When I could finally lock the door behind them, I sighed. It was a normal Thursday night, really. I let my head fall against the door thinking about it. Another Thursday night in a tiny dive bar named Kick Shot off US-175. It was the life I had wanted six years ago when I opened it.
It was still the life I wanted, but it was lonely, and I wasn’t afraid to admit that. It was lonely and tiring. I was open five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday. Five to one. No one helping out, no one to go home to.
I was worse than Joey.
“Fuck. None of that thinking, Jacky. Think of the alternatives.” Even saying the word alternatives made me remember exactly why I had chosen the life of bar owner outside a small town in Texas. The other options I had made me want to gag.
I cleaned up my tiny bar quickly. It wasn’t much work on the quiet nights. I didn’t balance the books until Sunday, so once I was done loading my dishwasher in the back and sweeping the floor, I had nothing to do except go home, if I even wanted to. I had a small apartment above the bar, along with my office, but I really only used it on the long nights when going home and coming back didn’t seem worth it. Tonight wasn’t one of those nights, something I was thankful for. My skin itched, which was a sign I needed to head home and stay there for the evening.
I walked out the back, locking the last door behind me. I didn’t really need to, since I had no fear of anyone breaking in, but I didn’t like taking chances.
Turning away from the building, I dismissed the idea of driving home. It wasn’t very far to my house. Kick Shot was surrounded by the pine forest that marked the area. Pine trees for miles, endless amounts of them going over the horizon. I nestled my bar in them so that I could hide a house out in the middle of my property. Most thought I never left the bar at all, and the few who knew my house was in the middle of my property didn’t know how to get to it.
There was a reason for that.
My skin kept itching and I rolled my shoulders, trying to loosen them up. It wasn’t a full moon, but it didn’t matter, because it was close enough to one, which made all of this a bit easier and explained the small itch I had. I stripped slowly, dropping my clothes into a gym bag. Some women kept purses. Me? I kept a gym bag on me at all times. Normally it was tucked behind the bar where the boys never saw it, but I always took it with me when I left. Once I was naked, I zipped the bag up, making sure the strap was in a good position for me to grab.
Joey and his friends, always asking me if I was a werewolf. Always wondering what the mysterious woman behind the bar could possibly be. They had no idea. If I lived my life right, they never would. Unlike the werewolves, my kind were very private.
The change flew over me the moment I asked it to, taking me down onto all fours. For less than thirty seconds, my bones broke and rearranged themselves, my muscles and tendons moving to fit over the new structure, the new body. It was over in less than a minute, amazingly fast by werewolf standards. They took nearly twenty minutes to shift, the poor mangy bastards.
See, Joey and his friends were half wrong and half right, but that wasn’t something I could ever tell them. I wasn’t a werewolf.
I was a werecat.
Now, werewolves? They looked like wolves. Big wolves, but still wolves. Werecats? I looked like something out of a prehistoric documentary with bad CGI and some scientist talking over it. I had five inch saber fangs and a strange tan and spotted pattern. Whatever cat werecats were supposed to be was long extinct. It made things very interesting when people caught us out and about, which was exactly why that could never happen. The werewolves were out to the world, but not the werecats. We couldn’t be.
And if people thought werewolves were big, they had no idea. I was just about as large as a male lion, which was to say, incredibly big. Human, I was five foot eight, weighing all of one hundred and fifty pounds, with a little bit of curve to me. Just a little, but I was proud of it, since getting any sort of curve as a werecat was practically impossible. As a werecat, I was four feet at the shoulder and roughly four hundred and fifty pounds. Massive, and roughly two hundred pounds heavier than most werewolves.
I gingerly grabbed the strap of my bag with my clothing and started to trot away, sniffing the air as I went. There were no humans anywhere near me or where I could see. I dove into the pine trees, heading straight for home. It was fun, more freeing than anything I could have ever imagined. I could really run when I wanted to, and while I sometimes hated what I was, I never hated this. There would never be a time when I hated the run.
As I went, my magic connected with the land, telling me everything I could ever want to know, like where potential prey was. I generally hunted whitetail since their population was always at risk of running amok in the region. I did my part, and it helped that even when I was human, I had a serious love for venison.
Werecats have a special magic with the land. We’re a part of it and it’s a part of us. We claim territory, which could be huge or very small depending on our strength and needs. Our connection with our territory means everything, from the day we claim it to the day we lose it. Mine was thirty miles in every direction from my home, a large circle if I ever bothered to draw it on a map. It was a sizable plot, but not the biggest I could potentially hold. I knew deep down I should have claimed a larger territory, but I never wanted to. I wanted a safe plot of land that was mine and didn’t feel too threatening to any other werecats in the state. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to look in my direction, so I kept my magic close, never letting it reach out to try to claim more than I wanted. Six years before, I had claimed even less than what I had now, but had very slowly spread it out until I was comfortable.
There were a few reasons for that. I needed the leg room, for one. Two, a werecat could only safely hunt on his or her territory.
I had been warned that trying to keep my territory while roaming away from it would bite me in the ass. Like the idea of leaving my bar unattended, it was something I had learned quickly to correct.
It only took two minutes for me to find myself on my back porch. It took less than that for me to turn back around and run off, wanting to keep stretching my legs.
It felt so good. I didn’t shift often enough, not nearly often enough. I tried for once a week, and there was really no excuse for me not to, but I was bad like that. I had never been a good werecat; I would never be a good werecat. I could only try, and even that felt too hard most of the time.
In the attempt to be a good werecat tonight, I sniffed out a whitetail deer nearly ten miles from home and took it down without thinking. Hunting came naturally, as I was ridden by animal instincts I couldn’t control sometimes. It saw prey, and the feline beast I shared my body with wanted that prey. I had to be careful, thanks to that beast. The werewolves didn’t admit it to the humans, but our animals thought they were prey too. It made things dangerous and was why I didn’t worry about being closed on full moons. Everyone was. No one wanted to be out when the monsters were. Joey didn’t know it, but it kept him safe too. I could never risk them visiting while some employee I didn’t want was at the bar. It made them easy prey.
I don’t know how long I ran, really. I could see the dangerous tinge of dawn just beginning to creep over the horizon when I was back on my front porch and triggered the change back into my human form.
“Fuck,” I groaned, leaning against my back door. It was always painful, and the faster I could do it every year, the more it felt like it hurt. Maybe the pain was just too concentrated; I had no idea, but it wasn’t pleasant. There was no fairy dust and seamless shifting for the moon cursed, wolf or cat. Our bodies just broke and healed into new bodies. It fucking hurt. Every time, it fucking hurt. For me, it’d been hurting worse, and my shifts had only been getting faster.
With that on my mind, I knew I needed to make a call. A call I would continue to avoid, because it was the worst call.
It was a call to family.
“Tomorrow,” I promised myself half-heartedly.
Chapter Two
Waking up to my cellphone blaring like a fucking police alarm wasn’t the way I wanted to start my Friday. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew there was no way I was getting back to sleep. It didn’t matter what time it was. I knew the ring tone. Even if it wasn't loud and obnoxious, the ring tone meant I was getting the call I had avoided making.
That was never good. In my world, it was possibly the worst thing that could happen.
Without opening my eyes, I reached out, groping for the phone. If I didn’t pick up, he would just call again. And again. Then he would text, which was the last chance I would have to talk to him before he just showed up and invaded my territory.
Luckily, I grabbed my cellphone and yanked it off its charger before it stopped ringing. I was able to hit the bouncing green symbol before it stopped.
“Hi,” I said blandly, hoping the caller wouldn’t realize I had just woken up.
“It’s three in the afternoon, Jacqueline. Is there a reason you almost missed my phone call?” His deep voice made my bones vibrate.
I still didn’t open my eyes, and holding back a yawn took effort. “I don’t open the bar until five, Hasan. There’s no reason for me to be awake before three,” I answered, trying not to grow impatient with him. The call had just started. I would have plenty of chances to lose my patience. The beginning of the conversation was not one of them. “What do you need?”
“To talk to my daughter more often,” he said casually, but I knew him better than that. There was a tightness to the words that I figured only a few people in the world could notice, and I was one of them. Unfortunately.
Daughter. I despised the word to the very core of my being, but I wasn’t foolish enough to refute it. I would never call him Father or Dad, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell him I wasn’t his daughter. In the eyes of the werecats, I was. A werecat who Changed a human was that new werecat’s parent. Mother or father to daughter or son. It didn’t matter if there was any relationship previously. It was just their way. I had spent the first year of my new life as a werecat arguing against it to no avail. It wasn’t even a bad thing. Just a thing I hated, and for very personal reasons, not because the system was flawed.