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Chelsea Wintergreen hummed the tune to Rocky Mountain High as she wound her way along Moose Antler Trail. True, they weren’t in West Virginia, but they were high up on a rocky mountain. The views were breathtaking; the icy cool blues and grays of the mountainside, the towering green pines whose tips brushed the azure sky.
“This is it, Pepper,” she announced to the fat old beagle who lay curled up on the passenger seat next to her. “We’ve finally found a home!”
She’d found Pepper abandoned in a grocery store parking lot the last semester of college, and she had gone through great pains to keep her hidden from the dorm monitor. But now, the days of rushing Pepper into her dorm room closet two or three times a week were officially behind her.
Pepper yawned and put her paw over her nose. She shot a reproachful look at Chelsea, a look that said, Let me sleep.
“No more hiding!” Chelsea said, trying to drum up some excitement in her canine companion. “You can roam wild and free! Well, in a fenced-in backyard, of course.”
She was rewarded with a gentle snore and a mild blast of flatulence that had her quickly rolling down her window. Realistically, it was hard to imagine Pepper roaming anywhere other than from her dog bed to her food bowl and back again. Also Chelsea was pretty sure that Pepper could fart at will, the rotten little beast.
Well, she wasn’t going to let anything dampen her enthusiasm. She was sure that Silver Peak was meant to be her home and her pack. Growing up in a foster home, without a pack or a family, had been tough. She’d learned to make the best of it, though. She’d pretty much had to, given her…condition.
She’d been worried, though, when she’d graduated from the Culinary Institute.
Like all shifters, she was required by law to sign up with a pack or pride as soon as she graduated from college or by her twenty-first birthday. Most shifters belonged to their family’s pack, but shifters like her, with no family, faced a dilemma upon reaching adulthood. Shifters who did not belong to packs or prides, and who did not have regular contact with other shifters, went feral within six months. The only way to ensure that no shifter went feral was to require that they be a member of a shifter group, and also to require that the leader of that group sent regular reports to the Council for Shifter Affairs certifying that all members were socializing like good little human-animals.
Of course, a lot of shifters resented having to report to the council in the first place. Humans had created shifters with the illegal experiments of the 1930s; there was understandable suspicion of any human agency overseeing them.
But, as compensation, the U.S. Government had given shifters enormous tracts of land where they could live completely free of human supervision or law, with one exception: monthly socialization reports. Or else.
Fortunately for Chelsea, as her twenty-first birthday had approached, the Council for Shifter Affairs had found a distant relative on her late mother’s side and put her in touch. Her choice was to join that relative’s pack or have the Council try to find her some random pack somewhere that was willing to accept a mutant strain of shifter like herself.
Well, the third choice was to live among humans, apart from all shifters, and go slowly crazy until she went feral and attacked someone and was put down with a silver bullet, but that didn’t seem like a really fun choice.
Mel, her third cousin twice removed, had responded to Chelsea’s phone call with great enthusiasm. She’d assured her that the pack would love her, and that Chelsea could crash on her couch as long as she liked and Pepper could come too.
This was it, then. This was the beginning of her new life.
One not-so-small ghost of worry nagged at her. She hadn’t yet told her cousin about her…condition. Not that it was so terrible, but it was something that put people off when they knew about it. It was why she’d never really had close friends in college, why she hadn’t yet found a pack to call her own.
Distracted, she almost missed the sign for Rural Route 501, it was so small. It was hand painted on a board stuck next to a towering Douglas fir tree.
“Here we go!” she sang as she drove down the narrow dirt road. And drove. And drove.
“Good heavens,” she muttered as she slowed to avoid hitting a deer. “Rural route? They weren’t kidding.”
Now she was starting to get a little worried. She’d passed 100 RR 501. It was a small log cabin style home with chickens pecking in the dirt out front. She was looking for 110 RR 501. But she passed by a big empty lot, and then came to 120 RR 501, a modular style house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sharply slanted asymmetrical roof.