by Lynn Red
And somewhere deep in her brain, Laney appreciated it. She couldn’t count how many times Elaine had gotten her to take a few breaths and tune down the blood pressure when nothing else possibly could.
“Thanks, Wendy,” Laney said.
Elaine shrugged and gave her a brief smile. The other thing she’d learned over the years of being friends with Laney was not to gloat when she was right. It isn’t like Laney went crazy or anything, she was just sort of prickly about certain things, and that was the biggest.
“No, seriously, I know you’re doing that thing where you don’t want to get me wound up, but I really appreciate what you said. And I appreciate you listening to me. We aren’t the warmest and cuddliest friends, but I’d be a mess without you.”
“I know,” Elaine said with another grin. “But now you have to deal with them,” she hissed, drawing back like Dracula seeing a cross as the Kiddie Time crowd filed in and started looking around.
“Miss Langston!” she immediately recognized the voice as the high-pitched, adorably-lisped girl who first warned her about the presence of the man who had complicated every single second of her life since his discovery. It seemed like a damn eternity, even though it had only been three days since they met.
“Miss Langston!” the little girl repeated, this time punctuating her call with a tug on Laney’s shirt. “How’s your boyfriend? Did he ever get what it was he was moaning and carrying on about?”
“I, uh,” Laney turned bright red, an unfamiliar sensation to her. “He was just hungry,” she said. Laney shot a look back toward Elaine, and found her bright red, hunched over, and trying her best not to start hooting with laughter. Laney shook her head grimly. “Okay, enough about my boyfriend,” she said. “Wait, I mean, he’s not my boyfriend.”
Getting flustered was also an alien sensation to the normally stolid, sensible, reasonable Laney Langston. But in the last few days, she’d started getting used to being confused.
All the cubs and pups and kits were giggling at her. It reminded her of those moments on Full House or some other 80s family-style sitcom when someone kissed someone else, and the entire studio audience made a bunch of ooooh’ing and aaaahhh’ing like they’d never seen anyone lock lips before.
“Are you in love Miss Langston? With the big guy who was asleep in the floor and groaning?”
Laney laughed. Thank God she could still laugh. And at least she wasn’t in love enough yet to have any problem denying that she was in love. Except when she went to say no, the words hitched in her throat.
A din of noise from outside where the small crowd had swelled to a much healthier knot of humanity gave her a moment’s break from having to explain both to herself and a bunch of curious children, whether she was or was not in love.
Elaine was by her side a half breath later. “Are you seeing this?” she grabbed Laney’s arm. “What in the hell is—er sorry, I mean what in the gosh darn heck—is going on?”
Both of them were staring out the front door, agape at the growing throng of people in front of their tiny, insignificant, perplexingly well-maintained library. That library lay in an unincorporated town full of shifters and witches in a barely-extant Township tucked away in the Stone Mountains and hidden from the rest of the world.
There wasn’t any reason on earth that what they were seeing happen should have been happening. Not a single reason that either of them could think of, but both of them knew, somewhere deep in the lizard parts of their brain.
“CNN is here,” Elaine said.
“And there’s an MSNBC crew,” Laney added. “This is bad. This is really bad.”
“Yeah, but it’s also pretty hot if you think about it,” Elaine said. “I think you’re about to get to know your future mate a whole lot better.”
“She is in love with him!” the little girl shrieked. “Miss Langston and sleepy guy sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
“Normally I’d say something about that,” Laney said, “but right now I’m more concerned with the fact that Rip Black is about to do something insane to try and impress me. I should be worried about that, right? I’m not crazy, right?”
“Oh baby, you’re nuts,” Elaine said. “You’re completely, unbelievably, impossibly nuts if you think this is anything but the hottest thing in the entire universe. Don’t you understand what’s going on? Don’t you see what’s happening?”
“I’m gonna throw up,” Laney said. “I’m definitely, absolutely gonna throw up.”
Elaine grabbed her hand. “Listen honey,” she said, “you need to realize that something is gonna happen, and it’s going to be awesome. Whatever it is, something good is going to happen. It’s bound to,” she insisted. “You deserve something good, and it’s happening right now.”
“We don’t even know that this has anything to do with Rip,” Laney said, her voice so hollow that she clearly didn’t believe anything that was coming out of her own mouth. “Oh God there’s nothing else that would bring those people to this town except the re-emergence of a world-famous, super controversial man who chose to hide here because there’s nothing in the world going on.”
“Well,” Elaine said, holding onto Laney’s hand, more to keep her friend from collapsing and falling the hell over and probably squishing at least a cub or two, “here he comes.”
“I’m gonna throw up,” Laney said. “I’m serious. I’m really gonna throw up. I’m going to go to the bathroom and throw up. Either that, or I’m gonna throw up on you.”
“No you’re not,” Elaine said. “You’re not throwing up on anybody. You’re gonna sit here, and you’re gonna listen to what this guy says, and then when he’s done with his Hugh Grant in Notting Hill-esque performance, you’re gonna go out there, you’re gonna kiss him and then you’re gonna—”
First, Elaine felt her arm go taut, as though it were supporting a dead fish. A very, very large, dead fish. “Laney?” she asked. “Oh jeez. Well, I guess that’s better than throwing up all over me.”
There, at her feet, lay her best friend, in a heap that reminded her of a potato sack that had an embolism. All Elaine could do was poke Laney with her toe. “I really hope you’re gonna wake up before you have to go out there and kiss him,” she said. “Because if not, this is going to be the most horrible turn around in the history of romance. From a grand gesture that’d finally make Luke and Lorelai get together on Gilmore Girls to him yammering on and on, ruining his self-imposed exile, and waiting for a girl to go kiss him whose, you know, laying here on my foot.”
She blew out a puff of air that knocked her hair back into place. “And I won’t even be able to go tell him what to do, because she’s put my damn foot to sleep.”
Laney stirred, but only enough to roll over on her back and look up at Elaine with glassy, almost milky eyes. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” Elaine said. “And you still haven’t thrown up. Which is really good because you’re on my foot and if you threw up on my foot, I’d be real cross with you, but in other news, he hasn’t said anything yet. Hell, he hasn’t even really got on the podium yet, although I’m sure that’s about to... shit, there he goes.”
“She said the S word!” a little raccoon kit with a pair of uneven red-brown pigtails squealed. “She’s gonna get grounded!”
“Fired maybe,” a voice from the back office came.
“Gilligan?” Laney groaned. “I thought you had a root canal or something.”
He was mumbling, and his face looked like he’d stuffed a football in either of his cheeks. “I’m not sure I shoulda driven,” he finally said. “Little woozy from the... uh... the... uh...”
“Medication? Anesthetic?” Elaine asked with a wry grin. “Yeah, I’d say you probably shouldn’t be driving. Why the hell are you here, anyway?”
He shook his enormous head. Laney, looking up at him from the floor, thought she saw his massively bloated cheeks wobbling, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
Flustered, and
clearly not understanding exactly what was going on in his immediate vicinity, Gilligan started chuckling too. Shortly, his uncomfortable giggles turned into hardcore belly laughs, and before long he’d started wheezing enough that Laney climbed to her feet, worried about him passing out.
“Did you know who he was?” Laney asked. “The guy sleeping on the library floor?”
“Oh, you mean your terrorist boyfriend?” Gilligan said, still recovering from his brief problem with respiration. “Of course I did, who doesn’t?”
“He’s not a terrorist, he’s just a naturist,” Laney said, blushing slightly.
“And damn is he hot. How did you know what was going on, Gil?” Elaine asked.
“It was all over the radio.” His words were slightly slurred and a very thick with whatever remained of his anesthetic. “Someone kept saying there was a big news conference in front of the library. I couldn’t remember the last time there was any news at all at the library, except that one time we got those 50 Shades of Grey audiobooks and someone started playing it over the PA system. It was so, so wrong.”
“But so, so hot,” Elaine offered. “Shit, that’s Warg Renfroe, isn’t it? I can’t believe that scumbag, jackal-shifting son of a bi—”
“Ex-boyfriend?” Laney cut in. “You sure do have some wild adventures, huh?”
Elaine shot her a nasty look and shook her head. The feeling in the area was so pregnant, so thick, that it had an almost palpable tension. The various news reporters were hanging out in all sorts of different states of duress and confusion.
Laney watched them with keen interest. She and Elaine both drew so close to the front door that they’d almost had their faces pressed against it. In fact, they would have if there weren’t a small clutch of shifter babies hanging out in front of them with their mugs mashed onto the glass. All of them waiting for whatever was about to happen to unfold. None of them, so far as Laney knew, had ever seen anything like this. A big gaggle of national news networks, many of them from the human world—which by the way, had only just started to recognize shifters as something other than Frankenstein stories that happened to be true—and the nightmare in the front of her mind was that she was about to be tied to someone who was going to ruin the only chance shifter-kind had at being accepted into the rest of the world.
“What if he does something crazy,” Laney asked whoever was listening. “I mean, what if this turns out to be some kind of horrifying rally with a bunch of protests and beatings or something.”
“He’s not that kind of lion, Laney,” Elaine said. “I know you aren’t completely aware of the fact that you’re shacking up with the biggest deal in the entire shifter-rights world, but I promise you, he’s not the type to make a big scene and start blowing things up. At least, I don’t think he is.”
Gilligan frowned deeply. His anger seemed to be replacing the pleasant cloud of drugs that had him giggling earlier. “Like hell he ain’t,” he said. His drawl was as present as it was when he had a few too many beers. “He’ll burn the whole world down if it means he gets to walk around without pants on and turn into a lion wherever he wants. This shit is crazy.”
“Mr. Gilligan said the S word!” the same little raccoon who had chided Elaine, squealed again. That time though she’d gotten quite a bit less vigorous in her reminder of profanity. There was too much going on for her to be completely devoted to her tisk.
“What’s going on out there, Miss Langston?” she asked. “Is that your boyfriend?”
Laney couldn’t help but smile. It only happened for a second. She immediately shut herself up, and forced herself to stop grinning at the very mention of Rip Black. She still had no idea what on earth he was doing, or if what he’d said was true. After all, there had been some pretty wild claims levied against him. A dissident, well, that was something she could live with—especially if he was a peaceful one. But a terrorist? Some kind of criminal? She’d rather just stay lonely than deal with that sort of business.
But sure enough, he was there, climbing the hastily-constructed, fairly rickety looking steps to stand behind a podium. His hair had the same careful messiness she’d seen that very morning. His cheekbones seemed even higher and more statuesque with the noonday sun’s blaring light. And when he turned to the library, Laney was just about sure that he flashed her a smile before turning back to the crowd.
“Did you see that?” Elaine asked. “He smiled at you. Or he smiled at me, but I doubt that.”
“Oh my... what have I gotten myself into?” Laney asked. Her cheeks were burning red and her entire demeanor had taken on a confused, slightly shamed posture. “All this because I woke some sleeping hobo up?”
“That’s anything but a hobo, honey,” Elaine said. “Look. I don’t know what you got yourself into, or how you managed to do it, but that isn’t a guy you need to be afraid of. God, look at those cheekbones. Anyway, something’s starting.”
Sure enough, the sea of newscasters, camera crews and onlookers began to quiet, and Rip seemed to be preparing himself for whatever revelation he was about to unleash.
“Where have you been?” someone in the crowd shouted out. “I thought you faked your own death?”
Rip wrinkled his forehead and held his hand up to his brow in a sun-deadening salute. “Whose that asking?”
“Oh, sorry, Rip,” the man called. “Reggie Taylor, Shifter News Network, I—”
As he talked, someone else cut the man off, announcing his presence from some human news network or another. A general confusion broke out, and as Rip raised his hands to quiet them, someone else from the back, well past where the cameras were standing up, started screaming incoherently.
“You think you’re an animal?” the wild, almost slavering voice screamed. “We’ll see about that!”
“Whoa, what the fuck?” the newscaster, Reggie, screamed. “He’s got a gun! Hey! Get this idiot! Get down!”
The general din of noise erupted into something very much like the blast of a volcano beginning to spew lava. At first it was slow, and then with a determined blast, one singular sound that pierced the entire world, Laney saw Rip slump over, and kicked the front door open without a second thought. She had no thoughts of death, not a single thought of fear. All she knew in that horrible, terrifying split second; that wretched painful breath of time, was that no matter what happened, she wasn’t going to let anything hurt her mate.
8
“Get down!” someone from the back shouted. “He’s still got the gun!”
Laney pushed Rip’s lump of a body aside. He was bleeding from a hole in his shoulder, but the onrush of people coming to take him away gave her the feeling he’d be fine. The asshole in the crowd who decided to take a pot shot? Not so much.
She hadn’t the first clue why she’d decided to act. Never, not once in her life was she the mama lioness. She never had those tendencies, never had the drive to protect people or put herself in danger. A surge of courage, maybe bolstered by what she figured this guy had already survived, and maybe given a shot in the ass because she really didn’t want him hurt before she could kiss him again, just possessed her. Laney didn’t even bother shifting. She didn’t need to.
Every ounce of strength in her body exploded at once. It wasn’t rage, it wasn’t even fear. It was just what she had to do.
From a librarian to a vigilante, she thought with a fairly smug grin. I guess that’s life, huh?
Finally, as she drove through the panicking crowd, she heard the blare of police sirens, but they were distant. Too distant, she knew, to catch the guy who had already turned tail. Literally.
A bushy, pom-tipped lion’s tail was disappearing around the side of the Township courthouse even as she broke through the crowd and pushed into the street proper. She took a deep breath, considered that she’d been running more today than she had in probably the last fifteen years, wasted most of her breath with a laugh, and took off again.
There were calls from behind her that commanded her to stop.
Only they weren’t commands, they were begs. People from the crowd – newscasters who should have just been interested in watching the scene unfold – were trying to get her to leave off.
Like hell, she thought. Like hell.
The half-shifted lion who’d shot Rip was quick, but he was also getting winded. And past that, he had something of a limp. He favored his right leg as he ran, and the more he ran, the more he limped. It seemed to her that at any moment he would collapse and she’d do... something.
Then again, there was the matter of the gun.
As Laney guessed, the lion tripped. His lame leg got caught up underneath the other one, and he tumbled to the ground. He’d just turned into an alley, and the stumble sent him careening into a pothole, and then into the side of a dumpster, where his head hit with a clang.
But there was still the gun.
His eyes were crossed, and he was obviously rattled, but there were still at least a hundred and fifty feet between him and Laney. As agile as she might’ve been, even in her presently winded state, Laney wasn’t about to try and dodge bullets.
The attacker leveled the pistol and steadied it against his leg. Laney ducked back past the entrance to the alley, and shirked back as the bullet struck the wall, sending a spray of mortar and brick chips flying. Another shot rang out with the same effect. The third cracked a bare corner of the brick protecting her, and that time a shard caught her in the forehead.
Police sirens that should have been heading directly to her position instead were going the other way, apparently to either calm down the crowd or because they thought the shooter was still in the gaggle. How they missed the brief chase and the audience shouting at them that the guy was headed the other way, Laney couldn’t tell, but the fact remained that no matter what, she was alone with the guy who shot Rip, and it seemed to her that she was the only chance in hell that he wasn’t getting away with what he’d done.