Chapter 14: Ryan

Sheila had taken the kid to the urgent care she worked at to have the doctor check her out for an infection. She said the baby kept slapping her hand against her ear and wailing louder.

“That’s the hardest part about them,” she said as she waited outside on Ryan and Rodrido’s stoop for the cab to show up, rocking the kid as she screamed louder. “They can’t tell you what’s wrong with them yet.”

The cab was halfway down the block, and Ryan could still hear the cries. He tried not to think about how much he was already regretting this decision.

“Don’t do that, man,” Rodrigo said despite Ryan having not uttered a word. “She needed to get out of there.”

“I didn’t say anything, Rodrigo.”

“You’re thinking it. I can tell.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna take the rest of them to figure out Sheila’s gone?” Ryan asked, desperate to yank the topic of conversation away from his palpable regret regarding this decision. “Joseph’ll probably come over here to try and convince her to come back.”

“He doesn’t have the sack for that,” Rodrigo spat.

“Oh no?”

“Nope. He’ll just wait till we go to the main house for some reason and get all in our faces.” Rodrigo smiled. “He’s not tough enough to take on Sheila.”

Their pack maintained an attitude that a lot of other packs they encountered, the one in Marin, the ones down south where the desert asserted its barren authority, were grotesque for the way they lived. Most packs didn’t expand beyond family members; everyone within the pack was somehow related. Because their pack allowed for more openness, they considered themselves more progressive. Even Ryan’s dad had thought so. He constantly referred to them as evolved. Ryan always wondered if his dad would still feel that way seeing how things were going currently. The pack didn’t seem all that evolved to him; their stances on roles and who did what among the members was about as regressive as it could be. Sheila as the widespread nurturer never really worked; most of the pack members were intimidated by her.

By mid-afternoon, Ryan decided he might as well tell Rodrigo about what Joseph said. He half believed it, Joseph was known to have contacts in other packs if for no other reason than he stuck his nose and his dick in where it didn’t belong, and he hated having information bubbling around in his brain for no reason. Rodrigo had once told him he ‘processed verbally.’ As of that day, Ryan had no idea what his friend was talking about.

“Wanna hear something Joe told me?” Ryan tossed the remote for the TV to Rodrigo who wasn’t even feigning attention at what had just been on. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“I never know what to make of Joe.”

“Seriously though. This is extra weird.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“He said that pack from Marin was planning some kind of hostage situation with this guy they did business with.”

Rodrigo scoffed. “What kind of shifter pack does business?”

“That’s what I was wondering too. I couldn’t get the rest of it out of him. Does this guy pay them? Do they kill people for him or just give them a scare?”

Rodrigo let his gaze fall to his friend’s face. He pressed his lips together and sighed as if Ryan was a child asking childish questions. “Ryan, you know what they must do.”

“They might not.”

“No. They do.”

The killing was an aspect of this world that Ryan hadn’t been able to swallow. His dad had warned him away from it, telling him that he was too smart to get his hands dirty. Meanwhile, his own hands were filthy. It was just as well for Ryan. He didn’t have the stomach for it. He and Rodrigo both found ways to weasel out of the killings that were cropping up with alarming regularity. When Ryan’s dad was alive, he was their excuse. He didn’t want either of them anywhere near it, and he made that more than clear. Once he was dead, Ryan had to come up with his own answer for why he refused to do these things.

“Because we hate them,” Rodrigo said whenever Ryan hesitated. “Because they’re stupid, dumb, immature acts of violence that do nothing to elevate us as a species.”

To that, Rodrigo was once again called a pussy, and the others would tear off, transforming as they ran. They were so used to the pain of the change by that point that they had no reason to stop moving as it tore through them. Ryan would watch them come home in the gray of dawn, their human mouths bloodied and the bodies of coyotes and rabbits dangling alongside them. One of their pack took down a mountain lion once, claiming the only thing that was harder to kill was another shifter. Ryan didn’t ask how he’d know.

“Joe looked all hyped about it too,” Ryan said, catching the remote as Rodrigo tossed it back to him. “The way he was talking about it, you’d think he was in on it.”

“How the hell does that idiot even know about it?”

“He said he heard it from a pack member of theirs who wants to defect. She thinks our pack will be better.”

Rodrigo scoffed again yet said nothing. They were both aware that it could be worse. That was the phrase they had heard their entire lives: could be worse.

They moved to the stoop, Ryan staring down at the quicksilver waves of the ocean that they could see at the end of their long street. Out in the neighborhoods by the water, distance became an illusion. The beach looked like it was right at the end of their block or just a few blocks away; not that far. Over one hill and down the next.

Ryan never lived anywhere outside San Francisco. He assumed he probably could if he had to, push come to shove, but living away from a coast line was out of the question. The times he had visited cousins and family members in the middle of the country, he started having trouble breathing the moment he got there. Nothing but land, dirt, earth as far as he could see. The ocean opened the end of the world up for him, made the horizon seem close enough to touch.

“Would you ever leave the Bay Area?” he asked Rodrigo who was staring in the opposite direction of the beach, obviously looking for Sheila’s cab to arrive and bring her and the kid back home.

“Maybe. I can’t imagine where else I would go but if I had to...sure, I guess.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “I wouldn’t mind living in New York.”

“New York? You don’t think all the people and the noise and everything would drive you nuts? You especially.”

“Not New York City. Like upstate maybe. Somewhere like that.”

“If we ever really broke with the pack and had to leave here, I don’t know where else I could go,” Ryan told him. From that distance, the waves of the ocean churned from silver white to black. “There’s nowhere else I’d want to live anyway.”

“We’re not breaking from the pack, don’t be so dramatic.” Rodrigo smirked. “We’re just doing our own thing. That’s perfectly fine.”

“Sure, no one ever gets killed over doing their own thing.”

Packs had intense rules and reactions to loyalty. They viewed everything with an animal’s sensibility, slighted and wounded by the mere suggestion of their members breaking. This was also a trait Ryan’s dad wanted him to understand and accept. He didn’t decry it or endorse it; he just made sure his son knew that this was the case.

“When you’re different, you need to stick together,” he had said while explaining it. “That’s the mindset these packs have. Everyone out there, all the humans and people not like us, are dangerous to us. That’s how they think.”

“But other packs are dangerous to us too,” Ryan said, working through it. “It’s like everything is a danger to us.”

“That’s the mindset,” his dad replied with a shrug.

If this other pack, this Marin pack, was plotting something as stupid as a hostage situation, it was going to alert everyone to their existence. Ryan wondered what kind of code those assholes dealt with because everyone in the San Francisco pack knew to keep clear of causing problems with humans. Or at the very least not to cause problems with humans that could be easily tracked back to them. This plan, what he knew of it, seemed dangerous and sloppy. And not just for the creatures who would be directly involved.

A rushing car filled with teenagers screamed down the quiet street. Soon after it, the train clattered along, stopping twice as often as any other vehicle that took that route.

“I don’t think Joe knows shit,” Rodrigo said suddenly. The sound of his voice startled Ryan who jerked upright and stopped staring down towards the water. “Some chick from a rival pack told him all this because why? Nobody likes Joe enough to give him information.”

“That’s why I told you: because I wasn’t sure what to believe myself.”

The traffic was starting to get heavier; the day was getting later. Springtime meant days stretching into nighttime, and dusk setting in well after the commuters got home. Ryan couldn’t tell what time it was; he was still used to the winter twilight that dropped night on the city before five PM. There was life in the streets when the sun set later, and their neighborhood was as far west as they could go. Every single night, they were the last houses to see the sun. The sun that had now crossed the halfway point, and was starting its slope towards the horizon.

“It’ll be dark by the time we get to the beach,” Rodrigo said.

“Do you not want to go?”

“No, I was thinking it might be a good place to, ya know, blow off some steam.”

They undressed in the dunes, tucking their clothes into the ice plants that grew in thick serpents over the sand. Ryan sprinted down towards the water naked, his transformation wrenching his body and dropping him to his knees. By the time he hit the waves, he was fully animal.

Rodrigo followed in his friend’s path, crashing into the cold nighttime water alongside him. He threw his elongated, furry face upward and howled at the moonless sky. The waves curled and broke, sweeping the two of them along; delivering them to the shoreline then yanking them back out to sea again. There was an indiscriminate quality to the ocean that both Ryan and Rodrigo admired even as it pulled them under and forced them to swim frantically, sputtering to the surface. If they were careless or foolish, if they didn’t keep an eye on how far out they were or how strong to undertow, the ocean would drown them. Simple as that. Even among animals, killing was more complicated.

Back in the dunes on his lean human legs, Ryan gathered his clothes and shook as much water as he could out of his hair. Despite the lack of a moon, the glow from the street lights along The Great Highway bathed everything in dull gold. Ryan stood naked, thinking himself in the shadows and everyone else tucked away at home. He didn’t see the young woman watching him from the bike path until it was too late. Her mouth hung open as her eyes ran down his tight muscled body, and settled on the cock that hung girthy between his legs.

“Holy shit, I’m so sorry,” Ryan tried to say as he dove back into the dunes and scrambled to cover himself. “I’m not some pervert or something.”

“I guess I am,” the young woman answered then she continued on her way, the sound of her heavy breathing causing the blood in Ryan’s body to start to gather in the cock she had so recently been admiring.