Acting for Shapeshifters [Anne Bishop's The Others]

Chapter Three - Rescue

When she returned forty minutes later, lugging a bag of clothing for Samantha and a selection of frozen dinners, Samantha wasn't there. The sheet lay crumpled on the sofa, and one of the Herald issues spread open on the coffee table.

"Bird-witted cat!" Tansy snapped. Her eyes scanned the open paper. An ad glared back at her, circled by a red pen, impossible to ignore. It mentioned a movie, shapeshifters, an audition, and an address. The date of the audition was set for today, from ten to one. Tansy glanced at her watch. A quarter past noon.

"It's a trap!" she yelled at the sheet, shaking her fist at the helpless daisies. "You know it's a trap. What are you doing rushing into danger by yourself?"

She shouldn't have gotten involved at all. She should've called the Courtyard at the onset of this disastrous caper and let the Sanguinati deal with the gun-toting thugs and the impulsive panthers who risked their lives for no reason. Now, she would have to go alone to that scam movie company and rescue Samantha again. Plus, whoever else those sham, shifter-hating moviemakers had snared.

She shoved the frozen dinners into her freezer and threw the no-longer-needed bag of clothes to the mattress, still sitting in the corner beside the patio door.

Should she call the Courtyard now? She stepped towards the telephone, and her feet tingled. No surprise there. "Drat! Drat!" she mouthed, stepping back. "Why should I do it all alone?" Even her brother wasn't available today; she would've conscripted him to her aid, but he was out of town, on assignment in the northwest for his radio station. She was on her own. And she had to hurry. If those gangsters hurt Samantha or another shapeshifter, the Elders, those scary monsters she had heard about, might descend on her city en masse and destroy half of it, as they had done in Toland last summer. She couldn't risk it.

Cursing everyone and everything, Tansy turned in a circle. What did she need? She didn't have a gun or any other weapon, except a Mace spray she kept in her purse. Didn't know how to use a weapon anyway. In all the five years of filming Coconut Boulevard, Mazel had never needed to handle a weapon, otherwise Tansy would know.

She didn't know martial arts either. Not much anyway. Once, two years ago, Mazel had needed some jujitsu moves in her dealings with burglars. The show writers wanted to spruce up the plot. Tansy had ended up training for several months to get her kicks authentic. Despite her best efforts, or maybe because of them, the viewers voted that episode the funniest in the series. Even the film crew had giggled as they filmed, and her instructor, a black belt sensei, groaned in despair when he watched the footage afterwards.

She would have to rely on her wits and her acting to extract Samantha from whatever predicament she had fallen into. In the last moment, Tansy retrieved the bags of second-hand clothes she had bought. The thick-headed panther might need it if she switched back to human. "Addle-brained feline," Tansy muttered as she stomped out the door. "I should feed her live rats, not gourmet dinners."

The street mentioned in the ad wasn't far geographically from her co-op, but it was on the next hill, and it took her half an hour to drive there. She stared in dismay at the building at the end of the cul-de-sac. It looked like a factory or a warehouse, abandoned by its owners years ago. Dirty chipped bricks and boarded windows didn't associate in her mind with any movie company, and the scraggy palms on the other side of the narrow lane contended for space with the chunks of twisted metal, broken glass, and deflated old tires, before the desiccated land dropped off down the stony hillside. She couldn't see anyone, not even a rat. Desolation and decay permeated the street.

A motorbike, old and scuffed, was parked in front of the large double-door of the warehouse, but when Tansy parked beside it and tried to get out of her car, her feet started prickling so fiercely, her knees buckled. Wincing and cataloging complex obscenities, she got back in the car and drove around the building, where she parked behind a rusted dumpster. This time, she left the car with no problem.