by Holly Gunn
I’m heading out the front door when there’s a pounding down the stairs of the two-floor condo that’s a bit run down, but it’s been home since I was twelve and we moved from Guatemala.
I close my eyes, throw the hand not holding the food over my eyes, the small bottle tucked into the crook of the same arm.
“Mama! Papi! Please tell me you have clothes on!”
Mama pries my hand from my face. I keep my eyes closed. She gives me a huge hug that I half return.
“Tienes que abrir los ojos, mi hiya.” You need to open your eyes. It sounds more like a weird omen, than her telling me her clothes are safely in place—and I’ve had enough of those today.
Still, I listen. I open my eyes. One eye at a time, which causes my papi to laugh and my mama to giggle.
Mama lets Papi in to give me a hug.
He crushes me. It’s great. It’s also icky because I know exactly what my parents were doing in their empty nest.
“I have to go,” I say in a rush. “I just popped by quick. Love you!”
“No, no, no,” Papi says, his tone chiding. “Sit, sit.”
I scrunch my nose and purse out my lips, a telling habit I’ve never been able to kick. It’s part of my least favorite part about myself, that being I can’t control my facial expressions.
“Oh, Dios!” Mama exclaims. “She’s been holding in her magic again.”
This is true. At her rather spectacular use of the gift of clairvoyance again, my face scrunches a little more.
“Go, go,” Papi tells me, pulling back but leaning forward to share, “but you need to stop holding in your feelings, mi pequeña.” That’s what my dad calls me, his little one. Always. Since I could remember. It calms me.
I smile, kiss his cheek, and still partially in his arms, lean to the left and let Mama kiss my cheek.
“Bye, Mama and Papi. Gracias, love you,” I again rush to say.
I hear their replies of “adios” and “hasta luego” as I exit the front door and run across the street.
I smell the lingering scent of pizza. It’s a few days old since Juno’s always got a pizza going. She left Monday when she and her sister, Getty, our other roommate, found out their youngest sister had been kidnapped and tortured by a witch in Nashville. Word from the sisters just this morning is that their sister, Callie, is currently in her animal form healing and she has the attention of the future king of the Wolf tribe, a runner-up and the son of the current king.
Ah, if these walls could talk.
Then again, the walls don’t need to talk. When Getty and Juno are home, they talk enough for all five of us who live in our condo, which is almost a mirror of the place I grew up in.
The other two roommates are my cousins, Esly and Ryn.
As soon as I enter, I throw the food on the coffee table and my body on the couch. My body hits the couch with such force, I groan at the sudden stitch in my side making itself known.
“She’s getting old.”
“She’s going to live until she’s one-hundred and fifty. Thirty-three isn’t old,” Ryn, her wavy dark hair in a long ponytail and her tan skin glowing with perfection, corrects Esly.
Esly thinks everyone’s old. She’s twenty-four and the baby of our bunch. Ryn is next at twenty-seven. Juno and Getty are thirty-five and thirty-six, respectively. I’m smack dab in the middle. I look like I’m a human’s twenty-four, and I’ll age at half the speed of a human. There are a great many positives to magic.
My stomach cries out, feed me, in its stomach-language, and I slowly sit up.
“Is that creaking I hear?” Esly asks cheekily at my movements. She grabs a spot on her chair. It’s not actually her chair. We’ve just dubbed it that because she’s the only one who sits in the ratty-assed piece of furniture that I swear has loose staples in it. I know I’ve gotten them stuck in my ass at least once. She claims it’s perfect. We let her keep it.
Esly grabs a book off the table, a shifter romance, and I roll my eyes.
“Esly, get your head out of the book,” Ryn commands.
Esly ignores the command.
“Roommate-slash-cousin time is commencing, and no soup for you,” I add, mimicking an episode of Seinfeld, my favorite show of all time, “if you don’t put the naked men down.”
Esly glares at me out of the side of her eye, but when I unveil the Chile Rellenos, she quickly throws the book on the table.
I smile.
Job done.
We’re not as loud as we usually are when Juno and Getty are in on the action, but we laugh and joke.
And because it’s always safe with them, I tell them about suit guy.
Shy, curvy, dark-haired Esly breaks out of her shell with us, and when I give the details of how my music changed with him there, her brown eyes go wide, she does a little dance in her seat, and then she tells dirty stories about how me and this mystery-man are ‘so meant to be’ and how maybe he’s a king and I’ll be his queen. I roll my eyes at this. She also includes visual imagery that only a romance lover would appreciate.
I don’t admit it aloud, but I’ve read a couple of books from her shelves.
I’m totally a romance lover. I would be, what with the crown-shaped birthmark I’ve got behind my ear. I just don’t let the world know I’m mushy on the inside, mostly because it’s saved for those who matter.
But I do love a good romance.
Therefore, I appreciate the imagery, so much so that when the fun is done and the night has hit, I’m lying in bed and need to take care of my body in a very different way than giving it food.
The cotton sheets against my back, my door shut, my window open to the June L.A. heat, I let my fantasies take me away.
Dabbler witches, as I’ve said, can do a fair few kinds of magic.
Creating a fantasy is a magic of its own.
The scene fresh in my mind, onyx eyes holding me captive, I reach to touch the swollen lips of my pussy, spreading myself open to the touch of my hand.
I imagine my fingers are his fingers, touching my clit, playing at my opening, and then entering inside to fuck me hard and fast or slow and passionate.
I like it fast and hard.
In this fantasy, I like it slow and passionate more.
I know this because, on the tail end of that sensual vision, I come harder than I’ve ever come in all my life.
My orgasm rolls over me, once, twice, again and again.
I don’t even know if I’ve kept quiet.
So lost to the sensation, it almost feels as though he is touching me, guiding himself inside me, driving his hips against mine in a rhythm not dissimilar to the beat I played earlier as he stalked me with his eyes.
Much later, spent, sweaty, thoroughly sated, my face plastered with a stupid smile, I realize I no longer need a soul-replenishment session.
An orgasmic magic-fueled fantasy based on the imaginings of a night with my stuffed shirt mystery-man is apparently enough to feed me for a good long while.
2
Eagle
“Fuck no!”
This is what I hear when I find myself at the entrance of my office at eight a.m. on Friday morning.
No ‘hello’. No ‘how was your morning workout?’. No, ‘did you happen to have a fantastic night of dreams where you fucked the most exotically beautiful woman?’.
This last thought I brush off.
Two members of the band I manage, Shyfter, are getting into it in a place of business.
My place of business.
I fix my suit and control the urge to shift.
Throughout time, there have been well over sixty species of eagle in the world.
I’m the largest of those not yet extinct. A Steller’s Sea eagle. I’m even bigger than the ones found in the wild. My wingspan isn’t a paltry 98 inches. Yes, even eagles measure. Don’t listen to the males in your life. We measure. We always measure.
I know this because when my wingspan topped out at eighteen, it was the first thing my fat
her did. He measured the span of my wings at 135 inches. The largest eagle on record. Because he views me as a weapon in his growing army, my father (forcefully) slapped me on the back at this discovery. My father using his hands on me is not unheard of; however, those hands have rarely been used when he’s proud of me.
I’m not just an eagle. Only when I choose to be, do I shift into that form.
And yet, because of my name and who I am, I am Eagle—always.
Eagle Fitzwilliam Ambustus, to be precise.
And I do like to be precise. The control I show on the outside isn’t a cover. It’s who I am. I’ve trained myself to be just as in control on the inside. ‘Mind over matter’, as my father, a descendant of Roman generals tells me often.
His training is a benefit in situations such as these.
I place myself between the two bandmates, placing a hand on each of their chests.
“Stop,” I demand calmly. They don’t stop, of course.
Grizz and Snake both smirk at me, then turn their furious gazes back on each other.
“You can’t bring a chick into the band, Grizz. She’s going to fuck with the vibe.”
Snake thinks everything fucks with the vibe.
When Grizz wanted to wear his new kicks on stage, Snake hid them. After Grizz shifted into his enormous grizzly bear form and attacked him, Snake’s only excuse was, “Those fucking shoes would’ve fucked with the vibe.”
When Heavy thought adding a few new songs, originals not covers, would bring in more followers, that was vetoed because it would ‘fuck with the vibe’ and also because Grizz said, “I sing, I don’t write.”
When I suggested wearing clothes that were more professional … well, that was when they all jumped in and nay-sayed the idea; however, it was Snake who added, “No way, dude. Just no. It’ll fuck with the vibe.”
Every damned thing fucks with the vibe.
Just like every damned thing is an argument that I venture to put myself between.
“I can bring a chick into the band if she can play, dammit! We lost Marty, Carm, and Rodrigo, our drummer, guitarist, and our piano man, in one shot, Snake. And we lost them to a band that’s playing good shit and going to get further than a small stage with groupies in an L.A. Ghetto.”
“The Shinedown isn’t part of the ghetto, it’s on the outskirts,” I clarify, speaking of the club where they play every Friday night. Except tonight, because we are down three members and need to fill those slots swiftly.
They ignore my commentary and continue arguing.
I don’t have time for this fight. The king of the Eagle tribe, my father, is going to be here any moment.
“Enough,” I say, this time injecting my voice with the control I’ve spent years perfecting. A cutting, smooth as a knife’s edge type of control that never fails to get attention.
They do not ignore me now. I have sliced through their shit, mid-tirade.
Grizz’s arms cross his chest.
Snake leans back against the desk, casually saying, “Make me, Scipio,” and sits his ass on the edge of it. Scipio is what he calls me when he’s being more of a bastard than usual. It’s a quip in regard to my Roman ancestry. Sometimes, he calls me general as well.
Normally, since this is my office and I’m their band manager, both his sitting on my desk and his trying to jest would ruffle my feathers.
They still do.
I glance to where he’s sitting then to his face.
His jaw ticks, but I also see that something meddlesome enters his eyes, like he wants to test me.
I’m not in the mood to be tested.
I hold his gaze.
He holds mine.
Neither of us cower.
We wouldn’t, seeing as every man in this room is a future king of his Shifter tribe. The names Eagle, Snake, Grizz, and Heavy, who’s been quiet, are our given names. They signify who we are down to our bones. We’re given these names of honor because we’re set to be kings of our tribes.
Every thirty years, a new ruling cycle starts.
And every thirty years, before that ruling cycle starts, the marks of those set to be king go dark and they have thirty days to find the woman with a crown-shaped mark destined to be their queen.
Thirty kings. Thirty tribes. Thirty futures determined by a faded tattoo at birth that goes dark somewhere around our thirtieth year.
I’m just glad I’ve got time. The process, you see, is geographical. Once one group completes their queen search, another is up.
The Nashville kings are currently up on the chopping block, a morbid thought for sure, but I’m biding my time. This first group has seven more days, and from what Heavy’s been sharing of news from back home, there’s only one more king who needs to find his queen.
They moved swiftly this time around, but the Wolf king is last. This is no surprise. Wolf kings have always been known to push it to the very last second.
I already know who my queen will be. It’s tradition within the Eagle tribe. The queen of the eagles has always been a marked eagle female.
I won’t say I’m overjoyed by the union, but I’ll only live one-hundred-and-fifty years or so. Life is about survival. I have work. I have my impeccable control. I have a great many interests and hobbies. And someday, I will have children of my own. I’ll raise them in the local convocation, and I’ll be a better father than my own has been.
So, if I have to suffer Vera as my queen, so be it.
“Snake, don’t be a dick,” Heavy, a boar shifter and one of my closest friends, barks, finally entering the conversation.
Snake doesn’t turn his eyes toward Heavy, but he does smirk—directly at me. And he smirks like he lives for being a dick.
I’ve known him since we were thirteen and attended the local shifter high school together, and I know for a fact that he’s a good man, has been a good friend for over seventeen years now, but he’s also very much a dick.
Heavy’s voice issues another warning, this time more gently. “Snake, man, please. His dad’s going to be here any minute.”
I’m the one who breaks eye contact then.
I won’t stand there and have them pity me, knowing why I get agitated when my father’s about to show. I’ve only known Heavy maybe eight, nine years, but again, I’ve known Snake since I was thirteen. He knows shit about me that even Vera, my future queen, will never be privy to. Mostly because she’s a bitch, but also because I’m not one to share.
Grizz, a grizzly shifter, I have known longer. Much longer. And he knows it all.
I control my expression and glance his way. “Our king will be here soon.”
I know I sound like a douche, but my father doesn’t let his children call him ‘dad’. He’s ‘sir’, or ‘king’, or ‘your highness’. If I’m honest with myself, which is something I try not to be too often. Honest in all things but to myself. But if I was being honest, I would say he is none of those things. I would say I’m happy I get to take over soon. I would say exactly what’s on my mind and call him—
“The dirtbag-douchewad-fuckwit asshat can suck my dickhole, brother.”
I would call him exactly what my adopted brother calls him, even when the old man is around.
I run my hand across my mouth to stop a smile from forming, something I find I do often with Grizz. He has this manner about him. One word out of his mouth, and you want to smirk, share in his joke, join him in revolution, whatever. He’s able to translate his charisma into his music. Grizz has a voice that means Shyfter is rising in the world of music, despite their inability to write music and the fact that bandmates drop like flies every few months.
I know he’s said what he has because he believes it, but he also says it because he knows I’d respond with exactly this gesture. I’d run my hand across my face to keep control, to keep from smiling. He says it for me.
I can hear them before they hit our office. I sit in my chair and hold tightly to the arms for a moment then release my grip. Heavy, Grizz, and Sna
ke spread out.
And we wait for his grand entrance.
My father walks into the office, the power of his kingship a force of nature I’ve never felt before—from any king. I almost experience the need to bow my head, but I have not succumbed to that reaction in years.
Grizz, Heavy, and Snake haven’t either. This pisses my father off—which makes me entirely too happy.
“Out,” he commands.
Heavy doesn’t listen right away. Neither does Snake. They turn to me for permission.
“I said, out,” my father repeats himself, his voice dripping with disdain.
I want to punch him in the face, but none of this shows.
I nod to Heavy and Snake, and then to Grizz.
“Grizzly, stay.” Not Grizz, not his given name as king.
Like he’s a dog who needs commands. I’m hard-pressed not to grind my teeth. A lifetime of holding most of my inner turmoil close to the chest means I can suppress the urge.
But this close to the thirty-year cycle’s end, and I’m not holding it in as well anymore. This close to ruling, and I want to give the man who is my father, but has never been my dad, a what for.
I want to communicate all of this to Grizz, but I don’t. I do what I have always done with my father. I repress every scrap of emotion a human being can produce, and I rise to standing.
“My king,” I begin, nodding my head in a small bow, “what can we do for you?”
He doesn’t answer me right away. The dark-haired female witch, who I’ve just noticed at his side, looks not only perturbed but also shocked at how he’s treated Grizz and the family dynamic in general.
She looks familiar, mostly in the eyes. I have to force myself not to ask her if we’ve met.
“Grizz,” my father instructs at my introductory remarks, “take note. That is how you treat a king. If you want to be even half the king you need to be, you’ll start to learn who deserves the respect in the room.”
Father’s eyes shift back to me, but although Grizz ignores our father’s ‘note’, I have to wipe my hand across my mouth when I hear Grizz mutter, “Oh, I know who earns my respect in a room, old man.”