by Raci Ames
But he couldn’t give up until he knew for sure that she was okay. Reluctantly, he shifted into human form, and went into town. He went to the fire station, hoping they would have information. And the Chief had recognized him at once.
“I know who you are,” the Chief said. “From the fire at the Matthews place. You saved that girl’s life, you know?”
Clark nodded uncomfortable with the complement but unable to resist asking the question that had been. “So she’s okay then?”
The Chief shrugged. “She’s alive. She suffered a pretty bad blow to the head, along with smoke inhalation. She’s in a coma, but she should come out of it soon enough.”
Clark had nodded, thanked the Chief and tried to walk out.
“I saw you shift, son,” the Chief said, stopping Clark in his tracks on his way out the door. “We gotta lot of wolves around this town, but I never saw one that looks like you before.”
Clark was shocked by the chief’s candor. He knew Woodland Creek was a hotbed of shifter activity. It’s why he’d come there from Georgia, where humans had hunted almost all of his kind. “As far as I know I’m the only one left,” Clark said, hiding the shame that wanted to creep into his voice. His family had been killed in a car crash, and he had massive survivors guilt because he was the only one who made it out alive. They’d sent him to live with an elderly aunt, and he’d spent his teen years way out in the country thinking that she was more than a little bit crazy with her talk about wolves and curses and the truth about his parents death. He’d found his escape in the local fire station. They’d taken a bored boy in, gave him small jobs for pocket change at first, and eventually trained him to put out fires with them. Which was probably why he was still sitting with this guy.
The Chief nodded and his eyes clouded with sympathy. “Well, that was a good thing that you did. You live here in town?” he asked.
Clark stalled, not sure how to answer. “I just got here, before the fire. I’d been traveling for a while. Was actually a fireman back home,” he said. Which was mostly true. He’d been here as a wolf for a while, moving slowly through the country to arrive in Illinois. But he’d only shifted to human for the rescue.
“You got a place to stay?” the Chief asked, going to the fridge and talking out a plate of sandwiches. He offered one to Clark, who resisted for a minute, until hunger got the best of him.
By the time he’d scarfed down that sandwich and four more, the Chief had offered him a bed at the station in exchange for a couple shifts a week. Clark decided he would take it for just long enough to make sure that the girl he rescued was fine.
Long enough had turned to months. Clark learned that the girl was alive, but blind, which left him riddled with guilt for not saving her properly. When winter was over and his hip was healed, he went back to the woods shifting back to a wolf. It was the only existence he felt he deserved. And the simple life gave him some peace.
Eventually she came home and he laid eyes on her for the first time, and became obsessed with checking on her to make sure she was okay. On days that she smiled, his spirits lifted. But on the days she fought with her parents and cried, he wanted to trade his life for her happiness, or at the very least give her his eyes.
He hung around more, to see how he could help, and had an opportunity
He hadn’t meant to show himself, not to a sighted person at least. But luckily Cori, for now he knew the friend’s name from listening to them talk hadn’t noticed his super speed. She even thought he was a dog. Once upon a time that would have infuriated him, but it didn’t anymore. They only thing he was good at was being an animal. Specifics really only mattered to humans.
• • • •
Jeremiah sighed, running a hand through his thick black hair and shaking his head. They’d been at this all night long, the drama as endless as the installation. They were on their third batch of high-end old-time pharmacy containers. Rhys, the fussy designer hadn’t liked the white ones with the raised letters, or the glass ones with the old-fashioned labels. The newest option were blue, leaded glass, and too heavy to see the accessories through, which went directly against the reason they’d scrapped the white ones in the first place.
Jeremiah was beyond caring so he kept his mouth shut and focused on arranging the blue containers in a way that captured the light and showed off the space they’d created. These were minor details in the 5000 square-foot store and all the other details had been nailed down for more than a week. Yes it was London. Yes it was the flagship store. Yes it was more important and more spectacular than any other job they’d done before. He’d used all those arguments to win this job from his competition. Seven years of hard work, and A-list client referral base, and the fact that the designer wanted to get his pants had secured the commission.
And he and Rhys had plenty of fun during the planning and dreaming stage. Drawing designs was incredibly enjoyable after a long night of great sex and a morning of pancakes and bitter coffee. Unfortunately their relationship turned bitter just as the build began and Rhys set his site on another set of hired hands. Now that he was banging the head of the construction team, he was much harder to please.
Jeremiah couldn’t even bring himself to care. He was so over this job, and the way everyone obsessed over details that didn’t matter in real life. London’s fashion scene was a playground for the fit and pompous. Jeremiah had loved it at first, had fought hard to make it to the A-List. But the high of making it was fading fast, and found himself yearning for simpler things and time to focus on things that mattered to him more. The only problem was that he had no idea what that was anymore.
Men and women filtered in and out of his bed and his life, always fun, never meaningful. He moved here wanting a place large, glamorous and open-minded. Somewhere he could be anonymous. Somewhere exactly the opposite of Woodland Creek, where he’d grown up. He’d hated it there. But lately he’d been thinking about going back for a visit.
He cringed as a glass shattered in the background, and Rhys screamed. “Jeremiah!” Rhys ran towards him. The designer’s own suit fit him perfectly in spite of the all-nighter, but his pale face and mussed hair showed the stress they all felt. “Your inane assistant just dropped not one but two blue jars!” Rhys said, enunciating every single syllable perfectly, which he only did publicly. Behind the scenes, the man had a thick Northern accent and cursed like a sailor but here he pretended to be a proper English gentleman, like the kind he made clothes for. It was Jeremiah’s job to create the proper image that would result in sales but at the moment, he was out of ideas and his teeth were beginning to lengthen.
He counted slowly down from seventeen, which was just the number that worked best in this case. He practiced extreme discipline and got himself under control immediately when something sparked his animal spirit. Jeremiah was a cougar shifter, just like all the men in his family. Except that they were all assholes who used their abilities to commit small crimes and intimidate people. He hated them all, and he hated that part of himself so he’d locked it up long ago. Now, he visualized his emotions dissipating like little glitter bombs in the air, and soon enough his fangs had retracted.
He walked calmly over to Rhys, hiding his own exhaustion and his hand on the back of the other man’s neck, a move he knew Rhys found calming. It was a bit of a cheat, given the fact that they’d been intimate. But at this late hour, Jeremiah needed to use every single bit of skill at his disposal. "You know, these apothecary jars won't really show off your phenomenal accessories,” Jeremiah said, reaching to pick a big piece of one from the floor.
They’d been his idea in the first place, a burst of random inspiration to honor the only place from his childhood where he felt at home. There was an old-fashioned apothecary in Woodland Creek, complete with a wise old lady who used herbs to heal people. He’d spent hours there with Pia, the woman’s grand daughter, and his first girlfriend. They’d been best friends for years before they started dating, and they spent hours together in t
he old store. He would rearrange the bottles of herbs like other kids played with legos, and she would read books about the body and healing. When they got older they spent time in the apartment above the store, and started dating.
Everything fell apart when he found out the truth about his family, and he’d left and they’d broken up. But she was the only person he really ever loved. She’d been in a fire recently, and on Jeremiah’s mind when he went looking for props for the store, so he’d started with the Apothecary jars. It was obvious now that the nostalgic choice didn’t fit the space, but he didn’t regret bringing them in. He was going to bring them home and maybe that would bring him some peace.
“You know, Ainsley isn’t the only one who's going to drop a jar and have it shatter. Do you really want your staff people cleaning up glass when they could be showing off your clothes to customers?"
Rhys pinched his top lip over and over with his thumb and forefinger, a blatant display of agitation given the fact that he was usually fastidious about any behavior that caused wrinkles. “We have two days, he said tersely glancing at his watch. "What on earth do we do instead?”
Jeremiah thought. His phone dinged in his pocket, the sound he had for calls and texts that came from States. He was waiting for Pia’s friend Cori to call. He’d been trying to reach Pia since he heard about the fire but couldn’t get her to call him back. They were still friends on Facebook, which is also how he and Cori were connected. When he saw on a status update that she was in London, he reached out to talk to her and got the lowdown on Pia, and now he was looking for more news.
Jeremiah wasn't completely dense. He knew that his recent lack of satisfaction with his own life likely came from Pia’s condition. They weren’t close anymore - a choice that had been his own. But there connection went deeper than a few years of living on separate continents. She was one of the most important people in his life and always had been. Her tragedy made him question everything, and he knew it was the reason for his recent agitation with his life.
He sighed, desperate to glance at the message. But doing so at the moment would surely infuriate his stressed out client, understandably so. He glanced around the store, considering the white walls like he’d never seen them before. The tire tracks in different textures and shades of black stood out much more than they’d expected. That had been a subtle design element in the planning stage, brought it in to remind shoppers that the brand meant for glamorous travel anywhere in the world. Now it leant a fast, industrial spirit to the store’s look. The apothecary jars had meant to reinforce the old-timey luxuriousness of the brand, like a drug store you might have dressed up to go into once upon a time. The two ideas didn’t mesh in person the way they had in Jeremiah’s imagination, and he should have made the change days ago.
“Tires,” he blurted out. “Rubber ones in all sizes sprayed white, with just a few in color to draw attention to accessories that are new or on sale. Hint’s of black coming through will make them feel real and traveled and tie the store together. “
“Will the paint get on the scarves and the socks and other accessories?” Rhys asked, eyes lighting at the possibility. They would tie the look together perfectly, but Jeremiah only had a few hours to gather everything and get them done.
“Not if we seal it it won’t. But I need to go. We need to paint them right away so they can dry overnight. I’ll bring them in the morning and we’ll have all day to arrange them before the opening.”
“You’re coming back, today, to finish, yes?” Rhys said, letting a bit of vulnerability show through. Those little glimpses had been endearing to Jeremiah. Once.
“Yes. Clean up the broken glass and pack up all the bottles and have them delivered to my flat,” he yelled to three of his guys still working to organize the floor. He turned to Ainsley, still shaking in the corner from Rhys’ angry display. “You’re with me. There’s a night of spray-painting tires in your future. I hope you’re appropriately coffeed up.” The girl nodded, relieved to be going, even if it was off for more long hours of hard work. “I’ll be back after one.”
He chased his assistant out the door, pulling resources from his contacts to get the tires and a place where they could paint them. By the time a car stopped for them, Jeremiah had arranged for sixty tires to be delivered, a combination of many sizes that in real life were used for cars and bikes and ATVs. He was pleased with the solution, and the way it came together so easily. Almost too easily. Jeremiah had a terrible habit of only appreciating things when they were just a little hard.
BEGINNINGS
“Feverfew,” she said, opening one and inhaling. “This was one of Gran’s favorites. And next to it should be Hyssop. Then Myrrh. They’re still in alphabetical order! And I know exactly where everything is.” Pia smiled, really smiled, for the first time in months as she went around the room. The bottles felt familiar. Covered with a decade and a half of dust and damp and neglect, it was hard to connect them with the way they looked in her memory.
Cori stood to the side, looking on fondly. “Is the gold-feathered mirror still up on the far wall?” she asked, looking in the direction of something more grey than reflective.
“Maybe,” Cori said, following the voice over to the spot on the wall. She found an abandoned towel and used it to rub at the dirt. The glimmering finish appeared when she choked on the dust. “Yeah, it’s here,” she said, sputtering. “Needs a good cleaning.”
“Everything does,” Pia said, sad creeping back into her tone.
“Nothing a little water and mopping can’t cure,” Cori said, poking around to see what cleaning supplies existed in the shop.
“There used to be mops and things over here,” Pia said, crossing the black and white tiled floor to a small closet behind the cash register and yanking hard to open the door. An old dried up mop tumbled out, followed quickly by the scurry of little claws. Pia shrieked, jumping away from the sound.
“Just a little mouse,” Cori said, putting a false bravado into her voice. She didn’t like the creatures any more than Pia did, but as the sighted friend she felt like it was important to minimize the gross factor to keep Pia’s spirits up. “This place just needs a big old cat,” she said, laughing.
“Yeah right. Animals. My parents, remember?” Pia asked, leaving the closet alone for the moment to go over the small sink along the wall. She found it quickly and turned the handle. The pipes banged and bungled until brownish water bubbled down.
“Someone’s been keeping this place up, at least a little bit,” Cori said, trying the various light switches around the room.
“There have always been tenants in the apartments. Although there aren’t any now.”
“Do they look like this?” Cori asked, trying to hide her disgust at the thought.
“No, they’re nice, actually. My dad had one renovated when we were in med school, and the top floor done just last year. That’s the one where my grandparents lived, the one I wanted to move into.”
“Let’s keep working on getting you more independent. And we’ll work on him.”
“We have to. This is the first place I’ve felt at home since the fire.” Pia continued to move around the room, muttering at various jars as she opened their lids. “I can see each and every detail of this place in my mind, like I was just here yesterday. And it’s been years, Cori. I haven’t walked in here since I left for college.” Pia’s Gran had died their freshman year.
“The scents of the herbs and other things probably account for that,” Cori said. “We talked about that at the center, remember? It’s a great way to claim your spaces,” she reminded her friend.
“It’s more than that. This place is a part of me. It’s my grandmother’s legacy. I want to clean it.” Cori nodded, smiling. With this kind of project, and Pia’s visible enthusiasm, Cori could teach her all kinds of things about cleaning and organizing that Pia needed to relearn how to do now that she was blind.
“Great idea, Pia. We can get supplies and come back tom
orrow to start.”
“No, we start now. And go as quickly as possible. I want to reopen the shop.”
“Okay. Okay. That’s big. And a great idea. Let’s just.... One thing at a time,” Cori said, watching a glass jar slip from Pia’s hands, shattering to the tile.
The crash immediately shattered Pia’s mood as, and she sank onto the filthy floor, just barely missing the shards of glass.
“Shit. Who am I kidding? I’m useless,” Pia said. The tears started up again, more pitifully than Cori had heard since she’d arrived days ago.
“Pia, you’re not useless. That’s just an old jar. We can clean it up,” she said, quickly moving the biggest pieces of glass away and wetting the towel to get up the rest. Then she went to her friend and gently pulled her back up to stand again. They both were covered with dust, and now Pia’s face also had tear streaks. “Two seconds ago you were all fired up. Don’t let a tiny thing like this take away that enthusiasm. Let’s lock this place up, go to the hardware store and get every cleaning product they have. We’ll have them deliver it all right here for first thing tomorrow morning, okay?”
Pia sniffled, and nodded. She wasn’t usually such a mess, only since the fire. But for a few minutes, in the Apothecary, she’d felt like a person with purpose, and ambition again. A person who’s main interest was helping - and healing - other people.
“Ok. Deal. If you see me crying again, you have permission to smack me, okay?”
“Deal,” Cori said, watching Pia. The other girl had gone over to a cloudy brown glass in the corner and pulled out what looked like a dried leaf. She sniffed it, nodded and put it in her pocket. “What’s that?” Cori asked, offering her elbow for the other girl to take, using her other hand to open the door.
“Linden. It gives you strength, and comfort during mourning. My grandmother kept some in her pocket every day after my grandfather died. I took some after her funeral. That’s the last time I was in this place.”
