by Lynn Red
Izzy placed her hand on the small of Erik’s back. She sensed him beginning to tense up again, and a giant, limb-tearing brawl was the last thing anyone needed. Reid took a deep breath. “Business,” he said.
“I knew I liked you,” Erik said. “The truth is that we don’t have any choice. Look out here.” He crossed the room and went to twist the rod on a set of blinds on the nearest window. The rod broke off in his hand, and the shades fell off into a dusty heap.
Reid laughed softly. “Talk,” he said.
“Here we have your town, right? We’ve got a library across that way that’s just starting to open up. There’s a very attractive young man walking in there, and a pair of similarly attractive young ladies apparently opening the place for business. And then this way we have a handful of hard working, probably suffering, small businesses. Couple restaurants, a movie theater. Say, have you seen Frozen?”
Reid growled.
“Our cub just fell in love with it. Say, you have kids of your own?” When Reid growled again, Erik just moved along. “Right, fine, not friends. Anyway, do you want this place to fall apart? Or do you want it to grow? Or if not grow, at least not die off?”
Reid’s left cheek twitched. “It means a lot to me,” he said. “Not just the shifters, but the humans. And that’s Laney Langston and her friend Elaine. They’re our librarians. The young guy I don’t know, which is strange because I know everyone here. He looks familiar though, I can’t place him.”
“That’s Rip Black,” Izzy said. “He’s one of the ones who helped us with this. Although he was more than a little upset at the final agreement.”
“Why?” Reid asked.
Izzy shrugged. “He’s a big name in shifter intellectual circles. He’s got some pretty radical views about shifter rights and all that. He was pretty proud of the no police and no interstates thing, though.”
Reid grunted again. “Why’s he here?”
“How should I know? Probably tired of the press chasing him everywhere.”
Reid turned his attention back to the visitors. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll sign the damn thing, but you have to come back to get it. I don’t sign anything I don’t read all the way through. And I’m not the fastest reader.”
Erik sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ve got a week and we don’t want to spend it here. First time away from the cub and all.”
“Yeah,” Reid growled, “and you want to go skate in South Beach.”
Reid stood up and approached Erik. The two of them stared straight into each other’s eyes for what seemed to be an eternity. Reid raised his arm in a ninety degree angle. “Shake,” he said.
Erik clasped his hand, and squeezed. Both of them flexed their considerable biceps, and as Izzy watched, she felt herself go a little silly.
“So it’s a deal?” Erik asked as they squeezed one another’s hands. “You’ve seen Predator I take it, you son of a bitch?”
“Come back in a week. I’ll have your damn paper. The only predator around here is me.”
When the two of them unlocked hands, it was like the earth breathed a sigh of relief. Reid didn’t want on either of them. Instead he just stomped out of the room, and out into Redby.
“That was something,” Izzy said. “I’m proud of you for not trying to kill him.”
“That’s the thing,” Erik said. “I think we’d probably tear each other apart before either of us gave up. I... I think I kinda like him, though I can’t explain why.”
“I could tell,” Izzy said. “So, next stop, Miami?”
Erik placed his hand softly on Izzy’s back and led her to the door. “You drive, I’ll sing. Got any Journey in that rack?”
Izzy sighed. “What do you think I am? An asshole? Journey it is.”
2
Laney Langston’s ears twitched. She sat up from behind the main circulation desk at the Redby Township Public Library (secondary location) and coldly assessed the situation. Her nose wiggled next, not completely unlike a particular television witch who was about to cause something extremely zany to happen.
Except, absolutely nothing of any zaniness was possible, that is, if Laney had anything to say about it.
Zaniness was the enemy of peace, of quiet, of thoughtfulness.
Therefore, zaniness was Laney’s mortal foe.
The only thing she could see from where she stood were a handful of diaper-clad toddlers of uncertain shifter background. One of them had a tail that kept poking out of the top of her Super Girl underoos, which were baggily situated over the diaper that the kid kept scrunching every time she scooted around to get another book. She’d decided on one of Llama-llama’s latest adventures, Laney noticed, this one where he went to the zoo.
An animal going to the zoo, Laney thought, something just a little bit existential about that. Or something a little creepy. I mean, wouldn’t that be like me having a pet werebear? Pretty sure that’s slavery. Or if not quite that depraved, it’s at least socially tricky.
She smirked and let out a silent laugh. She’d had eight years behind the circulation desk, so she’d gotten very, very good at doing things quietly. She’d even managed to learn to eat tacos and tortilla chips with such stealth that she was fairly sure she could chomp through a bag of Tostitos, and Elaine, her desk mate, would never know.
Aside from the kids playing around in the children’s section, as they waited for David Gilligan, the guitar-playing porcupine, to start the singing part of kiddie time, she could also hear a news broadcast from one of the media rooms. Some politician or another was talking about shifter rights, being allowed to go back to nature and stop worrying so much about acting so human. She blinked her eyes as a strange way to refocus her hearing. Hey, when you’re a lion, you have to do whatever you can to get more auditory signal than noise.
As she bent her knees to sit back down and keep scribbling away at her crossword puzzle. She was currently halfway through Weekly World News’s Bigfoot crossword for the week. She enjoyed both the extremely large grid, and the irony of a lion shifting librarian possessing Weekly World News. She didn’t consider the Bigfoot part, which should tell you something about how Laney’s brain actually works.
A hitching sound, almost like someone choking, caught her sensitive ears. Laney cocked her head, first on a tilt, and then toward the direction of the sound. “The hell is that?” she whispered.
“Shh!” Elaine hushed her. Her ferret-shifting, self-appointed supervisor, who didn’t actually have any authority over Laney, didn’t bother to look up from her crossword, which was the lowly New York Times Monday puzzle. “Sit down!” Her voice was a hiss, barely above a whisper. You’d never know, but the two of them had been best friends for years.
Laney just shook her head and kept peering around the room. There it was again, another throaty, horrible choking sound.
No, not a choke, she realized as the noise came once again.
“A snore?” she said out loud, accidentally breaking her own vow of silence. “Someone’s sleeping? Here?”
Disbelief marred the normally round, pleasant voice that matched her figure. She stepped around the side of her station, and hitched her jeans up, back into place. They always seemed to slip when she sat down, but a quick yank was all it took, and the world was right back where it was supposed to be.
“Why would someone sleep here?”
“Shh!” Elaine squeaked. It seemed like the top of her head would pop off if anyone made another noise. Briefly, Laney considered testing her hypothesis, but decided against it, because she’d have to clean it up if it worked. Instead, she just waved her hand at Elaine, dismissing her complaint. Elaine just sighed, and went back to her baby-time crossword after scratching behind her ear with the point of her pencil.
Seeing her scratch made Laney itch in the same place – one of her many strange personality traits – but instead of using a pencil, Laney relieved her itch with the shirt clip on her pen. Rounding the corner into the adult fiction area, which she always thoug
ht needed a whole lot more adult on the shelves Laney gave herself another scratch behind the ear.
“Miss Langston!” a tiny voice called, the split second before a tiny hand grabbed Laney’s shirt and tugged urgently. “Miss Langston?”
It was the very same girl with the Super Girl underoos and the scrunchy-sounding diaper. Laney looked down at her. “Yes dear?”
“There’s somebody asleep over there.”
“Which section?” Laney asked, and immediately began to correct herself. “Which part of the—”
“The Stephen King section,” the little girl with wiggling tail said with a smile. “I’ve read all of his books, you know,” she said proudly. “And the only time I got scared was that one part in It with the clown cutting off—”
“You shouldn’t be reading that stuff!” Laney said. “It’ll give you nightmares.” She considered for a moment. “Or even worse, you’ll turn out like me,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for the heads-up, sweetie. I don’t know any delicate way to ask this, so I’ll just... is he dirty? Like hasn’t showered for a while?”
“Oh no, Miss Langston,” the girl said, “he’s very clean. He smells pretty good, kind of like the cologne my uncle wears. He’s a businessman, you know, he’s got his own cleaning business and also a pest control business, and he’s a realtor and—”
Laney patted the girl on top of the head. “I’m sure he’s very interesting and smells very nice. But I’ve got to go figure out why someone decided that the best place for a midday nap was in my adult fiction section.”
“Not adult fiction, the Stephen King section,” the little girl urged. She was getting very excited about the whole thing. “Can I watch you fight him?”
Up on her tiptoes, the stumpy shifter’s head came almost to Laney’s waist. “Pleeeeeeaaaase?”
“If you promise to be quiet and stay back and—wait a second! I’m not going to fight anyone. What gave you that idea? I’m just gonna get him out of here, or at least wake him up.” Or if he’s halfway decent looking, I might ask him on a date. I mean, even if he was sleeping, he had to walk into the library in the first place, right? Might not be exactly what I’m looking for in a man, but what the hell—I can’t be all that picky. It ain’t like my clock hasn’t been tick-tocking away for longer than I’d like to admit.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts.
“Everyone said you fought that one guy who made a big mess and knocked over a bunch of carts when he was running around with his shirt off,” the kid said.
Laney cracked a grin. “Well, that was different. When you’re in college you’ll understand that sometimes the only way to counter the intense stupidity that comes from a mixture of Axe body spray, cheap beer, and groupthink is to lay the smack down on a fool.” She smirked again, thinking back to the incident the girl was talking about. She may possibly have overreacted to the rampaging frat guy, but what the hell—a girl’s gotta blow off steam sometimes, and a lioness has an almost desperate need for violence that modern society just doesn’t accept.
So when you get the chance... take a jump, right?
“Anyway,” she said, still smiling, “I’m not going to fight him. Stay behind me, I’m sure nothing exciting is going to happen, but you never know.”
By then, a small train of short people had assembled behind Laney. “Get him Miss Langston!” a tiny voice urged. “Yeah! Get him good! Get that sleeper! You’re not supposed to sleep in school or in the library!” another squeaky voice chimed in.
Suddenly, the tiny train gave Laney a shot of courage that could only be described as a similar feeling to going down the road and spontaneously deciding to roll down all the windows and sing along to some really raunchy Guns ‘n’ Roses songs, really loud.
And absolutely not giving the first shit who heard or what they thought.
And there was a guy sleeping in her damn library.
She puffed her chest up, lifted her shoulders until they formed something like a shelf upon which her head was sitting, and marched directly toward the most popular section of the library, a thought which bothered her and also didn’t. After all, she did really like The Stand.
“Okay, mister!” she started before she laid eyes on her victim. “You’ve really got to...”
When she saw his golden fur, his massive legs and arms, and a mane that would’ve been right at home on a 1980s Bon Jovi album cover, she heard her own voice skid to a halt. There, before Laney, in all his glory, was a gigantic lion who had apparently fallen asleep with a copy of Dolores Claiborne in his hand, er, paw.
“Can’t say I blame him,” she said, tilting her head to the side and looking at him fondly for no reason in particular. A moment later, she remembered the small legion at her heels, and knew she’d have to at least reinforce the rules.
She could be gentle about it, at least. No reason to be over the top. After all, it wasn’t like he’d fallen asleep in the middle of the floor. And it wasn’t like he fell asleep on a good book. She laughed at the thought, and then poked him with her toe.
“Aww, come on Miss Langston!” the girl in the underoos chided. “You gotta be meaner than that! He’s asleep in the library and he’s snoring!” Her kid-lisp made the last word several syllables longer than it should’ve been, and punctuated it with a rise and fall in the middle. She might not’ve been all that excited about kids in general, but this one was goddamn adorable, even to Laney. “What if a kid saw him and thought that’s what you’re supposed to do in lie-berries?”
Laney snickered again. “All right,” she said. “I guess you’re right. And I guess it’s possible he is an escapee from a zoo. I don’t know if I’ve ever known a single shifter in my whole life who could sleep peacefully enough to just turn into a giant lion. I almost hate to bother him.”
“Mmm,” the giant lion groaned. “Yeah, just like that. Yes, yes...”
“Oh holy hell!” Laney spluttered. “You kids go on, now, story time is about to start! Don’t want to miss story time, or song time, or whatever is about to happen.”
“We don’t want to miss this!” A chorus of voices announced at almost the exact same time. “He’s funny!”
“Yeah baby,” the big lion groaned. “Yeah, just like that. Don’t stop, just do it once. One real good one... yeah, just like that. Keep going, just one good turn and you’ll get me so good.”
He trailed off that time, a little drool coming out of his leonine lips. A moment later, his tongue followed the drool and hung out of his mouth like a homeless earthworm trying to escape an oven.
“Oh my God,” he started up again, the earthworm retracting back to its hole. “Yeah, you really got me, baby. You got me goin’ good now, yes, yes...”
“Okay kids! Back to the rug! Head over to the story rug time mat thing! Mr. Gilligan is ready for song time and—”
From across the library, a haggard looking man coughed loudly. “I still got ten minutes!”
“Shh!” Elaine hissed so hard she might as well have been a balloon with a hole in it. “Quiet!”
“I got ten minutes!” David Gilligan protested again. “She’s cutting into my break, I—”
“Then quit ten minutes early, Mr. Gilligan! Song time! Now! Go, go, go!” she herded the kids back across the center area of the library where sat nothing but empty study tables and a few cream colored Dell PCs from back when the ‘Dude You’re Getting a Dell’ guy was still on the commercials.
Gilligan grumbled, and whined for a second, but rapidly took his guitar up and began a rousing rendition of what seemed to Laney’s ears to be a version of She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain set to the tune of Live and Let Die—the Wings original, thank you very much. She didn’t much care what he was playing, as long as he was entertaining the kids while this sleeping lion finished his sex dream.
“Sex dream!” Laney whispered before she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Finish? No sir, not here.”
She poked the big lion with the toe of her rebel
lious, for a librarian, Mary Jane. “Wake up!” she whispered. “Get up! You’re traumatizing a bunch of kids, and you’re kinda making me tingle.” She clapped her hand over her mouth again, and shook her head.
“God I’m hard up,” she mumbled. “So is he, apparently.”
“Hunh?” the big lion snuffled a few times. One eye opened slowly, then the other. He blinked once, then again. “Where am I? Why the hell do I have Dolores Claiborne in my hand?”
Laney put her fists in her back and pursed her lips. “Sorry to wake you, baby doll,” she said. “You’re asleep in a public library, and apparently having some kind of dirty dream. You were—”
“Wait, what?” he shook his head and pushed himself into a sitting position. “I was dreaming about a...” He trailed off, and blinked a couple more times. “It was a hamburger, I think. I really get into how a person turns a patty, you know?”
Her mouth froze halfway through beginning a lecture. The rest of Laney’s body followed immediately after, until she felt like the tin man who had run out of WD40. “You what? You were carrying on and groaning like you were about to go straight into... er, like you were about to have, you know, relations.”
“Oh hell, I’m still a lion. I can’t believe I did that. Look,” he began. For a moment, he didn’t speak, instead he plodded off behind the section with lots of Dean Koontz books. When he reappeared, he was buttoning a pair of loose-fitting Levis. His button-up shirt was hanging open, and for a moment, Laney just stared slightly slack-jawed, at the lines of this magnificent creature’s muscles.
His shoulders flexed gently as he buttoned the red and blue, checker pattern shirt, and his forearms clenched as he rolled the sleeves up. “Like I said,” he continued, “I’m really sorry. I’ve been working late, not sleeping much. And did you say something about ‘relations’? That’s funny, I haven’t heard that word since the last time my Grannie Clara came to town.” His stomach growled mightily, interrupting whatever he was about to say. He grinned sheepishly. “I guess I’m—”