The winking full moon that overlooked the shop, with his crater dimples and knowing tooth bearing smile, was Marina’s little joke. Like she herself was winking at every shape shifter that entered The Planet. As though it were her little way of saying "it’s okay, I get it, you’re not alone here" and that was maybe the reason why Tina and her social circle congregated there. They felt comfortable there, in that place, as if just knowing it was run by a lesbian werewolf kind of made it uniquely theirs. There where other places around town run by werewolves and other types of weres, but as far as they knew she was the only lesbian business owner who could lay claim to also being a creature of the night (such as they were) and that made Marina and her place something special to them. Shape shifters in general were a minority because they kept their populations down to help avoid detection by humans. That meant that as small as the population of shape shifters was, the population of gay and bisexual shape shifters was even smaller. This in turn meant that finding a gay werewolf, even in a city as large as Los Angeles, was kind of like finding a unicorn unless you decided to turn a gay human. Which was the primary reason that Dana now sprouted a pelt of fur, a long muzzle and a tail every time the moon was full and had been for going on two years now.

Two years. Twenty four moons, more if you count the times when the moon was full enough, either waxing or waning, and her emotional state was volatile enough to trigger a transformation more than once per month. All in all, Dana Fairbanks had undergone forty three of the painful, humiliating and just plain inconvenient transformations from human into human/wolf hybrid beast. Every month, without fail, it felt like the first time all over again. The same fear, embarrassment and shame. Mostly fear though. Being turned rather than pureborn, Dana could not transform into a fully animal shape having access only to her hybrid form. Just as well, the unnatural mix of human and beast gave the hybrid state strength, vigor and hardiness the pure animal form lacked.