WIP: Foxy Tails (Patreon)

“Welp, that’s it.” 

Avery Jones, forest ranger and supernatural liaison for the Aneke reserve, nodded at the cabin sitting up at the end of the dirt road stretching out ahead of them. Then he turned, hawked, and spat. It didn’t seem to be a judgment on the house, just the chew he’d had tucked in his cheek for the hour long ride out from his office.

Lisa fought the urge to change her ears so she could angle them away from that sound. 

“Ain’t bad, for free,” he added, not expecting an answer. 

Ranger Jones hadn’t required much conversation from her at all, actually, except when he needed an answer for his forms. Lisa thought he must be used to carrying on conversations by himself, which was probably how he’d gotten his job. He also had a rare ability to interpret body language and infer accurate meaning from very little. Those were desirable qualities in a person whose job it was to interact with people who couldn’t always talk back.

He was a big man -broad in the shoulders and pot-bellied with graying mutton chop sideburns- but Lisa felt comfortable enough with him aside from the chewing tobacco. He’d driven her around the tiny Aneke township, showing her the little grocery store, the town’s lending library, where the weekly farmers market was held, and all the places where you could borrow wifi. They’d made a little conversation, mostly one-sided, but she hadn’t had trouble getting a word in when necessary.

It had been easy and comfortable in a way her life hadn’t been since she’d been a kid; before the Clan had been broken up and she’d had to go live with werewolves.

“No, it isn’t,” Lisa agreed. In all honesty, the little cabin looked like heaven to her although her standards weren’t quite what they had been. Maybe she’d change her mind in a year, but in a way that would be good too. Progress, or something.

It was a little square box of a building built out of logs with pale mortar in between. The roof was mostly sod, except for a few places where the edging had broken and rain had washed it away. That was something she’d have to fix.

She’d seen pictures of the interior. It came furnished in the same mixed Goodwill bag as most public housing for cryptids. There was a loft for the bed and everything else -kitchen, bath, and one lone armchair- occupied the same ground-level space. Only the bathroom and an all-purpose closet had the distinction of being walled off. The cabin was heated by a wood stove and didn’t have an AC. It wouldn’t unless she decided to install one. There was pretty good light in the little grotto that surrounded her new house, enough hopefully to power a few small appliances. She planned on installing a small solar farm. Ranger Jones had promised her it didn’t get too hot in the summers, but she’d heard that before and it was usually bogus. The sod roof would at least help with that a little bit, if so.

However, the cabin was private and surrounded by old growth forest. The nearest pack border was fifteen miles away. The nearest town was an hour’s drive. She couldn’t get further from civilization in this country without climbing a mountain or shooting herself into outer space.

It was perfect.

She might feel differently when winter came and she was forced to learn how to use that wood-burning stove, but one thing at a time.

“Gas tank’s this way.” Avery nodded towards a small barn-shaped shed down the hill and near the tree line that she hadn’t noticed up until that moment. The dirt road had forked at the base of the hill when they drove in and Lisa realized that must be where the smaller lane had led to. They walked down the hill, slipping a bit on the damp grass, and he opened the door which belched out a wispy cloud of dust, dirt, and wood debris. Inside was a dirty white gravity-fed reservoir; basically a barrel on four legs with a tap welded to the lowest point on the reservoir. It had a connected hose that ended in an attachment that bore enough resemblance to the gas station fuel pumps she was used to that she could figure it out. It had the very familiar look of a DIY solution to the fact that people didn’t like to deliver to the cryptid reserves –aside from other cryptids, that is.

“There’s probably water in there.  It’s been a minute since anybody here called for a delivery. The Finns up north of here’ll add you to their distribution route. Don’t put any in your truck until Sammy’s drained it and replaced it with fresh stuff. Deliveries happen every other week, unless you say otherwise. Everybody clubs together once a year for a tanker to come out. Last fella to stay here paid up through January and didn’t ask for his money back so you don’t have to worry until next year,” Ranger Jones continued. “Put the plug into your can before you open the valve. Jimmy Finn makes these in his barn and some of ‘em leak.”

Lisa stuck her head into the shed to look around. Her eyes adjusted fast enough that they probably didn’t look human anymore, so she kept her gaze angled away from the Ranger in case he was the type who got weird about that. There were other tools in the shed; a jumble of gardening tools and a roll of chicken wire. “Was there a garden here?” she asked. She had money, enough of it to get by until she could get her channels going again and bump her revenue back up to where it had been originally (hopefully), but the shelves at the grocers hadn’t exactly been overflowing. There was plenty of hunting around and her species were opportunistic eaters so she could survive on just about anything, but a vegetable garden would help a lot.

Although –come to think of it, she hadn’t been in a garden since she was eleven. She’d have to re-learn a lot.

“Ayup. It was terraced down the hill behind the cabin.” Ranger Jones jerked his chin towards the house, in case she’d been confusing it with all the other cabins around. “Last tenant didn’t do much with it so it’s overgrown. He’s a bear so he did a lot of foraging instead. The raised beds’re still there, but you’re gonna need to deal with the turf and probably evict some vermin.”

The thought of a little hunting made her teeth lengthen and this time Lisa didn’t hesitate to smile so he could see them. “I think I’ll manage.”

Ranger Jones nodded, looking thoughtful. “I can see how you might,” he agreed. “Folks share seed stock around here, but it’s late in the year for that. There’s some companies that’ll ship live plants to the township. Stop by the office later this week and I’ll get you some catalogs.

A low, but growing sound caught Lisa’s attention and she stepped out of the shed to see a ramshackle rental truck growling up the dirt road. The side of it had ‘MOVeRs’ spray painted on the side in a shaky hand with ‘& SHAKERS’ written underneath in a much more confident and artistic cursive. 

“My stuff’s here,” she told Ranger Jones who nodded and started tramping his way up the hill. The owner of the mom-and-pop moving company she’d hired, a Lamia by the name of Rashid, had offered him a ride back to Aneke township in exchange for his help unloading the van. Ranger Jones seemed resigned to it although Lisa would have given him a ride if he’d asked.

Rashid pulled his van up behind Lisa’s truck and waved at them through the windshield. He had the look of a normal human, albeit an ethnically ambiguous one with dark gold skin, thin, fine red hair, and a flat nose. His transformation magic was good apart from his green-gold reptilian eyes and forked tongue, which he couldn’t alter past a certain point. He greeted Lisa with a back-pounding hug and exchanged restrained, manly nods with Ranger Jones.

Lisa looked around for Rashid’s wife and, not finding her, looked quizzically at Rashid.

“Tsiya is in town getting us some lunch,” he explained. “She sends her regards and hopes you like your new place.”

“I haven’t been inside yet.” Lisa looked up at the cabin and hoped for the best. “So I guess we’ll find out.”

“Knew I forgot something,” Ranger Jones coughed and rummaged in his pocket. He came up with an old-fashioned steel key on a stained leather tab. “Here you go.” He cleared his throat, held up the key and intoned a word that hurt Lisa’s ears and made her brain skitter sideways rather than try to understand it. She forgot the sound almost as soon as he said it, but that was magic for you. Blue sigils lit up the sides of the key and he held it out to her.

Lisa swallowed and forced herself to open her hand for it. Logically, she knew the light wouldn’t hurt her. The ward magic contained in the key was just pairing with her aura so that the protections on the cabin would recognize her as the proper occupant. Emotionally though, she had a hard time submitting to activated magic she hadn’t seen cast. 

Nothing happened when Ranger Jones set the key in her hand and she blew out her breath. After a few seconds, the sigils guttered out.

‘There, that wasn’t so bad?’ she asked herself and ignored the moody child that was her instinct, which pointed out that it could have been and that one time it had.

She shook off that memory.

“All right, you go open the house,” Rashid said as he unlatched the back of the truck -a reinforced wooden plank that hinged on the bottom, bolted at the top, and served double-duty as a loading ramp- then let it drop to the ground with a thump. “We’ll start unloading.”

Armed with her key, Lisa trotted up to the cabin. She took a tentative sniff and decided it smelled okay for a place that had stood empty for as long as this one had.

The door opened at the lightest touch of her hand, which was reassuring. The ward magic had accepted her. Doors didn’t often have actual locks in cryptid communities. The key now in her pocket was just a symbolic tool; a physical object that Ranger Jones had used to confer certain magical privileges on her, namely; the privilege of not getting thrown across the yard for trying to enter her house and the authority to issue verbal permission for other people to come inside.

On the inside, things didn’t look much different than the pictures she’d seen online. Someone had swapped the faded armchair out for a palm-tree patterned loveseat with 1980s-vintage rounded corners. They’d also added a coffee table and an alarmingly ugly trophy fish over the black cast iron stove.

“Oh good. You’re in.”

Rashid was standing just outside the door with a loaded dolly that represented roughly a quarter of her worldly goods. He raised his eyebrows and nodded at the threshold. 

“You can bring those inside.” Lisa said and they both paid very close attention to the dolly as Rashid carefully pushed it through the door. The dolly and then Rashid passed through without issue. 

“Where would you like them?” he asked.

Lisa squinted at the labels she’d carefully affixed to every box. “It looks like that’s kitchen stuff. They can go by the cupboards. Everything else except the mattress can go by the sofa and I’ll figure out where to put things from there.”

“Very good.”

It took three trips to bring everything inside, including the stuff from the back of her truck. The sum-total of her life now fit into ten boxes and two big suitcases, not including her mattress and electronics. That was after she’d stopped halfway to Aneke from South Carolina to shoot some vlog footage, a few tiktoks, and then hit up an alternative energy specialty store in anticipation of her new circumstances.

“I think that’s it,” Rashid declared once they’d all met up in the front yard. “Is there anything else you need moved?”

“No, just the fish.” Lisa looked to make sure it was still in the front seat of the van where it could go home with Ranger Jones. She didn’t think the original spirit would still be attached to it. They couldn’t usually hold on through the taxidermy process, but she wasn’t keen to find out otherwise. If anyone could deal with a haunted fish, it’d be Ranger Jones. “Thank you.” 

“All right, if you don’t mind then I’d like to borrow your restroom real quick before we head out.” Rashid turned as he spoke. He’d been standing just outside the door and wasn’t trying to get in, but his shoulder passed over the threshold as he moved and that seemed to be enough for the wards.

A soundless explosion swept over Lisa, whipping her hair back, and Rashid went flying. She staggered and stared in dismay as Rashid’s form arced through the air. She had a couple seconds to race through ideas on ways she could possibly get something under him before he was halted in mid-air. She turned and saw Ranger Jones pointing at him with two fingers, blue eyes alight with mystical energy. He slowly lowered his arm and Rashid to the ground. Then he blinked and his eyes went back to their normal brown. 

“Hoooo,” he sighed and trotted over to where Rashid was struggling to sit up. “Sorry about that. Gotta be careful about the doors. My magic don’t really deal in fuzzy logic and I put some extra oomph in the protection on this cabin since it’s away from the road and there’s a young lady here.”

“Yeah, wow,” Rashid groaned. Between the two of them, they managed to get him on his feet again. He seemed okay, but a little shaky. “Thanks for catching me. Might have to ask you to drive back to town.”

“Sure,” Ranger Jones grunted and held his hand out for the keys. He turned back to Lisa. “You be careful around the door, but now you know what it can do if you need it. If it rejects someone three times within five minutes then an alert will sound at the Ranger’s station and at Ma Finn’s place. One or, more likely, both of us will come out to investigate. We don’t get a lot of trouble out here so if any comes your way then you hunker down in the cabin until one of us comes to deal with it.”

Lisa nodded to show she understood. Ranger Jones understood something of her circumstances so he wasn’t telling her all this casually. 

Ma Finn, the alpha werewolf of Finn Pack, was responsible for approving immigration applications and so she was the person that Lisa had had the most contact with. She knew all of Lisa’s story, but had made the executive decision to keep parts of it quiet except among her direct subordinates because young werewolves liked nothing better than starting shit with one another and nobody wanted five or six of the junior Finns to go butt their snoots into Lisa’s not-so-little problem, least of all Lisa. 

The Rangers were a peacekeeping force in the North American Preserve Network whose primary mission was to keep unauthorized humans and supernaturals out of the preserves so they had to know some of the details too, but at the end of the day Ma Finn’s truck still had an enormous ACAB sticker on it. She wasn’t about to share anything with the rangers that didn’t directly relate to Lisa’s safety, even if they were marginally cooler than most cops.

Lisa blew out her breath, patted her cheeks, and turned to look at her big plastic crates of stuff. Most of what was still outside were the components for her solar farm, which she’d need to get up and running if she wanted to catch any sunlight today. Otherwise her phone battery and laptop might not last the night.

“Time to get to work,” she told herself. 

At least she’d get some footage out of this.

-

Shooting was way different when you didn’t have a camera person or even an extra set of hands. Professionally, Angel had been the best camera person an influencer could ask for, but privately she’d been solidly pro-Cameron and that meant she was never truly going to be on Lisa’s side so Lisa hadn’t even tried to convince her to come with. Angel would have sold her out for a pat on the head. Lisa tried not to feel too bitter about that. It wasn’t really her fault. Wolves could get super enmeshed about pack stuff.  

To make up for that, Lisa set up three of her old point-and-shoots in the trees surrounding her soon to be solar farm and satellite sites, checking the feeds over and over until she was sure she had the most useful angles of her project covered. She could make this work. There’d just be a little more post production work than her channel had had needed before.

Watching herself go through the process of setting up the solar panels in triple time was a welcome respite after a long day. She sat on the floor in front of her iron stove with all the windows open to catch what little moving air there was outside, but it was supplemented by a little fan that was not running off the generator. The generator was fine and all, but she wanted to reserve her fuel for bad weather when the solar farm wouldn’t be operating at peak efficiency.

After a certain point during the installation, Lisa had clearly forgotten that the cameras were there, which was why she found herself hesitating over a two minute section of video where a panel fell on her while she was laying underneath trying to figure out what she’d done wrong with the wiring. Turns out the panel was loose in the frame and when it fell it hit her hard enough that she lost hold of her transformation and had shifted back to a fox while still on camera. 

On screen, her clothes deflated in a little puff of disturbed air and grass fragments. A little brown and gray fox wiggled out from the other end of the tilted panel, shook itself so that its fur puffed out, and then yipped angrily at the panel before trotting off screen.

Her  goal was to have a few weeks of footage ready before she took Foxy_Tails off hiatus. She only had two weeks of her scheduled break left and in that time she had to take care of the maintenance backlog that the previous tenant had left for her. Fixing the roof, the inside of the cabin, and the garden could make for good video material so she wasn’t as stressed about that. She’d also arrived ready to deal with power and internet, but she’d been banking on having a blanker canvas to work with inside the cabin in terms of visuals. The photos on the cabin online showed plain wood walls, but the last tenant had decided to paint over a lot of it in a really sad shade of avocado that didn’t match the existing furniture at all.  There was a lot of painting and decorating in her future.

That was why she couldn’t waste time re-shooting this section. The internet loved seeing a Process, but she needed to start off with a ‘before and after’ shot to really drive interest in her renovation.

Objectively, the incident with the solar panel was good footage. It was the right note of comedy to lighten up what would otherwise be some dreary DIY. It wasn’t a graphic transformation either. You didn’t actually see anything except a little bit of radiation effect. Fox shapeshifting was different than lycanthropy. Her transformation was magical, not viral so you didn’t get the whole ‘tearing skin and snapping bones’ thing. The afternoon light was great and her hair looked cute when she came back on camera in a fluffy robe to retrieve her clothes.

The only thing was, she’d never changed on camera before. That was werewolf stuff and a totally different target demographic. Foxy_Tails wasn’t about that. Her business model was primitive crafting with a little bit of ASMR, cooking, and stealth feminism.

Lisa sat back in her chair to stare at the ceiling, wrestling with the problem. She could just cut that bit. The jump wouldn’t be noticeable, but the rest of the clip was kind of boring. ‘Boring’ wasn’t the note she wanted to strike for her return. Taking the hiatus was risky enough even though she’d been keeping up with teasers and posts on her other social media platforms. 

It wasn’t like her viewers didn’t know that she was a shapeshifter. She spent as much time on four legs as on two even on camera. She just hadn’t changed on screen.

She rocked forward again.

‘Don’t change in front of the normies’ had been one of Cameron’s big rules. It had been right up there with ‘no one leaves the house after eight’ and ‘only Cameron gets to have a bank account.’

Thinking about the Santa Clarita house was just the right push. Fuck Cameron and fuck his rules. She wasn’t in California anymore. Lisa was her own pack now so she made her own rules. 

She pulled her laptop closer and started to work.

-

Come morning, Lisa had a bunch of videos ready to go across her various channels and so had no excuse to avoid unpacking. With her solar farm and satellite in place, she at least had some happy television noise to keep her company. The first thing she’d done after catching some breakfast was get the TV set up. Next up was the kitchen since even she couldn’t live off mice and voles forever. She’d even managed to snag some non-graphic footage this morning of herself hunting among the dew-glazed grass to work in as a little intro. 

Very little had come with her from California. For one thing, the pack had shared so much stuff and had so little storage that it was hard to figure out what belonged to who or to get it back even if you did. For another, nothing would have tipped Cameron off faster that she planned to run than having Rashid pull up in front of the pack house. Most of what she’d managed to squirrel away in a storage unit rented under her dad’s name was duplicated video equipment and old stuff she didn’t use much anymore, so the others were less likely to notice it had gone missing. She’d pretended to have donated it, but actually stored it for her escape. She’d had to leave most of her belongings behind as a decoy. 

Her clothes, her kitchen supplies, and her bed had all been purchased en-route. So it was a little like Christmas morning as she opened up boxes of brand new pans, spoons, and other things. She’d tried to balance utility with stuff that looked good; copper pans, wood spoons, and a million little ceramic bowls for putting ingredients into. The beautiful Damascus steel knives were what she’d really splurged on because of the way they sang on the cutting board.

The only problem was that the kitchen as it stood was going to be a terrible place to shoot. It was a galley style kitchenette with two postage stamps worth of counter space on either side of the sink. Her options were to put a camera on a tripod behind her or glue a mount to the underside of the cupboards. Neither made for compelling video. She had a vague idea of building a work table so she could at least face the camera or install an outside cooking space, but for the moment her prospects were dreary.

She’d have to work around it or focus on cooking over a campfire for a little while. That might end up happening for a bit anyway. The cabin’s ventilation fans were all full of squirrel trash. 

Lisa’s ears twitched as the sound of crunching gravel reached her. A sudden and irrational fear seized her and she scrambled for the front window to reassure herself that it wasn’t Cameron’s truck outside. 

It was a truck, but it wasn’t his truck. She sagged against the window in relief until it occurred to her to wonder who the hell was visiting her. 

The truck pulled up in front of her cabin with two guys about her age in the front seat. They were no one she knew and she couldn’t figure out what they could possibly want until the one in the passenger seat got out clutching a laptop. 

They were both tall and sort of reedy without the artificially symmetrical features of someone who’d picked their faces out of a book. Still, she could taste magic that wasn’t hers on the air as they got close enough for the wind to carry it over. Their shapes might be human, but they weren’t. That left a short and dangerous list of options for what they could be. 

At least the worst two options were the least likely. Aneke wasn’t zoned for vampires and the Finn pack -while not all related- were all some flavor of African or Latin descent. These guys were both super white. Lisa’s human face could usually pass for Caucasian. Her template was from a woman of Japanese-Irish ancestry who’d sold her likeness to a fox clan back in the forties in exchange for shelter from the internment camps. These visitors made Lisa look way darker in comparison.

“Hi!” Laptop guy said through a painful looking smile as she stepped out onto the porch. “I’m Jason and this is Peter. We’re your neighbors to the north. Uh, this might be kinda forward but could I borrow your wifi for like twenty minutes?”

Peter, the other guy, gave Jason a fond albeit exasperated sidelong look. “We’re sorry to drop in on you, but our satellite dish is down and this joker has a deadline to meet. We were driving into town, but his phone picked up on your network so we stopped, hoping you were in a generous mood. We’ll stay on the porch or anywhere you feel comfortable with us staying.”

“Sure.” Lisa wasn’t actually sure, but these were the first locals aside from Ranger Jones that she’d had any contact with. The urge to make a good impression was strong and, well, it wouldn’t cost her anything except the time it’d take to change the password after they left. “The signal is good on the porch. I’ll go write down the password for you.”

“Thank you so much,” Jason groaned. “You’re saving my life here.”

“Okay,” Lisa said and fled.

When she came back, Jason was seated on the front step with the laptop open. His screen was full of complicated looking code. She couldn’t even guess what it was supposed to be. She steeled her nerves and held the post-it note with her wifi password on it out to him. 

“Here you go,” she said and retreated as soon as he accepted it. 

To her credit, she didn’t go far; just far enough that she felt like she wasn’t distracting him.

Peter came over to join her and he had such an easy manner about him that it felt like her nerves eased via osmosis. “Thanks again,” he said. “Our router died last night and the wifi at the diner is down half the time. I didn’t like our odds.” He paused, evaluating her. “Did you move here recently? It’s a little hard to tell when someone new is around.”

“Yesterday. I’m still getting moved in. I spent most of yesterday getting the power set up.” Lisa tilted her head towards the farm. Peter followed the gesture with his mouth open like he was about to say something, but stalled when he spotted the farm.

Lisa was glad that she’d taken the time to do the job properly. She’d put in a bed of sand and gravel under the frames holding up the panels and buried the cables so it even looked nice. 

“Holy…” He stumbled off the porch and trotted over to look, vibrating with barely contained energy. “Who did you get to install this? Are they still around?”

“Oh, here we go,” Jason sighed and hunched over his computer. “I’m so sorry in advance.”

Lisa looked back and forth between them, trying to figure them out. One of two things happened when dudes encountered one of her projects. Either they started going on about how they did stuff like that all the time or they started nitpicking the pretty details she’d put into her work. She couldn’t tell which flavor of irritating these two had the potential to be. “I got the kit on my way out of Cali.”

Peter turned to look at her. “Seriously?” he asked. “How much stuff does this power?”

“The whole cabin so far, although there isn’t much in there but kitchen stuff and my AV equipment. I haven't put in AC yet.” Lisa shrugged one shoulder and felt a little at sea. He wasn’t making fun of her yet. That was so at odds with her past experience with boys that she didn’t know how to handle it. “It only got a few hours of sun the other day, but the battery lasted all night.”

“Do you think you could do something like this at our place?” He asked. “I thought you had to put solar on the roof and we’ve got a green roof like yours.”

“I’d have to take a look and maybe put a light meter out, but you can put them anywhere that gets enough sun. Ranger Jones was nice enough to track the light for me and mark the ground before I came out so I could get my kit installed right away. I wanted to keep the green roof so I went with a little ground farm. Might be different for you.”

“That would be amazing. We’ve been wanting solar, but no one will come out here to give us a quote.” Peter scowled. “Or, I should say, they’ll be agreeable up until the point where they realize our house is in the preserve and not the township. Then suddenly I’m outside their service area so we’ve been having to buy extra fuel for a generator.”

“We’ve got money,” Jason sighed from where he was watching a progress bar slowly crawl across a web screen. “We’ve had a budget set aside since we moved out here, but the Finn pack has a bad reputation with the normies in this county. You can’t get service here for love, money, or song unless it’s from a cryptid company and none of them do solar.”

That sounded familiar. Lisa had learned most of her handyperson skills by necessity. It seemed like everyone knew where the pack houses in town were so it was impossible to hire plumbers or electricians. That meant it was up to the housebound pack members to figure stuff out. “Yeah, I know how that goes,” Lisa sighed. “You might have to drive a little for supplies, but they sell all kinds of kits. I can give you some recommendations.” 

“That’s great.” Peter pulled out his phone and held it up. “Can I get your number… and, um, your name?”

Lisa felt her face go hot. “Oh! Um, sure. It’s Lisa.” She fumbled for her phone so they could go through the process of exchanging texts and adding new contacts. In doing so, she discovered they both had the last name. “Is ‘Woodsman’ a family or pack name?” she asked. 

Peter ducked his face and his ears went a little pink. “Both,” he admitted. “Jason is my partner, but we’re also registered as a pack unit so we both took the name Woodsman when we got married.”

“Oh?” Lisa cocked her head, both curious and a bit more at ease to know these two were committed to one another and she didn’t have to worry about the other problem young women living along could have with random men showing up on her doorstep. “Do you mind me asking what you are? Whatever it is, I haven’t smelled one before so I can’t tell.”

‘Pack’ used to imply werewolves, but a lot of the legal organization for cryptids since the 1980s was based on a werewolf pack structure. Most cryptids had some sort of family or group unit. Some were solitary, like werebears and sasquatch, but those types were pretty rare. Even Lisa’s original clan looked a lot like a wolf pack on paper, which is why she’d been dumped in Santa Clarita by CPS when her family died. So just because Peter said he had a pack didn’t necessarily mean she could make assumptions about what kind of pack. 

“I’d be really surprised if you had,” Jason replied on Peter’s behalf as he hit the enter button on his keyboard with a sigh of relief. He closed the laptop and set it aside to turn and face the conversation. “We're a pretty rare form of shapeshifter and traditionally solitary. The Woodsman pack has an open door charter that only excludes viral lycanthropy so we could still apply for a spot in Aneke without stepping on Ma Finn’s toes.”

Well, that made sense. The Finns were chartered for only viral lycanthropes, which was one of the main reasons Lisa had felt OK entering another wolf-controlled territory. They couldn’t make her move in with them the way she’d been forced into the Santa Clarita house by CPS as a kid. Humans might hate being shut out of anything on general principle, but exclusions like that helped different cryptid groups coexist peaceably. ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ and all that.

“I heard there was a fox moving in,” Peter asked, saving her from having to bring it up. “Kitsune?” he guessed.

“Sort of, but I’m native to this continent,” she explained. “We’re distant cousins, though, and use similar shapeshifting abilities. My own ancestors didn’t actually have a lot to do with humans until some Kitsune came over with a group of Japanese immigrants in the thirties and we started trading techniques. I saw you coming down the road. Which direction is your plot in?”

“Our hunting grounds butt up to yours a little ways north of here,” Peter explained as he pointed in the relevant direction. “We only take down big game so it’s not a problem if you need to hunt closer to our place. It might even be safer for you. I don’t know if the Rangers told you, but there’s mountain lions around here sometimes. They don’t get near our place though.”

“They did,” Lisa nodded as she agreed. “I haven’t smelled any big predators around. The immediate area still smells like bear, but they might move in after a while. Ms Finn said she could have some of her boys run through once or twice a month if I was willing to work out a trade.”