Shifter's Storm

by Carol Van Natta

  She flipped opened the cover of her tablet to call up the digital map for the area. The GPS would find the address faster than she could. It was too damn hot and humid to walk up the meandering driveway to look for a house number that might not even be there.

  In the Wyoming mountains, her home base when not in the training exchange program with other law enforcement organizations, mid-September was respectably arid and cool. Certainly not pushing a hundred and one with humidity to match, with little difference at night. Sweat soaked her two braids and glued her light khaki short-sleeved uniform shirt to every inch of her skin.

  “Are you lost? Let me help.” Deputy Denny Fontaine, cougar shifter, strode into view from around the curve of the road. The sight of the downed tree appeared to deflate him. “Oh.”

  Chantal removed and replaced her tan uniform ball cap. Her inner leopard twitched its tail. She never got lost. Few shifters did, and her magic gave her an extra edge.

  At forty years old, Fontaine was only ten years older than she was, but he seemed a lot younger. Considering average shifter lifespans, they were both new adults at best, but he reminded her of the sheltered pups and cubs of some overprotective families in Kotoyeesinay. Yes, she still lived with her parents, but they’d made sure she got plenty of independent experience outside the safe confines of the magical sanctuary town she’d grown up in. This was her fourth exchange assignment.

  Fontaine, on the other hand, had lived in Barron all his life. Between his guaranteed job and his rent-free, double-wide bachelor pad on family property, he had every incentive to stay right where he was. His circle of friends probably wouldn’t change for the next hundred years. He considered a visit to Naples, the neighboring county seat, an event. And to hear him tell it, the beach at Fort Lauderdale, eighty miles east, was a foreign country full of snotty, sneering natives.

  The nature gods had done him no favors by making him the prettiest unmated male shifter around. He knew it, too. Healthy athletic build, artfully unruly blond hair, and sun-bronzed skin. Tawny-gold eyes and a winsome smile that could charm anything.

  And, thank all the moon and feline goddesses of the known universe, definitely not her mate. Scent less interesting than morning cereal. No twitch on the spark gauge. Not a single thread of shifter-mate magic for miles.

  Persistence, however, in spades. When she didn’t immediately tumble into bed with him, he took it as a challenge. Apparently, no one had ever turned him down.

  He’d tried feline-shifter moves first. Offering her the first choice of food. Draping sweaty clothes around to remind her of his scent. Crowding her space. Sniffing her neck.

  When those failed, he’d gone online for “how to pick up women” groups for humans. She knew because he’d forgotten to erase the website history on the shared desktop computer in the office. Based on the techniques he’d tried, no one in those forums had ever talked to a female of any species.

  His latest tactic seemed to involve being aggressively helpful in anything that demonstrated physical skill or handyman skills. Especially if it gave him an excuse to take off his clothes.

  She had to admit he was as pretty as a billboard underwear model. However, until she’d seen Fontaine in action, she’d never run across a feline whose human side was all thumbs. No wonder none of the other deputies asked him for help. He couldn’t even change a flat tire without denting the hub cap or losing the lug nuts.

  As he contemplated the downed tree, his face lit up with an enthusiastic grin. “I’ll get the chainsaw.”

  “No,” said Chantal hurriedly, visions of calamity in her head. “We’d be here all day.” She brandished her tablet. “Let’s just tag it on the map and let the city manager’s office handle it.” She tilted her head toward the property. “We could see if the owner is home and needs–”

  He cut her off. “Not my job.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his expression of frustrated discontent. He muttered something that sounded like “frigid as a frog” as he spun and marched back to the road. His hand rested on the grip of his service weapon as he walked.

  She hadn’t heard that barbed insult since high school. Now, it usually just made her laugh. Give her a man who’d outgrown that nonsense any day of the week.

  Just as he disappeared around the curve, he yelled, “I’ll be in the truck, Probationary Junior Deputy.”

  Great. He’d probably sulk the rest of the afternoon unless he got to bust heads or shoot something.

  Most shifters thought guns were pointless, but the Barron cougar clan loved them. Collected them. Shot things with them—occasionally including themselves, if enough liquor was involved.

  The county sheriff, Ollie Torres, ordered her to follow policy and wear a gun on duty for protection from the natural wild animals. But a handgun wouldn’t stop a big predator.

  Besides, it was illegal to shoot the endangered alligators, bears, and Florida panthers. And where was the fun in shooting an overpopulated deer or an exotic invasive snake when you could go four-footed to stalk and ambush it instead?

  Furthermore, shifters dominated in tiny Barron County. The small, dysfunctional cougar clan had been there for centuries, hiding in the wilderness from human tribes and their wars. The larger flock of flamingo shifters came later, blown in by an early nineteenth-century hurricane. The flamingos had cleverly negotiated for the spells that made the town and county so forgettable they got left off any human records, including maps, so the cougars let them stay.

  Shooting fast-healing shifters usually just made them mad. Shooting one of the ancient races was more reckless than kissing a rabid wolverine. Shooting stray tourists brought notoriety that none of magical species could afford.

  And yet, the Barron cougars all just had to have guns. When he wasn’t in cougar form, Fontaine carried three of the damn things wherever he went.

  Her tablet finally signaled it had pinpointed her location, so she added a note to the coordinates about the downed tree. Barron might be an insular community trying to live down their recent disgrace, but thanks to the forward-looking flamingos, the government had state-of-the-art tech toys.

  The rest of the afternoon was as hot and annoying as she’d predicted. When Fontaine tried to pick a fight, she kept her cool and laughed it off, but just barely.

  The Sheriff’s Station owed its welcome cooler air to the city building’s new air-conditioning system, powered by rooftop solar panels and experimental, magically enhanced batteries.

  At her shared desk, she connected the tablet to the tower computer and copied all the reports to the local network. The files should already be synced to the cloud, but redundant copies never hurt.

  “Hey, Hammond.” Torres’s bass voice came from his office.

  As usual, Fontaine had disappeared two seconds after their shift ended, leaving her to do the hand-off to Osborne, the cougar male on evening patrol.

  The dispatchers and the other deputies were cougar males, too. She was the first female they’d had in the department in decades. Maybe ever. They’d had to trade with a fairy shop up north to tailor the uniform shirts and brown tactical pants to fit her. She was lucky they’d given her a nameplate and an ID badge.

  In her first month, she’d done ride-alongs with all the cougars at one time or another. But even after three months, she still wasn’t yet cleared to work any shift by herself, not even dispatch. It rubbed her fur the wrong way, but she doubted they’d loosen the leash for the last month of her assignment.

  At least they didn’t seem resentful toward her as a confident female, like she’d seen in some ultra-conservative canine packs. It helped that her outsized black leopard could hold her own with any of their cougars.

  It also helped that she’d proven she had a lot of free magic and knew how to use it. The newbie hazing had stopped quickly after her spell caused anyone who touched her gear without permission to experience a long and violent sneeze attack.

  She stood and crossed to the sheriff’s open
door. “Yes, sir?”

  “Two things. One, starting tomorrow, you’ll be riding with Osborne for the next four... Where’s your weapon?” His left eye twitched as he glared at the gap on her utility belt where her holster should be.

  Chantal tilted her head toward the storage room. “Locked up in the gun safe.”

  He was smart enough not to yell at her about following the official end-of-shift regulation he chose to let the others ignore, but his narrowed eyes said he didn’t like it.

  She tilted her head toward the whiteboard on his wall with shift notations. “Osborne’s vacation starts the day after tomorrow. I can take his last night shift–”

  “No,” he interrupted, “you don’t know when to let things… you don’t know the county well enough. Shit. I’ll set the rest of your schedule tomorrow.”

  It took conscious effort to keep her expression neutral. She’d jailed his hard-drinking, mate-terrorizing cousin Verna a couple of weeks ago. He likely knew she’d do it again, too. That cougar was a menace. “You said two things?”

  A sour look settled on his face. “Oh, that. Mayor Belinda wants to see you in her office about some volunteer ‘opportunity.’” A curled lip conveyed his scorn. “Her flock controls our budget, so be polite when you shut her down.”

  “Of course.” She spun away quickly, before he noticed she wasn’t on board with his attitude.

  Torres wasn’t a bad man, but he needed to find a job he actually liked. One where he could discipline employees or arrest miscreants without getting in trouble with clan or family.

  Admittedly, she’d been spoiled. She’d grown up admiring the world’s best sheriff. He was the reason she’d joined law enforcement. She missed Tanner, Shiloh, and all her colleagues in Kotoyeesinay. They were her friends as well as her coworkers. Emails and video chats didn’t make up for seeing and smelling them. Or playing elaborate practical jokes on Tanner, or racing cheetah-shifter I’itame around the block, or planning a surprise anniversary party for Shiloh and his husband.

  As far as she could tell, Torres’s major flaw was blind loyalty to his cougar-shifter clan. On top of that, he shared a tangled family tree with most of them. The Shifter Tribunal had believed his insistence that he had no idea his clan had been robbing the town blind for decades and killing to hide it.

  The Tribunal, with its flexible view of ethics, would have probably left the cougars alone, except their last murder was a big-city investigative journalist. The Tribunal only barely managed to cover up the crime as a hunting accident to derail the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s investigation and keep the feds out of it.

  The daylighted corruption was the town’s big, shameful secret that no one talked about. She’d only found out because her mother had friends who worked at the Tribunal. Torres had barely kept his sheriff job when the town and county governments fell apart.

  He certainly deeply resented the flamingos. They’d swept the slate of special elections after a dozen guilty cougars got hauled off to shifter jail. The convicted cougars would stay there for a few decades, until the humans forgot about them. In the meantime, the leadership vacuum left the town and county administration in shambles. Flamingos picked up the pieces.

  In Barron, no one cared about the color of a shifter’s skin or the pattern of fur or feathers, or paid attention to human political tempests, but they sure got exercised over clans.

  Based on the cold shoulder she’d received from the cougars, even if she stayed for forty years instead of four months, she’d always be the outsider. The flamingo colony took togetherness and group activities too far for her comfort, but they’d at least invited her to their picnics and parties.

  She texted the affable Deputy Osborne that she’d brief him after she got back from the meeting. Some information didn’t belong in official daily activity reports.

  Her shirt had dried in the air-conditioned office, but her braids were stiff with sweat and she still smelled like a steam room. Nothing she could do about it. Besides, shifter senses meant they all knew exactly what—and who—the other shifters had been doing. Which was another reason Fontaine hadn’t attracted her. He clearly liked plenty of variety in his bed. To her, sex without the emotional connection was less interesting than an afternoon nap in a high tree.

  A mate would be fascinating. She rolled her eyes. Her inner leopard had a one-track mind.

  She slid the tablet into the desk drawer designated as hers, then cast a tiny security spell to lock the tablet’s cover until she released it. Not that she was fluff-headed enough to use department equipment for personal messages, like a certain blond cougar deputy.

  The Sheriff’s Station was at one end of the L-shaped county building. She walked past the county offices at the center to the other end that housed the smaller town staff. Everyone tended to keep earlier business hours in the summer to avoid the oppressive heat, but from what she’d seen, Mayor Belinda worked overtime more days than not.

  Chantal politely knocked on the pebbled-glass door, then opened it and went in.

  Belinda looked up from an open laptop on her desk. “Deputy Hammond, what a nice surprise.” Her exaggerated Southern accent made Chantal chuckle. She was a short, rounded woman with light brown skin and laughing eyes. Her intensely orange-pink linen pantsuit mimicked the color of her flamingo form.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  Belinda clicked her mouse twice, then closed the laptop. “That Fontaine cub gone already, is he?” Subtle disapproval laced her tone.

  “I think Deputy Fontaine is around somewhere.” Chantal wasn’t one to give up her coworkers, even when they irritated her. “Did you want to talk to him, too?”

  “No, thank you.” She waved to a chair as she picked up her phone to send a text. “I’m asking Renée to join us.”

  Chantal sat. Recently elected county commissioner Renée Reyes was another flamingo shifter. Probably older than Belinda, but it was hard to tell with shifters, and it wasn’t always polite to ask. Renée also happened to be true-mated to a cougar shifter who worked for the much larger neighboring county’s Sheriff’s Department. Chantal imagined that had been the scandal of its day.

  She didn’t mind waiting. Nothing on her agenda for the evening. No place to go, either, since sleepy Barron couldn’t hold a candle to her last assignment in New Orleans.

  Besides, her jumbled work schedule made social plans impossible. After a shower and a meal at the all-hours diner, she might go furry for a midnight skulk through the stand of tall cypress trees a dozen miles north. She liked them better than the messy palm trees that residents planted just because everyone else did.

  Unlike her other exchange assignments, she hadn’t made any new friends in Barron. Guilt poked at her for not trying harder, since making connections with people outside her hometown was supposed to be one of the features of the program.

  Her inner leopard wanted to meet more people, too, if it meant finding her mate. Chantal liked the idea, too… in theory. Her shaggy-prehistoric-bear, true-mated parents had a fantastic relationship, and she wanted one just like it. Trouble was, she was only her mother’s biological daughter.

  The less said about her leopard-shifter sperm-donor father and his family, the better. She worried she might have inherited their tendency to cat around, so she was extra choosy. She could count the number of lovers she’d had on one hand and still have fingers left over. Despite her inner leopard’s growing impatience to be mated, very long shifter lives meant she didn’t have to figure it out this decade.

  It would be good to have someone warm to nap with. Her leopard pictured a large, soft bed next to a fireplace in a cozy winter cabin. Chantal couldn’t argue with that. But she wanted a lover who would be there when she woke up, too.

  The mayor’s well-padded visitor chair was more comfortable than the creaky metal monstrosity at her temporary desk. She melted into it.

  The mayoral office was suitably large and styled to look prestigious without being tacky. From
scent traces, a long-gone previous occupant had smoked a lot of Cuban cigars, and someone had recently eaten a shrimp salad for lunch. The air vents were much quieter. Maybe after tomorrow’s night shift, she’d try tightening the vent covers in the Sheriff’s Station. The one near her desk sounded like a kazoo when the fans kicked in.

  Renée arrived moments later, carrying a tablet. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and lived in khakis and sleeveless blouses. Chantal didn’t know how she stayed looking so neat and elegant, considering she was the county’s social worker with a passel of her own cubs plus some foster fledglings as well.

  After the obligatory offer of refreshments, Belinda got straight to the point.

  “Renée and I are part of an international charity that does relief work in southern Florida and around the Caribbean. We’re organizing a trip to Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico, to help with recovery efforts.”

  Renée nodded earnestly. “Actually, our Puerto Rican relatives are doing the organizing, we’re just recruiting.” She opened her tablet and brought up a gallery of photos. “Your namesake hurricane did serious damage to the whole island.” The enlarged pictures showed debris everywhere. Flattened trees, boats in pieces, houses with no roofs. “Rain washed out the roads and trails, too.” More pictures showed significant flood damage. “The military’s former bomb practice was bad enough, but this hit everything.

  Belinda waved toward the tablet. “After the last direct-hit hurricane, the human government ignored Puerto Rico and Vieques for years. We’re not going to let that happen this time. Our friends live there.”

  As near as Chantal could tell, Florida flamingo shifters were either related to or allied with every other flamingo-shifter flock and colony in the Western Hemisphere. They blended in with the natural wild flocks and cared for them. They’d even herded them south, away from Florida, once humans started hunting them for their pink feathers to decorate hats.

  “We’d like to know,” said Renée, “if you’d be interested in volunteering for a couple of weeks.”