Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

  Despite returning to the continent again and again, Nelson couldn’t say he was fond of Africa. The cities were noisy and smelly and full of people who always seemed vaguely hostile. But Africa was where the big game was and so Nelson was, back, trophy hunting for a black rhino.

  The government of Namibia only issued three black rhino permits a year and in previous years, Nelson had been outbid. This year, determined to score one of the coveted pieces of paper, Nelson had simply doubled the most recent winning bid and then added another 50K on top of that.

  He could afford it. His family had made a fortune raising hogs and he’d grown the money with shrewd investments in tech, renewable energy, Denver real estate, and commercial construction all over the southwest. At 48, despite his ex-wife’s best efforts to siphon off as much of his wealth as possible, Nelson had the time and money to do whatever damn thing he wanted.

  And what Nelson wanted to do was mount a black rhino head on the wall of his trophy room. If it took three-quarters of a million dollars to make that happen, well, it was what it was. He’d have his accountants find some way to justify the expense as part of an ongoing conservation effort or some such bullshit. If he had to say that the money he paid the government would go to fund rhino research and protection, well, he’d sing that tune. Not that it would make much difference to the PETA nuts. People were already prejudiced against hunters, but paying lip service to a higher purpose would at least keep his daughter happy. She disapproved of killing animals for sport, though she was very fond of her cheeseburgers.

  Thinking about his daughter made Nelson anxious. Her birthday was less than a week away and her mother would pitch a fit if he wasn’t home to fete his little princess in the manner to which she’d become accustomed. Sophia was turning 13 and was spoiled rotten, but she was a beauty, and pretty people could get away with murder. She had her heart set on a motorcycle, even though she wouldn’t be old enough to get a license for three more years.

  Nelson was still thinking about hos his daughter when he became aware that the two trackers were communicating via click-signals. The ranger glided up beside him. “We’re near,” Loide whispered quietly. Nelson had been told rhinos have poor eyesight but excellent hearing and a keen sense of smell and he was used to his companions speaking in hushed voices.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” one of the trackers had told Nelson their first night out. “Just because you’re not aware of them, doesn’t mean the animal is not aware of you.”

  The remark had seemed needlessly condescending to Nelson. He’d also been offended when Petrus, a tough white South African tracker, had told him the best way to survive a rhino charge was to dive head first toward the animal and then try to roll out of its way. “Move sideways,” he said, “not backwards.”

  “Don’t try to outrun it,” Loide, the ranger, had added. “Usain Bolt can reach a top speed of 27 miles per hour. A black rhino can hit a top speed of 34. A rhino can catch Usain Bolt. A rhino can catch you.”

  ‘I don’t run,” Nelson said, annoyed. He’d killed an attacking lion in South Africa the year before. He saw the two trackers roll their eyes when he mentioned that. They knew about the lion hunts in South Africa, where captive-bred big cats practically walked up to hunters and licked their hands.

  He was looking forward to facing the rhino. one of the last of the existing megafauna. There was something primal about being in the presence of such a massive creature. He had already crafted the Instagram post he’d send when he’d accomplished the deed. It was such an arresting image to imagine that he missed the start of the animal’s charge.

  Another man might have panicked at the sight of an animal roughly the size of a small SUV crashing toward him, but Nelson was no coward. He whipped his weapon up and fired twice.

  The kill, when it came, turned out to be spectacularly anticlimactic and Nelson felt a little disappointed that it had only taken two shots for his $20,000 .500 Nitrous Express gun—the very weapon wielded by Daniel Craig in SkyFall—to stop the animal in its tracks. Still, when the rhino fell, he felt the impact in his bones.

  His trackers and the ranger did not seem terribly impressed, which annoyed Nelson and he recalculated the tip he would hand out when they got back to the hotel.

  “This bad boy’s got to be ten and a half feet long,” Nelson crowed. Loide privately disagreed, estimating the body length to be a more modest nine feet and change, but Nelson was the one who’d paid nearly a million dollars for the right to kill the rhino. If he wanted to inflate his size, Loide wasn’t going to be the one to contradict him.

  “An impressive beast,” was all he said, as he pulled out a digital camera to commemorate the moment. Nelson took the obligatory “big game hunter” pose, kneeling next to the dead animal’s huge head, grinning from ear to ear while Petrus and Johannes, the trackers, stood in the background and tried not to look bored.

  Nelson was still kneeling when the beat up modified Landcruiser 4x4 drove up with two poachers inside and an armed guard riding on the hood. The guard sprayed a short burst from his AK47 that took out Nelson and the two guides but spared Loide, who had tipped the gang to the rhino’s location in return for a share of the money the beast’s two horns would fetch.

  The leader of the poachers, a yellow-eyed man with prominent freckles on his face, was pleased with the spoils, and as the other poacher efficiently harvested the horns—an action not unlike coring an apple—he took Loide aside to complete their shady transaction. The two had done business before, so the ranger had no reason to suspect the exchange of money would be anything but routine. What he didn’t know was that one of his colleagues at the Ministry was also working with the poachers and she had offered a better price for her information. Thanks to her, Loide had become superfluous.

  The alpha poacher could have shot Loide and offered him an easy death, but in his twisted mind, the ranger had violated a code and deserved punishment. Instead of executing him with a bullet, he chopped off his right arm with a machete. As the ranger howled in pain, his blood spurting in great gouts, the poacher got back into the Landcruiser.

  Less than ten minutes later, his accomplice slid in next to his boss, a bloody sack holding the two horns he’d just removed. He handled his burden awkwardly; the larger horn was almost as long as he was tall. “Six kilos easy,” he told his boss happily.

  At $6,000 an ounce and with just a little over 35 ounces to a kilo—even split four ways, it was good money. The money papered over the poacher’s guilt. He tried not to think about Loide’s fate. He hadn’t been completely dead when they drove away. He’d likely still be alive when the hyenas came, poor bastard.

  Hyenas aren’t dainty eaters, and they’d start chowing down on him without bothering to take his pulse. And after the hyenas would come the jackals and then the vultures, and finally the insects would be drawn to the feast.

  By morning, nothing would be left of the rhino but the larger bones. The only sign of the humans would be tatters of their clothes and a rusty red stain on the ground. Within a week, those would be gone as well.

  Chapter One

  If you google the question, “Can a wolf beat a hyena in a fight?” the search engine will take you to Quora where a number of people have weighed in on the subject without necessarily having any kind of expertise in the subject. The consensus seems to be…it depends. A large gray wolf can weigh around 180 pounds, while a large spotted hyena—they also come in stripes—is smaller, around 120 pounds. But other factors can come into play and when you’re talking about the creatures known as bouda—were-hyenas—your guess is as good as mine. And when you factor shape-shifting into the mix, the possibilities get even crazier.

  The thing about were-hyenas, I’d been told, is that unlike most animal shifters, their transformations can go both ways. Not only can humans shape into hyenas, in certain circumstances, hyenas can masquerade as humans. None of which was on my mind when I first sat down at a restaurant in Addis Ababa with Amari Kebede. I was
there to talk about possible corruption in a new trade deal the country was putting together with China and he kept changing the subject. As we lingered over a meal of kitfo and collard greens, the spice level cranked up to 11 and only partially soaked up by the soft cheese and spongy, sourdough injera served on the side, he kept evading the topic like a seasoned politician. I finally just gave up and ate.

  He kept flicking glances at me as I did so. The restaurant catered to locals, so I’m sure Amari thought I’d be sweating my ass off before the meal ended with a plate of the little caramel-coated balls of crunchy coconut I found addictive. Disappointingly for him, I’ve played the game of How hot can the American stand it? all over the world, even downing a handful of ghost pepper jelly beans once when I was on assignment in South America. It later turned out the treats had come from a Walmart in Buenos Aires, so that was kind of a letdown, but I’d made my point. Hot stuff? Bring it on.

  My wolf wasn’t too happy about the spicy meal at first. Too much heat upsets his stomach. But he was just fine with the kitfo. Hold the injera, bring on the raw meat. I’d only been living with the wolf for a year, and I still had a lot to learn about our enforced symbiosis. But one thing I did know—he liked meat. A lot.

  “Simon?” Amari said, snapping me out of my reverie. “There just isn’t a story here. It’s just a trade deal.”

  “At least not a story that someone wants told?” I suggested. “Who got to you, Amari? Is someone paying you to look the other way?”

  “Fuck you, Simon,” he said, which is something I hear a lot. He pushed his plate of candy aside and leaned forward. “Twenty years ago, Ethiopia was the third poorest country in the world. Now look at us. China invested more than four billion dollars in our country this year. Our bilateral trade’s around six billion. When you’re talking numbers that big, there’s bound to be some corruption in there somewhere. But meantime, Ethiopia is thriving. You want to be the one who throws a spanner into that machine?”

  I didn’t really, but I was on assignment from Der Spiegel, and I couldn’t exactly just dump it.

  I was about to point that out to Amari when he took a last swig of his Bedele Pilsner, pulled a strand of marble-sized beads out of his pocket, and plunked them on the table between us without explanation. I picked them up. The beads were smooth, hard, each one made out of a translucent, reddish brown substance.

  “This isn’t amber, is it?”

  Amari shook his head. “Rhino horn. I’m breaking about 16 laws just by having those beads in my possession.”

  “I’ve never heard much about the animal trade in Ethiopia,” I said, turning the beads over in my hands. They were cool to the touch and seemed to glow with inner life. I found them oddly mesmerizing.

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s a story that starts in Lagos.”

  “We’re nearly six thousand miles from Lagos,” I said.

  “I’m aware,” he said, with a smile. “But Lagos is where you need to go to chase this story.” He watched me for a moment, knew he had me hooked. “You can write about governmental corruption any time, and your father and six people will read your story. Write about rhino horn and elephant ivory, and tiger bone wine, and you’ve got yourself a page turner. Maybe even another book. One that’ll sell this time.”

  Now it was my turn to say, “fuck you.” Not that Amari was wrong. My last book had been about an eccentric Hungarian crime lord wiping out his competition and the nasty family fight that followed, but by the time I took out the juicy parts--like the tidbit about the crime lord being a fucking werewolf—the story had ended up nothing more than a standard issue cops and robbers tale. And with my manager dead, there was no one to promote it. I think it sold about ten copies. I still see it on remainder tables every once in a while.

  “Let me run it past my editor,” I said, wondering if I could persuade Uli to let me hold off on the political story in return for providing a tale that was a lot sexier. He’d cried when Knut, the Berlin Zoo’s polar bear, had died, so I was pretty sure I could interest him in a story about human hyenas preying on the dwindling population of black rhinos. Those were Amari’s words, not mine. At the time, I didn’t know he was speaking literally. Now I know better—from personal experience—and I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that there are shape-shifters abroad in the world, living among normal human beings who have no idea.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to “sell” Uli on the new story idea at all. Word of Nelson King’s murder—his companions’ deaths were merely footnotes to the main story—was all over the news and the topic of poaching and the global market for animal parts was suddenly hot. “Then thousand words minimum,” Uli said, “and we’ll pay you for any pictures you can bring us.” That was welcome news. I’m no Steve McCurry, but when you’re photographing a dead rhino, you don’t have to be—you just need to compose the shot and remember to take off the lens cap. I could use the extra money. I’d had to spend a fortune to “wolf proof” my apartment, and without Cress to sweet-talk editors on my behalf, the freelance assignments were drying up. To make ends meet, I’d been doing corporate communications work and selling the occasional paparazzi shot to the tabloids. There was always a market for a photograph of a pretty person hanging out with another pretty person, especially if one of the pretty people was married to someone else.

  “Bread and circuses,” Marie-Ange used to say when she was being judgmental. And after a while, the way I made a living—“catering to readers’ most basic instincts”—made her think less of me. So long as I was in some war-torn hellhole writing about refugees, she was okay with it, but do a piece on the Met Gala—which paid about twice my going rate—and she got all frowny-faced. And it was clear that a journalist for hire couldn’t hold a candle to the saintly guys she worked with, sincere people supporting noble causes, although their intentions toward Marie-Ange weren’t much different from mine. Wolves mate for life but I was still mostly a man and the idea of monogamy terrified me.

  Even though I’d been mostly faithful to my brown-eyed angel, when we were apart, which was often, I found it somewhat liberating not to have to live up to the high standards she expected from her consort. When I’d returned from Eastern Europe, we’d tried to reconnect, but every time I tried to tell her what had happened to me there, how I’d been bitten by a werewolf suffering from distemper, sheer ego kept me mute. I was afraid she’d think I was crazy. And she’d seen some interview with Aliz Farkas, the beautiful crime lord’s daughter, who mentioned me in passing, and that was enough to put wild assumptions in Marie-Ange’s head. None of those assumptions were true and none of them were flattering to me, but the gulf between us grew. We’d Zoomed a few times but the first thing she’d noticed was that I no longer wore the little silver ring she’d given me. That had hurt her feelings. I couldn’t exactly explain that I’d saved my life by forcing a werewolf to swallow the silver circlet, and every other thing I could say about it would have sounded like a lie, because it would have been. Things had been frosty since then and I had little hope of them thawing. But the night before I was supposed to fly to Lagos, Marie-Ange texted me. I had a dream about you. You were a wolf and you were fighting a pack of hyenas. I don’t know what this means, but be careful. Bisous—MA.

  Kisses. That had to mean something right? Marie-Ange had always told me she knew whenever I was in danger, a confession that usually annoyed me because I felt like it was her passive/aggressive way of telling me to be careful. But this time felt different. It felt like heartache, like the last echo of fond feeling fading into the night.

  I was also unsettled by her warning. This particular dream hit a little too close to home. She’d seen me as a wolf? I’d always wondered if she was psychic because this wasn’t the first time she seemed to know stuff she shouldn’t have known. I knew that when I got back from Nigeria I was going to have to man up and have a talk with her—even if it was a relationship-ending talk. If she would listen to me.

  “You don’
t appreciate me, Simon,” she used to say. Whenever she said that I would think about something my grandfather used to say, “Aki a kicsit nem becsüli a nagyot nem érdemli.”

  “Who doesn’t appreciate the little doesn’t deserve the big.” My grandfather had enjoyed a happy marriage. So had my father, bastard that he is. It bothered me that I hadn’t had their luck. One of the reasons my father was so contemptuous of me was that I was not yet married. To him, it meant I was still clinging to childhood, that though I might be grown, I was still a boy in his eyes.

  Gah, thinking about Marie-Ange kindled my desire for a cigarette, but I knew if I gave in to the craving, I’d pay for it later. The wolf would keep me up all night.

  Chapter Two

  There’s a popular belief that rhinoceroses are distantly related to the three-horned dinosaur known as triceratops and that the animals lost an extra horn (or two) as they evolved. Which just goes to show you how little most people know about science. And I know saying stuff like that is one reason everyone thinks I’m an asshole. I used to soft-pedal the science in my articles—adding links so readers could find out more information without feeling like total idiots. Then a YouGov survey in 2019 found that one in six Americans aren’t really sure the Earth is round. At that point, I just gave up trying to sugar-coat my disdain for the anti-fact crowd. They can all just drink bleach and die as far as I’m concerned.