He awoke with a start.
Something was wrong.
Trying to figure out what, he moved a paw to attempt rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and—
Wait.
Paw?
He stared at what should have been a normal human hand and smiled.
Before him was a paw.
But not just any paw.
A weretiger's paw.
HIS paw!
He looked over what he could see of his body and confirmed what his other senses were telling him.
I'M A WERETIGER!
He could feel a smile form on his muzzle even as his tail swished in joy and his other paw brushed gently to confirm the existence of his furry chest and other tiger features while feline eyes adjusted to unfamiliar surroundings.
He was in a darkened bedroom, but not the one he usually found himself in.
Then his head turned and saw the striped back of what he instinctively knew to be the were who had welcomed him into were society sleeping peacefully next to him.
He was about to put his furry arms around the other and cuddle...
When someone kicked the bedroom door in!
"I warned you what would happen if you went against my teachings, let alone took up with such abominations!" the man shouted, as he aimed his rifle.
John Harper awoke with a scream in his throat.
"What? John? Are you all right?" his sister Janice asked, sitting up in her bed.
The siblings were sharing what used to be Huck Jenkins bedroom, now a makeshift guest room in the Jenkins household.
Their older sister Jenny, now Mrs. Jennifer Jenkins, was working on emancipating them from their biological parents, but that still didn't stop the fears of the past haunting the present.
"Dad. Gun," John said, trying to pull himself together.
His sister got out of her bed, came over and sat beside him on the edge of his. "What happened?"
"I was... I was a weretiger. I was happy."
"You and Ginger?" she asked, thinking of the O'Toole girl a few doors down from the Jenkins house who had expressed an interest in John.
"I—" and then he stopped. Still trying to figure out whether he was gay, straight, or bi; John realized he had absolutely no idea if it was a tigress or a tiger in the dream bed next to him.
"Let me guess. Although the gun's a new twist, Dad did not approve and was about to punish both of you."
All John could do was just nod his head affirmatively.
"It's okay," Janice said, while hugging her brother. "Our folks still give me bad dreams too. Especially him," she added, referring to their estranged father.
"Really?" asked John, staring at her.
"The reason I'm so stuck on being a mermaid, especially now that I know they're real since we arrived here in Moon Lake, is that sometimes late at night I dream of becoming one and swimming far away to a happy place with other mermaids and mermen to start life anew so I wouldn't have to deal with Mom and Dad and how they treated us any more."
"I know the feeling," admitted John. "Do you have nightmares too?"
"Sometimes," confessed Janice. "Mom's been telling me since Kindergarten that one day Dad will find me a man to marry."
"Is there a problem with that?"
"Marrying a man? No," answered his sister, confirming John's belief that she was straight. "But I don't want to be like Mom, always worried about doing or saying the wrong thing, let alone having to do everything Dad says, no matter what. Besides wanting a REAL husband and not someone who thinks they're my master and I'm their slave, I want whoever I marry to be the man I LOVE, NOT whoever Dad thought would be best for me. After all, look how things turned out with that Dieter jerk," added Janice, referring to Dieter Wilhelm, the man their father wanted Jenny to marry, which was how the Jenkins family found themselves in Moon Lake to begin with when their Dad wanted to stop his oldest daughter from marrying the man she loved instead of the one he wanted her to.
"Love is very important," agreed John.
"Especially TRUE love," said Janice happily.
"Definitely. It's the only way I'll get married." But will it be to a man or a woman? John wondered, his undecided sexual preference raising the question.
"Well, in any event, we should get back to bed now," realized Janice, standing up to return to her own. "We're just lucky that no one else woke up. If any of them knew about our nightmares..."
"Yeah," said John, watching his sister walk back across the room.
Janice was about to crawl back under the covers when John said, "Hey, sis?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
"No problem. Whatever we might think of our parents, we still have each other, Jenny and Junior," she replied, thinking of their oldest brother, who was still back in Alabama to finish his last year before graduating college.
BUT OUTSIDE THE BEDROOM...
A small crowd gathered.
Jenny and Harry had arrived first. Their quick werefox reflexes sprung them into action the moment John started yelling.
Still being normal humans, Harry's parents brought up the rear. If anyone cared to make the comment, it was an interesting contrast, a werefox couple standing next to a human pair in their bathrobes.
Lisa Jenkins was about to speak when her son motioned for silence, before pointing back down the hall away from the closed bedroom door.
"They don't know we're out here," Harry finally whispered upon knowing they were out of his new inlaws range of hearing.
"What all did you hear?" asked his father, knowing how superior were ears were compared to human. "Are the kids all right?"
"Nightmares," replied Jenny. "Another legacy of our father," she added, wrapping furry arms around her mate for both comfort and support. "I knew about John's... problems, but until now I wasn't aware that Janice had any... issues too beyond the obvious of being abruptly uprooted from their prior existence and transplanted here."
"So what can we do?" wondered Lisa.
"Love and support them like we would anyway, but Monday I'm going to call Doctor Twist's office and consult with her," was Jenny's reply, as she turned back to look at the closed guest bedroom door.