by Lynn Red
Jake grunted. “I had to do it. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind being saved? But what are you talking abou—”
“Not being saved,” he said flatly. “About now being a werewolf.”
For the first time in her entire life, Mali fell flat on her face. Jake collected her, and gave the rock they’d been standing in front of a shove. It creaked out of the way, revealing a shockingly large motorcycle. “Glad that actually worked,” he said under his breath as he heaved Mali’s limp body into place. After a few moments, he’d satisfied himself with the bungie cord tie-job he’d done on her, and then secured her wrists around him. “She ain’t gonna be happy when she wakes up, but...at least she’ll wake up alive.”
3
“I’ll show those sons of bitches!” A pair of ill-fitting metal dentures clashed together, and the words Petunia Lewis, the world’s only carnivorous rabbit shifter, heavily lisped every S into slobbery TH sounds. As if remembering she’d put her teeth in, she shook her head and pulled them out, plopping them wetly into a cup.
The dentures were a marvel, really. They fit around her other teeth, sort of like a hockey player’s bridge work. But, they were sharpened so that she could eat the only thing she loved—lots and lots of meat. Carrots put Petunia to such anger she couldn’t control her rage. In fact, she’d gotten so pissed off a while back at root vegetables that she ended up half-dead, floating down the Greater James River.
Then, she ended up in the Jamesburg Jail doing a two-to-five for aggravated mischief. She vandalized a peaceful bear’s garden and then threatened a whole pre-school full of shifter cubs. That was dumb enough. After that, though, she had tried to hatch a plan to flood the entire town which, of course, didn’t work out too well.
She’d gotten two-to-five because no one could figure out quite how to classify her hare-brained plot, no pun intended... or maybe pun very much intended, but it hadn’t actually ended in any kind of damage. And aside from that, she was a model prisoner. Aside from sexually harassing the guards at the Jamesburg Jail, she never acted out, never did anything wrong. She took her medication, which was the main part of her recovery, and promised never again to don her silver dentures and go on another rampage.
But people don’t really change. Not really.
And, she hadn’t forgotten that, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to forgive it. She was tired of playing that she was sorry, she was tired of pretending like she wasn’t who she was. So, when they let her out of the lockup and had her on a once-per-month reporting schedule to the Jamesburg Probation Office, she hid.
One thing about Petunia: no matter how bizarre she might be, she’s damn good at hiding. After all, she did it for three years, six months, and a day and a half, just long enough to convince Erik Danniken, the Jamesburg alpha and more or less the judge, jury and executioner of the town, to let her out.
Well, that and the fact that she was one of three people imprisoned at the time in the Jamesburg Jail, and the other two were about as harmless as blind ferrets. That might’ve been because they were blind ferrets.
Petunia left her little cottage behind when she went underground, and although she loathed the diet eaten by every other bunny shifter on earth, she found that she quite enjoyed living in a warren. Admittedly, hers was better anointed than most: she’d had it wired for high speed internet, and managed to get a sixty-inch plasma screen down the inconspicuous staircase leading down to her abode.
“Ma’am?” a shaky, unsure, and frightened voice came.
And then there were the bikers.
Petunia grunted as she hauled herself up out of her chair and hopped onto the table top and stared straight into the shaggy wolf’s face. “What?” she asked with more courtesy than she meant to have. “I mean, what do you want?” she corrected herself with a more villainous tone. “I’m busy!”
“Yes ma’am,” he said with a slight stutter. “It’s just that, uh... well, something’s happened and I think you ought to know. And—”
“There’s more?” Petunia hissed. Her nastiness was starting to come back. The near death experience mellowed her edge for a few months, but the more time passed, the more she remembered who she really was and how to be a bad ass bunny.
“Well I was just going to say that I know you don’t pay me to think. It’s... it’s the joke you say a lot.”
“It isn’t a joke,” she said, as she sat back down and then hopped right back up again. “Talk!” she demanded. She prodded the wolf in the chest with one of her stubby fingers. To manage that, she had to take a pair of steps closer to him, so that her toes were dangling off the edge of the table. She clenched her feet into tiny toe-fists and gritted her teeth.
“Yes ma’am,” he said again. “We just... we found Danniken.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “That’s the only job you had, so now you’re done and I don’t have to put up with you foul mouthed, smelly shits?”
“Well it ain’t... it isn’t, sorry, it isn’t quite that simple.”
For all her other traits, Petunia was an absolute stickler for correct grammar. Also, she just really hated it when people used the word ‘ain’t’. She’d hired the bikers after a run-in with a few people in town who recognized her, and tried to get the cops to storm her warren. Jamesburg’s police force—made up mostly of hyenas known for their tenacity, though there were a pair of bears in the department these days—was small, but fierce. She’d lost them, but not without a couple of real close calls.
Petunia knew it wouldn’t be all that long until someone happened upon the public storm shelter that, if you knew were to poke at the bottom, led right to Petunia’s warren. She figured she had until Fall, which is when the big storms usually hit Jamesburg. All she had to do was exact her revenge, whatever that was, and then she could disappear. She could move somewhere else and change her name. She could get a night job at Walgreens and forget all about her villainous past. The possibilities, Petunia thought, were infinite.
Only problem was, she didn’t really have a clear idea of who to take revenge on, and she didn’t know what form that revenge would take.
That all changed when she heard of Erik Danniken’s older brother, Jake.
Erik, the town’s mayor-cum-alpha werewolf, hadn’t made his family a secret. He never said much about them either, but that’s because, honestly, there just wasn’t all that much to say. He had a handful of brothers and one sister, and they’d all gone their separate ways, as siblings do. Since becoming Jamesburg’s alpha, he met Izzy, his human mate, they had a pup, and things were pretty calm around town, barring the odd alchemical explosion or accidental zombie bear love attack.
Don’t worry about it—it’ll all make sense.
Seriously. Don’t worry about it. At some point, it’ll all make sense.
Probably.
“The hell do you mean it ain’t that simple?” Petunia winced at her own foul grammar, but couldn’t bring herself to correct herself for fear of appearing weak. “All you have to do is kidnap Danniken’s brother and bring him to me. How can that be so hard for a gang of beer swilling idiots with motorized bicycles?”
Once she figured out the alpha had a brother, and that brother had plans to come to Jamesburg? Petunia knew exactly what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. Take the alpha’s brother captive, hold him for ransom, get rich as hell and get out of town for good. What could go wrong?
“What could go wrong?” she asked. “There are eight of you!”
“Ten,” the dim-witted biker said, looking at his fingers with a slight bit of doubt. “Eleven. I can’t remember.”
Petunia shook her head. “Too stupid to live, but too dumb to know it.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said with a broad smile. “He got himself a girl.”
Petunia raised her eyebrows as mischief twinkled in her irises. “Really, now? Isn’t that nice?”
“I s’pose,” the man said. “After all, love is one
of the best things in the world, you know. I imagine anyone who finds love can get through just about—”
He fell silent when he realized Petunia was staring at him with her arms crossed over her chest and she was tapping her foot impatiently. “You done with the sap yet? Or should I go buy you a Hallmark card and a bunch of Kleenex?”
“I don’t have a cold,” he said.
“For the tears, stupid! For the whining and the tears and the... never mind. Just never mind. I don’t know why I even bother trying to joke with you morons. You’re just hopeless. So, did you capture him and his girlfriend? What the hell’s the problem?”
The big wolf turned his eyes down to the floor. Something about his mistress was terrifying to him on a very deep level. Her unwavering stare and the intensity of her jaw clenching was such that he couldn’t stand being in the same room with her for very long. He started shaking, even if he didn’t realize it. “Er, well...”
“Answer me! You got her, right? Got him, too?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. He winced, expecting a blow to the face, or even worse, a nasty tongue lashing. Instead all he got was a cold stare. That, probably, was worse than either of the other punishments. He felt compelled to explain. “See, we tried, but Danniken is real big, you know? He’s... well you know his brother, so...”
Petunia clomped down the table top to the other end, spun on her heel and tromped right back into the man’s face. She stuck a finger in his chin, parting his beard into a gray fork. “I didn’t ask for excuses, Jimmy,” she hissed his name. Just like a kid when you call them both their first and middle names, Jimmy knew he was in trouble.
“N-n-no excuses Miss Petunia,” he said. “He just took us by surprise and we—”
“Wait, what? How can one man take an entire gaggle of soft-brained morons by surprise? Surely one of you had to be...”
“We were busy,” he said sheepishly. “We found, uh, somebody and we were...”
“Oh just great!” Petunia had started waving her arms. “You were doing some petty theft, and you missed the quarry of a lifetime!”
“We didn’t miss him, to be fair.”
“Right, right, let me correct myself,” Petunia said, feigning humility with sarcasm dripping from her tongue with every syllable. “I don’t know what you were doing, and I don’t care. You ruined my plans and now you’re—”
He cut Petunia off, which took a considerable amount of courage. “It was his girl we had,” Jimmy said. As an additional testament to his nerve, he actually looked Petunia in the face when he said it. “We thought we had her but he took us from behind. I think we killed her, but now she’s back.”
Petunia had a strong feeling that the werewolf was lying, but about which part, she wasn’t sure. It didn’t much matter either, as she had some information that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “How can you have killed her and then see her alive again?” she had taken a turn, and was pacing in a highly Napoleonic style, back down the table to the other end. She stuck a hand in the habitually open button of her shirt, further invoking the tyrant’s mode.
The werewolf had opened his mouth, no doubt to explain in great detail some completely absurd idea about how it happened, but babble as he might, Petunia wasn’t paying him the first bit of mind. She was running through a laundry list of reasons it could happen aloud. She talked about the three sorts of resurrection—magical, scientific, and self-imposed—and how each of those could have possible taken place. In the end though, she wasn’t convinced.
“I thought you said his mate was a werewolf? If that’s the case, how could you have killed her? None of you have the right tools. I made sure you didn’t because I know you’re too stupid to control your emotions and actually capture Danniken instead of killing him if you had the chance.”
Aside from her grammatical pickiness, Petunia was also a meticulous planner to an almost comical degree. She had contingencies upon contingencies, sub-plots and side-plots. For every idea she had, she made four extra plans to make sure nothing went awry.
“What I mean is,” Jimmy said, “she was just a girl. I don’t know, I guess maybe he changed her?”
At that, Petunia arched her eyebrows again. “That’s... completely and totally illegal,” she said. “Changing a human to save a life? Oh my goodness, Danniken, you’re making this easy aren’t you? God, how could you be so stupid? How could you actually think you’d get away with turning a human? Then again, Erik was dumb enough to mate himself to a human... maybe Danniken wolves are just, you know, stupid.”
“I don’t think,” Jimmy started, but when he realized he wasn’t being listened to at all, he decided to play with a lump of lint he plucked out of his vest pocket instead.
“No,” she said, even though she hadn’t really been listening, “you don’t. But I do, and I know how dangerous this is. I know how stupid it is for the alpha’s brother to break shifter law. Especially with all the politics he’s been playing lately, what with going nationwide with the shifter coalition and all that...”
She took the hand out of her shirt and tapped her teeth with her fingernails. Then, she grabbed her silver dentures from the cup where they sat, and picked at one of the front teeth until it came out of the fixture. She didn’t really use those anyway, she was more of a back-of-the-mouth chewer. “You’re gonna take this, yes it’s another tooth, don’t talk.”
Chastened, the biker wolf just nodded and stuck the tooth in the pocket. “You’re gonna catch him, and you’re gonna give him the tooth. It matches the one you stuck in his boot. You did manage that, right?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. He was about to keep going, but she cut him off.
“Good. Then you’re going to offer him terms. I don’t even need to hurt him now. And imagine if I can catch both of them. Erik Danniken will be groveling at my feet to let his brother free. He changed that girl! Oh my God, how stupid can you get?”
“What are the terms?” Jimmy asked.
“What?” Petunia spat at him.
“The... the terms,” he said. “You told me to offer him—”
Petunia narrowed her eyes. “Do you think I wasn’t going to tell you? Of course I know that!” She cleared her throat. “Er, anyway, the terms. He brings himself and his stupid changed mate to me. I know what he did, and he knows what he did. And he knows that I know doing what he did was illegal as he knows it was and knew it was when he—anyway. He comes to me, I’ll make it better. I’ll make it look like she’s been a werewolf all along, and no one has to ever be the wiser.”
“That’s a good plan,” Jimmy said.
“Of course it is, you idiot! And then I’ll have a Danniken in my pocket. I’ll be able to tell him to do anything I want, and he’ll have to do it. Erik Danniken, that smug asshole, he’ll want to protect his brother, so he’ll buy me off. This is perfect. And a whole lot easier than kidnapping a pissed off werewolf and keeping him locked up when he doesn’t want to be.”
Petunia couldn’t do anything then except laugh. For all the pain she’d endured in the past few months, for all the embarrassment she’d had as a stumpy, life-long clumsy bunny who could barely hop, and who couldn’t stomach vegetables without significant gas problems, this made it all worth it.
“I’m gonna make all of ‘em pay,” she said to herself, clapping her hands. “Every last damn one of these Jamesburg shifters are gonna wish they never heard the name Petunia Lewis,” she threw her head back, laughing as maniacally as she could manage. “Every last one! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
4
Shapes flew past in a way that made no sense at all to Mali’s fevered hellscape of a brain. She was alive, she thought, but her body wouldn’t move and her eyes didn’t work. She couldn’t talk, she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t even hear, but inside her head, all those senses were still alive and well.
The only problem was that her senses were all in her head. For the second time in as many days, she was almost certain she was dead. She was alive though, she
knew that much. She knew she was dreaming, or at least hallucinating, but she didn’t have enough experience with the really fun parts of college life to know how to control the visions, so her thoughts turned back to the idea that she was, maybe, dead.
Except dead people don’t hurt, she was fairly sure. They’re dead, and being dead might hurt in the process of getting there, but once you’re good and dead, there’s not a lot going on in the ol’ noggin.
Flares of pain buzzed up and down Mali’s spine, and something that felt like a thick, horrible, fever-inducing infection was centered on the bite in her neck. Yeah, she thought, definitely not dead.
Mali had largely moved on from the idea of being dead, but now she was questioning whether or not she’d fallen into a coma of some sort. She had the general sense she’d wake up. Mali wondered if this actually was what a coma was like. She had the sensation that she was moving extremely quickly, but in her mind, she was standing still.
Wind, terrible and harsh, wailed around her entire body, encapsulating her with sharp chills which was awful, but in this strange, dark world, was the only sure thing Mali had.
She hugged her elbows and started looking around, wandering, watching, just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Every now and then, she’d catch a brief flash of the outside world, and sure enough it was moving incredibly fast. It was like tiny rips came through the blackness that surrounded her, and when they did she caught glimpses of the world outside.
She could see the desert in one flash, moving past incredibly quickly. In the next she saw mountains, a forest, something she knew wasn’t anywhere near the place she’d been when she... fainted? Passed out? Are those the same thing?
When she moved her dream hands, they went in slow patterns with tracers behind that reminded her of uncomfortable years in college. She sighed, and sat. The feeling of a soft leather saddle, or perhaps a seat of some sort, surprised her, but any comfort was welcome.
