Dragons instinct, p.1
Dragon’s Instinct, page 1
DRAGON’S INSTINCT
A DAY CARE FOR SHIFTERS
ELVA BIRCH
CONTENTS
A Day Care for Shifters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
A Note from Elva
More by Elva Birch
Writing as Zoe Chant
Behind the Scenes
Unicorn’s Instinct - Sneak Preview!
Sneak Preview of The Dragon Prince of Alaska…
Copyright © 2022 by Elva Birch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design © 2021 by Ellen Million
For Kayti.
The blueberries are your fault.
A DAY CARE FOR SHIFTERS
A Day Care for Shifters is a swoony, sweet-hot series of standalone novels (and interconnected shorts) set in the small town of Nickel City, where shifters are trying to stay secret…something infinitely complicated by young shifters just learning their magical skills, right along with walking and talking and stealing hearts! These are gentle romances full of humor and feeling, perfect ice-cream-straight-from-the-container escapes. They can be read in any order, but this is the order in which they occur:
Wolf’s Instinct: Roderick’s toddler daughter and busy plumbing business keep him too wrapped up for romance and while he trusts his wolf, the magic of instinct can be like playing hot-and-cold with a kid who’s forgotten where they hid the prize. Addison comes to Nickel City to take a job at a very special day care and finds a family to belong to.
First Comes Love (a mini-series!): Navigating on-line dating is hard enough for a single mom and first shift baker, but Chloe has a whole new set of problems when her little boy suddenly changes into a pushy baby penguin and Clay, a polar bear shifter comes to her rescue. This mini-trilogy includes three short stories: First Shift, First Day, and First Date. You can get a free short story from baby Ryan’s POV!
Dragon’s Instinct: Ian had enough trouble trying to write for a living and keep up with his daughter, Lucy, even before she started shifting into a squirrel. Now that she’s turning two and breathing fire? The twos just got a lot more terrible!
Unicorn’s Instinct: Tara just wants her mommy to be happy…and a puppy. Vivian doesn’t have the heart or time for romance, let alone a puppy, but everything changes when she meets the new pediatric doctor at her clinic and learns his heart-breaking secret.
Gryphon’s Instinct: A single dad chasing two kids - only one of them can fly, but the other one thinks he can…
CHAPTER 1
Shots sizzled across the speeder’s bow and Turnkey dove at the controls. “We’ve got a problem!” he hollered back to the engineer.
“You’re telling me!” Tagrin shouted back. “We’ve got a coolant leak in the quarterdeck and a crack in the second hull! She’s not going to hold together long enough to break atmo!”
“I know how to fix this!” Turnkey said—
Ian stopped typing, his fingers poised over the laptop.
He had no idea how to fix this.
It had taken him twenty minutes to re-read and remember where he was even going with his plot when he sat down to write and his brain felt shattered. He couldn’t recall when he’d last gotten a full night’s sleep or more than an hour of writing time in one sitting. Every time that he so much as started feeling like he was making progress on his book, his toddler daughter, Lucy, needed a snack, or a new diaper, or a hug, or a nap, or it was time for a meal or to do laundry or there was a toy that needed to be repaired.
Or, like now, there was suspicious silence, which was even worse.
Ian thought he’d have a little window of writing opportunity. Lucy had been happily playing with her food at the table, and as slow as she ate, Ian guessed he might be able to get a few hundred words written.
He didn’t want to think about how a few hundred words at a time wasn’t going to get him finished by the publisher’s (third) deadline, or how many times he’d had to delete big chunks because he was incapable of holding the whole book in his head and his plot had gone straight off the tracks.
“Lu?”
Ian leaned back in his chair so that he could see into the kitchen.
Lucy’s chair was empty, and her purple butterfly dress was hanging off the back of it. It hung neatly, as if she had taken it off before she shifted.
Ian swore under his breath and cheerfully called, “Lucy? Honey? Did you finish your food?” He should have kept her in a high chair a little longer, he thought woefully. But she was tall for her age and had convinced him that she was ready for a big girl chair. She was, but was he?
The sandwich that she’d been playing with had been disassembled and all the parts she liked had been eaten out. The halved cherry tomatoes were gone, of course, they never lasted long enough to be entertainment. Her sippy cup was on its side, a few drops of water on the table beneath it.
“Lucy, you know I don’t want to play hide and seek right now. Lucy?”
Ian was equal parts annoyed and worried. There was so much trouble that a little girl could get into...and even more that a squirrel could. She’d been so safely occupied, and he’d barely looked away. He was the worst dad, he was a miserable failure, how hard could it be to juggle a stay-at-home career and one small child?
Pretty damned hard, it turned out. Ian scanned the top of the fridge and the cabinets in the kitchen; Lucy liked high places. But she wasn’t in any of her usual spots, and Ian spread his search zone down the hall. “Lucy, please come out. Honey, are we playing a game? You know that Daddy needs to get his book finished, but if you want me to, I can read you one of your books. Lucy?”
The carpet gave a suspicious squelch, right in front of the bathroom and Ian flung the door open to find that there was water in a shallow pool all across the floor. “Argh!” He was wearing socks, and they were immediately soaked as he dashed across to the sink, where the tap was still running. There was a washcloth lying across the bottom of the bowl and when Ian pulled it out, the water in the bowl swiftly drained away. A few water-logged dolls sagged at the bottom.
“Lucy!!”
Ian made himself temper his voice. Lucy had probably realized that she’d done something wrong and was hiding as a squirrel in one of the million tiny places in this house where he’d never find her.
“Lucy, you aren’t in trouble,” he called as gently as he could. “I just need to know that you’re okay!”
He pulled the towels down off the rack to start sopping up the puddle. He had a box fan somewhere, he’d better get it going in the hallway before they had a mold problem to add to the mix.
The phone rang while he was wringing out the towels for the second time. “Hang on,” he said when the fan drowned out the caller.
“You sound like you’re in an air tunnel,” Wanda complained when he got the fan turned off. When Ian was feeling his most lonely and full of regret over their broken relationship, she usually managed to say just the right thing to remind him why they’d parted ways.
“Sorry,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound sorry. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk about The Schedule.”
She always said it like both words were capitalized.
The Schedule.
The Schedule was the calendar that dictated the days they had to see each other, the days that Lucy was hers or his. At first, Wanda had been adamant about getting every day allotted to her with their joint custody, and Ian had spent the days she was gone desperately missing his daughter. But Wanda got busier with work, her new boyfriend had kids, and Wanda had gradually adjusted The Schedule so that Ian had Lucy nearly all the time. He’d even thought about pressuring her for child support, but it had never felt like he was equal to the effort.
“After all,” she’d said more than once. “You don’t work, it’s not an inconvenience to you.”
Ian wasn’t sure which part of her assumption he objected to most. That writing wasn’t working? That raising a small child basically by himself wasn’t a whole job all by itself? But like most battles with Wanda, it simply wasn’t worth fighting anymore.
“What about it?” Ian sounded more surly than he meant. Was she going to want to talk to Lucy? Did he have to admit that he didn’t know where she was and that she’d just flooded the bathroom?
Wanda sounded almost sweet. “I know I said I didn’t want any of the holidays this year, but my parents invited us up to Helena for Labor Day. They’d like to see Lucy.”
Ian remembered holidays with Wanda’s folks. They were all squirrel shifters, and while he adored his daughter beyond reason, the ceaseless chattering and the way Wanda’s family was always in constant motion always left him feeling like he’d been in a room full of mental vampires after only a few minutes. Having to stay with them had been a kind of fine-tuned torture.
Labor Day. “Let me check my calendar.”
Ian didn’t really have to look at it. Aside from the looming red BOOK DUE (really, this time!) entry on his calendar, it was just a trudging list of nothing. The closest he’d gotten to a social life lately was babysitting his friend Roderick’s daughter Gabby, a little girl just younger than Lucy, while Roderick took his new girlfriend out on a date.
Sometimes, it seemed like everyone was moving on without him.
“That should work fine,” Ian said.
“You’re a peach,” Wanda said sunnily. “I’ll pick her up that Saturday morning and drop her off on Monday evening. Let me talk to Lucy.”
Dammit.
“Hang on.” He muted the phone, double-checking that he had, and then hollered, “Lucy! Come talk to your mom! She’s on the phone right now!”
A rustle at the baseboard gave him a few seconds of warning, and then Lucy shot out from behind the heater, her rusty red fur covered in dust.
She flowed up into a little girl, completely naked, and reached grabby hands for the phone.
“I’ll hold it for you, honey,” Ian said, thumbing the connection back on. He knew there were parents that would casually hand children Lucy’s age a several hundred dollar phone—Wanda among them—but he didn’t trust her attention span and he couldn’t afford to replace it.
“Mummy! Bathroom’s all wet!”
Ian couldn’t hear Wanda’s answer to that, and he oversaw half of a halting conversation before Lucy agreed, “Kisses!” and waved at the phone.
Ian checked to see that Wanda had hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. “You want to tell me about the bathroom?” he asked.
Lucy eyed her escape route back under the heater and Ian made a note to try to block it up with something. His entire house had become an obstacle course of trying to keep her out of small places and dangerous things. The cabinet locks were a constant frustration, as much for him as they were for her, and she could climb anything.
“You’re not in trouble,” Ian promised. “I just want to make sure it doesn’t happen again, honey.”
She wilted and mumbled something about dolls, carrots, and possibly a trombone.
“Just make sure you ask me before you play in the bathroom,” Ian begged. “And turn off the water. We don’t want to waste it!”
Lucy looked up at him hopefully, then said, “I’m hungry.”
It was her get-out-jail-free card. Ian wasn’t going to deny her food, no matter how recently she’d eaten, and he bent and scooped her up into his arms. “What did you forget, sweety?”
Lucy put two fingers in her mouth and said, “Clothes?” around them.
“Clothes,” Ian agreed. “You’re supposed to take your clothes with you when you shift.”
Ian found himself at eye level with the business card magnet that Roderick had given him the week before as he opened the fridge. Cherry’s new day care for shifter children, Tiny Paws, apparently taught kids to shift with their clothing.
A day care for shifter children.
Maybe he could talk Wanda into helping to pay for it. Maybe, if he could finish his damned book, he could pay for it himself. It would be good for Lucy to get more socialization. He couldn’t just go set up playdates with the neighborhood kids when she was so good at shifting and so terrible about knowing when she was supposed to.
“Do you want a yogurt squeezie?” Ian offered. He knew she would.
When he put her down for a protesting nap, an hour later, he went back to his laptop. There were sticky squirrel footprints on the lid.
I know how to fix this, he thought hopefully.
He opened up his phone and punched in the number for Tiny Paws.
“Hi,” he said when Cherry answered. “I was wondering if you had any openings…”
CHAPTER 2
“Here we are, Seltzer,” Olivia said, unlocking the front door with the key that had been left under the mat for her in a quaint, small town style. “Home, sweet, home.”
Seventeen Crescent Drive wasn’t much to look at.
Olivia had been expecting a posher neighborhood from the sticker shock of the lease; she’d taken the teaching contract before she went shopping for a rental and that had turned out to be a big mistake. If she hadn’t wanted to leave Florida and start over so badly, she might have tried to get out of it, but maybe she could get a second job. Maybe even taking wedding photos.
Olivia paused to let the wave of grief and anger wash over her, then pulled the key out of the deadbolt. Maybe not taking photos. She stuffed those memories back and opened the door.
She could probably find temporary work as a waitress or a cashier before school started. She was walking distance to the middle school, so she could keep her commute costs down.
Seltzer, impressed by neither her life plans or their destination, meowed from the cat carrier. Olivia released the hatch on his door and the big orange cat flowed out, fluffy tail high. He sniffed around the porch and sauntered into the house, prepared to investigate every corner of his new domain.
Olivia turned before following him, gazing around outside.
The houses were close together and small, but there were a lot of trees and everything seemed bright and tidy. It was a quiet suburb, with half a dozen kids in the street enjoying the last weeks of their summer break on bikes and a few people out doing yard work in the sunshine.
There was a quality to the air that was very different than the humid air of Florida. It was more than just dry; it actually felt more friendly. Olivia didn’t think it was just the mild temperature or the ideal water content, but she couldn’t identify the smell it had. Trees, maybe? Was it the variety of grass on the lawns here, which looked thinner and paler than the lawns she was used to?
There were sounds of insects, if she listened for them, but it wasn’t the same din that she was used to, and the blue sky was just a little hazy. There were wildfires further north, apparently a common hazard of Montana, but all of the current blazes were comfortably far from civilization. There were birds flitting around in the trees that Olivia didn’t recognize, but she heard a few familiar calls.
The interior of the house was exactly as it had been in the videochat tour with her realtor, Veronica. It had a sparse, open floor plan with a living area and kitchen, a bathroom and one bedroom in the back. It was unfurnished, with old but un-stained beige carpet in most rooms, and textured white walls. The kitchen was unremarkable, with melamine counters and box store cabinets. The appliances were white, and the cabinets had a pale, worn wood finish.
Everything was perfectly serviceable and completely impersonal.
Well, Olivia was here for a year, at least, and she could make it her own. For tonight, she was roughing it on an inflatable mattress with a sleeping bag. She opened the back door and looked out at the overgrown garden. It was probably too late in the season to make much of it, being the first week of August, but maybe next summer she could grow tomatoes and peas in the raised beds. There were some volunteer sunflowers that had grown up around an empty bird feeder and a lot of weeds that Olivia wasn’t familiar with.
