by Lynn Red
“He carried the guy off somewhere so the cops wouldn’t take him.”
“And that makes even more sense,” Elaine said with a grin. “Your boyfriend isn’t exactly popular with the police. But... damn, lady, what’s going through your head.”
“You were right,” Laney said. “Scariest thing I can imagine.”
“Being shot at?”
“No,” she said. “Falling in love and not knowing why.”
“Yeah,” Elaine said, not able to hide her smile. “That’d do it, for sure.”
9
“So now’re you gonna kill me?” the old man spluttered. He was suffering from a combination of utter terror, and having been carried for about fourteen miles clinging to the back of a much larger, much younger, lion than himself. The lion he was riding also had a hell of a spike to his backbone, which didn’t help matters.
“Good lord,” Rip said shortly, trying his best to catch his breath. “Put your head down, chopper’s coming.”
Rip shifted back to human, tossed a heap of peaty undergrowth over them, and held the old man down for a moment. It wasn’t long before the helicopter blades faded again into the distance. That was the last time they heard anything from the Redby Township Shifter Sheriff, but it didn’t make the old man relax any.
“Listen,” Rip said, a few minutes later, when he was sure that nothing else was going to interrupt their summer camp experience. “Why the hell would I save someone who shot me, and get him away from the cops just to kill him? What kind of sense does that make?”
The old man chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, his stubble rasping against his teeth as he sucked it in and pulled it out. “I guess it don’t make much, does it?”
“I did that because I actually do want to talk to you. I think you’re probably gonna be able to help me a lot more than you realize.”
“And what makes you think I want to do that?”
“Nothing yet,” Rip said. “But I hope this little exchange changes things. Or at least, I’m gonna give it a shot.”
“Give what a shot? Me?” the old man started wriggling away from Rip. “I knew it! I knew you was gonna shoot me! Ayup! I knew it!”
“I’m starting to really regret that act of good faith,” Rip said with a sigh and a sidelong glance. “No, I’m not going to shoot you. I don’t have a gun. My mate...” he trailed off, the fact that he just called Laney his mate for about the sixth time that day weighing heavily on his mind. Also constricting his brain was that this moron decided to end his press conference before it got started.
“I was going to end all this,” he said with a sigh. “I was going to... look, do you have any idea why I’m here anyway?”
“Yeah, sure I do,” the old man said. The words came out ‘shore uh dew’ but it was understandable enough, though just barely. “You came out this aways to get away from all the hell you rosed.”
His grammar notwithstanding, the old lion’s understanding of Rip’s situation was remarkable.
“Well, sort of,” Rip said. “But first, what’s your name?”
The wrinkly lion reared up again. “Why for? So’s you can hunt me down?”
Rip sighed and pinched his nose to alleviate the stress headache that was beginning to accumulate in his frontal sinus. “No. So I can talk to you without sounding like a used car salesman.”
“A used... I don’t understand.”
Rip drew his shoulders up almost to his ears. “Look, man, I just want to know your name so I can talk to you without being uncomfortable.”
“Oh, er, Samuel Grabitz, I guess.”
“You guess that’s your name?”
“Ayup.”
“Right, good.” Rip tried very hard to summon the necessary self-control to not roll his eyes. “So, the reason I brought you here is to—”
“You ain’t gonna kill me though,” Samuel said. The phrase came out ‘ainta gun kill muh dough. “Right? You ain’t?”
“Right, I ain’t,” Rip said. “Look will you just let me talk?”
“Dunno what else I’m here for.” Translated: dunno whatelss uhm herefar. After he finished his drawling, almost mewling sentence, the old man let out a long sigh. “Alls I wanted was to keep you from screwin’ us all up with your weird idears.”
“Do you want to be allowed to shift?” Rip asked quickly. “I mean, if you feel like stretching your back, stretching your claws, shaking your neck, do you want to be able to do that whenever you want?”
“Well,” Samuel considered, scratching at the sparse whiskers on his chin. “Who’d stop me from that?”
“In your house? No one,” Rip said. “But out on the streets? Even here? Some of the new laws in the human-shifter compact are real easy to change. For now, you can keep on doing whatever you want in Redby Township, but did you know that in the last four months, the number of shifter-owned counties got cut in half?”
Samuel shrugged. “But we waited so long,” he said, “I don’t wanna screw nothin’ up.”
“We did,” Rip agreed, “and the longer I keep bawling about how we’re all getting screwed by the new laws in the first place, the more people shoot guns at me. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to throw up my hands and just let whatever happens, happen.”
For a long moment the two of them sat on their stumps and stared at one another. Samuel’s eyes were narrowing to slits as he studied Rip’s face. Rip, for his part, was starting to get one hell of a nasty headache. Lately, he’d been fighting these damn things more and more. He hoped it was something to do with the horrific pollen in Redby Township, the sort of pine pollen that blanketed the world in a yellow mat every morning. A drop of rain made its way through the canopy above and splashed on Rip’s muscled forearm. He looked up, hoping to see another one.
The only thing on his mind was Laney. The way she warmed him all the way through with her smile and the way she made him laugh so loud his sides almost hurt. He needed her more than he’d ever needed anything in his entire life. His entire life that went back almost forty years, and was filled with accidental and unwanted fame; with fear and hiding; and finally with realizing that what he needed all along was what he never thought he wanted.
“I don’t want to do this. I can’t do it. I need,” he whispered to himself. “I need a break. I need to just be with her.”
Rip stood up, and held the sore spot where the bullet had struck him. “I’m done. I just want to be with Laney and I want to calm down and have a normal life. If this is how much people care about their—”
“It ain’t that, son,” Samuel said softly. “It ain’t that at all. We’re just tired as you are. But you gotta understand, we been fighting to do this a long, long time.”
Rip took a deep breath and held it for a long few seconds. “I know,” he finally said, blowing out the air. “But it isn’t what they said it would be. Equal rights, being allowed to be ourselves. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem worth it to have a couple seats in the senate and a handful of electoral college votes if we can’t even be comfortable in our own homes.”
Abruptly, Rip stood up and brushed the leaves off the ass of his sweatpants, and cleared his throat. “I’m going back,” he announced. “You’ve done what I thought I was going to do.”
“What’s that, son?”
“Taught me a lesson.” He looked off into the woods, until his vision blurred into a sea of green leaves and dangling Spanish moss. “I hate to do this, but can you get back on your own? Laney made sure the cops have absolutely no idea who you are, and the news yappers were too busy watching me writhe around on the ground to bother with you.”
“I know these woods like you probably know the shape of your own head,” the old man said. “That don’t make any sense. Ayup. Anyways son, I been out here my whole life. I’ll get back just fine. But while I’m doin’ a bunch of lessons, here’s another one.”
Rip turned back to the old man and smoothed his hair out of his face. The muscles of Rip’s chest flexed and r
elaxed every time he clenched his fist. Doing that made the pain in his shoulder soften just a bit, rounding it out instead of having a violent stab of pain every time his heart beat. “Yeah?”
“Take your time,” the old man said. “Things, you know, take ‘um one at a time. Don’t rush nothin’.”
Rip studied the old man’s face. The lines in the corners of his eyes and the wrinkles around his mouth belied his age, but there was something fiery in old Samuel’s eyes. “Why’d you shoot me?” Rip asked. “If not because you wanted to hurry something along.”
“I had a slip,” he admitted. “I got scared. I did somethin’ hasty and stupid to keep you from doin’ the same.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Rip said. “I might’ve been about to go up there and say that it was all over. I might’ve been announcing my retirement from... whatever it is I do. Public blabbering, being a hot head on TV. I don’t know.”
“You think I’ma believe that?” Samuel said. “Now go get that girl, and you do what you think is right. But don’t take nothin’ fast or it won’t never turn out right. You ever made bread?”
Rip shook his head. “Never been much of a cook.”
“All right, you ever roasted something on a grill?”
“Sure. Burgers. God I love burgers.”
“Do it turn out best if you make a gigantic blazin’ pyre and char the shit out of ‘em? Or do you start ‘em hot, then turn it down and let ‘em go until they’re just perfect?”
In one quadrant of his lizard-like brain, Rip couldn’t think of anything but the sizzle of perfectly cooking hamburgers. In other, far smaller, but far more advanced part, he knew the old man was right. “I’ve been moving too fast,” he said out loud, his voice distant and dreamlike. “I did all of that because I was scared that if I didn’t, then we’d get passed by. We’d get forgotten and caught up in the waves of society constantly moving forward. I mean, hell, there aren’t but... what? A couple hundred thousand of us in the entire country? Maybe a million worldwide?”
“About,” old Samuel said. “And I’m sorry for what I done. I really am. If you asked me this morning what I’d do today, I’da never said nothin’ to do with attempted murder.”
Rip hardly heard him though. He was a million miles away, lost in the sea of his thoughts. That sea, though, had a name. “Laney,” he whispered, loudly enough for Sam to hear. “I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to have her. The longer I’m away, the more it hurts. But what I don’t get is that I hardly know her. I’ve fallen for this girl and I feel like a goddamn idiot.”
“Some things need to go slow,” the old man said slowly, “and some go quicker. I’d known my mate eighteen years by the time we did the deed,” he said with a grin. “Ayup. But for all but the last three days of that period, she hated me too bad to even give me a cup of coffee.”
“What changed?”
“For me? Nothin’. I always knew. For her? No tellin’. I think I just finally wore her down.”
Rip couldn’t hide his brief smile. “You know what’s funny? I think this might be the exact same story. Just a lot quicker. At least, that’s how it looks right now. I chase, she runs. I try to make a grand gesture and,” Rip paused for a moment. “I’ve got a damn good idea,” he said. “If I do the same thing again, you promise you won’t shoot me? Another press conference, I mean. And I promise I’m taking things slowly. This one’s different.”
“You gonna be a big ol’ sap, ain’t ya?” Samuel asked. His puckered smile formed an upside down rainbow under his drooping nose.
“I think I just might,” Rip said. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Naw,” the old man said. “That was when you let her get away the first time.”
10
She had nowhere to go, and no clue where to look. Laney spent the rest of that afternoon worried, fretting, and generally making a mess of her own mental state. Elaine tried to talk to her and even Gilligan tried to cheer her up, but it was no good.
The press gaggle broke up slowly over the afternoon, and when they were all finally gone, it seemed like the entire day had been a surreal nightmare. At least, that’s how it felt to Laney. Everything that happened just sort of vanished. There was no trace of the ill-fated press conference.
She sat with her head in her hands, staring out the front window and wondering how the hell she’d find Rip again. Or, for that matter, if she would. She figured that she’d hear from him, but no luck there. And then, when she lost hope in that ever happening, she started thinking maybe she should go looking for him.
Elaine talked her out of that one the first time. And she’d been right, too—how the hell was Laney going to find him? If the cops with their cars and motorcycles and chopper didn’t manage, how was she going to manage?
Still, she could hardly help herself. Worrying was a fairly common state of being for Laney Langston, but this was on a whole new level. Her stomach kept clenching. Her pulse kept racing, and every time the radio issued a news report, she was absolutely certain she’d hear about Rip going down in a gunfight, or at the least, getting hauled into the station and being held without bail.
“You need to get drunk and go to sleep,” Elaine said. “Come on, we’re going to your house, and we’re breaking into the wine stash.”
Laney looked up and realized the entire library had emptied out, and the majority of the lights had been switched off. She stood, and popped her back. “I need to find him,” she said, but followed Elaine out the front door
The ride was quick and quiet. Neither of them had much to say, and the only thing on Laney’s mind was finding the lion. Somehow, she was going to find him, but she hadn’t the first damned clue how.
Elaine sighed heavily and broke the silence after the two of them plodded up Laney’s gravel driveway and inside her house. “We’ve been over this. He’s hiding somewhere, for some reason keeping that crazy old bastard safe and if he wanted to be found, he probably would have called you already or something.”
Laney shook her head, refusing to believe that was the case. “I can’t think that way,” she said. “I just can’t. I can’t believe he’s just gone. Not after the stuff he told me.”
Elaine slid an arm around her friend’s neck. “Babe, I never said he took off for good. That was your invention. What I’m saying is that knowing his type, the rogueish, heroic, Han Solo kind, he thinks he’s keeping you safe by keeping his distance.”
“He did say something about not letting me make this mistake,” Laney said softly. “But fuck that. I don’t let anyone tell me what to do.”
Cocking an eyebrow in a triangle that almost touched her hairline, Elaine shrugged. “God knows that’s the truth.”
“So I guess I’m gonna do this thing,” Laney said. “I’m gonna go and find him and I’m gonna make this shit right. I have no idea how, but I’m gonna do it because if I don’t I’ll go crazy.”
For a long moment, Laney was quiet. She watched Elaine’s face for a few seconds. When her friend just stared at her glass of wine, Laney frowned. “Are you listening, Wendy?”
“Yeah,” Elaine said. “I’m listening. I’m just trying to figure out what you’re talking about and why you haven’t already left. Because, let me tell you, that guy is hard up for you. Like real hard up. And he’s got some passion in his loins, and you better jump on it before he cools off.”
Laney stood up, stretched her back with a couple of pops and then sat back down. “I can’t decide what I should do,” she said. “Should I really just go get him?” A couple seconds later, she frowned again. “Wendy? Come on, the label isn’t that interesting. It’s a picture of a kangaroo and a flip-flop with pinot noir written over top of it. Why won’t you respond to me?”
“Because I’m terrified,” Elaine said. “I’m trying to give you advice, but I’m scared that anything I say is going to be stupid, and that you’re going to follow it.”
The two of them stared at eac
h other. “Really?” Elaine finally asked. “Why do you think that’s gonna happen?”
Elaine shrugged. “Because I can’t imagine any way it wouldn’t. Everything is just playing out the way it’s supposed to play out and here I am, waiting to see you finally get what you need. What you should have.”
“Oh come on,” Laney said. “I don’t deserve anything past anyone else. I have a good life. I just,” she paused for a second. “Oh my god, I’m almost sure that if I don’t get this guy I’m going to explode.”
Elaine blew up laughing. If there were any explosions about to happen, then the volcano was just waiting to pop. She stood up and patted Laney on the shoulder and shook her head. She stared into her friend’s eyes. A moment later, she hugged her once and then did it again after a few seconds of pause.
“It doesn’t matter,” Elaine said. “It really doesn’t. Nothing you can do is going to screw this up, and no bad advice I give you is gonna ruin it. But look, there’s... oh shit.”
She reached for the wine bottle, and nudged it. It made a little ringing sound as it almost flopped over on the table, but Laney caught it before anything spilled. Good thing, too, because the bottle almost managed to tip over and dump a significant amount of tasty, tasty pinot on her very ugly doily. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she tipped the bottle and took a little nip. “Be honest.”
“You’ve asked me that more than once in the past few days,” Elaine said.
“Maybe I’m feeling it. Or maybe I’m looking to you for validation that I’m not actually insane. Or maybe I’m thinking I am and—”
Elaine cut her off. “You’re starting to like it? There’s a certain comfort you can only get when you realize you’re not in control of your own brain. Like when figure out that hormones are raging, and you’re just a puppet in the claws of that raging, interdimensional demon known as estrogen. Lions do have estrogen, right? I mean you’ve definitely got yourself a cycle there, so—”