On the Growl: A Shifter Romance Anthology

by Lynn Red

  She hopped down off her little platform, sure to tuck Henry into her fanny pack and secure it around her waist before she started down the trail. The cool wind, blowing through the whistling pines, calmed a little of her nervousness, but not until she was bounding along through the underbrush, back toward home, did her thoughts really rest.

  Chapter 6

  “I’d like to see THAT on a Bear Grylls show.”

  -Paprika

  Two days after their intense exchange in the woods, Rika realized that she wasn’t going to sit around and wait. Healing took time, she knew that, but she also knew that getting out of your own head is a real good thing when the world has just turned into a confused mishmash of weird feelings and fear.

  His office line rang and rang, but no one picked up. Not until the third time she tried, which was about ten minutes after she saw her mom come down the stairs, post Jane Fonda, looking as worn out as if she’d just had eight or ten orgasms in the woods, caused by a bear.

  “Doctor Melton’s… you know what? Who cares? That’s you, right, Paprika?”

  “I, er,” Rika’s voice caught in her throat. “Well yeah? Abby, is everything okay?”

  “Look, T told me about you two, with the kissing and everything. You know him as well as anyone in this town except me, which is honestly pretty sad, seeing as how you’ve had a completely unreasonable number of nearly-sexual run-ins and haven’t shared so much as a meal. You shifter types always confuse me, but when it comes to one that looks like him? I totally get it.”

  Near-sexual? Guess she hasn’t heard about the last one. “Yeah,” Rika said, embarrassment obvious in her up-turned voice. “Listen, I was just worried about him. He told me about his mom and then he ran off in the woods and I haven’t heard from him since.”

  “Shit,” Abby cursed, a bitter laugh following her swear. “I hadn’t until about thirty minutes ago. Hurricane Thor came through just as your last call was filling my ears with the dulcet tones of train engines.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Abby said. “He came through, told me to close up shop, and then just left. I have no clue what the fuck is going on, but I’m pretty sure he just left town. His car was all full of crap, and he looked like he’d either just chugged a gallon of Jack, or he hadn’t slept in three days. He didn’t smell like the inside of a distillery though, so I’m guessing it’s the sleeping bit.”

  “Oh my God,” Rika groaned. “Why the hell… bears and their emotions. They’re like John Wayne times eighty. Why can’t they just talk things out instead of stewing until they blow up.”

  “Yeah well, you just described ‘all American males who don’t cry every time they hear Tiny Dancer on the radio’ so I doubt it’s just the bear part that screws them up.”

  Rika snorted a laugh – she couldn’t help it – and then the gears in her head started to grind. “What kind of car does he have?” She could have waited for an answer, but instead just rapid fired questions. “Where was he going? Did he have food? Has he given any indication of a place he’d go? What about the—“

  “Okay,” Abby cut in. “Hold on Columbo, let me answer at some point or I’ll start forgetting the questions.”

  Rika sighed. “First of all, nope, no clue where he’d go. I doubt he’d go back to the commune, not in this state. He had food, I guess, I mean he had some sack of burgers from a drive through. He didn’t tell me anything, uh… what were the others?”

  It didn’t matter. No amount of Disappeared viewing was going to make her into a crack detective. And after all, this was a bear who felt like he was at once trapped, and had nowhere to go. She told him she loved him, which was likely just a really great thing to do to someone who was already panicking.

  “I didn’t even mean it, not like he probably took it.” She closed her eyes in disbelief as soon as she realized she’d talked out loud.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, nothing, I just told him I loved him after we fooled around in the woods,” Rika said absently. Her mind was scanning all the places he might go, but he hadn’t ever— “Wait a minute. Did he leave his computer?”

  Abby sounded genuinely confused, but then figured out she’d been asked a question. “Oh, uh, let me go look. He only ever had a laptop anyway. Always hated typing on that thing. Give me a second.”

  The phone hit the desk with the determined thud of someone who didn’t know, or care, how to work the hold function on an old office phone. Rika heard Abby’s bare feet plop along the tile, until they disappeared down the hall that joined his office and the front. Then she listened as they came plodding back, and something hit the desk before she picked the receiver back up again.

  “Yeah, I got it,” she said. “But, why? He never looked at it for anything except model train shit.”

  Rika had her mouth open to instruct Abby to check it when what she’d just said registered. “Did you say train shit? Like he plays with trains?”

  “Loves ‘em. Even has a—“

  “Please tell me you’re about to say conductor’s hat because I swear to God that’s the only thing that could possibly make me smile right now.”

  “Yeah, conductor’s hat,” Abby finished.

  The two laughed in the way only two very strained, worried people can. It was a momentary release – relief – from the fear they both had pounding against their skulls. “What am I supposed to look for?”

  Rika heard the laptop open. “Just see what he was looking at. I’ve seen enough TV to know that people usually just shut their laptops and bolt when they’re going to run off somewhere. Hopefully he was so upset that he didn’t bother closing anything.”

  “Password,” Abby said. “Any ideas?”

  Paprika drew a long, irritated breath. “I Love Paprika,” she said sarcastically.

  “Nope.”

  “Hello? Admin? 12345? All those things you’re never supposed to use?”

  “No go, bro,” Abby said.

  “You sure you typed my name right? I—“

  Abby scoffed. “Yeah, I’m sure unless there’s a Y in there somewhere.”

  “All right, all right,” Rika tapped her fingernails against her teeth. “Trains,” she said, thinking out loud. “Trains… Engineer? Conductor? What’s that model train company?”

  “Lionel, and no to all three.”

  Rika sighed dramatically. “I don’t even… wait, how about choo-choo?”

  “Ugh, I hope not,” Abby said. “Nope.”

  “Did you hyphenate it?”

  “No, well, oh my holy ass,” Abby said.

  “Don’t tell me that worked.”

  “You got it, I won’t say anything. Except,” she trailed off. Rika listened intently, waiting for anything that might tell her where to look. “You ever heard of some place called Jamesburg?”

  Paprika was quiet long enough for Abby to ask if she was there. “There’s a picture of a sign, it says Welcome to Jamesburg on it, like a road sign? Hello?”

  “I’m listening,” she said, but really Paprika was pulling on her shoes. She had to get upstairs before her mom got in the car. “Thanks, got it, you’re awesome Abby.”

  “It says Jamesburg,” Abby was interrupted with the beep of a mobile connection cutting off. “Jamesburg, Gotta Love It.” She finished reading the sign, to a beeping phone, right before the line went dead, and she rolled her eyes and unleashed a real whopper of an eyeroll.

  “Mom! Wait!” Rika stuck her head out the window and called out just as Rosalie was climbing into the driver door of her way-too-big Wrangler. “I gotta use that!”

  It took her a second to realize it was her daughter, yelling from the basement, and not someone underneath the car. “Rika?” she asked. “Is that you?” as she pulled the earbuds out of her ears and wiped her forehead with a wristband.

  “Yeah, sorry, I’ve gotta…” she couldn’t think of what to say, so she just went for broke. “Thor’s mom died, he’s panicking, and I’m pretty sure he just packed all h
is shit and moved to Jamesburg?”

  It took about eight seconds for her to run up the stairs and out the front door. “I’m sorry, but can I please take the Wrangler for a couple days? I probably won’t wreck it.”

  “At least you’re honest,” her mother said. She’d already tossed Rika the keys before she said anything.

  Rika was already inside. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “This is crazy as all hell, but I think I love him.”

  Saying the words somehow made it seem more real, but it didn’t make it seem any less stupid.

  Her mother suddenly got very serious, sticking her head into the window and grabbing her shoulder. “The only thing stupid is not following your heart,” she said. “If you think you love this guy, and you’re going to go after him, then you do it and you don’t stop until you either reach the end of the world or you have him. I can’t tell you how many times I regretted something I never tried way more than something I did.”

  “The world doesn’t have an end, ma,” Rika said, with a grin. She grabbed her mom’s hand and squeezed. The smell of wine-orade wasn’t very strong.

  “Then I guess you’re just going to have to keep going until you drag his big, shaggy, beautiful ass in, huh? And what an ass it is.”

  “Oh my God, Ma, you’re gonna kill me with all this. Boundaries exist for a reason.”

  She stood up on tip toes and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “I know, I just wasn’t ever very good at them.”

  Rika laughed at that, and leaned her head back to crack her neck. “How far is it, do you know?”

  Rosalie shrugged. “That’s why I have that thing.” She pointed to the ancient GPS suction-cupped to the windshield. “No reason to need a map if I’ve got magic technology to keep me from getting lost.”

  “This from a woman who refuses to drink water out of the tap?”

  “One thing you’re going to learn the older you get, hon,” Rosalie said. “You get to pick your battles. And if that thing keeps me from having to pull off the side of the road and gawk at a map every time I think I missed an exit? I’ll deal with the cognitive dissonance.”

  The two of them shared a short laugh, and then squeezed one another’s hands. “Go get your bear, Paprika,” Rosalie said, stepping back from the car. “And while you’re there, say hello to your sister for me.”

  Rika nodded, smiled, and started to back down the short driveway into the street.

  “Paprika?” her mom called out as she did.

  “Yeah?” she pulled to a jerky stop.

  “And maybe while you’re there, find a good one for your sister? I get the feeling that she needs someone even more than you do, which… well, it’s saying something.”

  Rika smiled, and gave her mom a faux salute as she closed the window and backed into the street.

  After a few moments of infuriated pressing on the ancient touch screen, she’d got her directions to the address her sister had texted when they talked about her moving before. “Eighteen hours, huh?” she asked the device.

  “EIGHTEEN HOURS, EIGHT MINUTES,” it answered in a robotic monotone that had a vague, and slightly disturbing English accent.

  “Right,” Rika said. “Everyone’s an expert.”

  Chapter 7

  “We really should look into more therapy. Not for you, I mean, for me.”

  -Paprika

  In eighteen hours, one world can become another. A person can go from one end of the earth to the other, or, in Rika’s case, from one point in the space-time continuum to one that seems to be about four hundred years before.

  Another way to say that, is that a person can drive from the dead middle of the Midwest to the dead middle of a mountain chain that may or may not be part of the Appalachians, but that bears absolutely no resemblance to any town she’d ever seen before. And that bear part? That’s not just a pun.

  “Jamesburg,” she said as she rolled past the sign welcoming her to the town that claimed no state on the sign. “Gotta Love It.”

  She shook her head. “We’ll see, I guess.”

  Eighteen hours on the road with nothing to eat except a couple salads from a drive through and enough coffee to kill a more reasonable creature, had just about worn her to the bone. She lost phone reception about five miles before the welcome sign, but it came back when she neared the center of town. The GPS had long since given up trying to keep track of where the hell she’d managed to go, so she relied on a very lucky series of turns that ended up dropping her off right where she was supposed to go.

  “The universe has a way of working out,” Thor had said. “You just have to let it.”

  Rika laughed, a little bitter, a little pissed, but really, she was laughing at herself. She’s the one who made the trip, she’s the one who couldn’t let this bear go. He chased her at first, but now it was turnabout is fair play time, she figured. She didn’t want to be found naked in the woods, and maybe he didn’t want to be found in Jamesburg, but… at some point, in the eighteen hours of broad, golden fields that turned to forests somewhere in Missouri, she decided that maybe he’d been right about that whole universe thing.

  She could have just called it fate, but then again, fate? What is this, an old Greek play?

  By the time she rolled her mom’s gas guzzling Wrangler – the irony of a hippie with a gas guzzler wasn’t lost on her – to a stop in front of the Jamesburg town hall, it was just about three in the afternoon. And, there wasn’t a whole lot going on.

  “Pick up, sis,” she said angrily into her phone as she rang Petunia, unsuccessfully, for about the thirteenth time in the last thirty minutes. She swore again and set her phone down on the center console, wondering how the hell she was going to hunt down a rabbit who didn’t pick up her phone.

  That her sister might, right at that second, be on a work crew doing community service didn’t occur to Paprika until a van marked JAMESBURG SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT pulled up about eight spaces from her Jeep, and the most rag-tag bunch of men piled out. There were muscled guys, scrawny ones, men inked from head to toe and one that looked like his eyes were about to bug out of either side of his head. He licked his lips a lot, for some reason, she noticed.

  “Holy shit, it’s a chain gang,” Rika said, gawking openly at the parade of orange-clad men, most of whom would have been right at home half-naked in a desk calendar, maybe dressed up as a firefighter or a police officer. Or wearing a g-string, she thought with a giggle.

  “All right, ya buncha mongrels, line up.” A voice boomed from the front seat, preceding the appearance of an enormous specimen, with a tattoo poking out the top of his shirt. He was in a tight-fitting, well-tailored khaki uniform, which just about made Paprika’s heart jump out of her chest. “A. MORGAN” was on a name plate above his badge. “Let’s get this over with. I’m starving,” he added.

  All the guys shuffled into place, even the one who had features vaguely resembling a salamander who kept licking his lips.

  It was rude, and she knew it, but Rika just couldn’t stop staring at the deputy with the huge forearms and the shaggy, brown hair. She was reminded of Thor, of course, which just got her heart beating even faster.

  “Hey Ash,” a much, much, smaller man, also dressed in a Deputy’s uniform, said, as he hopped out of the passenger seat. This guy was scratching at his neck like he had fleas. “You seen the little one? That rabbit whose just on part-timer duty?”

  The big guy lifted his shoulders, and when he did, his trapezius muscles looked like they were going to rip through his epaulet-cuffed shirt. “She’s probably hiding under the seat. She does that to fu— to mess with me,” he said, catching his swear.

  At once, all of the others – the deputy included – started chuckling. “My mate, she tells me to cut out the swearing, that the baby’ll catch it and start in with the sailor talk. So, since I like keeping her happy and—“

  “And getting’ laid without having to beg a fox? Yeah, yeah, we know,” the other deputy said, the laughter trailing off.
“Anyways, all’a you, file in. Not much use running.”

  Okay so they’re just letting a bunch of prisoners check themselves into jail? What kind of Mayberry RFD place is this? No wonder my sister likes it so—holy shit!

  With a great deal of effort, the huge man bent down, crawled into the back of the transport van, and re-emerged holding a violently squirming, but apparently very happy, Petunia. As he set her down, she planted a kiss on his cheek, and then grabbed the little guy and gave him a big one on the lips. Neither of them really reacted, but it seemed to Paprika that her impulsive kissing might be genetic.

  “All right, all right, simmer down Lewis,” Morgan said. “Where’d you put the cuffs this time?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe under the back seat? I don’t remember.” It had been years since the two sisters saw each other in the flesh, but Paprika would know that lusty albino anywhere. “You might wanna look,” Petunia said.

  Morgan heaved a huge sigh and stooped down to fish the cuffs out as Petunia – and, Paprika, though she was a little embarrassed to admit it – watched his beautiful butt flex against his khakis.

  “Good show?” he asked, tousling her hair when he stood again. “What are you going to do when you’re outta time? Gotta be coming on pretty quick here.”

  “Three weeks,” Petunia said. She still hadn’t noticed her sister. It wasn’t hard to see why. “But it doesn’t matter, I gotta roommate from the internet. Big bear guy.”

  “You mean you’re subletting a room? And acting like he’s your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” she said. “But once he shows up, he won’t be able to say no to this.” Petunia made an exaggerated show of the curves that Paprika had, pretty much forever, been jealous of. For a rabbit, Tuna was put together pretty damn well, even if she was about six steps past “zany” and right into “crazy as hell” territory.