My Thanksgiving Faux Paw Read online

  “Uh-huh. And you’re showing up out of the blue because…”

  "I came to warn you."

  "Warn her about what?" Babe asked. He moved from behind me to create a semi-barrier between me and Jack. My husband stands at six feet five inches, an intimidating height, even among therians.

  Jack put up his hands. "Not from me," he said. He narrowed his eyes at me. "This is going to sound weird and hard to believe, but I'm psychic."

  My friends, the sheriff, and my husband all chuckled.

  Jack sighed. “I get that reaction a lot.”

  This young man was telling me he was the child of my parents and he was psychic? I decided to test him. "Sure, you're a psychic, and I'm a shapeshifter." I waved my arms with great exaggeration. "As a matter of fact, we're all shapeshifters."

  To the credit of my therianthrope friends and family, none of them reacted.

  Jack frowned. "I'm not lying."

  Neither was I, but he didn't need to know that. "Prove it."

  "Can I touch you? Your hand will do."

  I stepped down from the porch and held out my hand.

  "Nope," said Chav. She pulled me back. "Do me." She glanced back. "If he knows your parents, even if he isn't your brother, he might have information to read you with, but he doesn't know me."

  I nodded. "Okay. Be careful."

  "I'm not planning anything dangerous," Jack said.

  "Better not be," I told him. "I'd hate for Chav to have to eat you for dinner." I'd seen her, in her gigantic Brother Wolf form, eat a whole serial killer. I chuckled like I was kidding, and everyone let out pensive breaths.

  Chavvah held her hand out to the newcomer. "Just let the man do his thing."

  Jack stretched his fingers toward Chav's palm. He flinched when his skin made contact with hers. If he was psychic, I could only guess at what her mojo as a spirit talker was doing to his mind.

  "Close your eyes and think of a happy memory," Jack said. "One that you really connect with."

  "Why happy?" Chav asked.

  "Those are the most pleasant ones to live through." He smiled. "But try to pick something you wouldn't mind a stranger seeing."

  Chav looked back at me, her frown matching my own. Then she shrugged. "No problem." She closed her eyes.

  Jack's body jerked. His head flew back. He jerked again--his entire body animated except for the fingertip touching Chav's palm. Sid and Babe surged toward them, but Jack stilled.

  "Don't," I said. "He's not hurting her. Look. He's barely touching her."

  "Sunny, I've been privy to your kind of strange for a while now, but this is cuckoo even by your standards," Sid said.

  "I agree with Sunny," Willy said. "Let it play out. I don't think Chav's, uhm, brother, and I'm not talking about Babe here, will let anything happen to his girl." Willy was talking about Chav's spirit guide, Brother Wolf. He had a protective streak when it came to my BFF.

  "Sid has a point," Ruth interjected. "This is bizarre."

  Nothing happened. Nada. Zip. Jack let go of Chav's hand and smiled as if to say, "Ta da!"

  "Well?" I asked, less than impressed by the self-proclaimed Zoltar. "Will she fall in love? Will she win the lottery? Get that job she's been pining for?"

  Jack grinned. "You're funny."

  I crossed my arms over my chest. "And you've got about two seconds before I have the Sheriff here put you back into his patrol car and drive you to the next town."

  Jack winked at me. Winked! The little shit. Then he turned to Chav and said, "Your wedding, just as the sun set and the moon rose over the lake was really beautiful. Thank you for taking me on that journey with you." He rubbed his shoulder. "The pre-wedding fight with your step-daughter was unusual, though."

  Chav's eyes widened.

  Everyone took a step back from Jack, putting distance between their bodies and his hands.

  "It's a family tradition. It's good luck to fight on the wedding day, with, erm, family." I grimaced at my lie, but I was committed now. "I bet folks in northern California have wedding rituals that people around here would find different."

  "They might." He frowned. "But I wouldn't know. I grew up in Arkansas.”

  "Really? They moved the commune to Arkansas." Maybe Arkansas offered big tax breaks for "religious" communities. Even so, from what I knew of the state, it had some fairly conservative leanings. "Weird."

  "No commune, Sunny. "

  "Then you can't be my brother. My parents were dedicated to the Zen-wiccan-druidic-Hindu and whatever other philosophy or religion that suited their day to day cult-y whims."

  "I know it’s been a long time, but I swear, they don't belong to a cult. Dad's an accountant. Mom's a kindergarten teacher."

  "A-ha!” I pointed at him. “Jerry and Rhonda are pot farmers."

  His brows furrowed in consternation. "Mom and Dad are the most strait-laced people I know. They didn't tell me much about their past before Arkansas, but whatever they did before I was born, they left it all behind after." He narrowed his gaze on me, his voice lowering to conspiracy levels. "They really grew marijuana?"

  "They grew it, picked it, rolled it, and smoked it," I said.

  Jack guffawed. "I can't wait to bring this up at Thanksgiving dinner." He clapped his hands together. "So much to be thankful for."

  An aching twinge of jealousy pinched my gut. We'd never celebrated an intimate Thanksgiving as a family when I was growing up. Instead, the commune would commemorate a community wide harvest festival, complete with dried corn gathering, compost mixing, and other crappy activities, like using corn husks for basket weaving. I rarely saw my parents during the events.

  Ruth, who always seemed to know the right thing to say, said, "Well, since the whole psychic thing seems to be true, maybe we should all go inside and have a chat over pie."

  "I never say no to pie," Jack said.

  Willy put her hand on my shoulder. "You guys are definitely related."

  I rolled my eyes. "Liking pie is not a genetic trait."

  Chav stopped me from going into the house. "You all go ahead. We'll be right in."

  Sid tipped his hat. "I'm off. Call me if you need me to escort this young man out of town."

  We waved at the sheriff as he pulled out of the drive, but Chav's deep frown lines worried me. "What is it?" I asked when we were finally alone.

  "I relived my wedding," she said.

  "You mean you were thinking about it, right?"

  "No. I actually relived it. It was like I was there for the entire day from the end of the fight until the I do's. I could feel, smell, taste, and hear everything as if I was experiencing it all over again."

  "Really?" My visions mostly felt dreamlike. Real but distant. "So Jack somehow tapped into your memory?"

  "More than a memory, Sunny. I was there." She shook her head. "But that's not the weirdest part."

  "I'm afraid to ask."

  "Jack was there." She rubbed the creases between her eyes. "I swear."

  "In your mind, like a presence?"

  "No," she said. "He was actually there. At my wedding."

  Chapter 3

  I'd put the two extra leaves into the dining room table the night before, so there was enough room to seat eight people. Ruth stood at the end, dishing up pecan and pumpkin pie. Jack sat on the right, Willy and Babe sat on the left.

  My darling husband scowled at the young man. To Jack's credit, or maybe he was just too naïve to be scared, he happily dug into his pecan pie slice.

  "This is stupid good," he told Ruth.

  She glowed at the compliment. "I'm glad you like it. I have more if you're still hungry after that piece."

  "I definitely want to try some of that pumpkin," Jack said, before spooning in another mouthful. "Mmm mmm."

  "Making yourself at home?" I asked.

  Jack's mouth tugged up at the corner in a sly smile, but he didn't stop chewing.

  "Do you have any real proof that you’re my brother?"

  He swallowe
d. "Would a birth certificate do? I'd offer my blood, but a DNA test takes weeks."

  "I supposed Jerry and Rhonda told you I was psychic, too. Right?"

  "You're psychic?" He frowned. "Mom and Dad didn't tell me that."

  "That surprises me. They liked to tell anyone who would listen at the commune. They used to parade me out like a show pony every time there was a party, and since the commune grew their own weed and shrooms, there were a lot of freaking parties. Did they send you to find me?"

  "They don't know I'm here. They think I went to Grandpa Jasper's in Mountain Home."

  "Who's Grandpa Jasper?"

  He stared at me as if trying to decide if I was joking. "Dad's dad."

  "Jerry's dad is deceased. So is his mother. Same with Rhonda's parents." I was told all my life that my parents didn't have any family beyond the commune.

  "Grandma Evelyn and Grammy Sue would have a whole lot to say about that."

  "Fascinating," Willy said, using her cop voice. "But this isn't an episode of Jerry Springer. Get to the point. Tell us why you've tracked Sunny down."

  "Is it hot in here?" My lungs were tight, and I struggled to catch my breath. I couldn't wrap my head around Jerry and Rhonda having another kid and ditching their oh-so-important whack-a-doodle beliefs to give him a normal upbringing. On top of that, they'd lied to me about my relatives. When I'd run away from the commune at eighteen and moved to San Diego, I'd struggled for almost a year trying to find enough work to put a roof over my head.

  Anger surged inside me. "I had to live in a homeless shelter for two months, working cash jobs because Jerry and Rhonda thought that government identification, like birth certificates and driver's licenses, were part of the patriarchal overreach." My voice grew louder and my words faster as I continued. "I couldn't get a real job without a social security number! They ruined my childhood and sabotaged my adulthood and for what? A belief system they tossed away for… for you?”

  Babe had gotten up from his chair and he pulled me into a hug. "You don't have to do this right now, sweetheart."

  "Now or later, it doesn't matter. I don't see this getting any easier."

  "I'm really sorry," Jack said. "Mom and Dad don't talk much about their life before I was born. It's a sore spot for the family." He lowered his head and stared at his empty pie plate. "I didn't even know about you until recently."

  Ouch. "Out of sight, out of mind," I told him.

  "That's not it," Jack said. "I think it just hurt them to talk about you. At least, that's what they told me when I asked."

  My brow lowered. "How did you know to ask? Did you get a vision from them about me?"

  He shook his head and met my gaze. "No. I can't read them at all. Grammy Sue is a psychic, though her powers aren’t nearly as developed as mine. She told me that her gift didn't work on people she loved. The more she was attached to someone, the less she could see of their destiny."

  Hearing I had a grandmother who was psychic, and whose gift was similar to mine, made me sad and angry all at the same time. If I had known about her, maybe she could have helped me navigate some of the rougher periods of my life. "Does she know about me?"

  He looked away and sighed. "I don't know. Maybe. But she never spoke about you to me."

  "Then how did you find out about me?" I asked. It seemed that Rhonda and Jerry had done everything they could to forget they had a daughter at all. Hurt cascaded through me. Why was I surprised? It wasn’t like I had expectations that they gave a crap about me.

  Jack leaned forward and reached into his back pocket. He pulled what looked like a Polaroid and set it on the table.

  "Is that you?" Chav asked me. "Cripes, you were young."

  My hair was dark and pulled back into a ponytail. I was smiling, my face bright with what I thought was love. "I was seventeen," I said. My boyfriend, the boy I'd lost my virginity to, had taken the picture a week before my eighteenth birthday. The week before I left. He was supposed to run away with me, but he'd chickened out.

  "What does it say on the white part?" Willy asked. "It's pretty faded."

  I moved out of Babe's arms, staring at the young girl in the picture. I didn't even recognize her anymore. "You ruined my life. I never want to speak to you again. I hate you," I said, reciting the words on the photo from memory. "How did Jerry and Rhonda end up with this photo?"

  "They said you left it for them," Jack answered.

  I frowned. "I didn't leave it for them." I'd left it for the jerk who broke my heart. I had no idea how my parents ended up with it.

  "Who'd you leave it for then?" Jack asked.

  "Moonbell Lowenstein," I told him.

  "The Moonbell?" Chav asked.

  "Same." I'd told her everything about my life, including all the poor choices I'd made when it came to guys.

  Willy guffawed. "What a dumb name."

  "It really is," I agreed. "But that's a story for a never time."

  "Okay," Jack said. "Well, I found this a month ago." He tapped the photograph. "At first, I thought it was a picture of Mom from when she was young."

  "What did she say when you asked about it?"

  "She cried," he said. "Then she told me you'd run away as a teenager. She was really upset."

  "But not upset enough to try and find me." Not that I'd wanted them to. My life had been just fine without them. Better, actually.

  "She said they'd hired a private detective after you took off. He found you in San Diego. They sent letters. Even tried to call. They figured they’d ruined their chance to be in your life." Jack looked at me, sincerity in his gaze. “They backed off. Figured that was what you wanted.”

  Until this moment, I thought never speaking or seeing my parents again was what I wanted. But now? Doubt swirled through me. "That must have been after I finally received my delayed birth certificate and social security number. I would have been untraceable until then." I'd had to jump through some major hoops and save up money for forged school documents and such before the state would issue me a birth certificate. I didn't know how to feel about my parents hiring a detective to find me. On one hand, it was a total violation of privacy. On the other hand, they'd cared enough to track me down. "They hired a private eye, huh? I'm surprised they didn't try tracking me down with a divining stone and a celestial map."

  Jack blinked. “I can’t imagine they’d ever do something like that. They’re too... grounded in reality.”

  I held up my hand. "Grounded in reality? Are we talking about the same parents who hung crystals all over my room and anointed my bed with patchouli and sage smudge weekly because they believed it would make my psychic ability grow stronger while I slept?"

  "The crystals sound pretty," Ruth said.

  I sat down then forced myself to smile. "It was a long time ago." And just one of my many unsettling memories. I always felt like a commodity to them. "They used me to make themselves more important to the leaders of the commune."

  Ruth thrust some pumpkin pie in front of me. "Here. Eat this. You'll feel better."

  I wasn't sure pie could fix how I was feeling, but I was willing to give it a shot. "Thanks." I took a bite. The firm, but creamy texture, made the sweet, spiced pumpkin perfect, and the whipped cream cut the richness in a way that made me want to eat the whole pie by myself. "Okay, this does make me feel better."

  Willy's phone beeped. She looked at the screen. "It's Brady. He said that they made it to the park with the kids."

  "Were we worried they wouldn't make it?" Chavvah asked.

  I snorted whip cream out my nose then proceeded to inhale a chunk of crust into my windpipe. I staggered up from the chair, coughing, gagging, and sneezing. I knocked a cup of water onto the ground, and when I tried to step around it, I slipped and landed on my elbow and hip.

  Babe, Chav, Ruth, Willy, and Jack were instantly up and kneeling next to me and trying to help me up. The crust had dislodged, and while I was still wheezy, I could breathe again. "I am such a clutz," I rasped. The situation r
eminded me of Baby Jude's birth.

  Jack touched my wrist. "Are you okay?"

  I locked eyes with him, and...

  Jeremiah Bowers, the owner of the Paw-On pawn shop, waved a gun at me.

  A pain deep in my abdomen sent me careening forward. “Something’s wrong," I said.

  “Hello,” Jeremiah said. He thrust the gun toward me and Babe's Aunt Erma Jean. “I have a gun!”

  “And I’m having pain,” I yelled. It felt as if I'd been kicked in the stomach by a mule.

  “You’re having a baby,” Erma Jeans said.

  “Don’t you think I know that?" I asked her. "I’m five months pregnant for heaven’s sake.”

  “I mean now.” She gestured to the ground.

  My thighs were wet, my shoes soaked, and a big puddle of clear fluid was spreading across the smooth concrete floor. “Oh, jeezus.”

  “I don’t care if you’re giving birth to the Messiah himself, get your butt over here," Jeremiah ordered.

  I tried to comply with his demands, but I slipped on the amniotic fluid and fell backward. I grabbed a nearby shelf to stop my fall. It gave without warning. A large bottle of red dye number four shattered on the concrete. Its crimson liquid splashed my dress. Erma Jean attacked Jeremiah. Another contraction hit me. Where was Babe? I needed Babe.

  "Sunny?" a man said. I turned and saw a young man with golden brown hair. His eyes were kind, slightly turned down at the corners. They reminded me of my dad's eyes.

  "Get help," I told him, groaning as the pain increased.

  "Let it go," he said.

  I cried out as the pressure grew unbearable.

  My eye's widened when Erma Jean roared as she partially transformed into a werecoyote and ripped Jeremiah apart. After, she ran to my side.

  The man shook his head, his eyes wide with fear. "Let go of my hand."

  I looked. My hand was outstretched, holding his, and I couldn't for the life of me remember why. I let go as if I were holding a live wire, and...

  "Sunny!" Babe said, pulling me up into his arms. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," I told him. I glanced at my brother and stared at him. The memory had been real. Or at least, it had felt real down to every detail. Except for him. He'd been there. I looked at Chav. I knew what she'd meant now.