Grayslake: Lion to Get Her (Alpha Lion Shifter Romance) (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 8) (11 page)

“Lion shifter,” Laney said, searching her memory. “He was older, had a bit of a hunch in his back. As far as clothes, just a plain shirt and blue jeans. I wasn’t paying much attention to be honest with you.”

“Makes sense,” he said. “Anything else you can remember?”

Laney pinched her eyes closed. “Limp,” she said. “He was limping on his left leg. I don’t know if he got hurt running, or if it was an old thing. That’s all I can remember.”

Graves barked orders into the radio attached to his shoulder. “You get back to the crowd,” he said. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Just banged up from jumping,” Laney said. “And got a cut from some of the brick when he shot the wall. That’s it.”

“I hate doing this,” Graves said, “but do you mind going back over there yourself? We’re not exactly the most heavily manned force in the world and we need to catch this asshole before he hurts someone else.”

He didn’t mention Rip one single time. They’ve got no idea he was over here. How can that be possible? How can they have no idea that the guy who got shot wasn’t anywhere near where he’d been shot?
She couldn’t accept simple incompetence as a viable answer, but then again, it didn’t seem like any of them really cared about him.

“Did you see the guy who got shot?” she asked. “I mean, the one standing at the podium thing?”

“He’s back with the medics,” Graves said. “Looks like a nasty wound, but it’s just a graze. He’ll be all right.”

Laney, confused as all hell, started to trek toward the press corps, but the officer grabbed her arm and then immediately apologized. “I’m real shook up,” he said. “That was rude. Anyway, did the guy say anything about why he shot? Was it some kind of assassination attempt? All I know is the guy who got shot was some kind of hot shot academic or something, I dunno.”

Laney shrugged. “I was too worried about him not hurting anyone else to really delve into his motivations,” she said, which was true enough. But then something else struck him. “I think he was scared,” she added. “He wasn’t talking like someone who wanted to hurt anyone. I think he was just terrified of what was going to happen. He panicked.”

The cop thought about this for a brief moment and then chewed the corner of his moustache in a way Laney recognized from one of her uncles. Graves grunted. “Well, all right. I’ll keep that in mind. Lot of that going around these days. Anyway, thanks for the help.”

Laney paced slowly back toward the place where the news guys were buzzing around, and couldn’t help but wonder what kind of amazing disappearing act Rip had pulled to get away. And then there was the bizarre thing he’d did after he arrived.

Who the hell gets shot, and then catches the guy who did it, and gets him away from the police so they can talk it out
? She shook her head and then wrapped her arms around herself, clutching tight. She blended seamlessly into the confused crowd. Amazingly, no one hassled her, no one asked about her chasing the shooter. None of it made any sense, but she was glad for it.

She elbowed her way through the reporters, who were all far too busy babbling into microphones and preening in front of their camera crews to be bothered. One of them turned to face her and she thought she was about to have to perjure herself on national TV as well as to the police, but the white-haired reported waved someone over who was standing just past her.

Laney breathed a sigh of relief and kept right on walking.

She skated past the medics, and past the dais where everything started, then right back through the library’s front door.

“You’re in love,” Elaine said as she clutched her friend to her chest. “And you’re fucking crazy. You just chased that psycho.”

Laney smiled weakly, and then let go of the tears she’d been holding in since Rip took off. “I have no idea,” Laney said. “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. And he’s gone,” she said.

“Wait, what? How? Those EMTs or paramedics or whatever took him to the hospital.”

Laney shook her head. “I chased the guy who shot him—an old man with a limp, just a scared old man—into an alley. He took a couple pot shots at me, and then Rip showed up.”

“Shut the front door,” Elaine deadpanned. She always used fake curses when she was especially amazed. “How?”

“I don’t know, but he did. And then he talked the guy into tossing his gun. He wanted to talk to him. None of it makes any damn sense.”

“In a way,” Elaine said, “it sort of does.”

“How, Wendy? How the hell does that make any sense.”

Elaine shook her head. “Gentle souls are like that,” she said. “No matter how fiery and blustery he might be when he gives speeches, he just wants the world to be a better place.”

“He carried the guy off somewhere so the cops wouldn’t take him.”

“And
that
makes even more sense,” Elaine said with a grin. “Your boyfriend isn’t exactly popular with the police. But... damn, lady, what’s going through your head.”

“You were right,” Laney said. “Scariest thing I can imagine.”

“Being shot at?”

“No,” she said. “Falling in love and not knowing why.”

“Yeah,” Elaine said, not able to hide her smile. “That’d do it, for sure.”

––––––––

“S
o now’re you gonna kill me?” the old man spluttered. He was suffering from a combination of utter terror, and having been carried for about fourteen miles clinging to the back of a much larger, much younger, lion than himself. The lion he was riding also had a hell of a spike to his backbone, which didn’t help matters.

“Good lord,” Rip said shortly, trying his best to catch his breath. “Put your head down, chopper’s coming.”

Rip shifted back to human, tossed a heap of peaty undergrowth over them, and held the old man down for a moment. It wasn’t long before the helicopter blades faded again into the distance. That was the last time they heard anything from the Redby Township Shifter Sheriff, but it didn’t make the old man relax any.

“Listen,” Rip said, a few minutes later, when he was sure that nothing else was going to interrupt their summer camp experience. “Why the hell would I save someone who shot me, and get him away from the cops just to kill him? What kind of sense does that make?”

The old man chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, his stubble rasping against his teeth as he sucked it in and pulled it out. “I guess it don’t make much, does it?”

“I did that because I actually
do
want to talk to you. I think you’re probably gonna be able to help me a lot more than you realize.”

“And what makes you think I want to do that?”

“Nothing yet,” Rip said. “But I hope this little exchange changes things. Or at least, I’m gonna give it a shot.”

“Give what a shot? Me?” the old man started wriggling away from Rip. “I knew it! I knew you was gonna shoot me! Ayup! I knew it!”

“I’m starting to really regret that act of good faith,” Rip said with a sigh and a sidelong glance. “No, I’m not going to shoot you. I don’t have a gun. My mate...” he trailed off, the fact that he just called Laney his mate for about the sixth time that day weighing heavily on his mind. Also constricting his brain was that this moron decided to end his press conference before it got started.

“I was going to end all this,” he said with a sigh. “I was going to... look, do you have any idea why I’m here anyway?”

“Yeah, sure I do,” the old man said. The words came out ‘shore uh dew’ but it was understandable enough, though just barely. “You came out this aways to get away from all the hell you rosed.”

His grammar notwithstanding, the old lion’s understanding of Rip’s situation was remarkable.

“Well, sort of,” Rip said. “But first, what’s your name?”

The wrinkly lion reared up again. “Why for? So’s you can hunt me down?”

Rip sighed and pinched his nose to alleviate the stress headache that was beginning to accumulate in his frontal sinus. “No. So I can talk to you without sounding like a used car salesman.”

“A used... I don’t understand.”

Rip drew his shoulders up almost to his ears. “Look, man, I just want to know your name so I can talk to you without being uncomfortable.”

“Oh, er, Samuel Grabitz, I guess.”

“You guess that’s your name?”

“Ayup.”

“Right, good.” Rip tried very hard to summon the necessary self-control to not roll his eyes. “So, the reason I brought you here is to—”

“You ain’t gonna kill me though,” Samuel said. The phrase came out ‘ainta gun kill muh dough. “Right? You ain’t?”

“Right, I ain’t,” Rip said. “Look will you just let me talk?”

“Dunno what else I’m here for.” Translated: dunno whatelss uhm herefar. After he finished his drawling, almost mewling sentence, the old man let out a long sigh. “Alls I wanted was to keep you from screwin’ us all up with your weird idears.”

“Do you want to be allowed to shift?” Rip asked quickly. “I mean, if you feel like stretching your back, stretching your claws, shaking your neck, do you want to be able to do that whenever you want?”

“Well,” Samuel considered, scratching at the sparse whiskers on his chin. “Who’d stop me from that?”

“In your house? No one,” Rip said. “But out on the streets? Even here? Some of the new laws in the human-shifter compact are real easy to change. For now, you can keep on doing whatever you want in Redby Township, but did you know that in the last four months, the number of shifter-owned counties got cut in half?”

Samuel shrugged. “But we waited so long,” he said, “I don’t wanna screw nothin’ up.”

“We did,” Rip agreed, “and the longer I keep bawling about how we’re all getting screwed by the new laws in the first place, the more people shoot guns at me. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to throw up my hands and just let whatever happens, happen.”

For a long moment the two of them sat on their stumps and stared at one another. Samuel’s eyes were narrowing to slits as he studied Rip’s face. Rip, for his part, was starting to get one hell of a nasty headache. Lately, he’d been fighting these damn things more and more. He hoped it was something to do with the horrific pollen in Redby Township, the sort of pine pollen that blanketed the world in a yellow mat every morning. A drop of rain made its way through the canopy above and splashed on Rip’s muscled forearm. He looked up, hoping to see another one.

The only thing on his mind was Laney. The way she warmed him all the way through with her smile and the way she made him laugh so loud his sides almost hurt. He needed her more than he’d ever needed anything in his entire life. His entire life that went back almost forty years, and was filled with accidental and unwanted fame; with fear and hiding; and finally with realizing that what he needed all along was what he never thought he wanted.

“I don’t want to do this. I can’t do it. I need,” he whispered to himself. “I need a break. I need to just be with her.”

Rip stood up, and held the sore spot where the bullet had struck him. “I’m done. I just want to be with Laney and I want to calm down and have a normal life. If this is how much people care about their—”

“It ain’t that, son,” Samuel said softly. “It ain’t that at all. We’re just tired as you are. But you gotta understand, we been fighting to do this a long, long time.”

Rip took a deep breath and held it for a long few seconds. “I know,” he finally said, blowing out the air. “But it isn’t what they said it would be. Equal rights, being allowed to be ourselves. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem worth it to have a couple seats in the senate and a handful of electoral college votes if we can’t even be comfortable in our own homes.”

Abruptly, Rip stood up and brushed the leaves off the ass of his sweatpants, and cleared his throat. “I’m going back,” he announced. “You’ve done what I thought I was going to do.”

“What’s that, son?”

“Taught me a lesson.” He looked off into the woods, until his vision blurred into a sea of green leaves and dangling Spanish moss. “I hate to do this, but can you get back on your own? Laney made sure the cops have absolutely no idea who you are, and the news yappers were too busy watching me writhe around on the ground to bother with you.”

“I know these woods like you probably know the shape of your own head,” the old man said. “That don’t make any sense. Ayup. Anyways son, I been out here my whole life. I’ll get back just fine. But while I’m doin’ a bunch of lessons, here’s another one.”

Rip turned back to the old man and smoothed his hair out of his face. The muscles of Rip’s chest flexed and relaxed every time he clenched his fist. Doing that made the pain in his shoulder soften just a bit, rounding it out instead of having a violent stab of pain every time his heart beat. “Yeah?”

“Take your time,” the old man said. “Things, you know, take ‘um one at a time. Don’t rush nothin’.”

Rip studied the old man’s face. The lines in the corners of his eyes and the wrinkles around his mouth belied his age, but there was something fiery in old Samuel’s eyes. “Why’d you shoot me?” Rip asked. “If not because you wanted to hurry something along.”

“I had a slip,” he admitted. “I got scared. I did somethin’ hasty and stupid to keep you from doin’ the same.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Rip said. “I might’ve been about to go up there and say that it was all over. I might’ve been announcing my retirement from... whatever it is I do. Public blabbering, being a hot head on TV. I don’t know.”

“You think I’ma believe that?” Samuel said. “Now go get that girl, and you do what you think is right. But don’t take nothin’ fast or it won’t never turn out right. You ever made bread?”

Rip shook his head. “Never been much of a cook.”

“All right, you ever roasted something on a grill?”

“Sure. Burgers. God I love burgers.”

“Do it turn out best if you make a gigantic blazin’ pyre and char the shit out of ‘em? Or do you start ‘em hot, then turn it down and let ‘em go until they’re just perfect?”

In one quadrant of his lizard-like brain, Rip couldn’t think of anything but the sizzle of perfectly cooking hamburgers. In other, far smaller, but far more advanced part, he knew the old man was right. “I’ve been moving too fast,” he said out loud, his voice distant and dreamlike. “I did all of that because I was scared that if I didn’t, then we’d get passed by. We’d get forgotten and caught up in the waves of society constantly moving forward. I mean, hell, there aren’t but... what? A couple hundred thousand of us in the entire country? Maybe a million worldwide?”