“Uh huh,” I replied, nervously fingering the cash in my pocket. “You’ve got the ID, though, right?”
“Bro. It’s been the weirdest fucking week of my life.” She flopped down onto my bed and leant against the wall before grimacing at how damp it was. “You need to get the fuck out of this place, Sinjin.”
“Uh, Sinjin?”
“Your new name.” She beamed at me, showing a gleaming gold tooth. “You like it?”
Then she handed over my ID and my fresh papers. All of them stating my new name.
Sinjin Murphy.
“Isn’t... Sinjin a man’s name?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Who gives a shit? I thought it sounded pretty cool. Plus, it was as far away from your old one as I could get. Saint to Sin, see?”
I just stared at her, not knowing quite what to say. She seemed so damn proud of herself and I guess she’d filled the brief. I figured I could live with it being a man’s name if it meant no one from my old life could find me. By that point, I’d already cut off all my hair and bleached the shit out of it. A special little ‘fuck you’ to the Herald and his dumb ideas of modesty I’d been stuck with since I was a teenager.
“Bro,” Elara continued. “I saw this ad for a dog online, right? The owners said he was an ex-fighter, all mangled and shit. Only had one ear and a leg that was messed up. I thought to myself, hey, Morris gets lonely when I have to leave the house, so why not get him a friend, right?” She paused expectantly, like she was waiting for me to respond, so I nodded cluelessly.
“Right.”
She grinned at that, apparently satisfied. “But then I get to the meeting point and I don’t know how I knew, but I could just feel it. This was no normal dog. He was twice the size of Morris and he’s abig boy.” She paused again and I nodded because her dog looked like it could eat you with no trouble.
“More wolf than dog, really,” she kept going. “Plus, he had this look in his eye like he could see right into my soul.”
Another pause, waiting for my response. “Uh, right?”
“Anyway, turned out the guy was a fucking shifter in his animal form. That shit was messed up.”
I blinked at her. “They... tried to sell you a person? Did they think you wouldn’t notice when you woke up one day to a naked guy at the foot of your bed?”
“I don’t think they gave a shit, bro,” Elara replied. “Anyway, I did some digging and made a few calls and wound up in this town a couple of hours from here. It’s quiet and I’m pretty sure every person there is hiding out from something. They had a bunch of shifters from similar situations. It’s called Willow Ridge. You’d fit right in.”
The crazy thing was... I listened. I moved out a couple of days later and followed Elara’s instructions on how to get to Willow Ridge.
By that point, anything would have been better than staying in the basement any longer.
And so I wound up moving to a tiny town where mostly everyone keeps to themselves, so their secrets stay hidden.
No one knows me here. No one bothers me.
It’s boring as hell, but I’m safe.
Or at least I thought I was.
I GOT A JOB AT THISlittle shop—Grizz’s Little Oddities—as soon as I moved to Willow Ridge and I’ve worked here ever since. We sell mostly junk. Vases and trinkets and random crap no one could ever want or need.
I don’t sell much at all. Mostly, I spend my time in the back room and fix up any of the stuff people in town bring to me. I spend hourshere every day, trying not to go insane listening to the wall of ticking clocks someone decided would make a good decorative feature for the shop. So long as no one from Corporate notices how big a money pit this place is, I’ll put up with it.
The town is quiet and slow as molasses. Most people keep to themselves and that’s the way they like it. Me included. Most of the shifters around here are those that escaped the illegal fighting circuits. A lot of them had been trafficked and now live quiet lives. They keep to themselves and live in these enormous houses so they don’t have to socialize with anyone else. I guess trusting people after what they’ve been through is no simple task.
Is it worse here than living in a cult? No.
Is it also better than living in a smelly basement? For sure.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored out of my mind here.
Today, I’m fixing up a slow cooker for Old Mr Henderson, who owns the hardware store down the street. He used to fix his own stuff, but his eyesight isn't the best anymore. So whenever I get my hands on his stuff, he’s already patched it together a half dozen times, and I have to reverse engineer his creative solutions before I can ever find the real problem.
