Page 1 of A Hutch for Hoover

Chapter One

Hoover

“Where am I?”

My head pounded, every single part of me ached, and my voice was so quiet, I couldn’t even hear myself.What the fuck?

“Where am I?” I spoke louder, this time. At least, I thought I did, but nothing came out except low mumbles. I coughed and coughed, the pain searing in my throat.

“Where am I?” My attempt at the shout sounded muffled and far away, my throat aching as if I’d swallowed glass.

I attempted to open my eyes, and failed. Again, same results. And again, as hard as I could. They wouldn’t budge.

And then I felt a hand on mine. It was my brother, Dirk. My twin. He didn’t need to say a word for me to know it was him. He was there, and everything was going to be okay.

Static filled my ears like an old car radio, and I let darkness take me.

The next time I woke up, I felt better. Not good but on the way there. My body worked, my foot moving as I wiggled it, my head turning. There was still a lot of pain, but my rabbit was helping me heal. I still wasn’t sure where I was or what had happened, but this was an improvement.

The last thing I remembered was going into town to get some ink for my father’s printer. The kind he ordered to be delivered had been the wrong size, because, frankly, my father might be the alpha of the fluffle, but technology was not his gift. He often told me that when I took over his position, when he finally stepped down and deemed me ready, I could do all the modern upgrades that the fluffle needed.

And he was right. I could. I’d trained for the role of alpha my entire life, trained to be his replacement. It wasn’t becauseI was better suited for it than my brother, at least not when the decision had been made. I was older than my brother by three whopping minutes, and that was all the credentials I needed.

Growing up, I hated it. When my brother got to play, I got extra lessons. And at college, I had to take courses on how to run a business, the closest degree there was to what my new role would entail. Human politics wouldn’t do me any good, so no point in studying that. But I’d always loved technology and took as many of those courses as I could sneak in. Might as well combine the two.

I pushed myself to sit before opening my eyes, my brother once again by my side, holding my arm and mumbling something I couldn’t understand. And when I finally blinked away the fuzziness, I saw that I was in a hospital room—but not the one in our fluffle lands. No. This was a human hospital.

How had I missed that before? I’d been in a human hospital during college, visiting a human friend. It was loud and stinky. This place was quiet and, so far, my beast hadn’t scented anything much at all.

I inhaled deeply and ended up coughing hard, my lungs rebelling from my attempts to help make sense of this place.

From then, it was a blur of doctors and nurses, my brother and fathers doing the best they could to calm me as I went from test to test and was given treatment upon treatment. But, despite my family being there and the medical professionals focused on me, I’d never felt lonelier in my life.

The hospital hadn’t been quiet. My voice hadn’t been weak. Fuck, my brother hadn’t been mumbling. My ears took the brunt of the damage and weren’t much more than ornamental, thanks to shitty truck maintenance.

The truck in question had lost its brakes on the hill and forced me off the road. The doctor said my memory was blocked because it was how our bodies sometimes protected us when theworst happened, and I should be grateful not to remember the details.

Only he didn’t say it in words, because I couldn’t hear even if he shouted. Every person who spoke to me sounded like Charlie Brown’s teachers talking to his class, if that clear. Instead, he typed them out on his laptop, displaying the words on the TV screen across from me so everyone could “hear” his answers.

Now that my lungs were cleaned out and my nose no longer being fed oxygen, I could scent the familiar smell of human disinfectants. Best of all, I could speak without coughing. That part wasn’t broken; it had been me not hearing myself, paired with smoke-filled lungs. I held on to that because it was the closest thing to good news I had.

My ears were done. The damage wouldn’t get worse, but there was no coming back from it. I hadn’t been able to shift in time to fix them. Heck, I still hadn’t been able to shift at all. And unlike the rest of my body, which was healing the way shifter bodies did, they weren’t improving at all.

The doctor gave a big, long explanation as to what kind of hearing loss I had and how it happened, but most of the words were ones I didn’t know. I nearly asked him to print it out. He’d taken the time to type it, so why not? But I couldn’t.

Instead, I cried. Cried at the loss.

Over the next two months, I went back to my daily life. I had hearing aids, and they worked well-ish. I didn’t pick up on everything people said. Some of the sounds were distorted. But when they were in, I could get by.

But getting by wasn’t enough for me to take over my father’s role. He promised me it was fine, that we’d figure it out, but I knew the truth. I was broken, and a broken alpha put the fluffle at risk.

“Dirk.” I took my brother’s hand. “Walk with me.”

This would normally be a conversation we’d have after a shift. We’d play and then end up down by the river. That had always been our way.

But now, if I shifted, I couldn’t hear. I had no way of sensing the dangers around us, not all of them, anyway, and then what good would it do? We’d end up at the riverbank, and he’d talk to me, and I’d…I’d hear not a thing.

Dirk came with me. I suspected he knew what was happening. Each day, we came closer to the time when my father was to step down, and, by fluffle law, I was the one to take the spot.

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