Dream Catcher (Woodland Creek)

The car took on a life of its own, skidding and hydroplaning right off the road. I felt a bump as I crested over something, landing hard, my body jerking in the seatbelt, which pulled in and restrained me tightly. The scrape of metal and the groan of the rusted frame of my car creaked to a sickening silence.

My whole body was banged up real good. “Owww.” Automatic responses and a mental cataloguing of what hurt went through my disorientated brain. Everything hurt, including my face, which had been whacked by the unexpectedly deployed airbag. I supposed that was good, lucky even...the thought made me snort, which in turn made me wince in pain. The pain meant I was alive, but certainly not getting to Woodland Creek anytime soon.

Taking stock of my injuries, pain began to radiate up my left arm from my wrist. I moved around in my seat and found myself jammed, with my right knee scraping the underside of the wheel. The seat somehow unlocked and slipped forward only to lock again, squishing me against the wheel, which pushed painfully against my chest. Ruefully, I was thankful for my generous boobs and a twelve-year-old airbag in working order. This definitely wasn’t my week.

I wasn’t sure how long my car had been sitting there while I took stock of things. I was alone and shivering. Looking out the windshield did nothing since the front end of my car was now covered in debris and junk from outside. One headlight was out and the other glowed lonely and pathetic into the thick, soupy fog.

I doubted I was going to be found on this deserted stretch of road anytime soon. I didn’t even know where I was, having forgone the map some hundred miles back when the cracked window soaked anything worth having inside. Reaching over my chest, I tried to open the door with my right hand. I grabbed for the handle and pulled up the release lever to push it open. “Come on, come on, damn it.” The lever was jammed and I whined my misery to the empty interior. “Please, somebody just cut me a break.” I gave it another pull from my awkward position. I caught it and the door opened an inch. My heart lurched with excitement until cold rivulets of water edged their way inside. I pulled the door shut, but it jammed again, only this time it wouldn’t close all the way, catching something. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I kept pulling the door, trying to shift in my seat, but it was useless. Cold water filled up the bottom, stinging the cuts and scrapes on my legs.

“Okay, this is worse, definitely worse. Stuck in a rat can and now my car’s flooding.” It was so cold that my fingers felt like brittle twigs ready to snap. I wanted to rail at somebody or something because it shouldn’t be this cold in August. I lived in the Midwest with drought warnings all summer and now this? Panic coursed through me and my chest heaved. Closing the door wasn’t working and I was pretty sure my little ditch was beginning to flood from all of the rain. For all I knew I was in some frickin’ floodplain. Slumping back in my seat, I gave a cursory look around. My purse was on the floor of the passenger seat, currently getting soaked by the water. Who knew what the boxes of clothes and school supplies in my trunk looked like.

Lovely.

Drops of water smudged the printed out ink on my neatly stapled orientation papers for Hastings-Albrecht. I tried to maneuver myself with my one good arm to reach. “Ugh.” I leaned back against the headrest, slamming my head once and then again in frustration. “Damn.” Again, I leaned over, letting my right arm reach as far as I could. “Come on!” My fingers just barely tickled the leather strap of my cheap purse. “I bet shit like this never happens to Katie Wilson!” Leaning back again, I thought about the hot television journalist Dillon would pant over every Friday night when she broadcasted her interview segments from New York. Not that I didn’t like her. On the contrary, she was smart and who could argue with JCrew apple pie good looks and being engaged to a billionaire like Jacob Reed? That wasn’t my life and I guessed we all kind of had our crosses to bear.

My life…well, that was currently stuck in a ditch, filling up with water and going nowhere. No boyfriend, no job and on my way to start school in a town I’d never been to before and the closest family a couple hours away.

Peachy.

“Okay, one more time. Uhhhhh!” I gave myself a good heave-ho and pushed over in the seat, reaching out desperately. My fingers caught the strap and wiggled to grab it. “Finally! Woo!!!” I pulled the purse up to my lap, still cradling my left arm, and with my right hand I reached for the phone. My fingers submerged inside to cold, wet contents, pulling out a soaked cell phone. “Really? Fucking really? I couldn’t have just one thing work out for me?” To add insult to injury, I watched the phone power off into blackness, and with it my heart sank further into my chest.

Chapter Three

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maya Angelou

WARREN

I flipped through my phone lying on the bunk in the ambulance house. Twelve hour shifts were no joke and of all nights, tonight was a torrential downpour with flash flood warnings in effect all over Craft County and in Woodland Creek. The water table was dangerously low for our area in particular from the unusually dry summer. We were lucky no tornados were being predicted for our area as well. The conditions were just right for a twisted monster to rip through, and during a fast moving storm like this, well, it was the last thing we needed working these long shifts with no relief in sight.

Jase and I already responded to two medical calls earlier and finally had a break. I could hear Jase snoring in the bunk below me. Low rumbles and puffs of air drifted up while I clicked away, checking my personal social media page. I would be glad to finish up my paramedic schooling at the university. Right now I served as the captain of our EMS squad

, but I had interest in getting my pilot’s license to medivac patients eventually. When that happened, I would probably have to leave Woodland Creek and I wasn’t ready to give up the comforts of home so soon. My mom made the best food, all my friends were here and it was unlikely another community would be so understanding of my…shifting.

All day my skin felt taught and the hair on my arms rougher and thicker than usual. The change in weather was keeping me on edge, waiting for the shoe to drop or another incoming call from the Clark Country dispatch center to respond to another emergency call. It was unusual to run back to back twelve hour EMS shifts, but with the storms dumping massive and unexpected rain in our area, there wasn’t much we could do except wait out the storms and run calls as they came in.

I had a lot on my mind, recently enrolling in a paramedic course at the university and moving out of my mom’s house into a shared place with my cousin Jase Lupinski. We had grown up together, running the woods and spending many summers camping and visiting family in Northern Canada with our extended pack family. They were eager to see both Jase and I settled with companions, preferably a shifter of some kind to keep the lineage going. Something I wasn’t terribly keen on, but it was getting harder and harder to say no with family throwing willing females in my way. Jase already had a companion waiting for him when the time was right to settle down.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. Nothing up north was going to quiet the urge I had to continue doing my own thing. My mother had moved here, leaving her pack when she met my father. This was where they chose to build their life and I had been here ever since I was a mere pup. I wasn’t looking to be set up on some ridiculous mate-date as Jase referred to them.

Family could be so exhausting for a young and unattached wolf shifter.

I read a message from one of the girls, another shifter I usually hung out with, when a call came in over the radio. Unit fifty-four, please respond. Motor vehicle crash reported on Riverlane Road mile marker nineteen. Single car accident requesting medical assistance.

“Damn it, I was just getting to sleep.” From below, Jase growled half-awake, rolling out from his bunk to stand up, stretching in some weird ass yoga pose, his bones cracking against each other.

The sound of bone on bone popping made me cringe. “Every time, Jase, really?”

“Dude, I still don’t get why we can’t sleep at home in the comfort of our own beds instead of these bunks the day crew uses.” Yawning, he continued stretching, reaching up in what I recalled him telling me was half moon pose. He looked ridiculous if you asked me, swaying back and forth, and I got up to follow him.

“Because the ambulance is here and this is our job.”

“Mr. By-The-Books all the time. We’ve got a scanner at the house to hear calls.” Grunting Jase grabbed his jacket and I grabbed mine as we jogged to the ambulance bay, hitting the button for the garage door to open up into the storming night. He was right, I preferred to do everything the right way. It was how I got to where I was in my life so far. Jase was still dependable and trustworthy even if I knew he preferred the shortest route between point A and B as a given.

“Come on, Jase. You drive this time.” Clapping him on the back, we got to the vehicle.

“Gotcha, Captain.” He smirked, knowing the nickname wasn’t my favorite. I got inside the ambulance’s passenger seat, buckling myself in. We backed out of the squad building, flipped our lights and sirens on, and turned toward the scene of the call. Hopefully, Sheriff TJ Rickman would be there already assessing the accident.

I keyed up the radio to see if dispatch could give me anything else. “This is unit fifty-four calling command center. Can you give me follow-up on the accident? Over.”