Grayslake: Lion to Get Her (Alpha Lion Shifter Romance) (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 8) (2 page)

Reid stared wordlessly, his eyes and nostrils flaring.

“Do you, er, want a coffee?” Erik relaxed his hand and plucked a paper cup off the floor beside his chair. “We picked them upon the way in, and...”

Reid was silent, and still as a dead tree. “No,” he said flatly.

“Okay then,” Izzy said. “Is there a better light around here? And is anyone else coming?”

“I make the rules,” Reid said. “People agree with what I say.”

“Well, that’s good,” Erik said. “Strong leaders make strong societies. Like, you know, Stalin.”

When the glaring wolf remained stolid, Erik laughed. “It was a joke. I’m not saying you’re like Stalin. I mean, I don’t know you. I don’t know if you have a Redby gulag. Anyway, uh, you seem busy, so—”

“Shut up,” Reid said. “You’re babbling. I’m already sick of this.”

Izzy put her hand on Erik’s leg when she sensed him tense up. “Not now, Erik,” she said under her breath. “Not the time.”

Erik took a deep breath. “Fine,” he said, his voice a low growl.

The two wolves had leaned in closer to each other. Reid still silent, Erik breathing harder. “We have a deal to do,” Erik said. “If you’re too busy being as intense and aggressive as possible, we can come back later. If not, we can deal with this and get out of here.”

As the overhead flickered sickeningly, Reid sneered. “Do we really need to do this bullshit?”

Erik cocked his head to the side. “The world’s changing. We can’t keep doing the same things we’ve been doing for our whole lives and expect nothing bad to happen. We have to, you know, keep up with changing times. Humans know about us, and not just the ones we live with. The lid’s off and we have to make the best of it.”

“I don’t want to,” Reid said. “Old ways treat me just fine.”

“I’m sure they do.” Erik stood up and stuck his fists in his back. “Look, we’ve had four hundred humans move into Jamesburg in the past six months. I know you’ve got, what, a half a half population here?”

Izzy stared at her mate, astonished that he had such a good grasp on the numbers, though she should have gotten used to it by then. She pulled a pen out of her shirt pocket and a manila envelope from the folder she’d brought. Reid looked down at her briefly. “What’s that?” he asked.

“The agreement. Or at least the idea for one we drew up.”

She handed over the short stack of papers titled
Shifter Decency in the New Age of Human Interaction
. Reid grunted. “I hate this shit.”

“And yet we have to deal with it,” Erik said. “I appreciate your gruff demeanor and all that, but you have to admit that things are getting uncomfortable. Shifters and humans are starting to interact in places they never have before, and we need some sort of guidelines to keep both of us safe.”

Reid grunted. “I guess. But it still pisses me off.”

He flipped through the pages. “Having clothes to put on after you shift? Not being allowed to maul anyone if they disrespect you?” He shook his head. “What the hell do we get in return?”

“First of all,” Erik said, “the clothes thing is optional, and only necessary in places where people are likely to be surprised or shocked or terrified by the size of one of us.” A grin spread across his face. For a brief moment, Reid allowed himself a smile before he wiped it off again. “And what
we
get is the thing both of us want.”

“Which is?”

“To be left alone. If we avoid problems before they start, we don’t have to worry about armies sweeping into our town to eradicate us. This thing my beautiful mate just handed you was gone over by a handful of super-secret US Government operatives. They agreed.”

Reid kept flipping through. “Humans who kill shifters are to be held in shifter town courts? That’s positive. Can we kill them?”

“Er, no,” Erik said. “We
do
live in a country with things like jurisprudence and fair trials. Basically we become independent operators loosely linked to the federal government.”

“They’re gonna build goddamn roads, aren’t they? I swear if an interstate gets built through Redby, I’ll—”

Erik tisked his tongue. “Check page fourteen, subsection C. Guarantees our right to privacy. No government roads, no government police. We have to agree to the roads, and as long as we keep our side of the deal, we can police ourselves.”

“Why am I supposed to believe all this?”

Erik bent over and rested his hands on the back of the chair where he was sitting a few moments before. “Do you want me to stroke your ego or do you want me to get down to business?”

Izzy placed her hand on the small of Erik’s back. She sensed him beginning to tense up again, and a giant, limb-tearing brawl was the last thing anyone needed. Reid took a deep breath. “Business,” he said.

“I knew I liked you,” Erik said. “The truth is that we don’t have any choice. Look out here.” He crossed the room and went to twist the rod on a set of blinds on the nearest window. The rod broke off in his hand, and the shades fell off into a dusty heap.

Reid laughed softly. “Talk,” he said.

“Here we have your town, right? We’ve got a library across that way that’s just starting to open up. There’s a very attractive young man walking in there, and a pair of similarly attractive young ladies apparently opening the place for business. And then this way we have a handful of hard working, probably suffering, small businesses. Couple restaurants, a movie theater. Say, have you seen
Frozen
?”

Reid growled.

“Our cub just fell in love with it. Say, you have kids of your own?” When Reid growled again, Erik just moved along. “Right, fine, not friends. Anyway, do you want this place to fall apart? Or do you want it to grow? Or if not grow, at least not die off?”

Reid’s left cheek twitched. “It means a lot to me,” he said. “Not just the shifters, but the humans. And that’s Laney Langston and her friend Elaine. They’re our librarians. The young guy I don’t know, which is strange because I know everyone here. He looks familiar though, I can’t place him.”

“That’s Rip Black,” Izzy said. “He’s one of the ones who helped us with this. Although he was more than a little upset at the final agreement.”

“Why?” Reid asked.

Izzy shrugged. “He’s a big name in shifter intellectual circles. He’s got some pretty radical views about shifter rights and all that. He was pretty proud of the no police and no interstates thing, though.”

Reid grunted again. “Why’s he here?”

“How should I know? Probably tired of the press chasing him everywhere.”

Reid turned his attention back to the visitors. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll sign the damn thing, but you have to come back to get it. I don’t sign anything I don’t read all the way through. And I’m not the fastest reader.”

Erik sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ve got a week and we don’t want to spend it here. First time away from the cub and all.”

“Yeah,” Reid growled, “and you want to go skate in South Beach.”

Reid stood up and approached Erik. The two of them stared straight into each other’s eyes for what seemed to be an eternity. Reid raised his arm in a ninety degree angle. “Shake,” he said.

Erik clasped his hand, and squeezed. Both of them flexed their considerable biceps, and as Izzy watched, she felt herself go a little silly.

“So it’s a deal?” Erik asked as they squeezed one another’s hands. “You’ve seen
Predator
I take it, you son of a bitch?”

“Come back in a week. I’ll have your damn paper. The only predator around here is me.”

When the two of them unlocked hands, it was like the earth breathed a sigh of relief. Reid didn’t want on either of them. Instead he just stomped out of the room, and out into Redby.

“That was something,” Izzy said. “I’m proud of you for not trying to kill him.”

“That’s the thing,” Erik said. “I think we’d probably tear each other apart before either of us gave up. I... I think I kinda like him, though I can’t explain why.”

“I could tell,” Izzy said. “So, next stop, Miami?”

Erik placed his hand softly on Izzy’s back and led her to the door. “You drive, I’ll sing. Got any Journey in that rack?”

Izzy sighed. “What do you think I am? An asshole? Journey it is.”

––––––––

L
aney Langston’s ears twitched. She sat up from behind the main circulation desk at the Redby Township Public Library (secondary location) and coldly assessed the situation. Her nose wiggled next, not completely unlike a particular television witch who was about to cause something extremely zany to happen.

Except, absolutely nothing of any zaniness was possible, that is, if Laney had anything to say about it.

Zaniness was the enemy of peace, of quiet, of thoughtfulness.

Therefore, zaniness was
Laney’s
mortal foe.

The only thing she could see from where she stood were a handful of diaper-clad toddlers of uncertain shifter background. One of them had a tail that kept poking out of the top of her Super Girl underoos, which were baggily situated over the diaper that the kid kept scrunching every time she scooted around to get another book. She’d decided on one of Llama-llama’s latest adventures, Laney noticed, this one where he went to the zoo.

An animal going to the zoo
, Laney thought,
something just a little bit existential about that. Or something a little creepy. I mean, wouldn’t that be like me having a pet werebear? Pretty sure that’s slavery. Or if not quite that depraved, it’s at least socially tricky
.

She smirked and let out a silent laugh. She’d had eight years behind the circulation desk, so she’d gotten very, very good at doing things quietly. She’d even managed to learn to eat tacos and tortilla chips with such stealth that she was fairly sure she could chomp through a bag of Tostitos, and Elaine, her desk mate, would never know.

Aside from the kids playing around in the children’s section, as they waited for David Gilligan, the guitar-playing porcupine, to start the singing part of kiddie time, she could also hear a news broadcast from one of the media rooms. Some politician or another was talking about shifter rights, being allowed to go back to nature and stop worrying so much about acting so human. She blinked her eyes as a strange way to refocus her hearing. Hey, when you’re a lion, you have to do whatever you can to get more auditory signal than noise.

As she bent her knees to sit back down and keep scribbling away at her crossword puzzle. She was currently halfway through
Weekly World News
’s Bigfoot crossword for the week. She enjoyed both the extremely large grid, and the irony of a lion shifting librarian possessing
Weekly World News
. She didn’t consider the Bigfoot part, which should tell you something about how Laney’s brain actually works.

A hitching sound, almost like someone choking, caught her sensitive ears. Laney cocked her head, first on a tilt, and then toward the direction of the sound. “The hell is that?” she whispered.

“Shh!” Elaine hushed her. Her ferret-shifting, self-appointed supervisor, who didn’t actually have any authority over Laney, didn’t bother to look up from her crossword, which was the lowly
New York Times
Monday puzzle. “Sit down!” Her voice was a hiss, barely above a whisper. You’d never know, but the two of them had been best friends for years.

Laney just shook her head and kept peering around the room. There it was again, another throaty, horrible choking sound.

No, not a choke, she realized as the noise came once again.

“A snore?” she said out loud, accidentally breaking her own vow of silence. “Someone’s sleeping? Here?”

Disbelief marred the normally round, pleasant voice that matched her figure. She stepped around the side of her station, and hitched her jeans up, back into place. They always seemed to slip when she sat down, but a quick yank was all it took, and the world was right back where it was supposed to be.

“Why would someone sleep here?”

“Shh!” Elaine squeaked. It seemed like the top of her head would pop off if anyone made another noise. Briefly, Laney considered testing her hypothesis, but decided against it, because she’d have to clean it up if it worked. Instead, she just waved her hand at Elaine, dismissing her complaint. Elaine just sighed, and went back to her baby-time crossword after scratching behind her ear with the point of her pencil.

Seeing her scratch made Laney itch in the same place – one of her many strange personality traits – but instead of using a pencil, Laney relieved her itch with the shirt clip on her pen. Rounding the corner into the adult fiction area, which she always thought needed a whole lot more
adult
on the shelves Laney gave herself another scratch behind the ear.

“Miss Langston!” a tiny voice called, the split second before a tiny hand grabbed Laney’s shirt and tugged urgently. “Miss Langston?”

It was the very same girl with the Super Girl underoos and the scrunchy-sounding diaper. Laney looked down at her. “Yes dear?”

“There’s somebody asleep over there.”

“Which section?” Laney asked, and immediately began to correct herself. “Which part of the—”

“The Stephen King section,” the little girl with wiggling tail said with a smile. “I’ve read all of his books, you know,” she said proudly. “And the only time I got scared was that one part in
It
with the clown cutting off—”

“You shouldn’t be reading that stuff!” Laney said. “It’ll give you nightmares.” She considered for a moment. “Or even worse, you’ll turn out like me,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for the heads-up, sweetie. I don’t know any delicate way to ask this, so I’ll just... is he dirty? Like hasn’t showered for a while?”

“Oh no, Miss Langston,” the girl said, “he’s very clean. He smells pretty good, kind of like the cologne my uncle wears. He’s a businessman, you know, he’s got his own cleaning business and also a pest control business, and he’s a realtor and—”

Laney patted the girl on top of the head. “I’m sure he’s very interesting and smells very nice. But I’ve got to go figure out why someone decided that the best place for a midday nap was in my adult fiction section.”