Shifting In The Realms Collection Books 1-5

By Theresa Snyder

Escape to The Realms with a shape shifter who prefers his wolf-self to his human form. See this magical world through his eyes. Whether human or wolf, Cody/Scar’s world is the most unusual realm you will ever see. A world where everything humans think paranormal, magical, or fantastical actually lives, side-by-side.
A wonderous world where you can walk through the snowy gate in the land of the Yeti and appear on the sands of the Egyptian Sun God, Ra. An adventurous land where you could encounter a vampire and a dragon in the same day. Have a wizard exorcise a pooka from your home one day and find a fire demon in the basement a day later. Be served breakfast in a pub by a talking fox in the morning and then, by evening, take shelter in a stone fortress in the land of the Minotaur.
Cody’s friends don’t know he is a shifter, but he knows they are human and vulnerable in this land where anything and everything can happen with the sweep of a vampire’s cape or the flick of a fire demon’s tail. But Cody is a good wolf and he will do all he can to keep his pack safe; from Simone, his love, to his best friend, Pete, and he won’t hesitate to take advice from Remy, the oldest vampire gatekeeper in The Realms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theresa Snyder
• Release date: Jul 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463115565

Theresa Snyder

Theresa Snyder is a multi-genre writer with an internationally read blog. Theresa grew up on a diet of B&W Scifi films like Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still. She is a voracious reader and her character driven writing is influenced by the early works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffery and L. Ron Hubbard. She loves to travel, but makes her home in Oregon where her elder father and she share a home and the maintenance of the resident cat, wild birds, squirrels, garden and an occasional dragon house guest.

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BOOKS BY THERESA SNYDER

The Farloft Chronicles

Farloft’s Storybook

James & the Dragon - Vol. 1

Kingdom of the Last Dragons - Vol. 2

Dragon Deception - Vol. 3

Too Many Dragons - Vol. 4

Three & a Half Dragons - Vol. 5

Dragon Memories, Dreams and Reflections – Vol. 6

The Star Traveler Series

The Helavite War - Vol. 1

The Heirs of Henu - Vol. 2

Old Friends/New Enemies - Vol. 3

The Malefactors - Vol. 4

Cataclysm - Vol. 5

A Mear Sleight of Hand - Vol. 6

The Beast Within – Vol. 7

The Twin Cities Series

Shifting in The Realms

Shifting Agony & Ecstasy

Shifting Places

Shifting from Darkness into Light

Shifting for Better or Worse

We 3

(Non-fiction)

Learn more at:

www.TheresaSnyderAuthor.com

Book 1

Shifting In The Realms

Chapter 1

I didn’t bother trying to hide the sound of my approach. It wouldn’t have worked with Remy anyway. He’s a vampire. Besides having excellent hearing, trying to sneak up on one will only get you killed. Of course, in my case I guess that’s not possible, I mean, the getting killed part. You see, I am technically already dead.

Cody, Remy said as greeting once I was within earshot. That was several yards away since I have excellent hearing and he knows it. He didn’t even bother to turn from his post as guard at the tunnel into The Realms.

I came up beside him and handed him the still warm rabbit I caught for him on the way out.

Thanks. He sunk his fangs into it and had a good long swig of rabbit blood. He swore off human blood a while back. If this was in the real world out there on the other end of the tunnel my bringing Remy this rabbit would be like handing a cop a cup of hot coffee while he was on duty during a cold day. In The Realms things are just a bit wonky.

Remy was leaning up against a tree, so I squatted down beside him. I am really tall, better than six and a half feet, but skinny and not very appealing as a human. If I squat it makes me about chest high on Remy even though he’s not small himself.

Remy finished his drink and offered me back the carcass. I wasn’t hungry, ate on the way out, so I shook my head and he jettisoned the remains with one of those incredibly powerful tosses that only a vampire can do. Some other critter would have a nice little snack when they came across it.

What’s up?

Remy is a man of few words. In fact, sometimes he can’t even get them out right, but that’s one of the reasons I like him. He’s easy to be with. I get tongue tied a lot. I’m sixteen and as much as I hate to admit it I am at a very awkward age and it ain’t gonna get any better since I’m not gonna age since I’m dead. I told you that, right?

Just needed to talk. I ran a long skinny hand through my nondescript brown hair. It never does what I want it to. It’s always in my eyes. I have perpetual ‘bed head,’ another thing that makes me unappealing as a human.

May as well get on with why I came out. Remy was like stone. He could wait for years in order for me to get to the point, but I needed some advice. Remy being my oldest friend in The Realms and adult, I thought he might have something useful to say. Pete set me up with a blind date for Friday. There, I just spit it out. I needed some guidance. I’d never been on a date before. When I died, Hell, it was just a possibility sometime in the future. Now, damn it, sometime was here.

With a girl? Remy asked in all honesty.

Well, yeah. I tried to push the unruly hair out of my face again. Pete’s human. What else would he match me up with?

I mean, Remy knows I’m a shape-shifter. He’s the only one who does. He was here at his post guarding the tunnel into The Realms where a lot of the paranormals in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area live when I arrived beating feet in my wolf form just a few yards ahead of the retrieval unit from The Midlands between Heaven and Hell. I’d escaped while they were waiting for the judgment to come down. My pop always told me to keep my nose clean. Paranormals didn’t get into heaven, and hell, I had just murdered someone, so I had two strikes against me. When I saw the chance, I ran. Fought my way through the seven plains of existence back to earth, getting pretty beat up in the process.

Remy’s job is to guard this particular entrance to The Realms. He stepped aside. No words asked. I jetted by him full out, tongue hanging and tail tucked. He hid me and blocked their way. I wasn’t worth a tussle with a vampire as ominous as Remy, so they backed off spouting things like ‘you show your face in the real world and you are toast,’ and ‘don’t even let us see you on the earthly plain again.’ They are great at throwing around that kinda shit, but they can’t catch a fast running, sly wolf like me. As a human, I suck. As a wolf, I am awesome - fast, smart, handsome gray fur so thick you could sink your hand up to the wrist in it. The only thing my human body and my wolf body have in common is the eyes. I do have really deep warm, brown eyes. My sister used to say they were bedroom eyes and one day a girl was going notice them and fall in love with me. Yeah, right…

Remy was just standing there. I’d say he was thinking except that he looked more like he had completely spaced the conversation.

So, we’re going to go for burgers, I offered to bring him back from whatever abyss he was teetering on.

You like burgers, right? Remy said and stuck his hands in his pockets.

Yeah, that isn’t the point, Remy. The point is I’m scared shit-less. I never been with a girl before. What do I say? A few words of advice from the old guy would be helpful, I pleaded.

Don’t ‘shift’ during sex.

Why did I even come? What did I expect from a dude that if you asked him how many people came through the gate in the last century he could name everyone of them and in order of appearance, but he couldn’t tell you what animal he feasted on twenty minutes ago. I just didn’t have anyone else to talk to. I mean being here in The Realms - not knowing anyone but Remy and Pete was tough. Pete knew less about girls than I did, but was your typical hormonal teen human and willing to at least dive into the fray. Hell, he was anxious. I wanted advice. I missed my dad. Hell, I missed my whole family, but even if I wasn’t stuck in The Realms they weren’t in the real world anyway. They were all gone. Gone or dead like me.

Chapter 2

I was born and raised in St. Paul, until I died.

My Mom and Pop owned a pet food business. All-natural ingredients. Pop knew what a dog liked to eat. He was a shape shifter like me. He was originally from Texas, but moved to St. Paul to take over another pet food distributor’s territory. Mom was human and owned a pet grooming service when they met. My sister told me they hit it off right away. Mom loved dogs and I guess having a wolf around the house was more than okay with her. Mom was the one who banked Pop to start the pet food company. It was a real hit and was well established by the time I was born seven years later. My sister was six years older than me. You either inherit the shifter gene or you don’t. She didn’t, I did. Carrie was as human as Mom.

Life was good for the first ten years of my life. Pop and I were close. He never kept it from me what I was. He could smell it on me even though I wouldn’t go through the change and be able to shift until I hit the human equivalent of puberty. He always preached patience and being calm. He told me over and over to keep my nose clean.

When I was twelve, and started getting wolf urges, he took me to the entrance of The Realms. We didn’t go in. We went out as wolves. We tracked a human that Pop knew came and went and we just watched from a distance as he walked under a fully leafed willow and disappeared in a halo of green light.

Pop explained about the guards at the other end. Guards like Remy. He told me everything he knew about The Realms. Basically, it was a supernatural hub that connected the dimensions of Earth and various other worlds of what humans considered mythological, paranormal or spiritual. It is a grand city surrounded by swamps, deserts, arctic lands and other extreme landscapes.

Then Pop disappeared. Not that day, but the day after.

Mom always said he would be back. She died still hoping he would return.

My sister Carrie just turned eighteen when Pop disappeared. She always hung around Pet Perfect Food when she was a kid. She knew the business almost as well as Mom and Pop. She didn’t want to go to college, but Mom kept insisting. Finally, they arrived at a solution. Carrie would work during the day at the family business alongside Mom, and go to school during the evening in order to get her degree in business. That placated Mom and gave Carrie’s Type A personality something to chew on.

Unfortunately, two years later Mom came down with the big C. Mercifully, the cancer took her quick. She was gone by my fourteenth birthday.

Carrie had just turned twenty-one. She applied to the court and because of a lenient judge and an overburdened foster care system she was made my guardian. We soldiered on for another two years.

During that time Carrie was a senior in college finishing up her four-year degree and trying to keep Pet Perfect Food afloat. I just started high school and was becoming very hormonal even for a teenager. My wolf would try to take over at the most inopportune times. I had to refrain from playing sports even though the basketball coach would have killed to get me to play. If it got too physical I would come very close to losing control.

Some of the jocks took to teasing me about my height. Where jokes about ‘how’s the weather up there?’ hadn’t bothered me before, they now set my teeth to grinding. I spent a lot of time in the shower both at school and at home. I tried really hard to remember Pop’s words of wisdom, ‘stay calm.’ I managed to keep my shape shifter tendencies a secret, but just barely. Carrie spent more hours than I like to say talking the principal out of expelling me after I put my fist through a wall or a foot through a door in order to keep from striking a fellow student or from shifting into my wolf form in front of a dozen or more witnesses.

For someone so young my sister had a lot on her plate. She decided to hire someone to help out with the business. She consulted with her scholarly teachers and they advised her to promote from within. The person would already know the business. Less ramp up time. She did some interviews and made a choice. His name was Daniel Welter.

Daniel had been with the company for three years, same as Carrie’s official involvement. He was hired by our mother when Pop left. Daniel was a bit older, probably mid-40s. Carrie thought he was the right choice, and he was for a while. I remember the evening that assumption changed for both of us.

Chapter 3

The smell accosted me immediately when I opened the door to Carrie’s and my apartment, a mixture of bath soap, shampoo and perfume, but with a strong undercurrent of something else. Something I knew from my own raging hormonal self was the smell left after a sexual act. I told you I had good hearing, well a great sense of smell comes with the shape shifter package too. For that matter, sight is also enhanced.

I took in the room. The table was set for two and the meal had been consumed. I knew Carrie and Daniel were going to have dinner together and talk shop, which frankly, I had no interest in what-so-ever. I left for a basketball game at school before Daniel even arrived. Just because I don’t play doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching a good game and our team was good. On their way to all city champs.

My sister and Daniel obviously adjourned from the table to the couch in the living room. Their glasses of wine, one half finished, still sat on the coffee table along with a scarf I saw Carrie wearing when I left.

I must admit I hesitated when I saw Carrie’s shoes sitting by the arm of the couch. She must have been getting comfortable and if my nose was telling me the truth, which I had no doubt it was, I wondered if I should intrude any further. I had a friend who lived a couple of blocks down. I would just leave Carrie a note and go spend the night at Clifford’s house. Cliff wouldn’t mind. In fact, we would get a kick out of speculating how this all went down.

I was quietly rummaging in the kitchen drawer for a pen when my ears caught the sound of a sniffle and a stifled sob. I didn’t understand or like what I was detecting from Carrie’s room. I slowly crept down the hall. By the time I reached her door I could hear her sobbing through the pillow she obviously had her head buried in and the closed door of her bedroom. I hesitated for only a moment. What if Daniel was still here and this was some after sex thing that my inexperience knew nothing about. But, as I stood there I noticed the table in the hall was out of position and the flower vase that had been on it was toppled. I was concentrating on the unfamiliar noises from Carrie’s room so completely that I did not notice the table or the vase. Now the hair on the back of my neck began to rise and I was tuning into everything around me.

The hall carpet was scuffed up as though something had been dragged along it. There was a sweaty hand mark on the wall to the right of the door. When I leaned closer I could smell it was Carrie’s and worse yet, I could smell the fear on it.

By the time my shoulder hit her door it was not a human shoulder, but the shoulder of a hundred and eighty-pound wolf. My sister had seen me as a wolf, but never, ever, as an angry wolf. I was ready to tear Daniel apart, but Daniel wasn’t there. It was only my poor sister with her teary red eyes staring out of a shocked and frightened red face. I only made the situation worse than it already was.

Get out! she screamed and threw the pillow she had in her hand. Get out! She threw herself back down on the bed and buried her head in the other pillow without waiting to see if I left.

The totally ineffectual assault on my head with the pillow only partially brought me back to my senses. I was so angry I still stood there in wolf form seething. The bed was rumpled and the smell in here was much stronger. I could tell Carrie had taken a shower, but the sheets had not been changed. I padded up to her and placed my furry head beside her on the bed. When she did not respond I gently nudged her sobbing form with my nose. She rolled to the side and placed her hand on my head.

Damn it, Cody. I was so stupid. She sat up and in the process, slide off the bed to the floor at my feet. I sat down on my haunches and lay my head on her shoulder. She grasped me around the neck and sunk her fingers deep into my fur. I thought we were just having a nice evening, she said with a catch in her breath. I wasn’t coming on to him. I swear. She buried her face in the fur of my neck and let out a heart wrenching sob. I told him ‘no’…

She didn’t have to tell me anymore. I knew he raped her. I could see, smell, feel the act in my wolf form. I pulled away from her and licked at her tear-stained face. She continued to cry, hugging me fiercely. Eventually she quieted. I lay down first with my head in her lap. It was the longest I had ever stayed in wolf form. Somehow instinct told me it would be easier for her if I stayed an animal through her hours of pain, instead of her little brother. She eventually pulled the blanket off the bed. She lay down on the floor exhausted and I, in my wolf form, stretched out beside her. She laid her arm over me and pulling me close, buried her face in the fur of my neck, and fell asleep.

Chapter 4

Carrie didn’t go to work the next day. After I shifted back into human form, moved her to my room, saw that she ate some breakfast and sat with her until she fell asleep again, I went to work in her place.

Daniel was surprised to see me. I told him I was just checking in to tell everyone that Carrie was under the weather and wouldn’t be in until Monday. It was Friday. I didn’t let on I knew anything, but I could smell his fear that I might, and his relief when he thought I didn’t. He was guilty as Hell.

I didn’t go to school. Instead I went down in the elevator to the parking garage to wait for the asshole rapist. Wolves can be as patient as the family dog and several times more deadly.

He didn’t leave the building for lunch, which was just as well. There would have been too much activity to take the bastard down during the lunch hour. Instead, he conveniently waited way past the rush hour to exit. It was quiet in the garage. Just a handful of vehicles remained.

He came out of the elevator with a woman at his side. She bid him farewell and got in her car just two slots over from the elevator door. She was gone before he got within fifty feet of his car.

My actions were premeditated. I knew what I was going to do, and I did it. I wanted him to know what he was being punished for, so I rose up from the other side of his car in my human form when he was about twenty feet away. Too far away from the elevator to be able to outrun me in my wolf form.

Cody. What are you doing here? Keys in hand, he came to an abrupt halt. He knew why I was there. He just didn’t know how much trouble he was in.

You know why I’m here, I said and stepped around the back of the car. I’m here to give you what you deserve for raping my sister. I couldn’t help it, a growl escaped my throat even though I was still in human form.

He smirked at me. I was just a kid. A tall kid, but also a skinny kid with pimples and whacked-out hair.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, he said, as he moved closer to the car. Big mistake, buddy. He should have been running, but he thought he could talk his way past me, get in his new Honda and drive off. Not happening.

Did she tell you I raped her? Cause if she did, that was a lie. It was consensual. You know what that means, right?

Don’t talk down to me asshole. It was not consensual. She told you - No! Repeatedly. You raped her, I shouted, my fists balled at my sides. My wolf wanted out - NOW!

Then why isn’t she pressing charges?

She wasn’t pressing charges cause she was so out of it after you left that she washed all the evidence away trying to get your smell off her, you asshole!

Daniel took a couple more steps toward me and actually reached out to push me aside. That was all it took.

I am here to tell you, it isn’t like the movies. The guy doesn’t fall to the ground on all fours with his bones popping and his nose elongating into a toothy muzzle. You don’t just stand there and watch him change. My shifting is instantaneous. One moment I am a human and the next I am standing beside you in my full blown hundred and eighty-pound wolf form. It’s more like Superman’s change. It’s damn scary if the look on Daniel’s face was any indication. One minute he’s talking to a sixteen-year-old kid and the next he’s confronted by a wolf - a really huge wolf.

He dropped his keys and ran. It took no effort at all on my part to catch up with him, grab a leg with my very sharp teeth and pull him down. He struck at me with his fists and landed a blow or two on my face, but I had him pinned to the asphalt. He wasn’t going anywhere. I sunk my teeth into his shoulder right through his shirt and jacket. He grabbed my ears and twisted with all his strength, at the same time he brought up his knee into my groin with the force of desperation. He was a lot tougher than he looked and I was a lot less experienced than I needed to be to carry out this act of violence.

The blow to my privates was just as painful as it would be to a human male. My jaws instinctively released him, and I fell back. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled toward the elevator. As I recovered he could see that the elevator was not going to make it down in time. He stepped to the door to the stairwell, opened it and fled inside. I managed to get my nose in the door just before it closed. I shouldered it open and loped up the stairs after him.

He made the door to the floor Pet Perfect Food was on and managed to get it closed before I got to it. I was still limping a bit from his knee shot, but he was leaving a really clear blood trail. I guess he forgot I could shift, ‘cause he didn’t bother to block the door. I shifted back into my human form and opened the door.

That’s another thing that isn’t like the movies. I can create the image of clothes on my body. It takes effort and energy that you wouldn’t want to do continually, but it saves a shifter from having to worry about being nude in public, until he can find some clothes. If you touch me, you feel skin, but if you look at me, you see clothes. I shifted into a pair of jeans, didn’t bother with a shirt or shoes. I figured I’d run him down before I ran into anyone else, but just in case, Pop taught me how to take care of myself.

I followed the blood trail to the bathroom on that floor. The door wouldn’t open. He’d placed a trashcan in front of it. I could hear him on his cell phone.

I tell you it’s a huge dog. Big as a wolf! No! I have not been drinking. You better get someone down here fast or I will sue the city for all its worth!

Didn’t sound to me like the police were going to be in any great hurry. I shifted back into my wolf form and pushed open the door with very little effort. He was standing at the sink with a shit-load of paper towels to his shoulder trying to staunch the bleeding. He wasn’t getting much of anywhere. He turned when he heard the scrape of the trashcan moving across the tile floor.

I didn’t see the knife in his other hand. It was just a Swiss army knife he’d dug out of his pocket for self-defense. It was little, but I found out it could do a lot of damage.

I was finished with playing his game and I wasn’t anxious to be around when the police showed up and found his dead body. I rushed him throwing all my weight into him. He went sprawling to the tile floor. I came down on him and once again pinned him to the floor. I made a point of keeping my lower body to one side away from his knees. What I didn’t realize was I was putting my stomach right over his hand with the blade in it. When I came down on his neck with my teeth, he came up with his blade into my stomach. He drove in hard and then pushed down laying open my stomach until it felt like my guts would all fall out. I backed away, but neither of us was going to survive. I hit his jugular with my last bite and he was spurting blood all over the tile floor.

I came down hard on my haunches. I had never had anything hurt like my stomach did right then. When I looked down I was totally grossed out. I was going to have to hold in my guts until I got out of there. I couldn’t be found here with him. Even though it was justly deserved revenge it was not something my sister or the family business could survive. This was not the way I had it planned. This was not how it was supposed to end.

I dragged myself out the door and down the hall to the elevator in wolf form. I shifted and took the elevator down to the garage level. If someone had seen me then they would have seen a nude kid bleeding profusely. There was no energy for shifter’s fake clothes. I made it to Daniel’s car, picked up the keys and drove out of the garage. Shape shifters die hard. I found out that day we can take a lot of abuse. Not, spill your guts abuse forever, but lots longer than a human could. I managed to make it to the outskirts of town, up a gravel road I knew led to The Realms. I almost made it too. Almost, but not quite. I died there at the edge of the gravel road within sight of the willow tree at the portal to The Realms.

Chapter 5

Pete tugged on my sleeve like he thought pulling on it could make it stretch to fit my orangutan-length arms. He insisted I have a new pair of jeans and shirt for our date today. My old stuff was pretty ratty, so I accepted.

I haven’t received my first check yet from the job Remy found me with the grounds keeper for Raven’s mansion. That’s where I met Pete. He works there too. They don’t pay us much ‘cause the humans don’t need much to sustain them in The Realms. If they’re in servitude to a vamp, then the vamp takes care of them. If they perform some other duty they were most likely born here and have a family home that is passed down from generation to generation. Not very many people choose to move to The Realms. So, the only thing a human needs coin for is clothing and a few essentials.

Food is provided by the vamps. Light being limited in The Realms to five hours a day not much will grow in the way of produce. The vamps want to keep their food source fed and iron rich, so they supply food both at places similar to markets and at a plethora of food carts stationed around the town that give away hamburgers and such. Humans run the carts. Gives the children of the folks caught in The Realms a place to work. Birthrate is low among the humans. I think it’s ‘cause of all the bloodsucking. No matter how good they’re fed it taints them for reproduction.

A food cart was the kind of place we were going to today. Down on the beach of Nokomis Lake where a portion pushed its way into The Realms and made a nice area where the humans could sit on the golden beach, eat burgers and forget for a while they were in some wacked out paranormal world where most of them were considered burgers for the vamps.

Pete started to roll up my sleeves. There just wasn’t anything in The Realms that fit me. Vampires can be big, like Remy, but they are proportionate. I have orangutan arms and giraffe legs. Pete conquered the jeans being too short by having me tuck them into the tops of my boots. Now he was working on making the shirt less…well you know…Anyway, he just had twenty-three minutes more to do whatever he was going to do to make it work before we had to leave to meet the girls.

There, he said with satisfaction as he stepped back to look me over from head to foot. He had to take an additional step back to see my face from his lower height of probably five eight or so. I could literally look down on his head of immaculately gelled red hair. To me, Pete looked like an overgrown leprechaun. He had red hair, blue eyes, freckles across a pale skinned nose, and a laugh that was contagious. I don’t know why he picked me as a friend, but I was glad he did. I just wish I could do something with that hair of yours, he lamented. He had tried earlier and tried, and tried, until I made him give up.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked clean, but that was about all I could say about myself. The hair was still out of control. The face still had its scattering of pink pimple blotches. Why, oh why, did I have to die at sixteen? I was going to be stuck with this body for eternity. I let out a big sigh of disgust. It would be even better if you could do something with the face under the hair.

Hey, come on man, don’t be so hard on yourself. Pete picked up the comb and stepped up on the chair seat. I know he had eyes on my ‘bed head’ hair again. He didn’t give up easily.

I moved away, out of reach. Enough! No matter what you do, it ain’t gonna make it any better. Give it a rest.

Pete hopped down from the chair and turned to the mirror himself. Once he got the gel to spike his hair just so, he turned to me for inspection.

You’re looking good, dude. He inflated with my praise. He was a good friend even though we had known each other less than a month.

Pete grabbed the blanket we were taking with us to sit on the sand while we ate our burgers. He had it all planned out in his mind. It was going to be like a picnic. He’d been born in The Realms, but he’d made the trip out to St. Paul often enough he knew how the dating thing worked. He told me he used his cash to go to the movies at least twice a month and he knew what women wanted. He was going to show Lily a little romance while I kept Simone, her best friend, busy.

Lily wouldn’t agree to date Pete unless her friend came along. You couldn’t really blame the girl. The Realms was not a safe place and it seemed like everyone had an ulterior motive. I heard rumors that there was even a kinda slave trade where humans sold other humans into servitude to the vamps and other creatures. I didn’t want to think there was such a thing, but most likely my thinking it didn’t exist wasn’t going to keep it from being true.

Anyway, my invite to this little picnic was Pete’s idea to keep Simone occupied while he made the moves on Lily. We would see how well that worked.

Pete tucked the folded blanket under his arm. You ready?

Ready as I’ll ever be. It was time. I would have mumbled a little prayer if I thought that anyone would have been listening.

Chapter 6

Simone is sitting across from me on the blanket eating her hamburger. Everyone else finished a good half hour ago. Pete and Lily took off for a walk down the beach. I can see them holding hands sitting on a rock outcrop about a mile away.

Simone is beautiful. Even how she eats is beautiful. She doesn’t chomp down on her burger. She is daintily pulling it apart with her tiny fingers and popping pieces in her mouth. Her mouth doesn’t distort with the process of chewing. Her lips are still full and when she chews and swallows I can hardly hear it even with my excellent wolfish hearing.

She didn’t stick a straw in her drink either, instead she took the lid off and she is taking short little sips.

She’s sitting with her legs folded under her like a tiny faun - so delicate. She must be at least a foot and a half shorter than me. She’s a couple of years older too. She’s a woman, not a girl. She has curves in all the right places. I flex my hand and imagine it at her waist, Hell how about her boob?

She just looks at me and smiles.

I’m lying down on the blanket with one arm propping up my head so I can gaze at her and not intimidate her with my height.

She swallows and looks out over the lake as she places another tiny bite of burger in her mouth.

She is perfect.

Have you lived in The Realms long? she asks, between bites.

Not long. I want to keep my answers short, so I don’t stumble over my own tongue. I don’t want to screw this up. I think it’s love at first sight.

Did you move here with your family? she asks, not taking her eyes from the lake.

No. I have this lump in my throat and this block to my brain that won’t let me think of anything rational to say. All I can think about is touching her - running my hands through her golden hair to the back of her neck, pulling her toward me and placing my lips firmly against hers.

She’s finished her burger. Simone wipes those perfect lips and hands. I imagine those hands on me - running them through my mop of hair. She gathers up the papers from all our burgers and pushes them into the bigger sack they came in. Simone starts to unfold and stand up.

I pop up to a sitting position faster than a windup, old fashioned, metal, Jack-in-the-box.

Where you goin’? I want to reach out and take her hand, but I’m afraid. Afraid she’ll what? Reject me?

I’m just going to take this to the trash, she offers and indicates the bag in her hand.

I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to give her any chance of leaving.

I can do that. I grab the bag. I’ll do the dishes.

I smile thinking I really said something clever for a change. She smiles back. I get to my feet and take the garbage across the sand to deposit it in the trashcan for her. I don’t realize it’s a mistake until I turn and see her gazing at me from the blanket. She has a look on her face I have seen a million times from friends to strangers, from teachers to fellow students. It is that look that says, ‘jeez what a freak.’ What a tall, ugly kid. The worst part about her gaze is it also has a hint of sorrow in it. No, not sorrow…sympathy.

Well, I guess it wasn’t love at first sight for her.

I looked away. I couldn’t look at that expression. I wanted to run and hide. Instead, my eye caught movement down the beach as Pete leaned in to kiss Lily on the cheek. Yeah…I could see it from where I was standing. I also saw the return kiss she gave him and it made Simone’s look at me all the harder to take.

Simone followed my gaze and though she probably couldn’t see as well as I could, she was able to see her friend rise and drag Pete to his feet and off the rocks back toward us. Maybe Lily thought it was getting a little too heavy, a little too fast. She was more Pete’s and my age. I think Simone must have been like a big sister to her.

Simone rose and started to pull up the blanket. She shook it out and folded it, ready to leave the moment her friend arrived.

Lily and Pete were not in any hurry. They were holding hands strolling along like they had known each other for years. Simone and I just stood silently and waited until they came up even with us.

The sun was setting - throwing lovely colors of azure blue, lavender and peach across the lake and the sky above it. That’s a funny thing about The Realms, it has some really gorgeous sunsets and they last a long time, up to an hour. I think it’s The Realms’ way of giving all the day folks time to hide before the nighttime critters come out.

When Pete got even with us he smiled that shit-eating grin of his. You folks about ready?

Yep. I said without hesitation. I want out bad. If I had been in my wolf form I would have tucked tail and run away.

We’ll walk you ladies home, Pete offered gallantly. He wanted to make sure they were safely inside with doors locked before dark.

Pete led off with Lily at his side. Simone followed and I trailed behind like the whipped dog I felt like. Lily lived just a couple of blocks from the beach, up an alley and down a street. When we got there, she invited us all in for a soda and Pete gave me the high sign he wanted to stay. Simone said she couldn’t and needed to get home. So, Pete went in with Lily and I walked Simone the rest of the way home.

She lived a couple of streets further down and up a side road that turned out to be an easement between two pieces of property to several acres of land behind them. The house was at the end of a long winding gravel road. It was three stories and looked to be built out of the native stone in the area. The drive led to the back of the second floor on a hilltop. You could see there was another floor below that backed up to the hillside where the drive