by Amy Star
She fell over into bed without even bothering to put her pajamas on. Instead, she simply pulled her pillow over her head and did her best to fall asleep.
C HAPTER FIVE
The next day, work was… unusual. The first hour or so was fairly standard, but then something caught Casey’s eye, just out of the corner of her vision. She finished making a delivery to a car and made a tiny detour, just enough to catch a peek at whatever it was.
She nearly tripped over her skates when she saw Branson’s behemoth of a dog draped casually over the sidewalk, leisurely taking up the building’s shade.
It was another two hours before Casey could take her break, and she hurried down to the sidewalk with her lunch. The dog lifted his head from his paws as she approached, his ears angled towards her as she sat down on the curb.
“What in the world are you doing here?” she sighed, before she shook her head and grumbled, “I’m talking to a dog. Great.”
He cocked his head to one side slowly. When Casey offered him her hand, he deigned to give it a sniff before prodding it with his nose, and then he yawned and let his head fall back down to rest on his paws.
He wasn’t a particularly good conversationalist, but he was better company than most of her coworkers, so she stayed there for the rest of her break as she ate her lunch. It wasn’t until she was getting back to her feet to head back to work that she realized why he was there.
She hadn’t seen any camera people that day, at least not until that moment. She looked up as the dog lifted his head, and her eyes narrowed as she saw a woman with a camera across the street.
The woman was staring at the dog with some apprehension, and she beat a hasty retreat when he bared his teeth and surged to his feet.
Casey snorted out a laugh. “Good boy.”
It did occur to her, briefly, that he would need to be a very smart dog to identify such a specific subset of people to keep at bay, but she decided she didn’t want to think about it too much.
*
It was something of a relief that Casey could just wait outside the restaurant for a cab to pick her up. After all, no one was going to get anywhere near her with her furry, four-legged guardian angel still sitting on standby.
She was contemplating texting Branson to let him know she was leaving so he would know to come get his dog, but when the cab pulled up and Casey pulled open the door, the dog hopped right in before she could say a word. The cabbie made an irritable noise but didn’t object beyond that, possibly for fear that the lion-sized dog would eat him if he did.
The dog curled up into a neat, surprisingly small ball on one half of the seat, and with a brief shake of her head, Casey slid onto the remaining seat and pulled the door shut.
It was a tense, quiet cab ride after that, and once again, the cabbie refused to actually take her down the driveway, leaving her to once again walk. At least she had company that time, as the dog trotted along beside her.
Curious, she followed him as they got closer to the bottom of the driveway, wondering where he was going to go. Branson’s car was already parked at the bottom, so she supposed the dog would just go find him.
A strange feeling—a mix of dread and déjà vu—began to bubble in her chest as the dog carried on towards the once again open garage. There was a pile of clothing neatly folded on the seat of one of the motorcycles.
The dog strolled into the garage and paused, looking over his shoulder expectantly. He glanced from Casey to the pile of clothing and then back again, and he cocked his head to one side.
Clearing her throat, Casey closed her eyes and then covered them with her hands just for good measure. A moment later, she could hear fabric rustling, followed by Branson’s voice informing her, “I’m decent.”
She dropped her hands to her sides and opened her eyes in time to see Branson finish pulling a t-shirt over his head.
“So, the giant dog that looks like an over-sized wolf is actually an over-sized wolf,” Casey stated.
“A were-wolf,” Branson confirmed, running a hand through his hair a few times to put it in something resembling order.
Groaning, Casey dropped her face down into her hands. “Is Lydia the bird?” she asked, voice partially muffled.
“A crow, yes,” Branson replied.
“What were you doing the other times I ran into you?” she wondered, her face still covered. She peered at him from between two fingers.
“The first time, I was sleeping off the full moon from the night before,” he answered dryly, folding his arms over his chest and shifting his weight to one side. “The second time, Atticus called me after he saw the photos and asked me to check the woods to see if I could find anyone still lurking.”
Casey grumbled incoherently behind her hands, and Branson patted her on the shoulder. “It’s not quite as horrific as you’re pretending it is,” he informed her, tone dry and utterly unsympathetic. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been sitting on a sidewalk all day doing basically nothing, so I’m going to go find something entertaining to do until my brain reengages with the rest of my body.”
He strolled past her, and Casey stayed right where she was until she heard his car start and begin to pull away. Finally, hands falling away from her face, she turned to peek out of the garage and watch his taillights disappear, leaning around the bay doorway.
She wasn’t pretending it was horrific. He just wasn’t looking at things from her perspective. She was just—
…She was sort of being a bitch, she supposed. If she turned into an animal, she supposed she wouldn’t have told anyone until it was absolutely necessary either. Even if she turned into something pretty innocuous, like a giant crow. She supposed she especially wouldn’t have told a practical stranger, at least not until she had some sort of proof that they wouldn’t freak out. And despite her marriage to Atticus, she was still basically a stranger to all of them, and they had no proof that she wouldn’t freak out. She had freaked out.
She groaned and let her forehead thump against the edge of the open doorway before she finally shoved herself away from the doorway. She slapped the button on the wall that would close the door, and as it rumbled down from the ceiling, she ducked under it, back onto the driveway, and followed the steps back up to the front door.
It was probably about time to talk to Atticus about… everything, she decided, determination solidifying in her gut.
Her determination faltered slightly as she stepped into the foyer and remembered that Atticus wasn’t home yet. Grumbling to herself in impotent irritation, she kicked at the rug on the floor, only to immediately make sure it was laying flat once again, smoothing it out with the toes of one foot.
Heaving a sigh, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her rollerblades from where they had been dangling around her neck, and made her way to the library. It was always good for keeping busy for a few hours.
*
When Casey met Atticus in the dining room for dinner that evening, he seemed more than slightly surprised. “I assumed you would have dinner in your room,” he remarked, though he didn’t sound offended. That didn’t make Casey feel any better about it.
She took her seat and folded her arms on the table, staring down at her fingers, splayed over the table. The chef made no idle chitchat as he brought their dishes in, evidently aware of the tense atmosphere. He delivered dinner quickly and efficiently and then bustled back to the kitchen.
Casey and Atticus ate in silence at first, until finally Casey wondered, “So, did you actually plan on telling me?”
“If it was necessary,” Atticus replied plainly. “People have a history of reacting poorly to the news, so I tend to avoid just spitting it out at random.”
“So, you didn’t deem it necessary to tell me that I’m going to give birth to a bear?” Casey asked sharply.
Atticus scoffed, but cleared his throat immediately afterwards. “The odds of you actually giving birth to a were-bear are low enough to be hilarious. It is possible, but highly
improbable. If it was a guarantee, I would have told you from the start, but in reality, it’s more probable that if not for your friendly stalker, you wouldn’t have needed to know and you would have been happier not knowing.”
Casey prodded her food around on her plate and slid down lower in her seat. “I guess that makes sense,” she conceded, her voice low and sullen. She supposed that meant she could leave, if the odds of her actually giving birth to a were-bear were so low. But the odds weren’t nonexistent, so they were still just a bit too high for her to take her chances. And besides, Atticus hadn’t actually done anything to her, other than keeping a secret that she herself had already acknowledged that she would have kept if their roles had been switched.
She was just… annoyed at being left out of the loop. And really, how immature was that? But self-flagellation wasn’t going to make anything better. She could scold herself for the rest of her life about it, or she could do something about it. Considering that just sitting on her hands as things happened was not what she wanted to be known for, she supposed that narrowed her options quite a bit. Alright then.
Slowly, she sat back up in her seat to start eating in earnest, a look of determination on her face, no matter how out of place it felt just then. After a few bites, she looked up at Atticus, stating simply, “We should go on a date tomorrow.”
He blinked at her, looking utterly dumbstruck for a moment, before he gathered his composure and replied, “Alright. Anything in particular in mind?”
She shrugged and waved it off. “Not important,” she answered. “Just… somewhere to actually talk. There’s stuff I want to know, and now there’s no excuse not to tell me.”
Atticus nodded slowly. “Alright,” he conceded. “I’ll think of something.” He looked dissatisfied with his own answer, but Casey hadn’t expected him to just spit out an idea right then and there. She simply nodded once, accepting the ambiguity for the moment.
The rest of the meal was silent after that, but the tension, surprisingly, was minimal.
C HAPTER SIX
Casey woke up the next morning to find a note on the floor of her sitting room, having been slid under the door at some point. It simply informed her that Atticus would pick her up from work that afternoon.
She brought a backpack with her that day, a change of clothing stashed in it. Unsure of what he had in mind, she packed an outfit that was nice, but could still feasibly be called casual.
The rest of the morning was fairly normal. She found some bacon in the fridge and made that and cooked some eggs. She called a cab, and by the time she was dressed, ready for work, and approaching the end of the driveway at a jog with her bag thumping against her back, her cab was pulling to a halt.
As the cabbie laid on the horn, despite the fact that he could see Casey coming and she was maybe twenty feet away at most, Casey put some very real thought into just quitting her job. It wasn’t as if she needed the money anymore, and it wasn’t as if she liked the work or the people.
(That thought led to some slightly more honest contemplation during the cab ride, as she couldn’t actually think of a single decent reason why she still had her job, other than habit.)
*
Halfway through the day, Casey noticed three of her coworkers clustered together, whispering to each other. Eventually, one of them urgently pointed to something, and when Casey looked up to follow where she was pointing, she saw an enormous crow sitting on top of a streetlight beside the restaurant.
Lydia looked down at her, croaked affably, and then fluffed her feathers and returned to keeping watch.
Casey got to watch Lydia dive bomb two people that day, squawking and flapping and pecking and generally making it impossible for them to take any pictures before they wisely decided to get the hell out of there. Somehow, Casey managed to refrain from laughing both times.
It was amazing for her morale. A man grabbed her ass (and Lydia saw it happen; Casey knew because she heard the most affronted squawk immediately afterwards) and one of her coworkers spilled a large soda on her, and neither of those things managed to ruin her day.
*
When she took her break, Casey sat down on the curb beneath the streetlight. She was there for maybe a few seconds before Lydia fluttered down from her perch to land on the sidewalk beside her.
She was even more enormous up close than she had been from across a room. Though she looked like a crow, glossy black from her beak to her claws, she was nearly as tall as Casey’s torso. She looked as if she could have picked a small child up without any issue. She was also, in a strange way, incredibly pretty. But Casey supposed most wild animals were.
Casey stared at her for a moment, before she finally observed blandly, “The fact that you’re as pretty as an animal as you are as a human is ridiculously unfair. I’m judging you.” The words were not exactly intimidating, sadly.
Despite the (admittedly weak) judgment, Lydia fluffed her feathers up and preened pointedly for a few seconds.
“You’re not helping,” Casey sulked.
As if to offer some comfort, Lydia patted her beak against Casey’s shoulder. She was a very condescending bird.
Heaving a sigh, Casey let the topic drop. “What do you think?” she wondered blandly. “Think I should quit my job?”
The response was an immediate croak and a flurry of squawking as Lydia hopped in place and rustled her wings. It was a very emphatic answer.
“I guess,” Casey sighed, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing with. “I just wonder what I would do with my time without it.”
Watching a bird roll her eyes was sort of surreal. It was followed by a stern peck to Casey’s shoulder and a tug at a lock of her hair. Pouting slightly at the assault, Casey leaned out of reach, though she did at least concede, “Yeah, I know, that’s a really lousy reason to keep a job. But still, I don’t want to go stir crazy or get cabin fever or something.”
Lydia looked around rather pointedly, as if to encompass the entire city as a whole with the gesture. And Casey supposed it was a fair point; if she didn’t want to get bored, then she had an entire city with which to keep herself occupied and more money than she would ever feasibly need to do just that.
“I’ll think about it,” she sighed, followed by a sharp, “Hey!” as Lydia pecked at her shoulder again. “I said I would think about it!”
So, maybe Casey was a creature of habit, and maybe she was generally a little skeptical about trying new things, especially when “get married to a celebrity, potentially get pregnant with his baby, and figure out that celebrity and his social circle all turn into very large animals” had pretty effectively filled her ‘try new things’ quota for the month.
Lydia rolled her eyes again and fluffed herself downwards until she was nearly spherical, but she let the topic drop after that. Evidently, she decided that she could only get so far by pecking at Casey like she was trying to catch a stubborn worm.
*
All in all, the day seemed to fly by, so Casey actually needed to be reminded that it was time to clock out. Granted, the reminder didn’t come in the form of an actual reminder—her boss most likely would have been perfectly content to milk every second of work out of her as he legally could—but instead in the form of a few of her coworkers wondering who the motorcyclist idling on the curb was.
It took Casey a moment to recall that Atticus had not one but two motorcycles and that he was picking her up that day, so the motorcyclist on the curb was probably her ride. She dashed to the employee bathroom and hurried to get changed into her jeans and a blouse, and she shoved her uniform and her skates into her bag.
She paused in her jog to the curb to look up at the streetlight and offer Lydia a wave, and she had to smother a laugh behind one hand when the crow partially spread her wings and bowed before taking off and flying away to… wherever Lydia went. Casey wasn’t actually sure of much of anything about them, other than knowing that they tended to just wander into Atticus’s house as
they pleased.
(Given her own tendency to saunter into Jason’s apartment uninvited, she could understand.)
She slung her bag onto her back just before she climbed onto the back of the bike’s seat, and immediately, Atticus presented her with a second helmet. As if he could sense her rolling her eyes, he informed her blandly, “If you want to skate without a helmet and risk bashing your head open, that’s your prerogative. But my bike, my rules. Put the damn helmet on.”
“Put the damn helmet on,” Casey parroted back at him, her voice deepening to something that still sounded nothing at all like Atticus’s voice, no matter how hard she tried. She squealed in surprise when he revved the engine before she dutifully plopped the helmet down on her head.