Santa Claws (BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance)

by Sasha Winter

  In the past, that job had always fallen to the old sheriff, Bob Mason, but now that Bob had retired and moved to sunny Florida, Erik had taken over his post at the station and his Yuletide job. Erik loved strapping on the fake white beard and meeting all the town kids to hear their wishes; it provided a sweet and cheery contrast to his usually quiet, slow job as the sheriff.

  Still, it’d be nice to meet someone other than kids and parents for once.

  So that was why he’d turned to the internet to find his perfect match. It was the technological age, after all. PurrfectMates.com was a specifically targeted, niche dating site for the feline shifter community and Erik was hopeful that he’d be able to find his future bride there sooner rather than later.

  It had been a long day, with a gruesome murder landing on his desk, so when Erik had finally gotten home with takeout and sprawled out on the sofa, it’d taken a while for him to switch out of work mode. After an hour of the television on low for background noise, a shifter-modified beer and a full belly he was feeling much more relaxed.

  A call from the lead historian he'd called earlier that day delivered news he'd been impatiently waiting for.

  “I let her know the car would be there first thing tomorrow morning to get her,” the man, Donald something or other, said. “She's the only historian in the state specializing on that particular subject, and I have no doubt she will be a great help.”

  Erik thanked him, and immediately shot the homicide detective a text letting him know that the historian was on board.

  He signed onto PurrfectMates at about 8:30 P.M. and scanned over the handful of unread messages that were in his inbox. There were four new messages, different girls who sent various forms of “hi/hey/hey there/what's up,” and he deleted those as he went. Eric wondered if it was really that hard to initiate conversation. He never sent a message less than three sentences. First impressions are everything, after all, and if someone couldn’t even be bothered to say anything more than ‘hey’, then he honestly couldn’t be bothered with them, either.

  He continued scrolling and found the message he'd been hoping for.

  Erik was more interested in this new woman from the site than he’d expected to be after such a short amount of time. The lack of a picture had been disappointing and intriguing all at once and she’d been well-spoken and witty enough to hold his attention. He'd been worried himself that a lack of a clear picture would prevent women from messaging him, but he was quite wrong. Though he'd never met anyone in person from the website, he had flirted with enough of them and received enough interest to know that that wasn’t the case.

  The last thing he was expecting was the final message she sent that said nothing more than ‘Turns out I’m going to be in your neck of the woods soon for a few days,’ with one of the winking emoticons.

  It had been one of the more forthright and suggestive comments she’d made, but she’d signed off before he’d mustered a proper reply. How soon was too soon? He sent her an offline message, trying in vain not to sound overly enthusiastic, but still wanting to make his interest blatantly obvious.

  He settled in to bed, trying to clear his mind, but it kept racing as pictures of his most recent crime scene flashed behind his eyelids. This was only his second murder case as Sheriff. Sawmill Grove was a quiet town, with a low crime rate that suited Erik just fine. The odd traffic stop, a few domestic disputes, serving court papers, and pushing his pencil took up the majority of his time on duty. This murder investigation brought some unwelcome change—a forcible shift from his usual boring routine.

  There was something about the prints at the murder scene that had bothered him when he first saw them. The large feline prints were scattered all over the scene of the crime with no rhyme or reason. Some were compromised with the spilled blood of the dead boy, others oddly placed with no apparent pattern or even a natural gait. They all seemed too uniform, almost static. It made him think that it was as if the large feline was walking stiff-legged all over the scene. There were no partial prints; they were all perfectly intact, clear and recognizable in the mud. Furthermore, they were far more even and deep than the prints of a quadrupedal feline should have been in such thick mud, even for a heavy big cat.

  Sighing, he rolled over, trying to clear his mind and knowing he'd never get a decent night’s sleep while there was an active investigation of this magnitude. Changing the subject, hoping his brain would give up its unwelcome assault, Erik tried thinking about this new mystery woman.

  He wondered what she looked like. Why she was single. What color her eyes were. She seemed intelligent and open, flirting lightly throughout their interactions, and it was a fresh change from some of the women he'd found on that site, women who seemed to harbor deep fetishes or fantasies about shifters and had immediately steered the conversation toward sex.

  A rather insistent part of him didn't mind that, honestly, but he doubted that was the right approach to finding someone he was truly compatible with. His preferences weren't quite consistent enough for him to pin down a physical type that he was drawn to, though he tended to steer away from women who had a general dislike for cats.

  His thoughts wandered back to the murder case, lingering on the similarities between the present investigation and a historical account of a supposed shifter attack in Sawmill Grove which had occurred two hundred years previously. Finally, after agonizing over any tiny missing detail he may have overlooked that day, he was able to force himself to drift off.

  Sleep hit him hard and sent him deep.

  He woke with a start, heart pounding as the ghost of the dream he was having slipped through his fingers and into the abyss he knew he wouldn't remember it from. Stretching languorously, he let out a purring groan from deep within his chest. He wanted nothing more than to fall back asleep and spend the day in his bed, but he glanced at the clock and gave a defeated sigh. His alarm went off moments later, nagging him out of bed and into the shower.

  Coffee, deep and rich and steeped in a French press, made mornings more tolerable despite the fact that caffeine wasn’t as effective with his heightened metabolism. He quickly got into his routine, eating a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs before hurrying to the office. He stopped in at Freddy's deli stand on the way to work to grab a breakfast sandwich—he could never make it more than a few hours without those deep, wracking hunger pangs. And this time of month, his mood tended to swing heavily if he didn't keep his belly full and happy.

  He dove back into the case, deciding to bite the bullet and go in to the morgue to look at the remains. He'd been putting it off, he'd seen the state of the boy's body at the crime scene and wished he could soon forget the carnage. But he wanted to work quickly to retrieve any and all evidence from the remains so they could be released to his family. Though he tried to stay professionally distanced, he couldn't help but feel for the family, especially at this time of the year. Christmas Day was approaching rapidly, and they were going to spend their day mourning and clutching at the gifts they’d bought their son, which he’d never even gotten to unwrap and see before his life had been so cruelly snatched away from him.

  He delegated the required tasks for the day, giving the routine shift duty to his two deputies. It took a few minutes to brief them on his plans for the next few days. He knew the historian from the city would be there sometime that day, and he had a lunch meeting with the state-provided homicide detective and a few members of his team. They were working several cases in the county, and were thankful for Erik's competent aid on the case. He preened a little at that; he knew his solve rate was through the roof.

  He finished his second breakfast as he pulled up outside of the morgue, and he cracked open a can of soda and downed half of it before popping in a piece of gum. He wasn't exactly fond of mint, but garlic breath wasn't his thing either. The morgue had two sides: one half was a professional morgue and the other was the public mortuary. It suited the small town's needs.

  Erik let himself in the fron
t door, stopping to ring the bell at the front desk. A short, rather round sixty-something woman hurried in from a back room, a binder filled with pictures of floral arrangements propped open on one arm.

  “Oh, Sheriff Grey. Malcolm has been expecting you, go ahead to the back.”

  Sandy. Erik remembered her name and thanked her. He'd had a short fling with her daughter a few years back, and he blushed sheepishly at the memory, thanking her again as he hurried toward the door to the left.

  “No problem, dear, I hope you've got a strong stomach,” she warned gravely, shaking her head. “Such a shame. That poor family.”

  The remains of the boy took up all three of the slide-in refrigerators on that side of the morgue. Sorted and labeled, they had been searched for particulates, rinsed, and the flesh and bone examined and photographed for any sort of marks from weapons—or teeth. Malcolm, the local mortician and coroner, readily pulled open each one for Erik to look through, pointing out distinct blunt-force patterns.

  The patterns matched those of carnivorous teeth, sharp and pointed. What they didn't match was the typical pressure-fractures and tearing of a high-pressure bite. The patterns were choppy, sharp, and sloppy. Erik closely examined an arm, using a gloved hand to turn the limb.

  The rough hack job looked grotesquely like hamburger, messy and inconsistent until he got the back side of the arm, where it appeared the remaining flesh had been torn through. Malcolm pointed out the boy's torso, where several puncture marks dotted his abdomen. Peri-mortem, from what Erik could tell, the distinct hemorrhaging around the punctures giving them a red halo.

  Malcolm adjusted the overhead lamp, and Erik saw it. There on the boy's chest was the faintly bruised shadow of a paw print. Below that was a half-moon shape, also a faint rosy bruise. The thing that struck Erik as odd was the print itself. Too solid for the soft pads of a feline foot, and the lack of claw marks throughout the body disturbed him as well.

  This was wrong.

  “I'm not an expert,” Erik said slowly, deliberately searching for the right words. “But if this was a big cat, or even a shifter, wouldn't there be claw marks? Would a big cat, shifter or not, be able to hold and attack without the use of its limbs? I see teeth marks, I see a paw print, and I see pressure bruising around the wrists and ankles. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like the limbs were chewed most of the way through, then torn off with a pulling force from the end of the limb.”

  “I've thought about this. I'm not an investigator, I only gather the evidence. But you can't help but wonder sometimes. The only thing that makes sense to me…” Malcolm took a breath, contemplating. “This looks to be the work of a shifter. A shifter chewed this boy apart in animal form, then shifted to human form to pull the limbs off to scatter the evidence. I just don't understand why, there was no attempt made to hide the remains.”

  Erik felt himself bristle at the horror of the teenage boy’s death. In the sharp, harsh scent of the morgue, he could still smell the scent of the body. Even washed, he could smell the damp earth the remains had been found on. He could smell the scent of human, the faint scent of feline, but nothing smelled like shifter. Not even fresh at the scene could he catch a hint of shifter scent, and he knew that scent well. Ignoring his own, he had grown up with a shifter mother and sister. He knew the scent, and he tried desperately to make sense of why he wasn't finding it now even though the evidence pointed that way.

  Erik helped himself to Malcolm's desk, writing down shorthand notes, thoughts and reminders. He took a copy of Malcolm's autopsy report with him back to the station, and then he excused himself for a long lunch.

  The streets of the town were decorated with holly, tinsel, Christmas lights and sprayed-on snowflakes on windows, and Erik set his lips in a thin line as he crossed the main street to reach his favorite diner. This small-town holiday cheer would vanish from the air soon, as soon as word about this murder got out.

  “Erik,” the blonde waitress greeted him with a flirty, knowing smile. “Your usual?”

  Erik thought for a moment, ignoring her batting lashes. He'd had a good time with that one—Ashley? Or was it Cassidy?—though it was explicitly a one-time thing. She wasn’t his mate, but she didn't seem to get that hint.

  “New York strip, rare please. Fries and ranch. A chocolate milkshake too. Oh, and one of those fruit mince pies, please.”

  His body was craving calories and raw protein. It was nearing the full moon, and his urge to shift and go on a long hunt was stronger than ever. The waitress flipped her hair as she took his order back to the kitchen, returning with his shake. He ate his fill—which was pretty much everything on his plate and in his cup—and left the diner feeling a bit bogged down. He knew it wouldn't last long, he never stayed full long enough to feel satisfied this time of the month. Good thing he'd thought to order another batch of fries to go.

  The young woman standing at the front desk when Erik returned from his lunch break was absolutely stunning, dark skinned and striking. Erik hadn’t felt such immediate, visceral attraction in a long time and he took a few seconds to master himself and put on an unaffected mask to present his Sheriff persona to the stranger. He felt the panther in him growl with an entirely different hunger than he'd felt before lunch.

  “Hi,” he said and reached out with a hand. “I’m the sheriff here. Erik Grey. Have you been waiting long?”

  She reached out to take it and her skin was soft and warm. When she looked up at him he saw that her eyes were a rich brown and surrounded by thick lashes.

  “Elise Jackson,” she said and shook his hand. “Not long at all, thank you. I’m the historian here to consult on your case.”

  Chapter 3

  After driving for a few hours, Elise was relieved to get out and be able to stretch her legs. The driver hadn’t been very talkative at all so she’d had far too much time to spend analyzing the inside of her own head. For all that it hadn’t been particularly pleasant, the time had allowed her to gain a little clarity regarding her recent breakup. She had a few sobering moments as she tried to hold back the tears. Frustration, anger, and self-incredulity had her emotions going, and she'd had to bite her lip more than once to sober herself up.

  She’d spent enough time remembering all the occasions Tom had treated her poorly, all the forgotten special occasions and the blown-off dates and the criticisms, that by the time the drive was mostly through, she felt a sense of peace at the realization that the relationship was well and truly over.

  For all the benefits of the thinking time, she was still over the moon when her surroundings began to take on a more civilized feel and the driver glanced up at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Welcome to Sawmill Grove. Another few minutes and we’ll be at the sheriff’s station, ma’am,” he said and Elise nodded eagerly, straining up in her seat to look ahead and see the first hints of buildings that weren’t farm houses or barns that she’d seen in over an hour.

  Sawmill Grove was beautifully decorated for the chilly holiday season, and it really was quite a small town, she realized when they pulled up in front of a brick building with ‘station’ in big block letters and green double doors with glass panels. The driver informed her that they’d arrived and she waited until he’d gotten out of the car and circled around to the trunk before sighing at the unnecessary announcement. Her legs felt a little weak when she got out, poor circulation from inactivity and the long trip, but she surreptitiously shook them out as she leaned against the car. The driver approached, her suitcase at his side. “Shall I bring this inside for you?” he asked.

  Elise nodded and smiled gratefully. “Yes, that would be great,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She followed the driver through the double doors and into the station proper. It was smaller than it appeared from the outside and she couldn’t see anyone there, not even at the reception desk.

  “The sheriff should be around,” the driver informed her as he put her suitcase down against the front of the reception desk. “Would y
ou like me to wait?”

  “That’s fine,” Elise assured him and glanced around. “I’m happy to wait. Thank you for bringing me here.”

  “My pleasure. Hope you have a merry Christmas,” he said and tipped his head a little. Elise stared after him as he left, a little unnerved as she’d seldom had a private driver that wasn’t a cab driver. She stayed in the reception area for a few moments, walking a few steps each way until her legs felt more normal. Eventually the doors opened and a tall man came striding through with a paper bag in the crook of one muscular arm.

  Elise couldn’t help but stare at the way his shirt stretched over the bulge of his biceps and the tight uniform pants that hugged his legs. She looked away quickly, hoping she managed to keep the staring from his notice, before looking up with a slight smile on her face.

  “Hi,” he said. His voice was a low, warm rumble that sent butterflies loose in her belly as he reached out with a hand in greeting. “I’m the sheriff here. Erik Grey. Have you been waiting long?”

  She looked up to focus on his face, which was just as attractive as the rest of him. “Elise Jackson,” she managed to say as she took his hand and shook it. “Not long at all, thank you. I’m the historian here to consult on your case.”

  “We’re very grateful to you for coming,” Erik said, and Elise found herself in the midst of a small emotional crisis, well aware that she was fresh off the end of a serious relationship but also well aware that she wanted very little more than to be wrapped in those strong arms and swept off her feet that instant. There was something vaguely familiar about the way he spoke, but she knew she wouldn’t have forgotten a face like that so she shook off the sensation.

  “What kind of information do you have on the case?” she asked him.

  “Come through to my office,” he said and lifted her suitcase easily. “I’ve got the crime scene photos and the report, we can talk about it in there.”