On the Growl: A Shifter Romance Anthology

by Lynn Red

  Still she was Paprika’s big sister. Even if she was on a chain gang, and even if she did sexually harass the law enforcement officers in charge of her, she was always going to be the girl who brought Paprika a big chocolate Easter bunny – like a solid one, not the cheap ones from Walgreen’s – when she had her first big break up.

  That might sound a little weird, but among other things, the sisters shared a certain sardonic wit. Petunia also brought her a huge t-bone steak, but that was a different thing altogether.

  Rika had just started to roll down her window when her sister turned away from Itchy and Giant, and instantly perked up. “Rika?” she screeched, running straight past the two cops and right at the Wrangler. Morgan and the other guy exchanged confused glances, and then a shrug, before disappearing back into the station.

  “What are you doing here? How did you even get here? Oh wait, get a load of this.” Petunia put her hand on Rika’s shoulder, getting her attention.

  “That guy with the long hair coming out of the front? The one getting on the… holy shit that’s a big bike.”

  “Yeah, but bear’s ride bigger ones. Everything about bears is bigger.”

  It took a second for that to register. “Wait, what?” Paprika asked.

  “Nothing. Anyway, that’s Erik Danniken, the town alpha. Look at that hair. And that human is his mate. Obnoxious bi—“

  “Did you just say ‘alpha’? Like, that’s what they call the mayor? And why is everyone so, uh, big here? Well except that weird pale guy that came out of the pokey van.”

  “He’s a salamander – that’s Leon. He gets hauled in all the time for peeing in places he’s not supposed to. And those other guys, most of them were werewolves, but the big cop that I kept getting to bend over, that’s Ash Morgan, he’s a pro-wrestler or something that turned into a cop. I don’t pay much attention to anything except his ass.”

  Paprika blinked, and then opened her eyes wide. “You... what?”

  “I’ll go over it all later. Jamesburg is very much a place of its own. God, look at Danniken’s butt,” Petunia was practically drooling. “I promised to help replant the fields I tore up, and I got out of a two-to-ten. I’d be the only girl in the prison, so I think they went easy on me. There was some kind of crazy beaver that tried to blow up the city a year or so back, but no one’s ever found her.”

  There wasn’t much that Rika could do except stare. A very strangely dressed man – he was wearing skin-tight pants of all sorts of colors, a sleeveless, unbuttoned vest, and something that looked like the shoes Julie Andrews wore when she played Peter Pan. He was sauntering, in a slightly unsteady way, around the parking lot.

  “Is he high or something?”

  Petunia shook her head. “Nah, no reason to be here, the drugs wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t see anyway. That’s Glenn, he’s, well, I think you better meet him, I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  This was a lot to take in. Paprika slowly became aware that she’d been shaking her head for at least several seconds, and then rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “So they’re all...”

  “Shifters? Nah, not all of them. There’s Jenga – he’s the witch doctor with the zombies I told you about, except they’re more like Frankensteins than zombies, but they’re a cute couple. Then there are, yeah, lots of bears, turtles, foxes, what-have-you. We got a little coven of witches, but they keep to themselves except when they try to turn town residents into potions.”

  Petunia took a deep breath, and kept on rattling before Rika could get a word in edgewise, probably for the best. “And then there is Leon, he’s a drunk but also a salamander. He’s all right, if a little weird. Which, coming from me, that’s something.” An unsteady laugh came out of Petunia. “And then, let’s see. Right, the foxes, the corgi family who lives in a house where everything is short – which is super adorable – and then, oh right, the town permit officer is a hedgehog, and there’s a bat girl who may or may not be a vampire.”

  Paprika had both hands on the sides of her face, her mouth was hanging open, and she was just trying to process. “That’s a lot.”

  “You’ll get used to it. I have a little apartment out back of my house. I had to rebuild after I tried to catch a cowboy bear down there, and—you know what? That’s not important. I’m glad you’re here, sis!”

  The two of them held a tight embrace, both just about vibrating with nervous energy, but neither wanting to break the hug. “It’s been a while, huh?” Paprika finally said. She was getting a little misty in the eyes, but then again, so was Petunia.

  “A lot’s happened,” Petunia said, growing slightly wistful in her voice. “But I think life is finally turning around.” She shrugged. “Or at least, if it’s not, I’m going to have a hot roommate in a couple days, so what the hell. Speaking of, what happened to--?”

  She trailed off, catch a glimpse of the very obvious downward gaze that her sister took on. And it wasn’t just from exhaustion. Petunia, maybe not the most socially adept rabbit ever, was able to read that look, and she let it drop without another word. “Well hey,” she said, “want to go get a beer? The Tavern’s just down from here about three blocks. You can meet some of the crazies.”

  “They all drink at three thirty on Tuesday afternoon?”

  “The colorful ones anyway. Not a lot to do here. Shifters have a siesta sorta thing, except it usually involves beer, and a lot of food. Like, a whole lot.”

  The thought of an ice cold beer was pretty inviting. “Yeah, all right, I mean, I’m on vacation, or moving, or whatever the hell I’m doing. So I may as well get used to the place, right? When in Rome.”

  “Oh honey,” Petunia said patronizingly. “Rome ain’t got nothin’ on Jamesburg.”

  As Rika started her engine, and began the slow roll to the courthouse exit, she remembered the strange Peter Pan wandering around, and found him doing a handstand. “And nowhere to start with the crazies than with this one.”

  Petunia got a look of slight concern on her face. “Maybe wait on this one? He’s... no, you know what, Glenn’s the perfect guy to meet first. Ask him about his fairy dust.”

  “Hey there!” Rika called to the jester-clad fellow as she rolled down the window. “I’m new in town, know any good places to eat?”

  He looked back and forth, and then hopped from his hands to his toes with agility that a world class ballerina would have envied. Glenn assumed a very strange, sneaking position, half crouched down with his hands out to his sides like he was trying to infiltrate a pharmaceutical plant without anyone noticing.

  Petunia wouldn’t stop giggling. “Don’t forget the fairy dust.”

  Rika shushed her with a wave of her hand. Glenn kept right on sneaking around. First he hid behind the pole of the stop sign about five feet from Petunia’s window, then he cartwheeled and turned a very skillful somersault.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Glenn! Come over here!” Petunia squealed. “My sister needs a drink!”

  He froze in place, balanced on the ball of his left foot with his right leg bent at a strange angle in front of him. Very slowly he raised it the rest of the way and tucked it behind his head without using his hands. The slow motion contortionist act continued with him somehow rolling onto his hands, and then back to his feet in a kind of half-cartwheel half-handspring.

  “How did you see me?” he whispered, incredulously, when he approached the driver’s side window. “I’m invisible.”

  “No you’re not, good God,” Petunia squawked from the passenger seat. “This is my sister, Paprika. She’s named that because my parents were hippies and she was born with red hair.”

  Rika pursed her lips and shot Petunia a nasty glare. But then she felt Glenn take her hand and kiss it, first appropriately, and then up all the way to her shoulder, just like Gomez Addams did with Morticia. “Hellloooo,” he said fluttering his eyelashes. “Since you saw me, you’re destined to be my fairy princess.”

  Petunia
was now giggling madly, and Paprika was about to hit her.

  “So, uh, how about a place to eat?” the red-haired rabbit sister asked again, really feeling like it was time to backhand her older sister. “I’ll have to think about the princess thing.”

  “No!” Glenn shouted, dramatically, like he was Romeo and just learned of Juliet’s passing via a third party, because instead of being with her, he’d decided to go watch the Venice team play London in a medieval soccer match and get drunk. “No! You mustn’t take my heart!”

  He started spinning in slow, obviously very skilled pirouettes. “My queen, my queen, she’s gone from my life.”

  “I’m not gonna get a restaurant recommendation out of you, am I?” Paprika asked.

  Petunia was howling. “Ask him about the dust!”

  With a deep breath, and a heavy sigh, Paprika relented. “Okay what’s this about fairy dust?”

  As soon as she asked, her strange courter froze in place like he’d just had a bucket of liquid nitrogen dumped on him. “You can’t see me!” he hissed. “You don’t know I’m here!”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you, I—“

  Interrupting Paprika’s apology, and accompanied by Petunia’s one rabbit laugh track, Peter Pan spun on his toe, and flung two fistfuls of glitter right into Paprika’s face. He made a poof sound with his mouth, and ran off, shouting that he was invisible and going back to the fairy kingdom.

  “I’m covered in glitter,” Rika said flatly. “He threw glitter at me.”

  “What? No he didn’t, sis,” Petunia insisted. “That’s fairy dust! And now you’re invisible!”

  “I really, really, really need that beer right now.”

  Petunia was screaming, howling, blustering with laughter so hard she was turning purple. Good thing it didn’t take much effort to say “go straight” and “turn left.”

  Chapter 8

  “There’s very little worse than meeting a hedgehog shifting professor and not seeing him get upset.”

  -Paprika

  It took three beers to get through the interview-like introductions. Rika met the mayor, alpha, whatever; she met the bat – who was definitely a really hot vampire girl; she met the hedgehog, the tiny fox who was apparently mated to the huge bear cop she’d seen earlier. It took another half a beer to get through meeting the corgi parents, which was about the funniest thing in the world, and just as adorable as her sister had said.

  The weirdest thing though, well aside from all that, was how everyone kept asking about what sort of sunscreen she was wearing.

  When the tide stemmed for a moment, she finally had a second to talk to her sister privately.

  “Why do they all keep asking me about being out in the day?”

  Petunia shrugged. An absolutely enormous bear, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a cowboy hat wandered over to their booth, accompanied by a gangly man with all sorts of junk tied in his hair, who was flanked with two odd looking, half-green bears, who were alternating between holding hands and exchanging slobbery kisses.

  The big guy stuck his hand out. “I’m West,” he said. “I dragged your sister in after she ruined my garden.”

  Petunia seemed oddly at peace with this. “He did me a favor,” she said out the side of her mouth.

  “Hi, uh, I’m Paprika, I’m just coming to town to—“

  “Atlas!” the jangly looking man shouted. “Atlas! No!”

  But it was too late. The giant, whose breath smelled like a mixture of body spray, bubble bath and... candles? Had plucked Paprika off her stool, and was hugging her like a kid with a favorite stuffed hippo. “Hel...lo!” Atlas bellowed. “New... friend!”

  He was gross, and he was sorta grimy, but his enthusiasm was enough to outweigh Paprika’s horror. She started giggling and smiling as he mauled her with hugs and open-mouthed, watery baby kisses. The slightly smaller one finally grabbed his hair and yanked. “No!” she shouted. “Atlas, bad! Bad Atlas!”

  Looking dejected, the zombie put her down, but resumed smiling a second later when what Paprika guessed must have been the constructed girlfriend Petunia told her about started kissing him with an urgency, and an amount of drool, that most people saved for late, drunk nights at motels far from home.

  “I am sorry about all that, I’m Jenga. If you need a bleeding, or any kind of heart surgery let me know, though I suppose neither of those will be an issue for your sort. And I don’t do teeth anymore, so... anyway, just so’s you know.”

  West, and the witch doctor both left, and for a moment, the parade seemed to stop. “What the fuck just happened? And what does he mean “like you”? Why do people keep saying things like that?”

  “Honestly, sis, it’s like you’re an alien. And before you ask, no there aren’t any of those here. At least not that I know of.” She shook her head, slowly and mockingly. “Have you never read Twilight?”

  “Well, no, I saw the movie, but,” Rika trailed off as she turned one of her forearms back and forth under the dangling Coors Light lamp. The sparkles caught her eye and she finally made the connection.

  “I need a shower,” she said with a smirk. “I need a shower to get rid of this cologne smelling drool, and I need about nineteen hours of sleep. When I get that, I might be able to process all this.”

  “You’ve sure been a trooper so far,” Petunia said, pushing back from the table and dropping a twenty on the fake mosaic tile.

  “Is that gonna cover it?” Rika asked. “I mean, it’s not like I can toss in any, but—“

  “We have a deal,” Petunia said, tilting her head toward the bar tender, who was of course just about too large to be real. She winked. He, unbelievably, winked back.

  All the way to the car, Paprika couldn’t do much anything but just shake her head, and try to keep herself from drooling out of her wide open mouth.

  The shower did the trick. Petunia, for some reason, had invested in a huge, beautifully-tiled offset shower with two heads – one rain and one massager – with a frameless glass door. Upon seeing it, the only thing Paprika could think to call it was a “love-makin’ box,” which amused her sister to no end. Stepping into it, the notion that she could have shared it with Thor, assuming that he hadn’t... well, whatever had happened that made him bolt, put a squiggle through her that was half sad, half excruciatingly exciting.

  She’d find him. She knew it. He was coming here to take that dentist job, and nothing in the world was going to stop her from finding her bear. Hell, once he got his wits about him, he’d probably come looking for her, if the past was any indication.

  At some point during the hour that Paprika was allowing herself to scald and massage and soak in the shower before the water started going cold, someone rang the doorbell, and was chatting it up with her sister. She’d mentioned a roommate, so Rika didn’t give a second thought.

  Even if she’d wanted to dwell on the visitor, the completely ridiculous decadence of being massaged on the back, then the butt, and then the top of her thighs, all while warm, luxurious rain drenched her from head to toe? Suddenly, the point of this ridiculous renovation became wonderfully, achingly, amazingly clear. She might have to make her move permanent just for this thing. Although, she realized if she did, she’d probably need four jobs to cover the water bill.

  At some point, the pair in the living room apparently broke out some drinks, because they were getting louder and louder, laughing more and more. But Rika was off in her own world, floating around on a cloud of steam. It took fairly significant effort to pry herself off the built-in bench when the hot water finally started to peter out, and when she stepped out, Rika was shocked to find that it was almost seven o’clock.

  She’d never spent that long in the shower, mostly because wasting water was bad, and her mother liked to lecture about it, but then again, she’d never had a guy run away from her, and then gone on a cross country semi-move in the same day. So, she thought extenuating circumstances meant she deserved a little pampering.

&nbs
p; And anyway, there was a lot of cologne drool all over her, and that wasn’t going to fly. When she’d scrubbed and scalded herself pink, her naked skin was even more sensitive to the prickling, chilly cold rush of air she felt when she left her steam room.

  But, God did it ever feel good. Being in a new place, clean and refreshed, surrounded by crazies that made her sister look at least sorta-kinda normal? Rika took a deep breath and scrubbed her mop of hair dry-ish with one of the towels she dug out of her sister’s linen closet. It usually took two to get her hair dry, but tonight? She just didn’t care.

  She had determined, decided, that she was going to give life two days, maybe three, to get into some kind of a routine. She’d figure out what she could do around town, figure out if she could maybe get a job if she wanted to stay.

  Showers were the place where Rika made decisions, and when she had an uninterrupted hour? She made lots. She even came to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to hunt down Thor. They were both grown-ups, she’d reasoned. They both had their baggage and their bullshit. It wasn’t her place to run after him and harass him into a relationship, and anyway that probably wouldn’t work out very well in the long run.

  “Nope,” she said to herself, as she double-wrapped the towel around her body and stepped out into the hall. She almost forgot she was only wearing a towel and there was a stranger in the house. You know what? I’m wearing a towel, I’m not naked. What the hell do I have to worry about? New place, new life, right?

  She took one confident, self-assured, partially-dripping step toward the living room and immediately retreated. Okay, maybe baby steps into a new life. Baby steps are always good.

  Rika was partially horrified to find that the PJs her sister tossed to her as she was getting ready for her shower turned out to be fuzzy, purple, and matching. Worse yet, the pants had overly cute hippos on them, and declared “someone’s sleepy!” which is just a great first impression to make. She took a deep ‘what the hell’ breath, and resumed her walk through the living room. She had an apartment, yeah, and so it didn’t much matter who this guy was or what he thought of her, but…