by Zoe Chant
Austin didn't say anything. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground.
"Kids," Paula said, "there's something you need to know about Dan. Lissy, remember how you saw that bear in the alley the other day? And I said I thought you dreamed it? I was wrong, honey. I think you really did see a bear." Probably Derek on patrol, now that she thought about it.
"Told you," Lissy said, smug as only a vindicated nine-year-old could be.
"But it wasn't just a bear. It was a man who turns into a bear. There's real magic in the world, kids, and Dan has some of it too." She waved her hand at the bush, which was shaking a little, shedding snow off its branches. "Voila."
The bush gave a final shudder, and a grizzly bear stepped out from behind it.
He looked a little more natural out here than he had in her living room. With the backyard layered in snow, this was a more proper environment for a bear. She hadn't actually seen him walk before, and she was struck by how carefully he did it, with a lopsided, slightly hopping movement.
"Wow," Austin said. He sounded like he was aiming for surprise. It didn't sound very convincing.
Lissy shrieked and clung to Paula's leg.
"It's okay, kids," Paula said. She didn't look at Austin, trying to maintain the polite fiction that shifters were a total surprise to both of them. At least now she knew how Dan got snow all over him the other day. "It's just Dan. He's the same as he is when he's human. He won't hurt you."
She had thought that she would have to work harder at convincing herself. But one look at Dan was all it took. She didn't know exactly how, but she could still see Dan in him, even if he was as massive as her car and covered with shaggy brown fur. That was definitely Dan. And whether he was a bear or a man, she would never, ever worry about the kids around him.
Paula ruffled Lissy's hair and took a step forward.
Dan flopped down abruptly in the snow. A bear lying down wasn't that much shorter than a bear standing up; it appeared that most of their height was not in the legs. He settled his head down in the snow and watched her approach.
Paula felt a bit weird petting him (was it rude to scratch your boyfriend behind the ears?) but she needed to show the kids that he was harmless, and anyway, she wanted to touch him. How often did anyone get the chance to pet a real live bear in perfect safety?
She touched him hesitantly at first. His fur was coarse on the outside, but when she buried her hands in it, she found that his underfur was very soft, and very warm.
Dan gave a small grunt, which sounded pleased. Paula dug her hands deeper and then leaned against his side, and it occurred to her that she was getting completely lost in the experience; she had halfway forgotten the kids. She turned around and beckoned to them.
"Come on, kids. Come pet a bear."
The kids both hesitated, Lissy out of nervousness and Austin from embarrassment. Lissy broke first, and trotted across the snow in her little green boots and coat. She looked absolutely tiny next to Dan's great shaggy bulk. But Paula felt no nervousness, not even slightly, as Lissy reached out a hesitant hand and petted his muzzle.
They looked like an illustration out of a children's book, especially with Lissy's bright green coat, a splash of color in the snow.
"Come on, Austin," Paula said.
Austin sighed, but he came over and gave Dan a token pat.
"What else can he turn into?" Lissy asked. "A mole?"
"No, honey. Just a bear."
"An eagle?"
"No, Lissy."
"A horse?"
"No, he only turns into a bear, Lissy."
As Lissy grew more confident, she became visibly more excited. "This is amazing," she said, and gave Dan a hug, wrapping her arms around his giant head as far as they would go. "I have my own bear. This is awesome. I can ride him and play with him and—"
"Don't forget he's also Dan," Paula said, stifling her laughter.
"—and take him to school and—"
"No!" Paula and Austin said at the same time. Paula glanced at her son, who looked down at his boots.
"Wait 'til that stuck-up Kimberly Burke sees my bear! I'm gonna—"
"Honey." Paula planted her hand on Lissy's shoulder. She should have anticipated this problem. "You can't tell anyone about this, not ever, okay? It's a really big secret. Dan would be in trouble if anyone knew. But you can talk to me and Austin about it, and to Sandy and his parents, and to your dad."
Austin gave her a sharp look. Paula hesitated. This was the tricky part. Dan had told her that it was a huge breach of shifter etiquette to reveal a shifter to other people. But Terry being the kids' dad, and especially since Austin had inherited his shifting, put them in a gray area. They really needed to know. In fact, Terry should have told them years ago, and Paula still wished that he had tried harder to find a way to do that.
"Your dad turns into something too," she said.
"Whoa!" Lissy didn't seem at all surprised by this. At this point, Paula could probably tell her that her fourth-grade teacher was a vampire and she would cheerfully take it in stride. "Does he turn into a horse?"
"No—"
"A dolphin?"
"No, honey, he—"
"A rabbit? A zebra? An alien? A boxer dog?"
"Lissy, I'm trying to tell you, if you'd just let me finish." Paula was laughing so hard she could barely speak.
"He's a griffin," Austin said quietly. "Isn't he? Mom?"
"Yes, honey." Paula sobered. She had the feeling of trying to coax a wild creature to eat out of her hand. There were so many ways this could go wrong. "How do you know that?" she added, remembering that she wasn't supposed to know.
"You're the worst at fibbing, Mom," Austin said. He scowled. "Dan told you, didn't he?"
"No!" Paula said, and Dan backed it up by shaking his big, shaggy head, almost knocking Lissy into the snow. "I figured it out on my own after I found out about your dad."
"How long have you known about Dad?" Austin asked defensively. He sounded betrayed, and she reached out a hand, struck by the hurt in his voice.
"Only since yesterday. I promise. I had no idea when I was married to him. After I knew that, though, it wasn't hard to figure out what you were hiding from me." She swallowed. "Do you mind showing me?"
Austin took a step back. Dan raised his head, twitching his furry ears forward.
"You don't have to," Paula said. "But I bet your sister would love to see it."
"I do, I do!" Lissy said, clapping her hands, and then looked puzzled. "See what, Mom?"
Austin heaved a deeply put-upon teenage sigh, and shifted.
Even expecting it, Paula still jumped back. It was hard enough to get used to it with Dan, but seeing someone else do it, someone she knew so well—her little boy, the baby she had carried around, the toddler who had followed her everywhere, the stubborn teenager who had been both her pride and a pain in her ass for the last year—
It was shocking and also amazing.
He was a beautiful griffin. Now that she knew griffins were made of different kinds of cats and birds, she could see that his body half was something long and tawny—a cougar, maybe? His wings were fluffy enough that it was hard to tell exactly what they were going to look like when they finished fledging, but from the shape of his head, she thought he was probably some kind of hawk or falcon, like his dad.
Austin looked as embarrassed as anyone with a cat body and bird head could look.
"You're gorgeous, baby," Paula said, which didn't seem to help.
Lissy, meanwhile, was almost speechless with excitement. She jumped up and down, clapping her hands wildly.
"Austin is a kittybird!" she shrieked.
"Baby, keep it down, people can hear. It's called a griffin."
"Kittybird!" Lissy shrieked at the top of her lungs, still bouncing. "Kittybird, kittybird—awk!"
Her wild squeals turned into a squawk. Between one jump and the next, the little girl vanished, and what plopped into the snow was a fa
t, fluffy kitten with a very startled-looking, round-eyed bird head and little unfledged wings covered in downy baby fuzz.
"Oh no," Paula gasped.
Lissy looked around in bafflement. She started to get up, tottered and nearly fell over. Her head rotated all the way around backwards, causing Paula to yelp, so that she could look at her wings. She spread first one, then the other, and gave them a cautious little flap.
She was so round and fluffy that it was hard to tell exactly what kind of cat she was, but she seemed to have spots. Her bird head had a cute little pointy beak.
Austin came over to poke at her curiously with his beak. Dan nuzzled her reassuringly. And Paula stared at her family there in the snow—her boyfriend the bear, her two griffin cubs—and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
This certainly wasn't the life she'd envisioned just a few weeks ago.
Then she was overcome with the adorableness of it. She pulled out her phone and took a picture.
After playing in the snow for a while, Paula and Dan coaxed the kids back to kid-shape again—Lissy had lost a boot, which seemed to have vanished utterly; Paula dug out a slightly outgrown spare pair—and Terry showed up, exactly on time, with a promise to return them in the evening.
Lissy greeted him with enthusiastic delight, Austin with a bit more reserve, but all three of them were laughing and talking as they left the house. Paula was cautiously optimistic that this might work out okay after all.
When the kids and Terry were gone, a cheerful make-out session ensued. After they finally broke apart, Dan asked her, "What do you want to do with our free afternoon?"
She could think of any number of things, but still floating with satiation from earlier, there was one thing that came to mind ahead of all else.
"How about that date we never got around to?"
A few minutes later they were strolling down the street, hand in hand, looking in shop windows. After weeks of miserably cold, snowy weather, the sun was out today and the piles of snow were melting on the sidewalk. It wasn't spring yet, but it almost felt like it, as if the world had begun to thaw.
They strolled casually, in no hurry. Paula waved occasionally to people that she knew.
"It feels so strange to be out like this in the middle of the day," she admitted. "Between the diner and the kids, I've almost forgotten what free time feels like."
"Have you thought about delegating more?" Dan asked. "I know that running a business is two or three full-time jobs stacked on top of each other, but you might able to arrange things so that you only have to go into the diner four or five days a week instead of 24-7."
"I'm thinking about it. I gotta say, I could get used to this."
Actually, she was thinking about it now—thinking seriously about it. It wasn't that she hated running the diner, she realized. It was that she never seemed to have any time for herself. Maybe she could take more of a manager's role and find someone else to handle the day-to-day work.
Maybe if she sat down with Gaby Ruger and talked about some kind of partnership, she thought. Gaby was hellishly busy too, but Gaby's café was booming, and perhaps between the two of them they could hire a couple more people to work at both places and give both of them more time to spend with their families.
Her work-life balance had been tipped toward work for too long. It was time to get her life back, and fit the work part of it where it belonged: as a job that she could leave behind at the door to spend time with her family.
They had been strolling all this time, and they were starting to run out of downtown. A winding path led into Dodd Park at the downtown cul-de-sac. In the summer, there were benches and a stream. At this time of year it was mostly snow and dead-looking trees, but they wandered down the cleared paths anyway.
"What about you?" Paula asked. "I mean, as far as the future goes. Are you going to keep working for the Rugers?"
"I think so," Dan said. "I like it. In fact, I don't know if I want to go on to work as a bodyguard with Derek and Ben. I'm actually having a blast cooking for their kids and taking care of the babies. I might want more excitement eventually, but right now, I can't think of anything else I want to do more."
"And ... do you want to go on living at the Ruger farm?" she asked cautiously.
Dan looked down at her. In the bright sunshine, he looked like he was lightly glazed with gold. "Do you have another offer?"
"I might. There's a lot of room in that house, you know."
"I don't see any reason why I can't drive out to the Rugers' to work," Dan said. "Nothing about the job means I have to sleep there. Especially when there's such a tempting offer elsewhere."
Paula grinned. Her heart felt so full of joy that it was brimming over. She laced her arms around his neck and kissed him. The sun was warm on her shoulders.
"I still want to take it a little slow because of the kids," she said when they came up for air. "Are you okay with that?"
Dan brushed his thumb lightly over the corner of her mouth.
"I'm fine with whatever you want to do. We can go as slow or as fast as you want. There's no time limit, no deadline. We have forever."
"Forever," she echoed, and right now, with her heart impossibly full, she felt as if she could see ahead to it. All those tomorrows, filled with love and family and delight.
She couldn't wait for it.
Epilogue
Valentine’s Day
There were several cars already parked in Derek and Gaby's yard when Paula and Dan pulled in. It was late afternoon, with sun glimmering on the snow. The warm weather had continued for the past couple of weeks, with just a single brief snowstorm in early February that hadn't really stuck. As they got out of the car, Paula noticed that the grass on the pasture was showing in a brown and gray patchwork through the snow. There were even crocuses starting to come up.
"Smells like spring," Dan said, scenting the air. He leaned into the backseat to get out their contribution to the Rugers' Valentine's Day potluck.
"Can you actually smell that?" Paula asked. She took the cherry pie he handed her, clasping it in her mittened hands.
Dan nodded.
"What does spring smell like?"
"Green growing things. Melting snow. Fresh buds on the trees." He breathed in deeply, and smiled down at her, making her dizzy with the intensity of it. "I'm looking forward to finding out what spring in the mountains is like."
"Yeah, well, you'll need a little patience for that," Paula said. "It can't possibly stick this early. In a week, we'll probably be in the middle of a major blizzard."
"Snowballs and sledding and bonfires? Sounds nice to me."
"I knew the winter carnival was a mistake," Paula murmured, but it was playful.
Terry's car was among the assembled vehicles, so the kids would be here already. It was surprising to her how easily she had adjusted to having her ex take the kids some of the time. They still lived full-time with her, for now, but they both seemed to be thriving with their father in their life again.
The Rugers' front walk was neatly shoveled and salted, and lined with rows of pink and red paper hearts on sticks stuck in what remained of the snow. The hearts had arrows and THIS WAY!! printed on them in a childish hand.
"Lissy helped make these," Paula confided in Dan as they walked up to the front door. "I think she and Sandy did most of them."
There were also pink and red paper hearts taped to Derek and Gaby's front door, an entire heart explosion. In neatly printed felt marker, they said things like BE MINE and ONLY YOURS and—
"This one says EWWW KISSING," Dan reported, leaning over to read the hearts lower down on the door.
"Yes, there's one here that says VALENTINES UGH." Gaby freed up a hand from the pie to knock on the door.
While they waited, they found hearts reading NOPE and ARE WE THERE YET and POTATO. From inside, there was the sound of laughter and voices, and then footsteps rapidly approaching the door.
"Hi!" Gaby declared, swinging the door o
pen. "Come on in!"
"You didn't tell us we were supposed to dress up," Paula said, laughing.
Gaby was wearing a pink and red dress with a puffy tulle skirt, and underneath it, pink tights with red hearts on them, and little red shoes. She also had put on a kid's headband with two springs on it, each one tipped with a sparkly heart.
"I don't know what you're talking about, these are my normal clothes," Gaby said loftily. She held the door for them. "Food's in the kitchen, so just find a place and grab a plate. There's no dinnertime. The shifters are in the backyard. The only rules are, don't track snow in the house, and pants are not optional for humans over the age of four."
"Well, that sounds—interesting," Paula said faintly. Adjusting to having her ex-husband back in her life was child's play compared to dealing with the world of magic and shifters that everyone else seemed to accept so casually.
But Dan's face had lit up at the prospect of other shifters to hang out with. Gaby gave Paula a commiserating smile that made her feel warm, reminding her that she wasn't the only human mate of a shifter around these parts.
The kitchen was absolutely groaning with food, from time-honored potluck standbys like macaroni salad and taco dip, to amazing-looking tamales, luscious chocolate-dipped strawberries, fancy layered pastries glazed with sugar and nuts, steaming dishes of cheese-covered potatoes sprinkled in bacon, and a pasta bake that looked like it had about 4000 well-earned calories per serving.
Paula shifted some dishes aside to make room for hers. Her pie seemed very plain next to the rest of it, but Gaby exclaimed over it and then went to take a muffin pan of mini quiche out of the oven.
"How are we going to eat all of this?" Paula asked, nibbling on a pastry.
Gaby laughed. "Have you seen how shifters eat?"
"The babies are down for their naps," came another voice, and Loretta entered the kitchen, her red hair spilling loose over a dark gold cashmere sweater. "Oh, hi, honey," she said, and hugged Paula. "It's so nice to see you again."
"Babies?" Paula asked, hugging her.