by Lynn Red
“You okay, Leroy? I’m hungry.” Grandpa Joe’s voice shook me back to life.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “Got lost in my own head for a second. I... is it okay that I’m not excited about this? I mean I am, but—”
“Hey, hey,” he turned me around and crouched down so we were eye to eye. He had one hand on each of my shoulders. “Everyone gets scared,” he said. “Everyone’s afraid right now, no matter what sort of face they’ve got on. You’re supposed to be all giddy and excited and, if you were listening to that fellow who spoke for upwards of an hour, ready to conquer a small country. But the truth is, every single one of the people sitting around you, they’re all scared. And their parents are scared for them.”
I nodded, intent on keeping myself together. “Were you?”
“Me? Scared? I was so scared of graduating that I never did it. Seemed a better idea to me to join a club that sent me to Europe to get shot at for a couple of years instead of graduating high school. I was so terrified that I lied to get out of high school early. Lots of people did.” He pushed one of my short curls out of my face. “Everybody gets scared, Lily. It’s what you do afterwards that makes you who you are.”
I sniffed and looked down for a second, blinking furiously. He only calls me ‘Lily’ when he’s really serious. “Okay, yeah. Sorry, I’m fine.”
“No more apologies,” he said, holding me tight. “Everything’s gonna be fine. We’ve got each other, and you’ve got your whole life in front of you, which is probably more terrifying than it is anything else.”
I laughed a little. He always knew what to say. Always had.
“Sandwich?” I said, wiping my eyes with my thumb, very careful not to smear my eye shadow.
“Are you wearing makeup?” Grandpa asked with a quirked up eyebrow. “Were you trying to get a date, Leroy?”
“No,” I said, laughing and sniffling all at once. “I mean yes, I’m wearing eye shadow. What’s so weird about that?”
“Nothing at all, it’s just... you’re so beautiful I didn’t even notice until I was right next to you. Here.” A handkerchief got stuffed in my hand. “Now. About that awful thing you want to eat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. You’re the best, really. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”
His answer was a shake of his head. “Come on, we’re getting kicked out by Mr. Stimson, I think.”
Grandpa pushed open the door and held it as I walked through.
Was he telling the truth? Grandpa I mean. Was everyone really as scared as I was about everything? Even Caitlyn with that smug, obnoxious half-grin she always had? She was moving all the way across the country to go to a school that people go crazy trying to get through.
Aaron hadn’t ever been away from his parents for more than a weekend, and he was moving to Flagstaff, two hundred miles from here. Must be pretty horrifying.
Somehow, knowing that everyone was just as creeped out about the future as me gave me a little bit of perverse comfort.
“Hey, grandpa?”
The ancient Bronco’s engine roared to life. “Yep? What’s got your gander, Leroy?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, I just wanted to say thanks. That’s all.”
“Anytime, little girl,” he struck a match with his fingernail and touched it to the top of his pipe-full of vanilla flavored tobacco. “I know what it’s like. I might not remember much, but I sure remember all the little things that make life interesting.”
As we made our way down the skinny town road to the middle of town, neither of us said much. The only sounds were the air hissing through the tobacco in grandpa’s pipe and the rhythmic, gentle pop of his lips.
I closed my eyes, happy for a few moments of repose, and let my head roll back and forth against the window with each little bump in the road and rumble of the old engine.
-To Catch a Wolf (A Jamesburg Shifters Novel)-
“Enough!”
Erik slammed one of his fists onto the lectern, then grabbed his gavel and pounded the wooden podium. “Calm... down!”
Furiously, I typed away on my keyboard, trying my very best to keep up with the near-constant noise from the audience, but there was no way. Questions were coming from the left, and then an insult from the right, and someone even threw a bottle from way in the back.
“Alpha!” Seth, a young wolf, shouted above the crowd. “This is court! You can’t just show up and make us listen to you rant for half an hour and then tell us to be quiet! We’re wolves—”
“Some of us are,” Clay Tomkins, a proud hyena-shifter added. “Don’t be so exclusionary.”
Erik bared his teeth and for a second, his eyes went yellow. I swallowed hard, hoping he managed to control himself. If he lost his temper in the middle of a pack meeting, there would be a massive brawl and I’d be serving alcohol-soaked bandages at the reception instead of cocktails.
“Izzy!” Erik hissed. I typed it down.
“Isabel! Pay attention to me,” he said. Erik bent down to talk in my ear and narrowly avoided a chair that crashed into the wall above his head. “We need to go. I’m about to throttle that prick.”
“Which one?” I asked.
He didn’t answer except to snarl.
I took a deep breath and pushed my carriage return. No matter what happened, I had to keep typing. It might sound crazy, but part of my job as the alpha’s personal assistant is to go to all these insane meetings and try to make sense of it so he can read over the notes later.
Don’t ask.
I heard the wood on the podium top start to crack. Erik wore out two or three lecterns a year like this, habitually stress-squeezing until they finally gave out.
Real bad month at the courthouse.
“I’ve made my decision,” Erik growled. “If you want to hear it, sit down and shut up!”
The crowd just kept on. Shouting, complaining; the whole courtroom was an endless drone punctuated with screams.
“Izzy?”
I turned to see Erik’s bright gold eyes flash. When he does that little thing with his eyes, it makes all my girl parts clench up. It’s some kind of werewolf magic, he’s told me, that makes human women ache for them. But he seemed to be doing it more lately. For a split second, I wondered if there was any significance to that, but then he smiled and my head started spinning.
“Izzy? You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said shaking my head. “Sorry, you stared at me in that way you have, and...”
“Oh,” he shook his dark hair from side to side and smiled at me, flashing his dimples and his eyes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to do any charming.”
How he could do that – make the whole chaotic shit-fest of a world around us vanish – was beyond me, but there he was, forcing my attention on him in the midst of a pack of screaming shifters.
Someone threw a chair.
“I want you,” he whispered, “to duck.”
“What?”
“Duck. I’m going to take care of this right about now.”
“I—”
“Now!”
I hesitated long enough to see someone else rear back and sling a briefcase toward Erik.
“Get down,” he shouted, pushing me off the chair and to the ground.
As quickly as I could, I scurried under the table, peeking around one of the legs in time to see the lectern that I had just ordered go sailing across the room and catch one of the chief complainants in the side of the head.
He might’ve well pulled out a hand grenade and yanked the pin.
No one moved.
The only thing I could hear was Erik’s ragged, heavy breathing beside me. He reached down and wiggled his fingers. Tentatively, I took his hand and pulled myself up. As soon as my eye-level went above the tabletop where my typewriter sat, I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Every single person in the room – be they wolf, coyote, fox, or whatever the hell Leon is... some kind of lizard – was dead quiet and staring, open-mouthed, at Erik.
Duggan Degger, the town historian-cum-hedgehog, was characteristically tugging on his suspenders and shaking.
“Good,” Erik said, in a satisfied voice.
I hunched my shoulders and slid as quietly as I could into my chair.
I just about threw up when I adjusted my carriage return, and it let out a ding that turned a whole bunch of heads in my direction.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Erik smiled at me again. Those damn eyes flashing, those stupid dimples that got me all clenched up... if it weren’t for all that, I’d want to punch him right in the mouth. Maybe I did anyway.
“It’s fine, Isabel,” Erik said, giving me another dashing smile and turning his attention back to the previously-rowdy audience. “Good! I’m glad we could come to an understanding about proper courtroom procedure. Now, could someone check on Devin? He’ll heal pretty quickly, but someone make sure he doesn’t have a concussion.”
I watched, wide-eyed, as Leon the mystery shifter crouched down and checked Devin’s pulse, then his eyes. He nodded, and returned to his seat.
“Excellent! Now, as you all know, we were here in the first place to work through a little problem that came up in the last week. One of our townspeople, Lucien,” he stuck his hand out, indicating the black-haired wolf with the ponytail, “wants to file a claim that his mate has been stalked and stolen by Flavius.”
Erik rifled through a folder.
Two years ago, fresh out of school and without a shred of experience to my name, I saw an online ad.
How many stories start like that?
This ad, it said there was a small town mayor in the Appalachians who needed a secretary. No experience necessary, it said. Oh, and also, there was in innocuous note in the ad about the town being ‘an organization looking to expand’ which is one of those phrases that just sorta flies past when you’re out of work and needing to pay bills.
Good God was I ever in for a shock.
Upon arriving, I was shown around town, and needless to say, the first time you see someone strip naked, crouch down and turn into a horse, it’s a whole different sort of immersion learning.
“Are you getting this down?” he asked me. I nodded.
“What is it, then?” I’d recognize Lucien’s high-pitched voice anywhere, even if I was face-down to a typewriter. “Do I get my request?”
Erik took a deep breath and heaved a sigh. “I can’t go around letting everyone challenge each other to duels whenever the mood strikes. If you look around, the entire pack, minus a few of us who had to work or whatever it is that keeps them from mandatory meetings... we’re all here. And if you notice, we’re not as numerous as we were. I can’t have you killing people just because you feel like you’ve been insulted.”
I looked around the room in the second’s worth of a pause. I never noticed before, but he was right. Just last year, when our weekly shifter court convened – which, by the way, gives very different meaning to the term ‘monkey trial’ – this room was packed full. As it stood now, there were a handful of empty chairs in the front row, and scattered throughout the hall.
“I... I know that, Alpha,” Lucien said. He was so whiny that even I wanted to smack him one across the mouth. I’m not exactly the smacking-in-the-mouth type, either. “But I’ve been wronged, and this is the way of our pack! When someone steals your mate, you have the right to challenge them to a duel.”
Going back to my typewriter and adding what Lucien just said, I let my mind drift a little.
I’m so not like that. It’s crazy what being around a bunch of testosterone-pumped, muscle-bound, machismo-dripping werewolves, werebears, werefoxes and weregators can do to a person. As I looked around the room, Leon flicked his tongue out and licked an eyeball.
I never did figure out what he actually was. He got really mad when you called him lizard.
These days though, it was harder to think about going home and dealing with normal human drama. The shifters I had gotten used to, but Judgmental Uncle Ted? Ugh.
“Yes,” Erik said. He was being patient. Way more patient than I ever could have been. He leaned forward on the desk where his lectern used to sit, his knuckles popping. “That is true. However, I’m not sure that she was really stolen, Lucien.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The wolf, I noticed, wasn’t taking his dressing-down very well. “She was my mate, and then that jackass took her away!”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t half expect someone to voice a complaint about the pejorative use of ‘jackass’ but I kept my head down and went right on typing.
“All right,” Erik began. “What is it you expect to happen, Lucien? Let’s be realistic.”
“My honor!” the middle-aged wolf was almost shrieking. “My honor is at stake, Alpha! When that monster... that freak took my mate, I was going to murder him, drive a silver spike straight through his heart, to avenge my honor.”
Erik sighed again. It was really hard not to laugh. “First of all, let’s not start in with the freak talk. We’re all different here, but we’re all one pack. Get it? Werebear or werewolf, there’s no difference in the eyes of the alpha. And, in case you forgot, that’s me.”
I didn’t look up, but I knew the glare he was giving the room. I’d seen it a thousand times.
“He threatened me! He stole my mate, he—”
“What is the other rule about mates, Lucien?” Erik interrupted. “The one that says if your mate wants to leave, then...”
Lucien shook his head, at least feigning that he didn’t understand. A shifter’s mate leaving was a mark of shame for which we humans don’t have a corollary. The closest thing might be, I dunno, eating your co-worker’s lunch and getting caught on tape.
Erik gestured with his hand. “Come on, Lucien. If your mate wants to leave, then she... c... c...”
“Can leave?” Lucien said. I swear his lips were trembling.
“Uh-huh. So, if she can leave if she falls in with someone else, then I don’t really see what kind of a case you’ve got.”
“So I don’t get to fight him?” Lucien balled up his fists and stood. Erik hates it when people stand up. “That freak takes my mate and I can’t even fight him over her?”
Erik half-laughed, and then shrugged. “You can fight whoever you want. That’s not my business, that’s not pack business. But if you want to issue a sanctioned challenge for dominance, you’ve got to play by the rules. If he kidnapped her? Okay. If he swept in, cast a spell on her and took your children? Perfect. But right now, all we’ve got is someone leaving someone else, and no rules have been broken. Now sit down, and stop complaining.”
Lucien grunted, and he sat down hard. “Okay, fine,” he said, then added a mumbled, “Goddamn assho—”
“What?” Erik leaned over the table. “What did you say?”
“Uh... I said yes... I mean yes, sir.”
Erik’s shoulders visibly relaxed when he checked the clock. This was his favorite part of court days. The ending part.
“Fantastic,” he said with a sigh. “I thought that’s what I heard. Now, if there’s no other complaints to hear today, I—”
From the left, someone shouted, “I’ve been waiting all day!” From the right hand side of the room came a “Me too! This is ridiculous!” and then from the back of the room, someone complained that they’d been coming for two weeks and hadn’t yet been heard.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “There’s a lot of really irritated people. Is this really the time to go hide out in your office?”
Erik flashed a dimpled half-smile. “Do you remember what Walt wanted me to hear two weeks ago? He has a complaint about his neighbor watering his lawn three times a week instead of two. Oh, and the other one, Greg? Who’s been waiting all day, you saw the report. He is complaining that Leon of all people stole a bunch of DVDs out of his car. I just... I can’t even imagine. Leon can hardly keep himself awake most times.”
The noise from the audience started t
o grow, and before I knew it, Erik had my hand in his, and I grabbed the typewriter off the table. “Got everything?” he said.
“Uh... yes, I think,” I said, stammering as he pulled me to my feet. “Wait!” As he pulled me to the door to his office, which was conveniently six feet from where we were standing, I stuck out a hand and barely grabbed my notes. “Okay, now I do!”
“Good,” he said. “Court is adjourned! I’ll be in my office until four, but don’t bother knocking unless you have an appointment.”
“Sir,” I said, “there’s no appointments, you told me not to make any.”
“I know,” he grinned. My sex muscles clenched. I hated when he did that. Okay, hate is a little strong of a word. More like ‘wish he’d only do it behind closed doors.’
I started going a little weak in the knees, but before that mattered he shoved me through the office door, sighed and collapsed backward, resting against it. His huge arms strained the sleeves of his dress shirt as he ripped off his jacket and reached for his tie.
Without looking, he took a second to click both deadbolts and the lock on the door’s handle.
The grin from earlier came back, this time joined by a flashing pair of pale yellow eyes. His swelling muscles were just about to tear through the slacks that I’d had tailored for him not even a week before.
“Here?” I said, almost breathless. “But won’t everyone in the room hear?”
“Oh like it’s the first time,” Erik said. “The way you were looking at me with those side-eyes of yours, I could hardly control myself. I didn’t give a shit about anything going on in there for at least half the day. I’ve been thinking about this since lunch.”
“About what?” I asked, feigning innocence.
“Get over here, Izzy.” Erik grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me across the floor. “I can’t keep myself calm much longer. You better either take that dress off, or not care if I rip it to shreds.”
His words burned my skin just about as hot as his fingers on my wrist did. “I’ve got others,” I said in a breathy whisper. “You keep buying them for me.”
