Page 10 of Full Moon Frenzy

The sheep woman waved a hand. “Oh, I run the coffee shop. I know everything about everyone five minutes before it happens. I’m so glad you made it to the festival! Hard move? Kanar said you were coming from a bit of a distance?”

Kanar was the orc in the practice, a model-handsome pediatrician. Her face heated at the thought of being talked about. But this is just sharing harmless community news, right?

“I did, but it was fine. I-I moved myself. Workers are coming to unpack the trailer tomorrow, so I should be okay.”

“Love that, I’m a do-it-myself girl as well. Xavier? This is the new doctor!”

Adriana felt the flush spread up her ears when a man with the horns of a ram and long locs secured at the back of his head turned, giving her a warm smile, extending a hand. “Welcome to town. They are really looking forward to you starting at the clinic.”

“This is my brother, and this is my husband, Reg . . . Like I said,” the sheepwoman went on. “We know everything. If there’s anything you need help with, where to go, where to shop, I’m your girl. Now, make sure you open your welcome packet when it comes in the mail this week! There’s a pastry punch card in there for our shop — buy ten, get one free, and all teachers, medical, and first responders get a free medium house roast every day. And welcome to town!”

The smile Adriana gave the sheepwoman in response was more genuine than any she could remember crossing her face in months. They’re really nice and they give discounts?!

Her attempt to thank the coffee shop owners was swallowed by a sudden cheer rippling out from a nearby tent. She and the sheepwoman both turned in surprise, her brother leaning in to hear a reedy troll.

“Xenna, your man is stripping down. Ruby just said he’s next on the tank.”

The coffeeshop proprietress spun, her arms pinwheeling. She shoved a full bag of kettle corn in Adriana’s arms, sloshing the sweating cup of lemonade again, pulling off the bag she wore and thrusting it at the second ram-horned man.

“Hold my bag, Reg! We are getting that werewolf dripping wet tonight!”

“Should you be this excited to see that fireman in his drawers when I am standing right here?”

Xenna was already gone, pushing through the crowd with a fistful of money.

By the time Adriana edged her way closer to the noise, the crowd was so thick that she could barely see the platform. The man sitting atop it was practically naked, waving theatrically to the crowd he’d gathered.

Squinting, she tried to make him out . . . dark-haired with a lean, muscular frame, details she could only pick out based on the vaguely triangular shape of his upper body. Whoever he was, the town seemed deeply invested in his survival.

Or perhaps more accurately, she thought, surveying the whooping bystanders, deeply invested in ending it. This is like a public execution.

Another werewolf.

Her nose had picked them out of the crowd since her arrival at the square, one after another, able to smell them long before she could see them, a habit etched into the fabric of her very being. It was important to be aware of them, to know where they were, to determine if one was surrounded. Wolves, in her experience, weren’t friendly to her kind.

That’s only because you lived near the pack.

She knew it was technically true; knew that if her own pack had picked up and moved away from the wolves that had neighbored them, things might have been different. Her whole life might have been different . . . But they hadn’t, and there was no point in dwelling over a past that had never existed. The wolfpack had existed on the edge of the human city, and her smaller pack had clung to the fringes on the rim of that territory. Scavengers. Mongrels. Find your own space.

It was clear that the werewolf population in this town was ample, but none of them carried the smell of a pack. Maybe it won’t matter. You don’t have to let it matter.

A groan went up as the thrower struck out, and the wolf on the platform celebrated by dancing in victory from his precarious seat. The crowd erupted again as another throw narrowly missed the target. The man continued his cocky celebration, earning a fresh round of laughter from the spectators below.

Adriana found herself smiling again, in spite of herself. There was something strangely wholesome about witnessing a community comfortable enough with itself to create traditions built entirely around publicly humiliating someone they liked, werewolf or not.

She heard one of the balls find its target, striking the arm that kept the popular man upright a moment before he dropped. The assembled crowd seemed almost too shocked to react for a moment, erupting in laughter and cheers when he vanished, clapping and hooting as he pulled himself back onto the righted platform a minute later. She could barely make him out, but she knew he was dripping with water.

A brand new start in a nice little town, where everyone knew and liked each other enough to come together for an event like this. Nicer than anything she’d known before, but that didn’t have to matter either. She was tired of feeling as though her life was a series of temporary stops. Permanence. You can be anyone you want here. Nobody knows you. You have nothing to prove. Leave the anxiety behind and actually start living.

Her phone began to ring as she struggled to open her front door for the very first time a short while later, having hopped back on the convenient little trolley, juggling her lemonade, the second foil-wrapped sausage she’d purchased to bring home, and the bag of kettlecorn.

“Just making sure you didn’t have any trouble on the road. Everything go okay?”

Her mother never bothered with a greeting. Adriana was always vaguely mystified by phone conversations that started out with hi sweetie, hello dear, it’s mom, how are you? She and her mother simply started the conversation, no preliminary niceties involved.

“No problems at all. I got in a little while ago, no issues. Movers will be here early to unpack the trailer. I start work in a few days,” she went on hurriedly, not giving her mother a chance to tsk over the unneeded expenditure of saving her back. “I can’t be hauling boxes up two flights of steps. There’s a fair in town, so I went to grab something to eat before they shut down.”

“How’s the place?”