Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

  The beast he is after tonight is particularly crafty. After three full moons, he figured its hunting patterns and knew it would be returning to its first hunting grounds in West Memorial Park shortly. He is pretty sure it isn’t the same beast that had attacked and killed his family, but it is a werewolf, and he plans to capture every one of them until he finds the butcher responsible for his pain. Breeders too. To him, they are all the same. Tonight, he is looking for a bitch who only dared come out under the fullest moon. First, he had the hunting grounds to contend with.

  It is pretty nice as far as parks go—conservation land with a lot of wooded areas and clearings for kids to run and play in, open fields, three man-made ponds placed throughout its two-mile length, and only a few miles from the institute. This convenience makes trapping and transport easy. But it also invites the perfect hunting grounds for werewolves. It hosts about six small wooded areas all along jogging paths, and the whole park is surrounded on three sides by natural woods and one with a slow-flowing river. It is ideal for his purposes and a werewolf’s too.

  After a long circle of the grounds, he finally picks up her trail. She entered from the east through a dense forested area just south of I-80. Yeah, he knows where she came from. Smart. Not three miles away, there is a park and rest area for tired drivers. It seems his foe drove to the rest area and walked into the woods. This one knew what it was doing in and out of beast form. Some of them do, chose their prey days in advance even. Others are just mindless fiends; unable or unwilling to remember what they are or who they are when not transformed into flesh-eating monsters like Bella Lupe. Good riddance to her.

  The first time it, this particular beast, killed in this park it took a jogger named Tabitha Price right off the running path in front of her jogging partner and lover.

  Months earlier

  The dimly lit path offered little warning to the couple as they neared the end of their run and their ‘one true love’ lives together. They were only fifty yards from the parking lot with the light fading and automated park lights just beginning to switch on. Roger was telling Tabitha a story about something funny that happened at work. They had both slowed to work off any tension in their muscles after two laps around the jogging path, almost a full four miles.

  They had made the run many times, keeping fit being one of the things that attracted them to each other, according to Roger’s interviews and news reports. Roger stopped and walked in a small circle after noticing he was a few yards ahead of his love. He had made one whole walking turn hands on his hips when he heard the roar and turned in time to see something large and dark tackle his girlfriend. He watched as it lashed out at her and lowered its head, tearing viciously at Tabitha’s body.

  He did like any man would, he ran to her rescue, at least at first. Reaching her, he could barely make out what looked like either a bear or large dog, but he’d never seen a dog so large. Instinctually, he began screaming and kicking at the beast. Its only reaction at first was to glare for a moment and then bite down into Tabitha’s neck, pulling a huge chunk out. Swallowing her bloodied flesh, it bore its teeth at Roger as if offering a challenge. The challenge wasn’t accepted. Instead, Roger screamed and turned to run away and seek help. Dumb. Never, ever run. It triggers a predator’s instincts to pursue and kill.

  Tired and weak from the shock of what he’d just seen, Roger only made it a few yards before the animal was upon him. It easily tackled him from the rear, knocking him face down on the hard, clay jogging path. It dug at his back and bit his shoulder deeply as it flipped him over to face itself. Just as it leaned back and howled, ready for what would have been the death bite, headlights struck it from several parked cars.

  West Memorial Park was also a favorite make-out spot for teenagers. Lucky for Roger that the highway patrol hadn’t made their rounds of the park just yet to run the teens off before closing. They were tied up a few miles away at a one-car accident. Sleepy drivers, well, shouldn’t drive. The teens, hearing screams, had turned on their headlights in the direction of the jogging path. They watched a man mounted by a large animal. Some of them screamed, but one opened her cell phone and dialed 911.

  “This is 911, what is your emergency?”

  “Oh my God, there’s this big animal thing killing someone. We need help.”

  “What is your name and where are you calling from?”

  “Oh, my name is Sharon, and we’re at a park, hang on. Where the hell are we, Chuck?”

  Chuck turned from screaming and waving his arms at the animal now covering its eyes down the path. “West Park.”

  “Okay, we’re in West Park; some big bear or something is killing a guy down some path.”

  “Okay, let him get this straight. A bear is attacking someone, and you can see the bear?”

  “Yes, we can see the thing. It’s really big, and it has some guy pinned down.”

  “Okay, do you have a car there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell everyone to get into the car. Do not approach the bear, just get in and honk the horn. See if that scares the bear away. Don’t do anything else. The highway patrol is on the way.”

  Sharon told her friends what to do and they followed the operator’s advice. Within two minutes, three units were racing into the parking lot and toward the two carloads of teens still honking and tapping between high and low beams. Upon their arrival, a few of the braver teens jumped out of their cars—one with a missing hood—and pointed toward the path and the one remaining body. Some stayed in locked cars, terrified and shaking with fear while crying uncontrollably.

  Sergeant Mick Talarico grabbed one of the boys and asked what was going on while officers from the other two units drew their weapons and advanced down the path.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  Chuck could hardly stop shaking. “The stupid bitch on the phone said to honk and try to scare it off of the guy. It fucking came after us.”

  “Hey, watch your mouth, and try to calm down. What came after you?”

  Chuck shook, holding himself in a tight hug, looking left and right and then trying to look in all directions. “The lady on the phone said if we honked our horns it would maybe let the guy go.”

  “Well?”

  “What do you mean, well? We honked, and the damn thing came after us and tore the fucking hood off my car.”

  Chuck began shaking violently. An ambulance arrived just after the highway patrol units but stayed by the park entrance. The kid was still rattling off as he watched in the distance. “It must have heard you guys coming; no sooner had it lifted its head and looked toward the park exit, it growled at us showing those fucking big teeth and turned and ran back down the path. A few seconds later, your headlights lit the area up.”

  Talarico looked around and unsnapped his holster before reaching up and pressing the mike switch on his shoulder-mounted radio. “Be advised, the animal is still in the area; you guys be careful up there.”

  He could hear two clicks come over the radio. They had heard him. He watched them work their way down the path scanning the brush and tree lines to either side. Some of the brush seemed like it came almost up to where the jogging path was.

  “Talarico,” his radio buzzed.

  He pressed his mike’s switch again. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “We need that ambulance up here now. This guy is hurt pretty bad, but he’s still alive. We think he’s saying there was someone else with him, but we don’t see anyone.”

  Talarico scanned the area as well as he could in the dim light. Some of the teens were on their phones talking to parents, others were locked in the cars, some crying, some holding them, and some rocking back and forth in obvious shock.

  The ambulance pulled up next to him at the beginning of the clay jogging path, the driver asking as he rolled down his window. “Where you want us, Officer?”

  Mick shook his head to clear it and pointed. “Down the path. There are two other officers with a possible bear attack vic
tim; they need you right away. But be careful, the bear may still be in the area.”

  The driver smiled. “Bears won’t attack groups of people, they’re more scared of us th—” He stopped in mid-sentence. “What the hell happened to the hood of that car?”

  Mick Talarico jerked a thumb in the direction of a small nearby field. “That scared bear ran over here and tore the hood off the car then tossed it over there just before we got here.”

  The driver started to roll up his window. “Holy shit.”

  Mick watched the ambulance pull around the chains running between two poles blocking the entrance to the jogging route and drive up the path. The spotlights on either side of the converted van scanned the tree line back and forth until they reached the wounded man and two officers with flashlights out doing the same thing.

  Within minutes, the backup arrived, and a full-blown search began. Roger, badly wounded, was hurried off to the nearest hospital while highway and state police conducted a vigorous search of the area. Over the next twelve hours, they did find parts of Tabitha’s clothing and flesh, but not enough to identify her immediately. That is, until a state trooper stopped under a tree to catch his breath and felt something dripping on him. When he looked up, wedged between two branches was the mauled head of a woman staring down at him, her mouth open in a permanent scream, forever unheard.

  Winslow was there that night, watching from the shadows at the other end of the small parking lot. He was just a little too late for the attack, but the police had kept him from tracking it. Tonight will be different. Tonight, like the many nights since, shows little in the way of joggers. No other attacks had happened since, but only because there is now less prey. In the end, it was all blamed on a rogue bear. They said it was desperate for food to fatten up on before the winter’s hibernation. Little by little, the teens are starting to come back to the park to party and fog up their parents’ car windows. Snow makes it harder to get in and out of the parking lot, but they come anyway. Dumb. Young. Dumb. In love. Tonight, they are his bait for the beast. He will do his best to protect them from it, but if any of them are bitten, he’ll do what he did to Bella Lupe. And he won’t be sorry for it, no matter what Garrison and the other bleeding hearts say. Any beast who lives on human hearts deserves to be caged.

  He is not coldhearted, he just doesn’t want any more of those damn things running around committing mindless murder. Sitting here in the tree line, he has the teens within easy sight and reach if they need his help. As he looks around, he can almost sense its presence. It’s here. I can feel it. He starts his search, watching the tree line upwind from him. He spots movement, something closing from behind them, moving tree to tree, staying low. His stomach flutters, sure it is the beast. A glint of moonlight touches one of its eyes, and he sees a demonic red flash as it moves closer, pausing to make sure it isn’t detected. It must want them all. Not on my watch. Not this time. This is a very ambitious beast. But not as ambitious as him, he decides.

  He has no choice. He breaks cover in a dead run just as it makes way to attack a pair of teens leaning against the back of a snow-covered sedan with its engine still running. He reaches them just as it leaps, and he does the same. They collide only a few feet from the horrified teens and swing at each other, slashing out, kicking, biting, and tearing at one another. It doesn’t take long until it is just Winslow and the beast rolling around on the ground, each trying for the death blow, neither getting the chance. Both bleeding badly, Winslow is winning. Pretty soon the beast will be too weak to fight him off, and he would kill it. It is strange how easy it seems, to defeat this one. It isn’t even as big as he imagined it would be. Is this even the one I came for?

  It must sense its doom and turns its head toward the sky and howled. That’s when Winslow reaches out in and slashes its throat wide open. Its head drops, its eyes looking into the researcher’s—a look of almost confusion. It’s not the anger he expected. As it coughs and gurgles its blood out over the clawed hands, it tries to cover a tear which threatens to fall. Winslow, who doesn’t understand this reaction, hears something else far off in the distance behind him. He turns. He hears howls, not one, not two, but at least three or four distinct answers to the dying beast’s call. Winslow looks back down, more focused now, and can also hear the coughs of the beast as it becomes human again. Confused, he turns back to the teenager, whose eyes are starting to glaze over as if he’s seen something terrifying. In his eyes are sorrow. Winslow sees it—in the teenager and the dying beast too—his little brother’s face. Love lives on. What have I done?

  Garrison

  Garrison isn’t a stupid man. He’d learned a lot of things in his difficult life. We become who we are told we are. It’s nearly impossible to avoid. When we hear a lie long enough, we start to believe it. It’s just the way things are. Or, if we are of the strongest breeds, we strive to become the opposite. Usually, and sadly, it doesn’t happen that way. For most of us, the human kind, it’s hard enough getting from one day to the next. To fight against the laws of nature is just too much.

  He knew it back then too. He told himself, when they threw fatty table scraps into a bowl on a filthy floor and made him eat side by side with his selfless, skinny German shepherd Rosalee, that she and he were different. Even as a young boy, he promised his only friend that someday, they’d be more than pets to owners too cheap to even get them a crate. He’d get her out of there and they’d start over. He promised her, after they were asleep and she and he were alone on the floor, that he’d take them to the woods. There, they’d find a way to survive without anyone hurting either of them anymore.

  Even now, he likes to think she believed him. He is pretty sure she did. She’d stretch across the filthy braided rug and let him lay on her. Even at three, she outweighed then-eight-year-old him by a good twenty pounds. And there, on her chest, he’d sleep on a hard kitchen floor, careful not to move around so he didn’t wake their owners. He’d squeeze his eyes shut tight and remember how it used to be. He’d hold his breath and whisper in her ear that his name wasn’t “Dog.” It was Garrison Roger Gleason—Gary for short because Garrison is a name for a grown man. He knew his best and only friend would never let him forget… She promised him too.

  But he’d grown up. He knew other things about life and vows too: promises were meant to be broken.

  Fifteen years ago

  “Get the fuck up!”

  The boy is on his feet faster than he can follow up the man’s command with his makeshift name: Dog, short for Dog Boy. He is sure to stare him—this monster who came into his home eight years ago—in the eye. If he doesn’t, the man will kick him. He’ll tell him he’ll never be a man. It’s stupid, really. How can a dog become a man, exactly? he wonders, but is not stupid enough to ask. Instead, he slowly moves his leg a few inches more to the left. It’s just enough to be sure Rosalee has gotten the message too. He can’t handle seeing the monster hit her in the head again with the vacuum.

  “We have shit to do,” he says.

  Dog Boy nods.

  “Well? You coming?”

  He has no idea where the monster stepfather wants him to go, but he can take a relatively educated guess for a kid who hasn’t been to school since the man told the witch—his mother—that he was too dumb. He is a pretty smart kid. He knows, by the leaves he rakes into big piles outside the trailer when the monster’s gone, that it’s that time of year again.

  It’s the only time the man allows him to stand—when he is doing chores or out helping the monster with another haunt. Today is not an ordinary day. None of them really are. In general, Dog Boy is not sure where the monster goes all day. He only knows he breathes easier when the man’s gone. Why can’t he just leave? It’s a thought he has every day. In this way, the day is normal. The second the man grabs his flannel shirt from the coatrack, Dog Boy knows, at least for a few hours, Rosalee and he are safe. The witch mother won’t hurt him. She can’t be bothered. She’s usually got a list of her own to com
plete before the man gets back, stuff involving webcams and lace outfits that make Dog Boy’s stomach turn.

  The monster’s glare is so hard, Dog Boy swears his blood will boil. Finally, in as strong of a voice as he can muster, Dog spits the words out:

  “Permission to get my shoes, sir?”

  “What the fuck are you waiting for? Meet me in the truck, Dog.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He scrambles down the hall. At the end of it, by a dog bed the man forces him to sleep in, are the one pair of shoes he owns. Dog Boy winces, thinking of how he’ll squish his feet in them. They have to be three sizes too small by now. He once asked Mother for a new pair when the monster wasn’t around. Last time, she called him needy and told him she’d send him to the pound. He hasn’t asked since. Maybe this time will be different.

  It’s not that he thinks the pound would be such an awful place. He’s used to sleeping on the floor and eating from a bowl. What bothers him is that Mother says Rosalee is a better dog than he is. Sometimes, she takes Dog Boy’s only friend away and locks herself in the bedroom with her. Rosalee howls. It scares him. He has no idea what they do in there, but it’s enough to make him know that being the favorite dog might not be the best idea. Still, he wishes he could protect Rosalee better. If he was a better friend or something, well, then maybe.

  Dog Boy plops into the dog bed, spitting Rosalee’s clingy gray hairs from his mouth and careful not to sneeze. He gets in trouble when he interrupts Mother in her room on camera. The monster says it makes people stop buying by-the-minute pay chips. Dog Boy don’t even know what that means. What he does know, is if he is super quiet and he does as he is told, he might have a chance of sitting at the dinner table tonight. He might even get enough food to save the good stuff to share with his dog.

  He can do this, he reminds himself. Last year, after a haunt, he’d helped so much that he’d made Mother smile and use his real name. She’d even said she was proud of him for almost a week. And the monster paid him five dollars for his work. The man even took him to the store so he could buy something. He bought a new collar for Rosalee. The monster told him he was a joke. This year, if he pays him again, Dog will be sure to buy something the man would approve of—bullets, beer, chewing tobacco, and minutes for the phone. He’ll say it’s a gift. Maybe that will get him a spot at the dinner table.