One True Mate: Shifter's Solace (Kindle Worlds Novella)
Georgette St. Clair
Chapter One
“Yo, Rory, make me a sammich, will ya?”
Rory threw half an onion at his fellow firefighter’s head, and missed. “You wanna cook instead, Ben?”
There was a chorus of dismay and the sound of someone mock-barfing.
From the Chief’s office, a deep voice called out, “I forbid it.”
“Thought so.” Rory shook his head sadly. “Man, those biscuits you made – could’ve used them for hockey pucks.”
Ben picked up the half onion and took a big, crunchy bite, then grinned while the rest of the shift groaned with disgust. He would famously eat anything, which meant that his cooking had to be tasted to be believed. Tunafish and jelly sandwiches, a substance he swore was oatmeal but they’d privately agreed was tile grout…he could even fuck up bacon. They’d unanimously voted him off the kitchen rota.
“That was my grandmother’s recipe,” he said with his mouth full, hand on his heart as though mortally offended.
Rory pointed his knife at him. “I won’t listen to you slander an innocent old lady,” he rumbled, and went back to chopping onions for the lasagne he was building for the next day.
The trick to cooking for the squad was to make something that could be abandoned halfway through if a call came in, and reheated without turning into rubber. And something that could be made in bulk, of course – bearen ate a lot, and every man in Firehouse 206 near Serenity, Illinois was a bear shiften.
It had been a quiet shift. The ambulance had been dispatched a couple of hours before to a kid who had his head stuck in the park railings, and when a tub of Vaseline and a lot of pulling had failed to get him free, the truck had been sent out with a high-speed steel saw to cut through the wrought iron. There had been a call about a cat in a tree, but the Chief had got on the line and suggested that they open a can of tuna. Nothing else so far.
In fact the whole week had been quiet. Most of it had been spent up at the water tower, cleaning off the graffiti that kept reappearing there: They walk among us. Werewolves are real!
To clean it off, they had to use fire department equipment to either climb up or abseil down. They couldn’t work out how it was even getting up there, but it kept coming back.
Everyone on the squad knew, though, that a quiet shift could turn on a dime. It only took one call – one dropped match, one spark from faulty wiring, one tipsy smoker falling asleep with a lit cigarette, one building site collapse or industrial accident…
The squad were ready to drop everything and move out when the call came, their boots lined up next to the engine, their turnout pants and jackets ready to shrug on. Even when the station was quiet, they ran drills, and they could go from suppertime to sirens in less than a minute.
When the stove timer beeped, Rory abandoned his prep work and pulled out big pans of chicken stew, thick with vegetables and topped with golden-brown cheddar biscuits. Good, rich smells filled the air.
Ben inhaled deeply. “You’ll make somebody a lovely wife one day, princess,” he said.
The laughter in response was half-hearted, and Rory fought not to let the pain those words caused him show. “You’ll make someone a lovely rug one day,” he shot back as the guys helped themselves to platefuls of the fragrant stew and sat down to eat. But his heart wasn’t really in it.
The fact was, none of them were likely to find wives. Ever. Almost all the female shiften had been killed off years before, victims of the demon Khain. The demon’s plan was one final generation of shiften, mateless and suffering, and then nobody to stand in his way; the human race completely at his mercy without its protectors.
Rory joined the others at the table, and they ate their food in silence, listening to the clink and scrape of silverware against plates. Mostly it was just because bearen rarely let anything get in the way of filling their bellies – they were big and brawny, and since almost all of them worked as firefighters, they needed the fuel. Rory was quiet for a different reason, though. Their paramedic, Brady, always with an uncanny knack for knowing when one of the others was hurting, spoke up.
“They’re still out there, you know,” he said to Rory. “The women. The ones from the prophecy. The ones who’re meant for us. You shouldn’t give up hope.”
Rory shook his head. “They’re not meant for us,” he said. “They’re going to be for the wolven. They’re the humans’ protectors, not us.”
There was a sudden bang, and the table shuddered. Ben had slammed his fork down on the tabletop and was on his feet, glowering. His usual infuriating good humor was gone, and his face was dark with anger. “Bullshit,” he said furiously. “That’s bullshit. We’re their protectors too. We risk our lives every damn day to keep people safe. Fuck you, Rory. Fuck you.”
And he stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard it bounced back open again, which kind of ruined the effect.
Nobody laughed, though. The emotion in the room was too raw for that. Rory stared down at the table, fists clenched on either side of his plate, afraid to open his mouth in case he roared.
Brady was the first one to speak, always the peacemaker. “He’s just hurting,” he told Rory. “He wants a mate – we all want a mate – and he’s scared it’s never going to happen for him.”