The Shifter’s Hostage

by T. S. Ryder

Jackie stared at him. "Are you for real? You want to talk about that now?"

  "I have wanted to talk about it every second of every day for the past month. I want you, Jacqueline Smith. Not just as a girlfriend and mother of my child. I want you for my mate, for the rest of my life."

  His arms wrapped around her waist, bringing her as close as he could. Their bodies slipped against each other, the water heating between them.

  Jackie didn't know what to say.

  "I haven't said it because I didn't want to scare you away. Maybe it's the adrenaline, but I need you to know right here, right now. You are mine and I want the world to know it."

  Jackie's heart fluttered. The water ran down her face, tasting sweet on her lips, and she stared back at the cool, confident gray eyes. A hundred reasons why she should say no flitted through her mind. She wanted this, whatever logic said. But was it a good idea?

  "I love you," he said softly. "You know that, don't you?"

  And just like that, all her doubt disappeared. He did love her. He would hold her through thick and thin, and he'd fight for her, even if he had to fight against her to make sure she knew how he felt. Emotion welled in her heart and she nodded.

  "I love you, too. Let's start the application."

  Epilogue

  Five years later, their application had finally been approved.

  After a busy day of planning for the mating ceremony, Jackie kissed her five-year-old son's forehead, pulling the blankets up to his chin while Myles put away the book they had been reading. Tim smiled in his sleep, and Myles took Jackie's hand, leading her from their son's room to their own.

  "Did you watch the news?" he asked, his eyes sparkling.

  Today was the day that the Supreme Court was going to rule on whether the laws surrounding werewolf mating were constitutional or not. "I wanted to, but I was too nervous. Besides, I was planning for our wedding next month."

  Myles grinned and pulled her closer. "We won."

  "We won?"

  Myles kissed her fiercely, bringing her body flush against his. Jackie slung a leg over his hip, excitement coursing between them. Even if their mating application had already been approved, this was still a major victory for werewolves across the country. After five years of long legal battles, finally, finally, it was recognized that werewolves didn't pose any danger to the humans they wanted to mate.

  "We won," Myles whispered again, stroking Jackie's hair from her face. "We won."

  "We did," Jackie whispered back, and she knew Myles wasn't just referring to the legal battles they had fought for free matings. He clutched her tighter. This was also about the two of them. In spite of the odds, they had been brought together, they had fallen in love and they had a beautiful little boy who had his mother's blonde curls and his father's steely determination.

  Myles pulled her in for another kiss, a kiss that marked the start of a new world, a new life, for all of them.

  *****

  THE END

  The Bad Bear's Baby

  Description

  A BBW returning home PLUS a bad boy who still loves her PLUS a dangerous gang leader looking for revenge!

  Thomas is a Shifter and an addict. He is a member of the dark world of drug cartel and violence. Life in the slums, with the social problems of being a Shifter, push Thomas toward taking refuge in cheap thrills.

  Clarice was his childhood sweetheart. Disappointed with the way that the slums transformed her friends and her family, she ran away when she was young -- moving out as soon as possible. Life is hard, and when Clarice is forced to move back, she is also forced to interact with all of the disappointments of her previous life in the slums -- including Thomas.

  Things get ugly when Thomas crosses the wrong person while trying to get his fix. Clarice and her family get drawn into the action and Thomas has to make a choice.

  Will he sacrifice it all for the one he truly loves?

  Chapter One: The Curse

  Thomas was a bad man. There is no other way to say it to make it sound any better. He was a vicious and feral shifter who had nothing better to do with his time except intimidate other people and make the most of every opportunity he came across. His involvement in the underground aspects of the City of Crows involved trafficking of highly illicit drugs and marginal involvement in prostitution. The drugs kept his inner animal quiet. And the women —well, they helped in their own way when the drugs weren’t available.

  Things weren’t always this way for Thomas. He used to be a stand-up guy — someone that you were happy to be around, even though he seemed a bit stand-offish at times. Somewhere along the way, he broke and dove into a world of darkness and despair. When you’re down in the dumps like that, there are few things that can bring you back out again. Usually, the tiny redemptive sparks of light which help lost souls find their way back to health, come in the form of love —but it was difficult for Thomas to know love. Long ago, his heart skipped town, not even bothering to leave a note.

  The joy of love and authenticity began to be replaced at first by cheap thrills, and when those got too expensive to bear, he had to resort to fewer savory activities in order to simply maintain the dysfunctional existence that he had created for himself.

  He had a handful of friends if you could call them that. Each of them was an addict, in the worst way. None of them cared about the other with any sincerity, except when they could help one another achieve the next high that they all kept in the forefront of their mind.

  You see, the City of Crows had a system in place that operated on a sub-cultural level. The essential social currency of the City was shame. Most of the shame was centered around identity. Shifters were seen as the scum of the earth because they were unreliable. Shifters had trouble maintaining relationships because of their wild sexual appetites. They were also seen as dangerous, because in order to manage their multiple souls properly, they needed to dedicate regular times of the day toward meditation and physical exercise.

  Nobody really wants to be around a person who has trouble distinguishing which aspects of their mind belong to them, and which aspects of their mind belong to a beast. For most shifters, the beast is something that they fear for their entire lives —unless they develop a means to integrate their inner beast.

  Thomas had heard about the merits of integration from many of the posters around the City —all of which were sponsored by non-profit psychological and social health organizations. The main thrust of these organizations was to reduce crime in the City.It was commonly believed that the more feral, or wild, a shifter was, the more dangerous they were in their shifted form.

  The reality was, negotiating with unintegrated shifters was like playing with fire on a windy day. Do things in the wrong way, and you could end up with an entire portion of the city set to flames. In fact, one such incident had taken place not quite a year ago. The fire was set by one of Thomas’s ‘friends’—a Bear shifter with a proclivity for arson. He liked to be called “Smoky”, but the truth of the name ended up being a bit too hot for even someone like Thomas to handle, and so he was excommunicated from the underground.

  Truth is, you can’t have someone flipping their lid, and setting a major industrial property on fire, no matter how much you may agree that “Smoky’s boss was a total asshole, and they probably deserved it.”

  Smoky’s flagrant abuse of power resulted in about forty people hospitalized, twelve dead and several hundred of the lowest paid section of society being out of a job. Thomas, and everyone else in his circle, knew that being “Bad” was different than being “Stupid”. Smoky was a fool.

  In spite of the occasional dark acquaintance that got lost and dove off the deep end, Thomas’s group played it cool. They took occasional holidays to participate in ecstasy marathons, where they would transform, fuck, fight and generally let their conscience have the week off. Most of the time, these marathons were held in the deserts on the outskirts of the City —where the regular folks didn’t dare go. The rest of the y
ear was business as usual, even if the business was shady.

  Chapter Two: Mal-Adjustment

  Clarice was a woman who had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks. As such, she had seen enough hard times in her life to warrant the desire to skip town and never be heard from again. At least, that was what she hoped to achieve. Of course, rebellion and flight never really amount to as much as we hope they will. Not even if said rebellion included falling deeply in love with a bad boy and having a child with him. On the contrary having a child opened her eyes to the kind of life she was building up to, with the kind of man she was building it.

  There was little hope for any kind of a life with the man who was the father of her child, she knew that much. He wasn’t the settling down type and so without even informing him of his child she left town hoping to find a new life for her and her child. But like most dreams that single girls weave, this one too ended with a sobering dose of reality. So she was back home once again, eight years later, without much hope for leaving again anytime soon.

  While she was gone, she managed to take care of a few different things. She made some personal decisions in her life which ended up being very fruitful for her. After a very brief dance with substance abuse, she had a close friend die of an overdose in her house. She was only seventeen at the time and had made friends with this boy who she thought was dreamy. The two of them had shared a brief relationship, and he had actually reminded her of her childhood sweetheart. Obviously, things didn’t work out like she had hoped.

  The dead boy, his name doesn’t matter because “Selfish Junkie” was the only way she could ever remember him by anymore, had scored some trash and had come over to her shambled apartment to get off. Never mind the fact that she came from one slum and migrated to another —in truth, she couldn’t have afforded much different. Everything seemed like it was going to be ok until he stopped breathing. That was the first strike against her desire to find a new life outside of the socio-economic oppression that she felt had consumed her family back in the City.

  Clarice made her way through a couple of different jobs. A firm decision not to become involved with anyone else who was a drug user meant that her ‘hip’new group of friends that she was slowly building had to be disintegrated and removed once more. She had a soft spot for shifters, but the overlap between shape-shifters and the drug community was often too severe, so she didn’t tend to stay in touch with them for longer than a glance.

  A lot of the time, when people left home and went out to live on their own in some other place, there is a brief period of adjustment. The people either sink or swim. Some never return back home again, while others find that the responsibilities of maintaining a separate existence are just too much for them. Those who are overwhelmed, tend to return home within a matter of months —perhaps six to twelve.

  Clarice left when she was 16, crashed with an acquaintance turned friend and found her own place one year later. That place ended up being too much for her to manage psychologically after “Selfish Junkie” decided it would be a good place to off himself. After that, she actually found it difficult to land a place. Monopolies were incredibly common within that area and once you were on a blacklist, nobody would rent to you. Unfortunately, with a majority of her friends now being noone she would want to live with, she was stuck checking in and out of shitty hotels, just so she could keep her job as a waitress, not that there were a whole lot of opportunities for a young girl without so much as a high school diploma to her name.

  The restaurant she worked at was the only consistent part of her life for that eight year period of time. Of course wages were so low that she never made enough to get past the lowest threshold of income and stability. She lived from paycheck to paycheck, month after month. Eventually, she came to a place where she was so sick of the mundane routine that her life had become, that she fell into a depression and stopped getting out of bed.

  When her boss came to the door of her motel, she didn’t answer. She couldn’t bring herself to confront the situation. Her savings dwindled, and due to her own inactivity, she was eventually outed from the motel by the police. Her belongings were seized for back-payment and she was removed from the property. Stranded, with nowhere to go, no friends and no job, she finally decided to return home. Clarice was hoping that she could at the very least, find a place where she could rest and figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

  Her brother, Edin, had wired her some money for a train. She was going to spend Christmas home. When she got off the number twelve train station with her child in the City of Crows slums, she saw him —the reason she had finally decided to leave the City in the first place. She saw Thomas.

  Chapter Three: Arrival

  Flirting with some young girlfriend of his, and scheming on how he could get the girl to fork over another $50 so he could get a fix for him and another buddy of his, Thomas was most certainly in his element. He had perfected the art of seduction and manipulation over the last decade of his life. It was almost Christmas. Not that that mattered to him. Just another day in the slums.

  He was just about to close the scheme with this trick, when he saw Clarice over the girl’s shoulder, stepping off the train —a single bag in one hand and a child’s hand clutched in the other.

  “So…tell me, whatcha gonna do with it if I give it to you?” the girlfriend said, playing with his collar, and running her leg between Thomas’s thighs in a seductive dance.

  She slapped him, playfully, but obviously enough to indicate that she wasn’t used to waiting longer than a second for his response. He was preoccupied, which was unusual for him during one of his scams —he was staring at another woman about fifteen feet away, and he couldn’t shake her from his attention.

  “Psh,” the girl continued as she turned around to see what Thomas was staring at. “If you think a girl with an ass like that is gonna help you score, you’re mistaken.”

  “Later,” Thomas said, gruffly shoving the woman to the side with one hand.

  He was taken by her, and he knew that face though it had been so long since he had spent any time with her that it almost seemed like a dream. He didn’t recognize the child. From the looks of her, she couldn’t be more than seven, eight if one were being charitable. Some small part of his brain calculated the last time he had seen Clarice and began forming connections which were promptly shut down by another part of his brain, one that pushed away such thoughts as responsibility and consequences. He walked over toward her, as though in a trance. Somewhat hesitant at first, but then with more purpose as the clarity of his memory began to take shape.

  “Is it really…” he said to himself, not daring to say so until he confirmed his suspicions.

  At that moment, she turned toward him, regarding him with a disappointed and depressed expression.

  “Clarice?” he said, standing not four feet away from her position at the train station.

  Her eyes flashed with recognition, and then he saw her evaluate him. She took in his clothes and his generally disheveled appearance. He hadn’t recalled the last time he shaved. He looked a mess, but in the circles, he walked in those days, there was never really a high premium for personal appearance. At best, he could expect that his appearance would mark him as a rogue. At worst, he was strung out on Splin, the anti-shifter drug, and he couldn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought about his appearance.

  Clarice’s eyes rested on him for a moment, and her heart sank even deeper than it had been when she got off the train. She shook her head. Without saying a word, she took the child’s hand and left the platform to head toward her mother’s house.

  ***

  The house Clarice grew up in was unique on the block because it was one of the only houses in the area that used to belong to the church. There was a great deal of history surrounding the church, and how it came to disintegrate, and eventually, be turned into housing. But the most interesting part about the entire tale was that the pastor of the church died a
violent and terrible death in the oak grove just outside of the house. Ever since that point, the grove was considered by most to be haunted.

  The slums never really had very large property allotments, but because the property had been a church, the size had been somewhat larger than normal. The building had been small. A tiny thing tucked away at the edge of the allotment. However, the land itself had been converted into a public park and nature asylum.

  The pastor had been a shifter himself. While the common functionality of the building was to provide weekly sanctuary for anyone and everyone who needed it, people began to notice how fiercely the pastor protected the natural zones outside of the tiny cabin, which served as the church.

  One day, there was a disruption in the chapel. A man had come into the church seeking refuge from an underworld of sex, gambling and drugs. He was a hunted man, given to violent, uncontrollable outbursts and unconscious assaults while in his shifted state. The man who arrived that day was precisely the person who needed the pastor’s help the most, but the sequence of events which had led the man to the church had been too drastic.

  The police don’t bother with the slums district. The active policy of the moment is that given the high percentage of feral shifters in the slums, there was no reason that the police should spare valuable resources going into the slums. After all, the police’s primary mandate was to protect the property of the rich, and the interests of the state. Those were, after all, the means of their continued employment.

  The policy ended up being tantamount to, “If they want to behave like dogs, then let them devour one another like dogs.”

  The unfortunate consequence of the policy was that in the absence of a law enforcement structure, small gangs had turned into semi-proficient militias. This had, in turn, increased the distance between the police’s interest in taking calls in that part of the City, and the needs of the citizens.