2. Doreen
DOREEN
The drive out of the city helped soothe Doreen’s indignant wrath and calm her ruffled inner badger. It was a gorgeous sunny day, crisp and exhilarating, autumn colors brilliant along the road. And once she got out of the suburbs and started climbing into the mountains, the highway was increasingly empty, so she could put her car through its paces.
Doreen’s classic Camaro was her pride and joy. She could never have afforded it in mint condition, but she had acquired it for a skip and a song as a beat-up project car. It had been sitting in its previous owner’s backyard for decades. Doreen happened to wander over to the estate sale out of curiosity, and the car immediately caught her eye, flat tires and all. It had a rust block for an engine, mouse nests in the seats, and it was hard to even tell what color it had originally been. She got it towed to a friend’s backyard, since there was nowhere to work on it at her apartment.
Years of work followed, sacrificing evenings and weekends, acquiring parts one by one, spending late nights scraping rust and repainting while classic rock blared from a radio sitting on the hood. And now the car purred . It wasn’t mint, but it was good. Doreen rolled the top down, let the wind blow through her hair, and sang along to Bruce Springsteen.
The fall colors got even more glorious as she drove up into the mountains. Doreen didn’t know the names of most of the trees she saw, but the hillsides flamed with shades of gold, scarlet, and dark red. To entertain herself, she began tagging them mentally with car paint colors. Now that’s a good bright Porsche Carrera red , she thought. Classic maroon there . Ooh, that’s a 1970s GTO gold ...
Occasionally she pulled over to step out, stretch, and take in the view. The fresh autumn air, full of little rustling sounds as leaves fell off the trees, made her yearn to shift and rustle around in the leaves herself. Some part of her always felt strangely busy and hungry in the fall. Badgers didn’t hibernate, but they did fill up on the many foods in their omnivorous diet to get them through the winter to come.
I could go for a burger. I hope the lodge has a good restaurant.
Fated Mountain Lodge. The name was new, she had learned by looking them up online; it went along with the lodge’s new focus as a shifter retreat. Maybe it really was her destiny to go there, she thought. At least for the weekend.
Her phone rang. Doreen smiled at the caller ID and leaned a hip against the car. “Hi, Waldo.”
There was a very badgerlike snort from her brother’s end. “Don’t call me that. At least not unless you want me to start calling you Dodo again. Actually, that has a certain ring to it.”
“Don’t you dare,” Doreen said, but she was smiling. Her brother Walt could always cheer her up.
He was twelve years older, an eternity for a child, so she had related to him more like a beloved uncle growing up, but as adults they had remained close. Walt was the one who told her about the mountain resort. He was a school guidance counselor who had a talent for recognizing and helping out shifter kids. One of his former high school kids was the resort’s new manager. Their website didn’t advertise it openly except in coded language (“be yourself! explore your inner beast!”), but he had let her know that the place welcomed shifter-only guests in the fall and winter, after the main tourist season was over.
“I wanted to catch you before you get up in the mountains,” Walt said, his voice warm on the other end of the line. “Cell service can be flaky up there. So just pay attention to where you’re going, and don’t walk off any cliffs.”
Doreen laughed. “I’m not one of your teenagers, you know. I’ll be fine.”
“Not to be nosy here, but are you okay?” Walt asked. “I don’t know if it’s my badger telling me things or what, I’m not sure if I believe in that, but I felt like I should call you today before you get out of touch.”
Doreen blinked hard and gazed off into the scenic distance. Why not tell him? “I was fired today.”
“What?” Walt’s voice filled with his badger’s snarl. “Who would fire you? I thought they loved you at the garage.”
At the suggestion of a sympathetic ear, she spilled out the story, and was rewarded by Walt’s furious interjections at all the right points. By the end of it, Doreen found that she could almost laugh about it.
“—and I broke his computer on the way out. I didn’t mean to. I was just going to knock his coffee cup over to make a point, and I knocked his computer over instead. Maybe he’s right about one thing,” she added.
“That jerk isn’t right about anything,” Walt growled.
Despite herself, Doreen felt her spirits lifting. “No arguments here. But I do have a temper. Remember what Mom always used to say when I’d get mad as a kid? Be calm like a still pool of water, Doreen . Well, I was not a still pool of water today.”
“It’s fine to be mad sometimes,” Walt said. There was still a touch of a growl in his voice. “My kids have big feelings a lot of the time, and one of the things I do is help them manage those feelings. But it’s still okay to have them.”
Doreen rubbed at her eyes. “Let’s not rehash this to death, okay?”
“Okay. No problem. You want me to go over there and break anything else of his?”
She burst into a spontaneous laugh. Walt really was the best big brother. He’d never acted embarrassed about a much younger sister tagging around after him, and although Doreen hadn’t really needed him to defend her against bigger kids (she was usually bigger and stronger than most of the boys in her classes), she had appreciated that he was always ready for it. “No, I think the computer is enough property damage for now. I’d better get back on the road. Talk to you later, Waldo.”
“Later, Dodo. And hey, if you see Hester Hatherill, tell her that Mr. Delano says hi.”
Doreen wondered if the lodge manager even remembered her old school guidance counselor. Then again, who could forget Walt? “Don’t call me Dodo. But have a good weekend.”
She felt much better after hanging up the call. Taking in a slow breath, filled with the scents of leaf mold and small creatures going about their lives in the forest, she could feel the remaining tension sliding out of her body.
“I am one with the flow of energy in the universe,” she murmured. “I am a placid reflective pool of still water.”
While she didn’t exactly feel like a placid pool of anything, she got back into her car with a renewed sense of purpose.
More twists and turns of the road took her higher into the mountains. The colorful trees began to flow against a dark tide of pines and firs. Doreen’s view of the tallest peaks stunned her, their high summits already glistening with early winter snow. Mountains for her were calendar pictures and distant glimpses on the horizon. She had never been so close to them before.
She began to eagerly anticipate the lodge. The pictures on the website were vivid in her mind, a peaked log chalet with tall picture windows and beautifully landscaped grounds full of flowers. At this time of year, she supposed the flowers were probably not in bloom, but there would be plenty of red and gold leaves to take their place.
She couldn’t wait.
Following the directions on the website, she drove up a steep hill, the Camaro laboring on the climb and making her wince as it scraped against ruts in the gravel road. At the top of the hill, FATED MOUNTAIN LODGE was painted in large letters on a stray glacial boulder, surrounded by painted flowers in bright splashes of pink and gold. Doreen drove past it, through the trees, into a large open space.
There was a lawn, slightly brown and overgrown. There was a building. There were no flowers. There were also no logs, at least none visible. The building, vaguely recognizable in its overall shape as the one from the brochure, was swaddled in white plastic house wrap, some of which fluttered in streamers as if torn off by recent winds, and it was surrounded by scaffolding and ladders.
Doreen turned her engine off.
“Well,” she said after a minute.
She got out of the car. There was no sound except the rustle of wind in the pines and the occasional small plop of an acorn or dead leaf falling to the ground in the forest. After a minute or two, to her great relief, Doreen heard the sound of a power tool coming from somewhere out of sight among the outbuildings surrounding the main lodge. (Or what she hoped was the lodge, anyway.)
At least the weather was nice, Doreen reassured herself—just as a cloud rolled across the sun. She looked up at the ominous white fog cloaking the peaks of the mountains that she had been admiring earlier. It was starting to look like it might rain.
She left her purse in the car, pocketed her keys, and walked around the end of the building looking for the source of the power tool sounds. At least she wasn’t all alone up here, even if she seemed to have wandered into a construction site instead of the spa weekend of her daydreams.
Out back of the lodge was ... more construction. This part of the lodge grounds was in even more of a shambles. It looked as if most of the landscaping had been torn up and was being redone. There was a large pile of rocks next to a muddy pit which, Doreen supposed, in light of the recent autumn rains, was probably in the process of becoming the “Outdoor Rock Pool” promised on the website.
“Hmm,” said Doreen.
She supposed wading in mud was as healthy as swimming in clean water, for a badger. However, she didn’t want to slip and fall into it in her shoes, so she walked carefully around it and tried not to step in too many puddles.
The power tool whine had turned into hammering, and eventually she found the source. There was a nearly naked guy up on a ladder, and a woman with unruly brown hair holding the base of it while he tried to do something to the edge of the roof.
Hmm. This day is looking up already.
The naked guy was wearing underwear, a tool belt, and nothing else, including shoes; he gripped the ladder rungs with his toes. He was saying, “Now I just need to get the cable up through the rafters.”
“Mauro, wait—” the woman began.
The naked guy vanished. The woman lunged and grabbed the tool belt before it clattered to the ground. The abandoned pair of underwear drifted down past her hand.
In place of the man, there was a medium-sized weasel. While Doreen stared, the weasel caught up the end of the cable in its mouth and darted between two exposed beams into the under-structure of the building’s roof. A moment later it was back, minus the cable.
The weasel shifted into a naked man sitting on top of the ladder. He grinned down at the woman holding the tool belt. “See? Simple.”
Doreen couldn’t restrain a small noise of shock. As an urban shifter who had grown up surrounded by humans, she had never before seen anyone shift so openly in her life.
The man’s easy smile vanished. He hastily grabbed the tool belt and put it over his lap, where it did next to nothing to cover him.
“How long have you been there?” the woman asked, bristling with defensiveness. Doreen could feel her badger reacting to it, becoming belligerent itself.
“Not long,” Doreen said quickly. Understanding what they were worried about, she added a bit awkwardly, “I can shift too.” It felt very strange to just come out and say it. She was so used to hiding it.
The man relaxed a little, and the woman brightened. “What do you turn into?”
“Badger,” Doreen said.
The woman beamed. “I’m a hedgehog. I’m Hester, and this is Mauro. Welcome to—wait, what are you doing here?”
“Well, I thought I was coming up for a spa weekend.” Hester looked around at the construction site. “It looks like some wires got crossed, or maybe I’m in the wrong place. This is Fated Mountain Lodge, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but we’re not open.” Hester gave Mauro a look that was simultaneously fond and exasperated. “Why don’t you put some pants on, nudist. Aren’t we expecting some deliveries this afternoon anyway?”
“If the lady insists,” Mauro said. He leaned down to kiss Hester on top of her head.
They were clearly a couple, and Doreen felt simultaneously flustered and envious. Before she could decide what to say, Hester bustled briskly over to join her.
“Come on in. We’ll check the computer. We shouldn’t be taking guests at all, we closed at the end of summer for renovations—oh, I know what might have happened.” Hester sighed deeply. “ Mom .”
They went through a side door that Doreen didn’t even realize led into the main part of the lodge until they entered the foyer. It was dim with the overhead lights off, but still grand in the afternoon sunlight filtering through the half-covered windows. There were huge paintings on the walls showing historical mining and lumber-cutting activities from the area’s history. Most stunning of all, there was what Doreen could only assume was an actual, vintage biplane hanging from—she hoped—very sturdy cables above the front desk, emphasizing the sweep and scope of the lobby’s grand size.
Hester went to the computer at the desk and booted it up. “What’s your name?”
“Doreen Delano,” Doreen said, wrenching her gaze away from the biplane. “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“No, of course not. It looks like it’s our mistake.”
Mauro followed them in, still barefoot, but wearing jeans and tugging a shirt over his head. “Is it Peony?”
“It’s Peony,” Hester sighed. “My mom,” she said to Doreen. “She did a complete overhaul of our booking website, which is great, except it looks like it went live before it was supposed to. So yes, we’ve got you in the system and no one else. I’m so sorry. We’ll give you a full refund.” She glanced at Mauro and added under her breath, “As soon as we find the money somewhere.”
“No,” Doreen said firmly.
“What? Don’t you want?—”
“I said no. I paid for a weekend vacation and that’s exactly what I plan to have.”
She didn’t intend to come across mean or rude, but apparently, there she went again, because Hester looked almost as if she wanted to cry.
“But—I mean—we don’t have the spa up and running, and there’s no way we can get it working today. You can one-star us on Yelp all you like, but?—”
“I’m not going to do that,” Doreen said, shocked. “No! All I really want is what you already have. A quiet place in the mountains for a few days.” She laughed, unable to help herself. “Listen, a spa would be nice, but I don’t really care about mud masks and cucumber wraps and whatever else you have here. I don’t even know what my toenails would do if I gave them a pedicure, probably start crying and fall off. Just let me stay here quietly for the weekend, and I promise I’ll stay out of your way. You don’t even need to worry about feeding me. I can shift and forage in the woods. There’s plenty to eat at this time of year.”
Hester had begun shaking her head, although she was grinning. “You won’t be in the way. And we’d deserve all the one-star reviews in the world if we let a guest forage her own meals because we didn’t feed her. The hotel restaurant is closed, but as long as you don’t mind sharing with us, we’ll make sure you don’t starve.”
“Do I look like I expect five-star meals?” Doreen waved a hand down her nearly six-foot frame. She was still wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s shirt that she hadn’t bothered to change. “Just make sure there’s lots of it.”
“I think we can do that,” Hester said, still grinning. “Actually, do you want to pick out your room? That’s the best thing about being here when no one else is. You get your pick of everything.”