Here is the first chapter to my urban fantasy. It has recently been rewritten, and it feels new to me now. Hope you enjoy.
Chapter 1
I was regretting the necessity of
crouching down beside a dumpster in a cheap hotel parking lot. It was part of
my job, unfortunately. When I had been blackmailed into taking the job a year ago
it had sounded a little glamorous. The reality was that I spent a lot of time
skulking around in dark smelly places waiting for something to happen.
It was a warm night for early
September, but I wouldn’t have been bothered by cold. If anyone happened to notice
me crouched beside the dumpster, the only thing they would think odd was that a
silver fox was in Settleton. I could have shifted into a shaggy black dog and
erased all possibility of notice, but I had gone to outrageous lengths to touch
a silver fox so I could masquerade as one, and I used it at every opportunity.
I played with my tail, watching it
catch the moonlight. Part of being a private investigator meant I was supped to
have lots of patience. I had never been very good at being what I was supposed
to be. That probably had to do with being a shapeshifter. I strove to rise
above the unfortunately accurate stereotypes associated with my species. We
were opportunistic manipulative cowards and had been responsible for more than
one war. Not that we fought in the wars. We would hide during the fighting and
return to pick over the spoils with a new face.
I spent a lot of time pretending
that I was brave, honest, and loyal. Unfortunately, I tended to throw up around
large amounts of blood; I had to lie to everyone in order to keep from being
killed or imprisoned; and I had no one to be loyal to seeing as I hadn’t seen
another of my kind since my parents were killed. But I was trying to be good,
so I would reward myself with ice cream when I got home.
I wished they would hurry up and get
it over with in the hotel room. I’d snuck in earlier and placed a video camera
to catch the cheating wife in action. I just needed them to leave so I could go
and retrieve the camera. I flicked my tail back and forth a few times. I
clicked my claws against the pavement. I looked back at the hotel room door.
They were still going at it based on the grunting my sensitive ears picked up.
I hated listening to people have sex, especially when I hadn’t had any in a
while. I could be out at a bar finding some hot one-night-stand. Instead I was
crouching by a dumpster.
I
was getting tired. Taking on any shape that was drastically different in mass
from my human form took concentrated effort and was dangerous if maintained for
long periods. The fox was on the smaller side, but I loved it enough to have
perfected it. It was the form I had taken as my last name. My fake driver’s
license was in the butt pocket of a pair of jeans crumbled on my apartment
floor. It said my name was Kali Fox, I was twenty five, five foot nine, one
hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, and human. Some of that was
true. The name was made up; one I chose for myself after my parents were
killed. In my un-shifted form, the rest of it was true, except for the human
thing.
At long last the man and woman
erupted from the hotel room. They reeked of beer and sex. I watched them fondling
and kissing before they got into separate cars and left the parking lot. I
trotted across the lot and turned into a mouse so I could squeeze under the
cheap door. I shifted human to retrieve the camera, conjuring clothing so it
wouldn’t look weird when I let myself out of the room and walked across the
parking lot. I wasn’t actually wearing anything, but making clothing was the
same as making fur. I could even make it feel real. But I could only make
clothing that was skin tight, so I was often mistaken for a hooker.
I put the camera into a bag and
resumed my fox form, slipping my head through the strap so the bag hung around
my neck. I could make much better time as a fox. I kept to the shadows as I
made my way back to the office. I slipped through the doggy door installed for
my after-hours work. The front reception room was dark but there was a light on
in Benny’s office. I trotted down the hall and scratched at the door.
“Don’t scratch the wood, Kali,” Benny
muttered in his smoke-ravaged voice. “Why the hell you insist on gallivanting
around as a fox is beyond me. I can’t look at your tits when you’re a fox.”
I decided that if I shifted to human
and gave him a show he’d be more likely to pay me in advance. I shifted,
conjuring a tight black corset that hugged breasts that were larger than the
ones I had naturally. I completed the outfit with black heeled boots and tight
blue jeans. I chose to be just over five feet rather than my natural five nine because
Benny didn’t like looking up at women and he was a short man.
I opened the office door and took in
Benny in all his glory. He was five foot six with his boots on, with a shaved
head that didn’t really disguise the fact he was balding, and small dark eyes.
He was about fifty pounds overweight and his once muscular body has gone soft
and flabby. He wore sweatpants and a food-stained tank top, his uniform of
choice. A menagerie of chains hung around his neck and each finger had a ring.
The jewelry wasn’t worth anything, but Benny was proud of his image. He looked
like a demented leprechaun on a two week bender.
“Good evening Benny,” I said.
“Who was our delicate Mrs. Norton
banging this week?”
I tossed him the bag with the video
camera. “Tim O’Riley.”
“Two birds with one stone,” he
grinned at me, exposing his fake gold tooth. “You’re the best, Love. Now we can
collect from Mr. Norton and Mrs. O’Riley. Not a bad night’s work.”
I stuck out my chest. “I think I
deserve an advance.”
“Don’t even try that crap with me,
girly.”
I gave up the slutty pose. “Come on,
Benny. Just this once? I’m late on my rent. If you pay me tonight you save me
from a fight with my landlady.”
Benny looked at my tits for a
minute. I let out an exasperated sigh. I knew better than to rush the bastard.
If I let him ogle long enough he’d give me the money. I gave my breasts a
bounce for added incentive.
“Alright, Love. Come to Daddy and
I’ll give you your allowance,” he said.
“You are such a pig.” I walked up to
him. “If you hadn’t blackmailed me into liking you I’d never come back here.”
Benny had witnessed me shift forms.
I had slipped into the women’s bathroom during a date and shifted into a blonde
in order to escape the horrifically self-centered bore my friend Sam set me up
with. Why Benny had been in the women’s bathroom I never did ask, but the point
was that he threatened to tell the Cagers what I was unless I started working
for him. In the year that followed I had grown to like the dirty scoundrel. Not
that we were friends or anything. He was endearing in a stray dog kind of way.
I let him stuff a wad of bills down my cleavage.
“You’re always such a good sport,”
he said, giving my butt a gentle pat. “It almost takes the fun out of harassing
you.”
“Then why keep at it?”
“I said almost, Love, almost.”
I gave my butt a suggestive wiggle
and shrugged. “Goodnight, Benny. Sweet dreams.”
“When your ass is the last thing I
see, how could I dream of anything else?”
Home was the third floor of a
rundown house on the end of a dead-end street. The second floor tenant was a
drag queen who was known on stage as Bambi but to me as Sam. The first floor
apartment was occupied by 86-year-old Bertha Ellouise Matthews. She was in
denial that her hearing was gone and reminded me every time I took out her
trash that she was perfectly capable to care for herself.
The fire escape had been converted
to a somewhat more solid version of stairs and served as the only entrance to my
apartment. I climbed the two flights of steps and unlocked my front door with
the key. There were only three rooms in my apartment. The main room had a wall
of counters and appliances that I laughingly called a kitchen. I had a scarred
wooden table slightly larger than a pizza box, two rickety chairs, a loveseat
that had seen better days, a beaten TV that sat on the floor, and a mattress on
the floor in the bedroom. I had a pile of clean clothes and a pile of dirty
ones. I could conjure clothes but that took concentrated effort and I preferred
to relax and not have the worry of losing my focus and ending up naked on the
bus.
I let out a sigh in the empty apartment.
I had often wished for a pet, but animals didn’t like shifters; neither did
anyone for that matter.
Supernatural
creatures had announced their existence publicly in 1975. We had presented
ourselves diplomatically and with a promise of peace. The humans insisted on a
registration program, stating that it was for our safety. Then the Cagers
appeared on the streets. Humans didn’t want Supernaturals to live among them so
they were providing us with safe communities. The fact that those communities
were really camps run by the military did not escape our notice. Most of our
leaders were killed during a ‘peace negotiation’. Once the leaders were gone,
the most dangerous of us were hunted and killed during the resulting Supernat
War. Those that survived the war went into hiding or were locked in the camps.
I was born in 1990, long after the war. My parents and I lived in hiding,
unfortunately not very successfully because they were killed when I was nine.
Now, it was 2015, and it had been long enough that the short-lived humans had
grown complacent that they had the Supernat population under control. If they
only knew.
Law enforcement was still actively
searching for Supernats, if not to the extent they did in the past. Still, if I
were caught I wouldn’t be brought to a camp. Shapeshifters were nearly impossible
to imprison. We could look like anyone and shift into insects and rodents to
escape confinement. When the day came that Cagers caught up to me, I knew I
would be killed just as brutally as my parents had been. Shapeshifters ranked
dismally low on the dangerous creature scale, but we were still Supernats. I
was not a fighter. If I saw Cagers I hid. If I was ever found out I would run.
I had run before, the night the Cagers found my parents.
Sixteen years later I was still
alive and free, but never relaxed. The media buzzed on about the possible rise
in the Supernatural population and the rumors about hidden armies. Those in the
camps continued to petition for equal rights and peace. I kept my cowardly ass
out of it. I was a survivor.
I let the clothes dissolve and stood
naked by my bed. My true form always felt odd for the first few seconds. I
guessed it was due to a life of constantly hiding what and who I was. I removed
my shoulder length dark brown hair from the single braid, letting it fall
loose. I watched the moonlight from my open window playing over my skin. My
mother had been one of the rare non-Native American shapeshifters, which meant
my skin tone was a shade lighter than my full-blooded Cherokee father. I had my
mother’s blue eyes. That was all I had left of them.
I lay naked on the bed and listened
to the quiet. Tomorrow, I’d go out and find a man to make me forget my
loneliness, at least for a little while.
