Height of Dreams (eBook)

Chapter One

It was the new kid’s first day on the grill, and it wasn’t going well. Shaka tried to be patient with him, but the orders were piling up.

“Shit!” he yelled as he scraped a mess of eggs and shell off the grill and flung it into the garbage.

Shaka stepped up beside him. “May I?” she asked.

The new cook, Jamie, stepped aside without answering.

“You’ve just got to use a little more finesse, and you’ll be fine,” she said as she quickly cracked two eggs onto the grill. They sizzled immediately, and she placed a lid over them. “You want to flip those?” she said as she motioned to the hash browns.

Jamie quickly grabbed a spatula and turned them. “Great,” he exclaimed, “they’re burnt!”

“Not yet,” she said as she glanced at them. “They’re crispy. Most people like them that way.” She grabbed the next ticket and went to the cooler for the pancake batter. “I’ve got this one. You start the next one.”

Jamie reached for the next ticket.

In the cooler, Shaka ran her fingertips over the plastic containers that lined the shelves, leaving a track in the condensation that clung to their surfaces. She stopped when she touched the one labeled Pancake and pulled it from the shelf. She spun around to head back to the grill, when the door swung open. Orion stood in the doorway, blocking her passage.

“They’re not happy out there, North Country,” he said.

“I know, I know. I’m trying to help him catch up,” she answered. She had grown to like Orion’s nickname for her, but this morning it annoyed her. “So, if you could move out of the way, I can do that.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Of course I don’t care if they ever get their food,” he added. “But you look cute in your little chef’s coat.”

“Maybe you could try to pretend to care? The business kind of depends on people getting their food.”

Orion sighed and stepped out of the doorway. As he walked back toward the dining room, she called after him, “And you look cute in your little apron!”

“That’s what they tell me!” he answered as he pushed through the double doors and disappeared from the kitchen.

The year before, Shaka had bought a café in the town of Two Harbors on the north shore of Lake Superior. Though she was only twenty-three at the time, with the help of her grandfather and a few close friends, she had successfully remodeled and rebranded it. It was now Arnold’s Café and Bakery, named for her grandfather. On weekend mornings, Arnold would seat people and work the till to help. He spent a good portion of those mornings reading the Duluth News Tribune and drinking coffee on his stool by the till. He was becoming an icon in the little café and seemed to like the attention, which surprised Shaka. Her grandfather had always been such a private man.

The two of them, along with Orion, had good reason to keep to themselves. They were shape-shifters and could turn into wolves at will. Sometimes when all the tables and booths were full of happy customers, Shaka would wonder how quickly and chaotically the place would empty if they revealed their supernatural abilities. It was just a daydream though. They took great care to keep their gift a secret.

Shaka and her grandfather were from Duluth, a large port city just down the shore from Two Harbors. Orion, on the other hand, was new to Minnesota. He came from a ranch in Yellowstone National Park, where he had been the alpha of a pack of shifters, a role that had never sat well with him. Meeting Shaka had persuaded him to leave the strain and structure of the pack and move east to Minnesota.

Because he had grown up sheltered, he had some unusual ideas. One that Shaka wouldn’t tolerate was his disgust for people who didn’t possess his supernatural ability. He called ordinary people “plainsmen” and seemed to spit the word when he said it. When he had come to her to learn how to live outside of the pack, she’d decided this prejudice of his should be the first thing to go. She asked him to be a server in her café, so he could get used to interacting with regular people. Her plan had worked, to a degree. Orion was getting better at it every day, and he even admitted that he liked some of them, but the rules of social exchange didn’t seem to apply to him. At twenty-seven, he was tall and lean with piercing green eyes, his golden hair often pulled back into a loose ponytail. If he waited on a table of women, he was getting a good tip, no matter what the service was like, but his size and stature intimidated other men. Though he no longer controlled the day-to-day activities of the Yellowstone pack, he still carried himself with authority. Very rarely did anyone challenge him with a complaint.

Shaka would watch him count his tips at the end of his shift in awe. “I guess you got the serving bit mastered,” she once told him. “You’ll probably succeed at whatever you do.”

“How could I not, with nothing but plainsman for competition?” he’d replied.

“Spoken like a true fascist,” she muttered, and he quickly asked her what a fascist was. “Someone you overthrow,” she’d quipped, leaving him puzzled.

But this morning in the café, he was doing his best to pacify the customers, who were wondering why a simple order of French toast or eggs and hash browns was taking thirty minutes or more.

“It won’t be much longer,” he assured each table.

Finally, the bell in the kitchen started to ring. Orion hurried back to the line to collect his orders. He stacked several of them on a single tray and easily hoisted it up on his shoulder.

“Don’t drop that!” Shaka teased him as he left the kitchen.

He quickly moved from table to table, placing plates in front of customers, getting all of them correct except for one, which was simply exchanged across the table.

Table by table, the morning got back on track, and eventually the breakfast rush subsided. As they cleaned up, Shaka tried to keep Jamie from getting discouraged. “You’ll get better, it just takes time,” she told him.

“I’m just not used to being up front. I was on the fryers at my last job.”

“It’s different when you’re in charge. But you’ll get it. Do you want to take the lead for lunch? I’ll do the fryers.”

“Okay. I’ll give it a shot.”

Shaka was hoping Jamie could handle the kitchen on his own a couple days of the week. She had worked in the café every day since it opened that spring. Now that things were starting to feel more settled, she wanted some time to herself again.

Jamie had interviewed well for the position, having worked three other jobs in busy kitchens in Duluth. Therefore, she had been a little surprised to see him struggle as much as he did. She wondered if she should have been more thorough in checking his references. Either way, she had hired him, and she wasn’t ready to give up on him. She liked him. He wanted to do a good job, and he listened to her when she gave him directions. She knew he’d be the cook he’d appeared to be on his resume one day, but she wouldn’t be taking any time off for at least a couple more weeks.

The café closed at 3:00 p.m. on weekends and 2:00 p.m. on weekdays. Shaka had initially wanted to serve three meals a day, but soon found that with no liquor license, she wasn’t getting many dinner guests. But now that the summer business was steady, she was grateful for the evenings off. She needed the time to unwind. Most nights, she and Orion would shift and run together, and sometimes her grandfather would join them.

As she closed the café that afternoon, she felt the heat washing in from the windows and couldn’t wait to get out into the woods. She’d rented a small apartment in town so she could be close to her business, but most days, she spent at least a few hours at her grandfather’s cabin in the woods. After the café was cleaned and locked up, the three of them piled into Arnold’s car, turned from the cool breeze off the lake, and drove into the woods.

“You kids go on,” Arnold said as he parked the car in front of his cabin. “I’m gonna relax with a cold one on the porch.”

“Okay. See you in a while, Grandpa,” Shaka said as she hopped out of the car. Orion just nodded to Arnold and slipped out of the back seat. He strolled behind Shaka as she rushed down the trail to the little lake behind the cabin.

When Shaka reached the lake, she flung off her clothing and dove under the surface. She liked it down here; it was quiet and still. She exhaled a stream of bubbles and let herself sink, enjoying the peace of being surrounded by water. Then she thought she heard the muffled sound of Orion calling her name from the shore. She sometimes thought he worried too much, but then, she couldn’t really blame him. Even though they were powerful supernatural beings, their lives weren’t without threats. It had only been two years since Shaka had escaped from a research facility that had been capturing and experimenting on shifters. She had...