Owl Be Home for Christmas (Virtue Shifters #12)

Chapter 1

The thing people didn't realize about owls was that despite their reputation as wise old birds, their heads were mostly made up of those enormous eyeballs.

That left them only a very small amount of brain to work with.

Kayla Walsh had known for a long, long time that her owl's tiny little brain was only interested in two things: food, and murder.

And it could only hold one of those ideas in its head at a time.

Most of the time, Kayla could keep it focused on food.

It would have been easier if she'd been a nocturnal bird, but she was a snowy owl, which were one of the few owl species who hunted almost exclusively during the day.

So she couldn't sleep through its natural hunting hours, but overall, it was still distractible with a snack here and there.

And despite the occasional impulse to indulge in its death-dealing tendencies, she had not yet allowed it to overcome her own good sense and resort to murder.

She was, however, considering it.

Who? her owl asked. It hadn't been paying attention; it rarely did when she was at work. But if she was thinking about murder, its fluffy, feathery self was all in.

Either that or it was just being an owl and expressing itself through the species' generally-limited vocabulary.

For a bird of very little brain, it could certainly give her a dirty look from inside her own head. I was asking who you wanted to murder. Let's murder.

Kayla murmured, "No one," and smiled at the woman doing her makeup. "Am I perfect?"

"You're always perfect," Ruth said obligingly. "Even better-than, now." She paused. "I am sorry about the hair."

"Nothing to be done about it." Kayla had been carefully not looking at herself in the mirror for the past few days, and had big plans to continue doing that for the next few weeks. Possibly longer. It helped keep her mind off murder. "Aside from that, am I good to go?"

"Including that, you're good to go." The makeup artist smiled at her, spun her chair away from the mirrors Kayla wasn't looking at anyway, and shooed her out of the trailer and on to set.

Onto a set that had once been Kayla's hometown.

Virtue, New York was picture-pretty year-round, and deep in December, looked one hundred percent like the set of a made-for-TV Christmas movie.

Inches of snow blanketed the enormous town square, which had changed since Kayla was a kid.

Now there was a huge, complex wooden playground on one side, and even though her production was filming and technically had full rights to the whole area, there were still a bunch of local kids chasing each other across the playground's ladders and bridges and pathways.

There were also a startling number of trees, black-branched and bare for winter, stretching toward the clear bright afternoon sky; when she'd grown up the whole square had been nothing but lawn.

A number of the larger trees had to be transplants, but a lot more were obviously new growth, currently hidden in heavy tarps to keep them warmer over the winter.

The great big gazebo was the same, though, and what she remembered as a tiny handful of local sellers seemed to have grown up into a real holiday market in the years she'd been gone.

The production crew had asked if the town could put the Christmas tree up early for filming, and it towered above the gazebo, which had a top that opened so the massive tree could go inside.

The market was halfway constructed, people working at the casual, cheerful speed of people who knew what they were doing but also had friends to catch up with.

Kayla was used to techs on set putting things up and down at break-neck speeds when scenes needed to be changed inside a single day.

She found watching the more laid-back approach soothing.

"This way, Ms. Walsh." Her on-set assistant scurried up and tucked Kayla into a coat big enough to cover hoop skirts, never mind that she was wearing jeans and a sweater and a fashionably puffy coat already.

The overcoat had one feature that Kayla adored: a huge hood with a frame inside it that meant it kept its shape around her head, not crushing whatever hairstyle she had for filming.

Although nothing could possibly be worse than the hair she currently sported. She sighed as Trina tucked her into the coat, and tried to keep her hands off her hair. Trina, in turn, tried to smile, and made it most of the way to a grimace. "It's not so bad."

"You're a terrible liar, Trina."

The girl blushed, then laughed. "Well, that's why I'm an assistant and you're a movie star. You can lie with the best of them."

"It's called acting when I do it." Kayla ended up smiling at the girl, who was about twenty-two and very excited to be on her first film set as an assistant.

It was about Kayla's fortieth as an actor, and probably her fifteenth as a lead, although she'd never had the breakout film that launched her into international stardom.

She was, though, a familiar face to people who liked holiday romcoms, and there were much worse ways to make a living than playing the part of a woman drawn back to her small hometown for the holidays, only to fall madly in love with a local blacksmith/carpenter/toymaker while reluctantly releasing the grip she'd held on her big-city dreams and rich boyfriends.

Kayla, glancing again toward the holiday market being set up, was not unaware of the irony.

Falling madly in love, though, was right out.

She was just off a particularly sad breakup.

Her director was a different, bitter ex.

Kayla was determined to not make any more mistakes in love.

She was a shifter, for heaven's sake. Either there was a fated mate for her out there somewhere in the world, or there wasn't, but she was done trying to make it happen.

The best thing about coming back to Virtue for a few weeks of filming was that she already knew everybody there, and not one single person had ever flagged her owl's interest as a potential fated mate.

She could concentrate on her movie, on her flirtatiously charming costar, and on not murdering anybody.

Who? her owl demanded again. Who should we murder?

I am not really murdering anybody, she reminded it. It's just this haircut.

Her owl turned its head upside-down like it was examining her carefully.

Kayla wasn't entirely sure if it could really see her from the outside, or if it was just looking at her mental image of herself, but it didn't seem quite worth asking about.

Eventually, after careful consideration, the owl provided an image of itself soaking wet and miserable.

Kayla laughed, albeit quietly. Yeah, pretty much. Owls were notoriously silent when they flew, but in evolutionary terms, they'd given up being waterproof in exchange for their quiet flight. It was why they looked so incredibly silly and pathetic when soaked through.

The haircut wasn't exactly anyone's fault.

The script called for her character's niece to cut her hair the night before she met the hero.

Nobody had expected the little girl to actually yank the wig Kayla had been wearing for the scene off her head.

With a small child's lightning-fast reflexes, little Maria had seize a huge handful of Kayla's actual hair and whacked it off, and then managed to get another several chops in before Kayla could do anything but sit there in shock.

And very, very unfortunately for Kayla, it had been almost the first scene they'd filmed.

The director—Cyril, her bitter ex—had taken one look at the results and said, "Oh, we're keeping it," thus dooming Kayla to not just the bad haircut in itself, but having to maintain it while they filmed, because the story took place over a week, not nearly enough time for her character to grow it out.

Murder, her owl agreed.

"Food," Trina said brightly, distracting both Kayla and the owl.

"You have time for a quick snack while they finish setting up the meet cute.

There are your packages," she said with a nod to the pile of gifts that Kayla was meant to be carrying when she met her hero, "and I got a coffee from the real-life doughnut shop over there.

They have the most incredible doughnuts.

But I guess you know that, because didn't you say you grew up here? It must be fun, coming home to film."

Kayla winced. She'd blurted that information without thinking when they'd announced Virtue as the location selected for filming this particular movie.

Fortunately only Trina had heard, and Kayla had convinced her not to mention it to the rest of the crew.

It wasn't that Kayla objected to being from Virtue.

It was a good place to grow up. But ever since fashion designer Zane Bellamy had drawn Hollywood attention to the little town, Kayla had been trying not to draw any more attention to it.

Shifter sanctuaries didn't need the wider world looking in on them.

Which was why she'd spent a career being casually cagey about where she was from in the first place.

She was a small town girl from Anywhere, USA; that was her schtick.

It wasn't easy to maintain that kind of privacy in the internet age, but Kayla tried.

That was one good thing, at least, about not reaching mega-star levels of international fame: people didn't care quite as much where a little holiday romcom film star was from.

"It's a little weird to be back. The doughnut shop wasn't here when I grew up," Kayla said, more or less as a side observation, since Trina was holding both sides of the conversation pretty well on her own.

"A lot's changed. Fortunately I don't think anybody here realizes actress Kayla Walsh is just Kylie Quinn from Virtue. I don't look much like I used to."

"Really?" That got Trina's attention, and she blinked at Kayla with interest. "Did you get a lot of work done or something?"

Kayla laughed. "No. No, but I did grow five inches after I graduated, and all my baby fat went to better places.

And I don't think I had my natural hair color between ages nine and nineteen.

Or a decent haircut," she added with a wince, and put her hand on her hair again.

Maybe the mess on her head was closer to who she used to be than Kayla wanted it to be.

"Well, it's very pretty. Uh, the town, not your hair, sorry. Here, drink your coffee," she added hastily, and thrust a paper cup into Kayla's hands. "You're going to be freezing once that big coat comes off."

The cup was wonderfully warm and Kayla wrapped her hands around it a moment before taking a tentative sip, then a larger, happy slurp.

"That's good coffee. Thanks. And look, honestly, this is just another job, okay?

I still don't want to make a thing about being from Virtue.

" If anybody local recognized her, it wouldn't be because she had been short round Kylie Quinn.

It was because she was now tall curvy Kayla Walsh, film actress, who had nothing to do with the girl she'd been all those years ago in Virtue.

"I don't know why. I'd totally want everybody to come worship me if I came home from Hollywood as a film star."

And that, Kayla thought, was definitely one difference between twenty-two and thirty-six. She smiled at Trina, then said, "Whoops!" and shrugged her big coat off as Cyril yelled for places.

Her costar, a ruggedly good-looking white guy who despised his first name, Ethan, and went by his surname, Anderson, as much as possible, appeared from his own trailer looking miserable about the cold. "At least you get a coat."

"A puffy jacket won't show off your magnificent biceps.

You're stuck in flannel." Kayla patted one of those biceps on her way to get the packages her character was meant to be carrying while Anderson went around the street corner so they could crash into each other in their meet cute.

The cameras were set up for two different angles, and they'd practiced the run-in often enough that Kayla desperately hoped they could get the scene in one or two takes.

A dresser ran over, shoved a winter hat on her head, then backed off with a thumbs up.

Kayla flashed her a smile, let somebody else pile boxes into her arms and someone else tuck her phone between her ear and her shoulder until she was arranged to their satisfaction. "Am I good?"

She got another thumbs up as she found her sight line through the carefully-placed packages she was carrying. Somebody asked in return if she was good, and at her nod, signaled to the director, who called "And go!"

Kayla, having an absurd moment of delight that this was her job, picked up her lines mid-sentence—her character, Chloe, was talking with her sister about holiday plans—and strode around the corner with the confidence of a woman who knew how to take a prat fall.

Anderson, studying his own phone, came barreling around the same corner at speed, and Kayla knew from forty rehearsals exactly how they would collide.

Exactly one and a half steps before their choreographed impact, something hit Kayla in the back of the knees and she went down into the snow as her owl screamed MURDER!