What in the world am I going to do?
She clutched the canvas around her and watched the green coastline speed past as the boat carried her closer and closer to an unknown destination.
EREN
Eren was getting verytired of trash griffins stealing his sandwiches.
"Give me that or I'll come up there and take it," he growled.
His family fishing boat,The Codfather, rocked on the gentle waves. On top of the pilothouse, the trash griffin—cat-sized, with a seagull front half and a raccoon back half—crouched with one clawed foot on top of a roast beef sandwich.
Eren's roast beef sandwich. The one he had brought for lunch.
The trash griffin opened its beak and hissed. It had the head and wings of a gray-and-white seagull. Big brother Tor could probably tell exactly what kind of gull, but Eren sure couldn't, and didn't particularly care. The important thing was that ithad his sandwich.
"Give me that back or I'm getting a broom."
"RAWWWWWK."
Eren growled back at it.
Letting even that much of his bear rise up inside him brought a sudden surge of overwhelming emotion. He was suddenly filled with rage, far more than a wild animal stealing his lunch should have caused. His bear was ready to tear its way out from inside him.
Eren threw himself into reasserting his human side. He fought a battle over his bear that resulted in choking it back down, stopping the shift before it could begin. His bear seethed in him, forcing him to push down on it to keep it there.
No wonder he was so on edge all the time.
"Fine," Eren snarled at the trash griffin. "Keep the stupid sandwich, I don't care."
As he stomped into the pilothouse, he was aware of another of the trash griffins swooping in to join its stinky little friend on top of the roof.
Wonderful.
They had moved into the region this spring. Eren had never seen one before, and he hadn't believed the old-timers when they started swapping stories of weird-looking seagulls. There were strange tales from the old days, but Newfoundland wasfullof tales from the old days. If you believed them all, you'd lose your wits.
And then an occasional mini-griffin sighting turned into a whole flock of them following his boat around, stealing his bait, eating his lunch, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They were even worse than seagulls, and that was saying something.
He closed the door firmly, retrieved another sandwich from the cooler—at least being a bear shifter meant you always had plenty of food on hand—and started the motor. It started right away, so apparently his hasty-rigged fix was working. Eren let it settle into a nice rumbling idle, then opened the throttle and the boat began to move, its aimless rolling motion on the waves settling into a steady forward churn. Eren piloted the boat with a loose hand on the tiller and the sandwich in his other. He had run the family boat so often by this time that he could almost do it in his sleep.
Engine probably could use a full tear-down and rebuild, he thought, rather than a constant series of slapdash repairs. Maybe he'd get big brother Tor to help him, if Tor wasn't too busy with his house remodeling project and a new baby on the way.
Not for the first time, Eren felt a tug of envy. Of course Tor was the first in the family to find his mate and move out of the house where the other grown kids still lived. Tor always did everything first and better than everyone else.
Eren was, as always, left to be the tagalong younger brother. Fully grown, in a family who loved him but, it sometimes seemed, would never see him as anything other than a kid.
At least he had the family fishing boat. He glanced around it with pride. It wasn't officially his yet, but he'd cleaned up a lot of Dad's clutter, put a fresh coat of paint on her, and generally made the boat look as sharp as a several-decades-old fishing boat could look.
And after being delayed by engine troubles and trash griffins, he was finally back on track for the day's errands.
* * *
He had piloted the boat into the St. John's harbor so often by now that he hardly noticed the beautiful scenery, the rows of colorful houses and the tall gray point of Cabot Tower on Signal Hill that greeted visitors as they motored through the Narrows into the bay.
He had never actually been up to the remains of the old fortifications. Maybe someday, he thought; it was a fact that people who had lived in a place all their life rarely did the usual tourist things.
Right now he had a shopping list and he was running behind.
He picked up the family truck, a big old rumbling monster that was stored on a family friend's property near the docks, and set out to collect his list.