insisted. "And I want my ring back."
"It's worth quite a lot of money," she said calmly, but Jo saw which way her eyes twitched. At least that narrowed it down. "Unfortunately for you, I'm not in the habit of giving things back to people who were stupid enough to lose them in the first place."
Jo pulled out her gun, the weight of it almost comforting in her hand. With her arm outstretched, it almost touched Bela's forehead. Her hand didn't shake. "Give me the ring."
"Then you know what it's worth," she said. "I would have thought you'd take better care of it."
Jo bit her tongue against the urge to say no, that wasn't the point. She didn't care about the money. If she said that, Bela would know. It would be obvious and Jo would be at a disadvantage, even with the gun an inch from Bela's brain. "Shut up and give me the ring. I'll shoot."
"No. You won't."
"You really wanna try me?" Jo snapped.
Bela grinned. "You really had no idea what you were wearing, did you? It's quite a catch, actually. I'm considering keeping it rather than selling it. It could come in quite useful."
Jo could have killed her. She could have shot her right through the head and been out of here long before the cops got close. She could have been so far from the scene and out of suspicion in less than ten minutes. She could have done it, except that she couldn't. "You talk too much."
"Sometimes," Bela said with a nod. She lifted a perfectly manicured hand and pushed the gun away; Jo's hand went lax by her side a second later without her mind's permission, even as the rest of her went tense with frustration. Bela smiled. "It's protection. I don't have to be wearing it for it to work. You might want to think again about trying that."
"I'll get it back," she promised. Bela waved a hand dismissively. Jo caught her wrist in mid-air and discovered with an overwhelming surge of satisfaction that the charm on the ring had absolutely no effect on punches.
Jo was gone before Bela could retaliate; she was far too busy stopping the torrent of blood from her nose landing on her rather expensive dress.
---
When Jo was nine, her neighbour stole her Barbie doll. They had been playing with it all day. Jo had taped little silver slips of foil wrapped around cardboard to give Barbie a knife just big enough to protect her from the one-eyed teddy bear that had kidnapped the rest of her toys and her neighbour bent it in half. She wouldn't apologise and Jo kicked her in the back of the knee just to watch her fall over; the girl's parents had been called and the fight had ended in tears and tantrums and Ellen's angry rants.
An hour later, Jo had noticed that her Barbie had disappeared from the pile of toys on the floor. Forty-three minutes after that, she gave up her thorough search of the house and realised that the neighbour must have taken it.
Her dad had taught her a lot. Most of all, he'd taught her to never rush in unless the coast was clear. Jo sat down with a pencil and a pad of rainbow paper and concentrated.
After school, she had a window of twelve minutes to get in and out of the house, give or take a few seconds; her neighbour's dad always took the family home via the bank after school on Thursdays. She was small enough to get in through the tiny kitchen window they left open and once in, she knew it would take five minutes at the most to find her Barbie. Her neighbour was ridiculously predictable in her habits.
That evening, she ran a pink comb through the doll's hair and smiled to herself so smugly that her mom caught a clue. "What have you been up to, Joanna Beth?"
"Nothing, Mom," she said as sickly-sweet as the ice-cream and caramel sauce put in front of her. "Just found my Barbie."
Jo didn't remember her neighbour's name or her face anymore, but she remembered how to work a flawless plan.
---
Bela wouldn't stick around for long. She wasn't stupid; she'd be out of the hotel before Jo had a chance to work out where she kept the ring. There wasn't much time to sit and plan but there was one trick that worked almost every time. Jo had read it in a book somewhere as a kid and had used it three times; twice at school, which was easy, and once at the Roadhouse, which wasn't. All three times she had gotten what she wanted and now wasn't going to be any different.
She strolled up to the hotel desk and noticed with approval that the guy was the same one as an hour ago. He recognised her and that made it easier. She asked if her cousin checked out yet and the man said no, but she'd called down to order a cab booked for one thirty. That was still thirty-five minutes away; Jo had time. She gave him an extra-wide grin and strode confidently towards Bela's floor.
When she was twelve she had learned how to make a smoke bomb through one of her dad's notes scrawled in a drawer. Her mom had evacuated the Roadhouse at the busiest time of night twice before she realised what Jo was doing. Times like those, it had been nothing but hilarious to watch drunken hunters stumble out into the snow. Times like these, it could make or break Jo's pending victory.
The dark smoke billowed dramatically from the canister and Jo stepped around the corner. She didn't have to wait long.
Alarms sang out like banshees and alarmed guests flooded into the hallway. Jo was hidden in the thick, acrid smoke as panicked people flowed past her towards the stairs and out of the building. She had to duck further back when one of the hotel staff bustled past her but there, just behind him, Bela was walking calmly from her room. She had a black handbag slung over her shoulder, the epitome of composed except for her sharp glances through the smoke. Jo watched with a pleased grin as Bela's hand dipped to unzip it.
She dropped a small blue box with rounded edges into the bag. It was the perfect size for a ring.
Ellen's bar had had a spate of thefts when Jo turned thirteen. It was never anything serious: a cheap watch, a penknife, spare change from a pocket. Nevertheless it had made the regulars twitchy and her mom had all but ripped out her hair in the stress of working out what asshole was doing it. One day, it had just stopped.
Jo had never told her mother it was her, but if her mom had noticed that all the expensive stuff was mysteriously found underneath tables the next morning, she had probably guessed.
---
Jo was ushered out of the lobby two minutes after Bela. She held the box in her hand, tightly as possible, the weight satisfying. She'd done it. She'd beaten the thief at her own game and she had her ring back. Bela walked straight across the parking lot without looking back, suspecting nothing, and Jo grinned.
While the hotel staff tried to calm the rabble, Jo paced off to one side and held the box flat in her palm. With one quick glance up, she flipped the lid open.
Inside it, folded neatly, was a note. Jo lifted it up. There was no ring beneath it.
Jo unfolded the note with hands tense enough to tremble. "Fuck." She looked up just in time to see a car pull away and Jo would bet anything that vehicle wasn't Bela's, either. The scheming bitch waved out of the tinted window.
In handwriting just as neat and bold as Bela herself, the note said:
You hunters are so predictable. I like you, Jo. Sorry about the ring. It's only business. See you around!
---
That night, after three bottles of beer and a pizza the size of New Jersey, Jo threw the note into the trash and packed up her bag.
She didn't need a ring to protect her. She didn't need something so small linking her to her dead dad. Bela was right about one thing; she was a hunter, or close enough. That was more of a link to him than a scrap of charmed silver could ever be. Its absence might have opened old wounds but she wouldn't sit at mope, feeling the gap on her hand where it once had been. Not when that was what Bela would expect.
Jo could sit around obsessing about this, like hunters so often do. She could spend weeks planning her revenge to get it back. She could waste her life worrying about old hurts and new absences. Or she could prove Bela wrong, be a hunter without the stale old predictability, and make her dad proud.
She dropped out of college and drove home the next morning.
Let Bela keep the ring; Jo had something so much better in store.