Page 2 of Shifters in the Night

He was so shocked by the punch that for the first time in his life, he got caught in the plants just under the surface and couldn’t fight his way free. It was a good thing that as a selkie, he could breathe underwater. Otherwise, he might have become one of those bayou ghost stories. By the time he broke through, she’d made her escape. He supposed he deserved that. Men who spied on ladies in the woods deserved to be abandoned in those woods.

Jon sighed, and for a moment, balanced his forehead against the warm steering wheel. It had been a long, long time since he’d … swum with anyone. It had been a long time since he’d even wanted to, and it seemed like he’d chased away the first girl that had interested him by behaving like a creep.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. The smart phone was a recent addition to “the daily shit he had to keep up with” purchased by Will Carmody. Jon had managed to go years without needing any sort of phone except his trusty landline. Hell, he’d only gotten an email address about ten years before because he could no longer avoid the internet while operating his repair business. But Will insisted that a modern cell phone was an important part of the “rejoining life in Mystic Bayou” plan. Jon wasn’t entirely sold on said plan, but Will’s life seemed to be going pretty well for him and Jon had to admit he was due for a change.

Jon plucked the phone from his pocket and read the text on the screen. “Stop sulking in your truck and walk in the damn store, Jonathan Carmody!”

Jon frowned at the message from his brother and painstakingly typed out, “You don’t know that I’m sulking in my truck.”

Within seconds another little bubble popped up on the screen, “Dumbass, the clinic is like 200 yds away. I can see you from my office window.”

Jon’s head whipped towards the Mystic Bayou Medical Clinic, where he could see his brother waving in the window. His phone buzzed again. “Yup.”

Jon stuck up his middle finger in response. Behind the glass, Will threw his head back and laughed. Jon hunched over the phone and typed back, “I’m so glad you moved all the way back across the country so you could mock your brother.”

Will was still laughing in the window. Jon thought about flipping him off again, but Riley Kauffman was walking past with her two impressionable toddlers and that seemed inappropriate. Jon texted, “I’m goin, I’m goin. But I’m telling Sonja you’re being mean to me.”

Jon had the good fortune of seeing Will’s face go stricken before he shoved his phone back in his pocket. It was a low blow, using his sister-in-law-in-all-but-official-paperwork like that. But Will had it coming.

Jon’s relationship with his brother was … complicated. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along as kids. They just did their own things. Their upbringing had been a hurricane mixed with a maelstrom, thanks to their parents’ constant marital upheaval. It had always given Jon this sense that nothing was permanent, not even sibling relationships.

Jon slid out of his pickup truck and squared his shoulders, slightly shamed by the emotional energy required for him to do something as simple as grocery shopping. People did this every day. Why was it so hard for him?

Gritting his teeth, he forced his feet towards the sliding glass door and braced for the grocery’s fluorescent lights and Muzak. Jon shuddered, but grabbed a cart and steered it towards produce. The store was still set up just as it had been when he was a youngster, but the products … it was overwhelming to see so many options. He’d been asking for the same basic foods for the last fifty years. When did everything start coming in so many flavors? And why did so many of them involve sriracha?

Was it because of the League moving to town, he wondered? Was the store trying to suit the tastes of all these drole along with the diverse cultures of the Bayou’s shifter residents? Or did everybody really like sriracha that much? This was probably what he got for not watching TV, but he was going to go ahead and blame it on the League.

The International League for Interspecies Cooperation had established a research village-slash-secret-not-at-all-suspicious-facility on Main Street a few years before, exchanging information about the local population and certain atmospheric anomalies for resources. This included funding the town desperately needed for new roads, the clinic and other niceties that kept its citizens safe and well. Jon had not been thrilled at the time. He’d been taught from a young age not to trust the League, an elite group of shifters that took control of the supernatural world sometime in the Renaissance. While the League’s “mission” revolved around an extensive list of banned behaviors meant to keep humans from finding out about the supernatural world, they also provided aid to struggling shifter and fae communities. Still, the resentment toward the League and their high-handed ways was still there.

So while Jon wasn’t thrilled with a bunch of new people tromping around in his figurative backyard, even he had to admit that the League brought a lot of good things with them to Mystic Bayou. For instance, closing that “atmospheric anomaly,” otherwise known as la faille, a rift in the fabric of the universe. La faille had been stable for years, its rippling influence drawing supernatural creatures to settle in Mystic Bayou for centuries, but suddenly it started leaking supernatural energy, turning humans who came from long lines with absolutely no shifters whatsoever into all sorts of interesting magique, the local term for supernatural types.

The League sent several specialists to deal with the rift, eventually figuring out that the leak was caused by an ancient artifact containing … well, Jon never got a definite answer out of his friends, but the situation had been fixed.

Life had been normal in the Bayou for five whole minutes when a Louisville-area satyr named Eustace Cornwell launched magique into the public eye by losing his horned mind in an argument over a parking space and shifted in front of dozens of humans. Those humans had their own smart phones and social media accounts and what was deemed The Pope Lick Monster Incident was simply too much exposure for the League to cover up. Fortunately, the League had been preparing for this eventuality for years by studying the unique culture of Mystic Bayou, where humans and magique had managed to live together for years with minimal ruckus. Some of those League employees had even coupled up with Mystic Bayou residents.

Jon spent a lot of time with those couples – far more time socializing than he would have considered reasonable even a year ago – but he was still very single. Which was probably why he had multiple frozen lasagnas for one in his cart. Which was just frickin’ sad.

Jon tried to stick to his shopping list, because if he picked up everything that caught his eye, he was going to need three carts to get out of there. And while he did startle a few times at unfamiliar faces that seemed to sneak up on him in the aisles, Jon eventually settled into the routine of shopping.

Life in the Bayou had changed since the Pope Lick Monster Incident. With the existence of the supernatural world finally revealed to humanity and Mystic Bayou brought into the spotlight, new people seemed to be arriving in town every day. New families with children, young single people, retirees. For the most part, they seemed to sort of fall into step with the town. But everything seemed more crowded now, more frantic. Jon felt surrounded by strangers for the first time in his life and he was having trouble adjusting to it. It was almost soothing, the feeling of doing something for himself and controlling what went into his cart and what didn’t.

He was reaching for creamer –why would anyone want pumpkin pie spice in their coffee? – when he glanced up through the glass of the dairy case and saw his moonlit dream woman perusing the margarine.

“Holy hell!” he shouted, making her drop the creamer bottle with a yelp. “You!”

“You!” Her eyes narrowed at him. They really were the color of duckweed, absolutely enthralling even in this harsh artificial light.

He would never say the duckweed thing to her out loud.

“Do you ever not sneak up on people?” she demanded.

“Technically, I was here first,” he replied. "So you are real!”

“Of course, I’m real. Why do you keep asking if I’m real?”

“Because normally, a beautiful woman doesn’t just swim up to my house like a fantasy delivery service!”

Why were those words coming out of his mouth? Why? This was the most he’d spoken to a woman, besides Sonja and her friends, in years and he was blowing it. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it should be disappointing somehow, to see her in a mundane setting like the grocery store, but she was just as mysterious and gorgeous in harsh fluorescent lighting as she was under a waxing moon.

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