The Lottery--Furry Read online

  The Lottery - Furry

  Karen Ranney

  Karen Ranney LLC

  Copyright © 2016 by Karen Ranney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Free Care, Come On In, Y’all

  2. Me, female. You, keeper of all wisdom

  3. I've been fighting my fate ever since

  4. Have you lost your two front teeth?

  5. My libido got all squirrelly and squeaky

  6. I was a spoiled, entitled, brat

  7. Was he a Wolfie?

  8. I was a slut for Fig Newtons

  9. Notice I wasn't moving?

  10. Big whoop de do

  11. Luxury for the most discriminating Were

  12. Torrance Taxi at your service

  13. I won the lottery

  14. He deserved to have his balls cut off

  15. I was still winging it

  16. They'd pull out Uzis

  17. Am I your first Were?

  18. My libido crawled out of its cave

  19. They’ll destroy it

  20. I was in deep doodoo

  21. Fear is like cranberry sauce

  22. I wasn't ready to die

  23. My house was trashed

  24. Think supply and demand

  25. I’d had about as much drama as I could stand

  26. Is it time? Is it?

  Also by Karen Ranney

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Free Care, Come On In, Y’all

  “Dorothy’s picked up another one,” the vet tech said.

  My heart sank.

  “Are she and Fred on the outs again?”

  Betty nodded.

  Dorothy was a genuine kind soul who’d made it her life’s work to collect every stray in a thirty block radius, especially when she and her husband were having problems.

  Dorothy’s condo organization restricted her to two dogs, which meant that she could only keep her two yippy little Chihuahuas, both of whom needed a personality transplant.

  In addition, although she was married to a retired Air Force colonel, Dorothy never had any ready cash. Fred kept her on a tight financial leash, if you’ll pardon the pun. I thought that was one of the reasons they fought so often. Therefore, she couldn’t pay for any of the rescued dogs’ services, such as heartworm testing and treatment, flea dipping, shots, not to mention spray and neuter operations.

  I couldn’t turn her away, however, but my partners in the practice were giving me dirty looks and not so veiled hints. My being a terminal softy wasn’t affecting their bottom line yet since I paid for everything, but I think they were afraid I was setting a precedent. Nowhere on the outside of Alamo Veterinary Services, LLC did it say: Free Care, Come On In, Y’all.

  “Is she here?” I asked.

  “No, she skedaddled,” Betty said.

  Dorothy always skedaddled, especially when the bill was due. I’d transfer some more money out of my savings into my checking account. One of these days I was going to have to have the conversation that I dreaded. The one in which I sounded heartless and said: you can’t keep bringing me the dogs you find, Dorothy.

  “I wish Fred would stay at home,” I said.

  Whenever Fred was on the prowl, so was Dorothy. He was looking for a new female and she was on the hunt for dogs without homes.

  Talk about strays. One of these days someone would have to tell Fred that seventy-two wasn’t the optimum age for being a horn dog.

  Before I even saw him, I knew the new stray would be a male because for some reason, that’s the only gender Dorothy picked up. Females didn’t gravitate to her.

  Somewhere, all the stray male dogs in the city gathered together. Maybe behind the row of apartment buildings on the next block. I think they traded intel about where there was free food or a warm, dry place to sleep. Maybe they shared when the animal control truck rolled past and when Dorothy’s Mercedes stopped on the street.

  More than once Dorothy told me that a dog had just leaped through the passenger side window. I believed it. Dorothy had kibble written all over her and I’ll bet her Mercedes smelled like bacon.

  I didn’t know, for certain, that dogs shared a communicative bond, but as a species I wasn’t far removed from them. You see, I’m a Were. Ever since my younger brother asked me if that meant we were weird I’ve called myself a Furry, a label that doesn’t endear me to either my family or my friends. At least, those who knew what I was.

  Only another Were could recognize me, but even then, we don’t go around acknowledging each other in public. In other words, we don’t sniff each other. We don’t even venture near the nether regions in our four legged form. Can you imagine meeting the eyes of someone whose butt you just checked out when he was furry?

  Nobody at my practice knew that I was something other than human, either. I was the junior vet, which meant I got to do the things nobody else wanted to do. Trust me, it wasn’t all Milk Bones and liver treats.

  Like right this moment.

  “Go ahead and bring him in. We’ll do the tests,” I said.

  Betty brought in the stray and we both hefted him up on the examining table. He looked like an Alusky, a cross between an Alaskan Malamute and a Siberian Husky with grayish black fur, a white and black face, and ice blue eyes.

  Alice stepped into the examining room.

  “That one of your strays?” she asked.

  Alice was one of the older vets who ignored me most of the time. When she did deign to communicate with me she did so with a sneer in her voice and a spear-like gaze.

  Occasionally, based on the feeling I got around her — a kind of tingly wariness — I wondered if she weren’t a paranormal creature herself. She wasn’t a vampire because she showed up for work every morning at seven.

  The middle of her face was pinched like the neck of a balloon. If someone had been blowing up her face he stopped short of finishing the job. Everything about her expression was a little wrinkly like she was smelling something slightly off.

  Her hair was white, left long, and she shed worse than some of the elderly cats I treated.

  “Dorothy just dropped him off,” I said.

  Instead of asking me any further questions or saying something nasty about Dorothy, she only held out a collar.

  “He was wearing this,” she said, placing it on the table beside the dog.

  I thanked her and watched her leave, feeling like the room warmed several degrees with her departure.

  Something clicked the minute I looked at the dog. I had the strangest thought that I knew him. How odd was that? The longer I stared at him and his ice blue eyes, the stronger the feeling grew.

  What the hell?

  As Betty was drawing blood for the heartworm test I picked up the collar. There was a tag on it. Not anything that would help find his family, just a metal, bone shaped tag with his name.

  Joey.

  I looked at the dog, then the collar, then back at the dog.

  No.

  It couldn’t be.

  I got the chip reader and did a sweep of the dog from nose to tail. He didn’t have anything embedded beneath the fur. No way to tell who his owner was. He hadn’t been a stray for long; he was too well fed and his fur looked well brushed.

  Betty left to do the test and I was alone with the dog. We hadn’t weighed him yet but I guessed he topped seventy pounds. He was very well behaved and just lay there on the stainless steel table looking at me.

  As I watched, he rol
led over, spreading all four legs wide. He was definitely an intact male. He wiggled a little, almost as if he were saying, “Hey, girl, look at me!”

  When I was seventeen, I put a load of buckshot into Joey Palmer’s ass because he’d called me names. Even worse, he demanded that I lose my virginity to him rather than to his older brother.

  I took exception to his announcement, for which I was summarily punished. A female Were does not assert herself, especially against a male Were.

  There were lots of rules to being a Were, most of which I’d broken at one time or another.

  A Were transforming into a dog was unheard of, impossible. Of course, humans would say the same thing about being a Were. It’s all in your perspective.

  I bent close to the dog.

  “Joey? Is that you?”

  Weres have developed a language of grunts and guttural sounds we use in our four legged form. What I actually asked Joey, purely translated from Were was: Do I know you?

  He rolled over on his belly, his nose lifting as he sniffed the air. We all did that from time to time. We Furries were attuned to our environment the way fish know water.

  I stared at Joey, certain that I was losing my mind. There was no way a Were could get himself transformed into a dog.

  When I changed into my four legged form, I knew what I was. My human brain was still intact while the hind brain belonged solely to the four-legged animal. However, there was none of this foggy stuff that was supposed to happen between the two brains. I knew exactly what was going on all the time.

  I'll bet that Joey did right now, too. If this was Joey.

  "Joey, if that’s you, bark once,” I said in English.

  The dog made a hoarse chuffing sound, but only one time.

  Maybe I should reword my request.

  "Joey, do you recognize me? It's Torrance.”

  Joey barked twice, so loudly that Betty stuck her head in the door.

  "Need a muzzle?"

  I shook my head. "No, not now."

  Holy crap.

  I still wasn’t convinced.

  Instead, I went about finishing the tests. Joey the dog was healthy with no worms, a strong sounding heart, and clear lungs. The heartworm test was negative, too.

  “He’s a beautiful animal,” Betty said, running her hands through Joey’s fur.

  The vet tech had a stern, sober face, with dark brown eyes and long hair scraped into a bun and threatened to an inch of its life. No loose tendrils for Betty.

  She’d had some difficult times in her youth and now saw life like a toilet bowl, waiting for something else to be dropped into it. No amount of positive thinking or pep talk would ever make Betty an optimist, so when she smiled, like now, it was like the sun coming out from behind dark clouds.

  Joey wriggled again, evidently liking the attention. Another similarity between Joey the dog and Joey Palmer.

  Seriously, had I lost it?

  Okay, so his name was Joey. Okay, so he was not exactly shy about his attributes. That didn’t mean they were one and the same.

  Get real, Torrance.

  After weighing him — he was seventy two pounds — I walked Joey back to the kennel area and put him in a large cage appropriate to his size.

  Bending down, I talked in a low enough voice that only he could hear.

  “You’ll be fine here,” I said, feeling like an idiot.

  He whined back at me, and I reached in with a finger and scratched his nose in response.

  I was going to treat him just like a stray, nothing more.

  But I was also going to call my father.

  Chapter Two

  Me, female. You, keeper of all wisdom

  Alamo Veterinary Services LLC was housed in a large building the size of a city block. Two of our eight vets — four men and four women — concentrated on large animals and handled the adjacent ranch population. I preferred to specialize in domestic animals. Besides, whenever I got close to a herd of cattle they had a tendency to get agitated and run a lot. Not good for business and hard to explain.

  The first floor of the clinic was given up to the patient lobby, a grooming salon, examining rooms, storage, a store where we sold everything from collars to toothpaste, and a boarding kennel plus an area where prospective surgical candidates and recovering patients were placed.

  In addition, we all had a microscopic office large enough only for a desk, a chair, and a visitor’s chair.

  Now I entered my closet of an office, pulled out my phone and stared at it for several moments, getting up the nerve to call my father.

  My name was Boyd, which doesn’t mean anything if you were a normal, red-blooded American female. But when you were a Furry, it was a big deal. The Boyds were one of the first five families of Weres. We were, humbly speaking, Furry royalty.

  Our clan came from Scotland. Even the name Boyd was rooted in Bute, off the Firth of Clyde.

  My father was extremely proud of being a Boyd, of carrying the royal line into the future. He’d done so with the birth of my brother, Austin. I was the next to carry the torch, so to speak. If I could mate with a good secondary family and produce offspring, I would have succeeded in achieving my life’s purpose.

  My mother and father were ideal royal consorts. My father’s an attorney while my mother was content to be his submissive wife. They’re perfect citizens. They’ve never broken a law. They vote in every election. My father has held numerous positions on the school board and even on the San Antonio City Council.

  In the Were culture the women get to name the offspring and Mom went a little wild. My name is Torrance. My brother’s name is Austin. My poor sister’s is San Antonio. That’s her first name. She’s spent the last twenty-one years explaining that our parents had a geographical fetish. She’s more tactful than I am. I’ve told the truth: we were named for the city in which my mother thought we were conceived.

  I guess it could be worse, but I don’t honestly see how it could be for San Antonio. We’ve had to come up with nicknames for her, one of which was Sani, which made my sister sound like some kind of toilet cleaner. We’ve settled on Sandy.

  All in all, I felt blessed that my parents were in California when they did the deed for me.

  Most of the time I could forget about being a Furry, even about being Furry royalty. It was easier before I came home.

  I didn’t know how vampires governed themselves. What I’d learned about the Were Council had been gleaned through listening to conversations my father had with my brother. I wasn’t supposed to worry my pretty little head about such things.

  Weres didn’t grow our group like vampires, by turning an unsuspecting human. Our numbers were only added to by births and those closely regulated by marital laws.

  Families were on a strata: the first five families — our royalty — were from Greece, Scotland, Russia, China, and South America. Next were acceptable second families, those who’d proven to be financially viable. They hadn’t been guilty of any crimes or socially damaging behavior. The last group, the third tier of families, had failed financially, disobeyed a law — even a misdemeanor — or behaved in a way that garnered the wrong kind of attention.

  If you were born into a third tier family, your chance of advancing upward was almost nil for a generation or two.

  Because our numbers were relatively small, we only had five Councils, originally based in the home countries of the first families. Besides the Boyds from Scotland, the family from South America as well as the one from Russia were living in the United States now, having relocated generations ago.

  My father was head of the Scottish Council, a position of great power, one in which he reveled. Most of the Weres in the southern United States were subject to the governance of the Scottish Council.

  The more powerful my father became, the more distance I felt from him. He didn’t budge. He wasn’t malleable, flexible, or open to suggestion. He believed he was never wrong and more than once had bragged to me that he’d never apologiz
ed to anyone.

  I could see being proud of never driving drunk or never cheating on your taxes or never crossing against the light. But to be proud of never apologizing, never admitting you were wrong? That just shows how far apart my father and I were philosophically. Therefore, the easiest way for me to deal with him was to simply ignore him.

  I’d done that for the last eight years, only returning to San Antonio three months ago.

  Prior to buying into the Alamo Veterinary Clinic I’d worked in Austin at a large corporate veterinary practice attached to a pet products chain. I was close enough that if anything happened to a member of the family, I could be in San Antonio in an hour or so, less if I drove like my father.

  I told myself I wanted to get out of a corporate practice and into a more individual one. That’s why I’d come home. Another reason was my grandmother’s attorney who kept reminding me that one of the provisos in her will was that I occupy her house. If I continued to flaunt that request, my inheritance was in jeopardy. The last reason was a little weird, coming from me. Because, like it or not – and I didn't – I was a pack animal and I missed my pack.

  I finally dialed my father’s number. I guess it was indicative of something that I didn't have him on speed dial.

  When he answered, I did the five minute obligatory daughter thing. I asked him about his golf game. Anything new and different going on in his practice? Was there anything I needed to know? I asked the last question a little halfheartedly. I knew he was either going to cut me off with a curt, “No." Or he was going to launch into a long diatribe about everything I wasn't doing correctly as a Boyd female.