Gideon sighed as he stopped next to Savannah. “I’m hiding behind you,” he said.

She took the plate and looked at him, came to the correct conclusion about how long it’d taken him to get there, and then giggled. “Now, is that brave?”

“Absolutely not and I’m not ashamed,” Gideon said.

Savannah picked up the brownie and nibbled on it.

“Julia Smith?” Gideon asked. “Is there something going on there with her mother?”

Savannah winced. “Met Mrs. Smith huh?” She swallowed. She leaned in closer to Gideon. “Don’t let the glasses, long hair, and mary-jane shoes fool you,” she murmured. “Julia is a lot more wild than her mother knows.”

Gideon’s jaw worked. “I was worried a minute there.”

Savannah sniffed. “I’ve nothing polite to say about Mrs. Smith. Julia however is one of Rumba Ruby’s girls.”

Gideon filed another name into his memory to find out more about later.

Savannah heard a short whistle and looked towards the door. Brand and Esme walked arm and arm out of it. She quickly finished her brownie. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get to dinner.”

Gideon looked at his plate. “And I didn’t get to eat anything.”

“The plate is paper,” Savannah said. “And you stole one in the kitchen, this is what you get, all that nasty karma coming back to you. Later Merle!”

He mock pouted at her anyways and winked at Merle. Savannah wrapped her arm around his and tugged him towards the door. He picked up a cookie and ate as they walked. They paused in the lobby. Savannah retrieved her bible and changed her shoes. Gideon finished his cookies and found a trashcan for the plate.

They headed outside.

Savannah stopped by her bike. “I guess you’ll need to follow me up to Grandfather’s.”

“Um.” Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. Did he really have to go to Sunday dinner with Brand and Esme?

Savannah shook her head. “Oh, there is no getting out of it. Esme invited you and will expect you to be there every week.”

“Every week!” His eyes widened. He was not comfortable with all the attention. The pancake dinner yesterday had been bad enough and he’d been able to sneak out after an hour and hang out with the guys he already knew.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “It isn’t that bad.”

He eyed her. “You say that like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

Savannah rolled her eyes. “It really isn’t that bad. She means what she said, you have no family in town and this is her way of making you feel welcome.”

Gideon sighed. “That’s it.”

Savannah smiled. “Yes, she wants you to feel welcome.” She turned around and put her unused Bible into her storage compartment along with her shoes.

Gideon eyed her and decided teasing was in order. “As long as someone doesn’t make us late.”

“They should be long gone by now,” Savannah muttered, talking about the Rebels. “And if they aren’t, someone has explaining to do.” She stopped and stared at him over her shoulder.

Gideon grinned at her back. “I wouldn’t want the food to be cold or anything.”

“Will you stop baiting me?” She threw up her hands and turned to her bike.

He smirked. He would if she would stop taking everything seriously. He saluted her with two fingers.

She closed her eyes tight, shook her head, and then stuck out her tongue at him.

He snickered and headed over to his auto.

Savannah sighed and tilted her head back. “Males,” she said to the sky. “Surely you understand them,” she muttered to God. She turned the bike on and drove it past his auto where he’d pulled out and was waiting for her.

--

The road that Savannah led him up twisted and wound its way up the side of one of the ‘hills’ that made up the sides of the ‘valley’ that was Jasper. In Gideon’s opinion, these hills were more like small mountains. He’d driven up this hill once, to see what was there. The houses set into the hillside were more like mansions than houses. They commanded a pleasant view of the town, the tree covered hill that the Club nestled up against and the hill across the valley that held the local university.

The mansions hadn’t come in any particular style that Gideon could see, or at least the ones that could be seen from the road. Many of them were hidden by a twisting driveway and a clever screen of trees that the way one knew they were there was the drive connected to the road. There were brick houses, stone houses, houses covered in stucco. Houses that looked to be made out of logs and were ‘cabins,’ but no mere cabin was generously appointed with windows and garrets.

Savannah turned up one of the drives where he couldn’t see the house. The drive turned in a sharp curve and then turned the other way. The house appeared through the trees. Three stories tall at its highest point, made out of concrete from the local granite with large cut blocks of the same stone on the corners. It wasn’t a symmetrical rectangle or square, but more of an L shaped building, at least from the front with trees set in the interior corners as if the house had been built to accommodate the trees and not the other way around.

Gideon parked beside Savannah’s motorcycle and got up, still staring upwards. There were windows no more than five feet apart with rounded triangular transoms on top of them. The windows looked odd to him, until he realized that given their shape and the old fashioned look of the house he was expecting them to be set with small panes of glass. The windows it seemed were a nod to modernity, two panes of glass split vertically instead of horizontally and they could be pushed open to let in a breeze.

It wasn’t until he got closer to the house and his head tilted back that he realized that it wasn’t the windowpanes that were different than what he expected. The windows were set into frames, not that had been molded with special saws, but looked like someone had taken branches out of the trees, stripped the smaller branches and twigs off along with the bark, sanded them, steamed them straight and then painted over them. In the middle of each transom was a circular piece of glass surrounded by what had either been carved to look like the frames branches or a branch had been steamed until it had been made into a circle.

He brought his head down as they neared the door. The front door was deeply inset into the walls, which Gideon realized had to be over a foot thick. The natural theme from the window frames carried over to the concrete arch that formed over the door. The arch looked like thin trees, entwined with vines that went almost to the frame of the door. To each side of the door, multi-sized spaces had been left and panes of glass set in the negative space. The door itself was heavy iron bound wood with an iron handle and a large knocker in the shape of a wolf’s head with a ring hanging from his jaws.

Savannah grabbed the door handle before he could and pulled it open with a small bit of effort. She walked right into the house and kicked off her boots, replacing them with her heels.

Gideon was grateful for the pause. It gave him a few minutes to take the room in. The largest showiest piece of the front room was a staircase that curved upwards. The wood had the aged golden color that indicated to Gideon that after being sanded down, they hadn’t been stained but simply covered with several clear coats of varnish and the light colored it naturally over time. The staircase drew his eye up to the ceiling past a large ironwork chandelier where exposed natural wood beams had been left exposed and their crossed pattern revealed that this had been a deliberate choice rather than an afterthought of the builder.

He squinted. The beams weren’t beams at all, but full trunks of trees that like the window frames outside had been stripped of branches, then sanded and then covered with a glossy varnish to preserve them. Natural light shown down between them from skylights set in the ceiling.

The natural wood theme continued on the walls. Set like fine paintings into the walls were large panels of curly maple and curly oak. Their grains polished and burnished until they glowed. These smaller panels were set into ‘frames’ of either other wood panels or drywall, Gideon couldn’t tell for it was covered in a light silvery gray birch bark paper. The ‘moldings’ that separated the wood panels from the paper were more of the natural branches, no bigger around than a good pencil.

Off to the left, instead of more paneling, was a huge painting of a birch forest in the transition from summer to autumn. The leaves of the trees turned from a bright yellow-green to golden yellow.

And in front of him, which in any other home would have captured his attention first, but not in this one where the notions of what ‘rich’ meant had been turned on its head, was a large stuffed male albino pronghorn, the American antelope, caught mid-climb. The black horns gleamed in the natural light.

Gideon had been in the homes of the rich before. He spent many Sunday dinners at his commander’s house as a guest. The commander had fine paneling, more traditionally molded and painted. There were crystal chandeliers in abundance and many aesthetically pleasing rendered paintings. This house, though the essence of ‘rich’ was still there, every effort had been taken to make it appear natural rather than overly carved and ornamented.

Like when he’d stepped inside Savannah’s garden, something deep inside Gideon relaxed. And like then, Savannah didn’t seem to have a care for his reaction. She headed off towards the right, and deeper into the house.

Gideon started and followed her into a huge dining room with dark green walls. They walked past a table large enough to seat over a dozen people. The entire far wall, minus a small door, was made of stacked slate pushing out into the room. In one part of the slate was a large fireplace that looked more like a cave. And on the opposite side of the door and where the wall met the other into a corner, the slate wrapped around and an actual waterfall complete with ferns and moss spilled down into a small pool.

Gideon did a double take at evergreen trees, with the needle bunches going up, instead of down, that sat in pots to either side of glass doors. There were several large paintings, this time of evergreen forests, in the room. Paintings designed to show together from their style. He didn’t have time however to stop and take a closer look.

Savannah took him through the small door set in the slate wall into an equally large, if not larger kitchen.

Gideon decided then the house was huge. His family’s house was huge, but that was a farmhouse built for when parents had as many children as possible to help work on the farm, and with five werewolf children it had still felt small. And it was a farmhouse, meant for work, not decoration. Farm wives were known for decorating in a country style using whatever they had to hand and with their work of their hands such as embroidery, not painted paneling and paintings.

Esme pulled a large roasting pan out of the oven and set it on a counter. Gideon glanced to his right and saw that the fireplace of the dining room was echoed on this wall. And if he was any judge of space, the fireplace was big enough to roast an entire bull in if necessary. He wondered idly if it had ever been necessary.

Esme barely looked up. “Savannah, honey bunny, would you set the table?”

“Sure, how many?”

“Just us four today, out of deference for Gideon’s week,” Esme said. “You’re probably feeling a bit overwhelmed by now,” she said to him.

Gideon shifted on his feet. He’d been overwhelmed the first day. He’d managed to gain equilibrium until yesterday. He’d gained panic in the between time however. Yes, he was back to feeling overwhelmed again. He glanced around the kitchen. He didn’t have to respond while Savannah went over to the cupboards.

If the foyer was a birch forest and the dining room was an evergreen forest, this was definitely a maple forest. Maple leaves in cheerful colors of bright red and fiery oranges decorated the towels, hung in the windows as sun catchers, were painted on or glazed on containers and small kitchen appliances and actual leaves dipped in copper, gold or silver were hung from ribbons on the cupboard doors and held back curtains. A red maple bonsai sat in one of the windows and here instead of paintings were decoupage artworks with maple trees drawings, leaves and representations of their seeds covered in glass.

For as he could see, the kitchen was a working kitchen with granite countertops, oak cutting boards, knife blocks, spice racks, oils and vinegars steeping with herbs in glass jars and a huge table in the middle for whatever needed doing. The curtains of red and white gingham check made him smile a little.

Savannah pulled four plates down out of the cupboard and turned to Gideon. She held them out to him. He took them and raised an eyebrow.

“What?” she asked.

“Which end of the table?” he asked. It was a large table.

Esme pulled another roaster out of the table and chuckled. “Closest to the kitchen is fine, Gideon.”

Brand entered the kitchen from a different door. He’d taken his suit jacket off and his tie. He came around the table and kissed Esme. “Anything I can do to help, love?” he asked.

“Mash the potatoes,” Esme said. “I can brown the rolls.”

Brand rubbed his hands together and grinned. He glanced at Gideon. “And take your coat off,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

Gideon nodded and headed back into the dining room. He watched his feet. He didn’t know the lay of the floor and he didn’t want to trip over anything.

“Then you can carve the meat, and I can make gravy,” Esme said, kissing Brand’s cheek.

Savannah found glasses and mugs. She followed Gideon into the dining room. He’d set the dishes on the table. “Here,” she said. “Esme sits on the right and we sit on the left.” She put the glasses down at the appropriate places and set the plates in front of them.

Gideon shifted on his feet again. “Right.”

“Grandfather will want you to sit next to him,” Savannah continued. She stopped and looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. He didn’t know how to take Brand’s order to make himself comfortable. He plucked at the sleeves of his coat, looked down and shrugged.

Savannah half smiled. “Here,” she pulled the chair he’d be sitting in out. “You can put your coat on the back of the chair, and you might lose the tie before he orders it gone next.”

Gideon sighed and shrugged out of the coat. It wasn’t that he liked to wear formal clothes. He distinctly didn’t and they made him feel extremely uncomfortable though the blue of the suit reminded him of the blue of his dress uniform. The suit fit, which was a miracle in and of itself.

It was Sunday dinner at Brand’s home. Gideon wasn’t sure how he felt about it one way or the other and the suit was a little like armor against it, uncomfortable armor, but still armor. He came around and set it on the back of the chair. Before he could do anything else, Savannah unbuttoned the cuff that was nearest to her and started rolling up his sleeves again.

“Don’t you have any short sleeve button up shirts?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. She shook her head but didn’t say anything else to his relief. He loosened his tie with one hand and had to switch to take it off as Savannah came to the other side of him and started rolling up that sleeve too.

She reached up to unbutton the top button of his shirt again and he smacked her hands away. “I can do that myself!” he said.

She grinned at him and bounced back into the kitchen.

Gideon rolled his eyes and jerked his chin, sighing, before he followed her, unbuttoning the top buttons of his shirt as he went.

She opened another cupboard, took down saucers and mugs and set them on the counter. Feeling he should be useful, Gideon took two of them and headed back into the dining room.

Brand mashed the potatoes with an electric mixer with a look that was something like glee on his face. By the time Gideon and Savannah had finished setting the table, they were able to help bring out the food dishes as Brand cut the roast. Gideon was both amused and relieved to not see any green salad. It saved him the effort of refusing it. He was an adult. He didn’t have to eat raw rabbit food if he didn’t want to.

Brand didn’t say anything when Gideon sat down at the chair to his left. Instead, he picked up the roast, offered it to Gideon first, and Gideon turned and offered it to Savannah. Brand’s lips twitched as he held back a smile. Savannah took the slice of roast with the most fat she could find and added it to her plate.

“What did the Rebels want?” Brand asked.

Savannah frowned. “I thought you didn’t care.”

Gideon backed his chair up two inches. He wanted out of the line of fire.

Brand pretended not to notice Gideon’s tactical retreat. “I didn’t care why you were late to church. Since the Rebels were in town, what did they want?”

Savannah scowled. “That’s a tidy bit of semantics,” she said.

Gideon took a slice of roast, passed it back to Brand who held the platter out to Esme before taking his own slice. Brand raised an eyebrow at his granddaughter.

“They wanted what they always want, to go about their business unmolested. Since we know what their business is, I wasn’t about to let them do that.” Savannah picked up the bowl of roasted carrots and celery, carefully took more celery than carrots and started mashing them with her fork. “I sent them on their way with a bit of a tongue lashing because it is Sunday and an escort of the biggest males on duty I could recall.”

“Anyone important?”

“Seemed like newbies to me testing the boundaries of what they’ve been told. It looks like they’ve been on a recruiting binge.” Savannah added butter to her mashed vegetables and then selected a roll and added almost a whole tablespoon of butter to that. “Or they’ve had graduations.”

“Might be both,” Brand said.

Gideon turned his mug over and picked up the coffee urn. He glanced at Brand first to see if he wanted any. Brand turned his mug over and Gideon poured him a mug before pouring his own. Esme reached up to her mug and slid it across the table. Gideon grinned and poured her one too. He glanced at Savannah. She made a face at him, pulled a smaller urn closer to her, turned her mug over and poured herself hot chocolate.

Gideon snorted and set the coffee urn down. He looked at Brand. “You don’t let the Rebels into Jasper?”

“We try not to,” Brand said. “We did for a time until they started selling drugs out the back door of one of the shops, set up a van for the college students, and tried to extort the Dwight clan.”

“The Dwight clan took care of their problem themselves,” Savannah muttered.

Brand grinned and it faded quickly. “That’s about the time we figured out that they were going to be a nuisance and started chasing them back out as soon as we figured out they’d gotten in.”

“Fortunately,” Esme added. “They hadn’t started recruiting yet. It didn’t get too messy. The Council has labeled them a gang.”

“Within the boundaries of the law, Jasper police are allowed to do whatever they want to them,” Savannah added.

Brand picked up his coffee mug. “Outside the boundaries of the law is where we step in,” he finished.

“What do they want with Jasper?” Gideon frowned.

“Territory, expanded business, the college crowd.” Savannah shrugged.

“College students have the demand. Gangs have the supply. And we stand in the way.” Brand shook his head. “Simple economics.”

Esme cut up her meat and looked at Gideon from under her lashes. “For them, it’s like a right of passage. Come up to Jasper, see how much they can do or sell before we catch them and kick them out. For others, they don’t get the hint. The potential market is too lucrative and they won’t have to share with other dealers.”

Savannah nodded. “As it stands, the college students have to leave Jasper and go to them. And the Native American Mafia has as many customers as they do. And the Rebels don’t like that.”

“We lock them out of Jasper and Sturgis. The Natives lock them out of Deadwood, and their towns.”

Gideon nodded. “They do a lot of shooting at each other.”

“Sometimes, mostly in Deadwood or Rapid City. Bodies have turned up in nomansland before after they’ve gone missing and search parties were required to find them.” Brand sighed. “We haven’t had to shoot any of them in a while. Which might be part of the problem, you stop shooting folks and they stop taking you seriously. It only takes one.”

“It takes one mistaken identity kill to start a war,” Savannah pointed out.

Brand grinned. “Which is why we haven’t been shooting anyone in the open or otherwise.”

Savannah nudged Gideon. “What Grandfather is saying is they don’t want the scrutiny as much as we don’t. As long as things are quiet, the government lets us go about our business without overmuch interference.”

“Which wouldn’t bother us since were mostly law abiding citizens,” Brand said. “Until the wars start.”

Gideon looked at his plate. “Which means what?”

Savannah grimaced. “It means, that governments spend too much time investigating and looking to convict and putting dealers and murders in jail, when a bullet would save a lot of time and money.”

“And when the bullets start flying, we don’t have time for little niceties such as government sponsorship for our ‘vigilantism,’” Brand said.

Esme kept her tone light. “Since Colorado has designated the Heathens as a gang, none of this really matters since they won’t be looking past that label anyways.” She nailed Brand with a look.

Brand cleared his throat. That was Esme’s unsubtle hint that it was past time to change the subject. Besides, they’d probably given the prospect more than enough to think about.

Unfortunately for him Gideon had caught something different between what Brand had said and Esme had said. “Has the Jasper City Council labeled the Heathens a gang?”

It was fortunate that Brand hadn’t anything in his mouth or else he would have spit it out. “No.”

Gideon kept his eyes on his food. “Why doesn’t Jasper care about what Colorado thinks?”

“Because Jasper was here first,” Brand said and changed the subject before Esme stomped on his toes. Not that it would do much, since his dress shoes had steel toes. “How are you liking Jasper?”

See this was exactly what Gideon had been afraid of when Esme had invited him. And what did that question mean anyways? If he hadn’t liked Jasper to begin with, he wouldn’t have stayed. And being interrogated wasn’t going to make him like it any better. “The people are friendly.” Sometimes they were too friendly.

“And Beda is taking good care of you,” Brand asked.

Gideon scowled at his meat. “She won’t let me pay the rent,” he growled.

Esme coughed.

“That’s part of her way of trying to take care of you,” Brand replied.

“You said she’d give me a break on the rent, not that she wouldn’t let me pay it completely,” Gideon said, and then realized he’d probably overstepped himself and bit his tongue. He fiddled with his food and when Brand didn’t say anything. “She let me put down the deposit,” he added.

Savannah leaned closer to him. “Have you been pestering her about this?”

Gideon glanced at her. “Maybe.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s going to make her more stubborn,” she told him. “Say thank you, help her with her weeding or get her tools out of the shed for her or sweep the walk and let her bring it up.”

“But—” Gideon started. He wanted that bill paid.

“You aren’t being polite,” Savannah told him. “And she thinks you’re a polite young man otherwise, I’m sure.”

Gideon flushed and sank into his chair. “I want to pay the bill,” he muttered.

“Responsible of you,” Esme said.

Gideon glanced at her. “Thank you.”

“Besides, you’ve barely been here a full week and haven’t had a chance to find an outside job yet. She knows you’re helping the Clarks.” Savannah brushed off his concern. “She’ll probably want to wait a month to make sure you get a job and then have worked long enough to cover the rent and adjust as necessary.”

Gideon’s eyes widened and he stared at Savannah. He was going to have to prove he could afford it wasn’t he? He was going to have to take a bank statement or a pay stub to prove he could pay his rent. The rent was fair, it seemed more than fair to him. He wanted to sputter that that was absolutely crazy and who thought like that.

Brand interjected. “See, she wants you settled first.” His eyes narrowed and he grinned. “Have you been settling in at all?”

“He has furniture,” Savannah said.

Brand nodded. “That’s a good start.”

“Hey! I can speak for myself,” Gideon said. “I’m working on it.”

Brand snickered.

Savannah rolled her eyes at Gideon. “Though you don’t have curtains.”

“There are blinds,” Gideon said.

“Not the same at all,” Savannah muttered. She gave Gideon a look and changed the subject. “Any news from Dr. Brown’s family?”

“They’ll be here next week,” Brand said. “Doc actually set up a video feed that they could talk to him, face to face, so to speak. They seem relieved that he’s all right. It appears that they didn’t know where he’d went on his vacation.”

“Oh. Oh dear.” Savannah’s eyes widened.

“They did however, filing a missing person report which they’ve been able to rescind,” Brand said.

Esme spoke up, “They needed a few days to put things together to be able to make the trip.”

“I would think,” Savannah murmured.

“Messrs. Smith, Jones and White aren’t pleased,” Brand said.

Savannah didn’t raise her voice but the tone changed, “Who cares about them?”

Brand took a bite of food. “And have left town.”

“One less thing to worry about.” Savannah nodded.

“I guess, all that remains is to figure out what we’re going to do to help Dr. Brown,” Brand finished.

“Which can wait until he’s feeling better,” Esme said.

Brand reached over and squeezed her hand. “That’s true, love.”

Esme squeezed his hand and smiled at him.

Gideon applied himself to his food and crossed his toes that he would be able to avoid being the center of attention for the rest of dinner.

Brand looked over at him and smiled. “I understand you’re popular with the ladies.”

Gideon almost choked.