Miracle on Shifter Street

by Braylon Black

  I couldn’t really blame them. The police sketch of the suspect at large looked like my twin—down to the exact same mole on our left cheek. It was so bizarre that I couldn’t help but feel like the universe was playing a cruel trick on me.

  Several hours later—I don’t know how long, exactly—they brought me to the interrogation room again. I asked them how long they were going to hold me for. They said I was under investigative detention, and a prosecutor was reviewing the case to determine if there was enough evidence to press charges. This time I told them I wouldn’t answer a single question without a lawyer present.

  So they brought me back to my cell, and that’s where I’d been ever since, tossing, turning and staring at the ceiling... all night long.

  Now it was morning again, Christmas Eve, and it seemed there was still no resolution. I knew they couldn’t hold me without charges forever. But even so, I could still miss Christmas entirely... and my heart was already aching terribly and missing Marlie so bad.

  A guard appeared and unlocked the jail cell.

  “Daily phone call,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  I immediately dialed Marlie’s number. Thank God I remembered it.

  “Hello? Logan?” Marlie’s sweet voice washed over me like a cleansing rain and immediately lifted my spirits.

  “It’s me, sweetie.”

  “Oh, I miss you so much! I couldn’t sleep all last night! Please tell me they’re gonna let you out today! I need you back at home with me.”

  “Well,” I sighed. “I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. They seem pretty convinced that I’m the guy they’re looking for. I wouldn’t be surprised if they press charges soon. Then I’ll be shit out of luck.”

  “Oh, no!” Marlie cried. “That’s so awful. I don’t understand why this is happening to you.”

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  “Are you okay? Are they feeding you? No one’s hurt you, have they? Oh god, I’ve watched enough TV to know how awful prison can be. This is outrageous! I’m gonna sue the pants off—”

  I chuckled softly. “No, Marlie, it’s okay. I’m fine. This isn’t prison. It sucks, but these guys are just doing their jobs. All I can do is cross my fingers and pray that they don’t have enough supposed evidence to charge me with anything.”

  “And if they do?”

  There was a long silence on the line as I thought about it. “Well... I’m gonna have to lawyer up, I guess. And that means I’ll be stuck in here for a long time, unless we can post bail. But who knows how much that’ll be.”

  Marlie sighed. “This is so unfair. I miss you so much.”

  “I miss you too, Marlie. But don’t worry. I’m sure everything will turn out fine.”

  I tried to keep my spirits high for Marlie’s sake. But honestly? I was worried. Really worried.

  “I don’t understand,” Marlie said. “We got the rabbit’s foot back and yet this still happened. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, maybe the rabbit’s foot never worked in the first place. Maybe it was all in your head. A placebo.”

  “No way! That can’t possibly be true. How else do you explain all the bad luck I’ve had?”

  I chuckled. “Maybe you’re just clumsy, Marlie.”

  Silence. I could feel him scowling at me over the line.

  The guard gestured that my time was up.

  “Listen, Marlie. I gotta go. I want you to stay positive, okay? This will all work out somehow. And Marlie, please don’t try to cook anything, okay? And if you make a fire, um… please just be very careful.”

  Marlie sighed. “Okay.”

  I moved to hang up the phone, but then stopped myself. “Marlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You believe me, right? I would never do these awful things, ever.”

  “Of course I believe you, Logan.”

  “Thank you. I love you.”

  The words escaped my lips before I had a chance to stop them. I heard Marlie gasp.

  “I... I love you too, Logan.”

  I smiled and hung up the phone. Warmth spread through my entire body from head to toe. For the moment, at least, the fact that I was locked up and rotting in a jail cell on Christmas Eve ceased to matter. This problem was temporary—it would pass, somehow, some way.

  More importantly, I had my omega’s love that I knew would last for all eternity... and that’s all that truly mattered.

  Marlie

  I gazed out the window, watching the snow falling soundlessly in the blue light of dusk. I’d been plastered on the couch all day under my fuzzy blanket, too depressed to move. Once again, somehow, I found myself alone on Christmas Eve.

  I held up the rabbit’s foot and stared at it.

  Stupid thing. You don’t even work right. Why the hell is Logan in jail right now?! That’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s all your fault!

  I threw the rabbit’s foot across the room with a growl. It knocked over a porcelain figurine of a rabbit, which shattered into pieces on the floor.

  I rolled my eyes. Of course.

  I wondered if Logan was right. Maybe the rabbit’s foot was never magical at all. Maybe it was just the placebo effect or cognitive bias, or something like that.

  It was possible I just automatically attributed all my good fortune to the rabbit’s foot, while disregarding everything bad that had happened to me over the years.

  After all, it’s not like I was living some incredibly charmed life or anything. I lived alone in my grandma’s stuffy old house, single, with no family and few friends. I’d never been very popular because people thought I was weird. The only guy I ever dated dumped me after three months. I survived month to month off my grandma’s small inheritance, and by selling my garden-grown veggies to markets and stores in town. Needless to say, I had to follow a tight budget and live frugally. I didn’t get to enjoy fancy new iPhones or vacations to Europe.

  I wouldn’t say my life sucked or anything... but it was certainly lacking.

  Most of all, I was lonely.

  Now, it felt like fate was just toying with me. I’d finally been given a taste of love, real love. I’d found my forever mate… and now he’d been cruelly ripped away from me. On Christmas, for Santa’s sake!

  This stupid rabbit’s foot didn’t do shit.

  Maybe the world was just random and chaotic. My parents died because they got T-boned by a semi-truck. The driver just wasn’t paying attention. It had nothing to do with some inanimate object.

  Likewise, I’d nearly burned my house down and fallen on my ass so many times simply because I was clumsy and careless. Logan got arrested because... well, because life just isn’t fair, and sometimes bad things happen to good people. That’s all there was to it.

  It was probably a good idea to stop putting so much faith in magical objects, and start taking responsibility for my own life instead.

  But for the moment at least, all I could really do was lay here and wait to hear from Logan, and pray that we’d be blessed with a last-minute Christmas miracle. I didn’t care about the damned rabbit’s foot anymore. I just wanted my alpha, my mate, back by my side.

  Especially since...

  I inched my hand down my chest and let it rest on my belly. I could feel something happening there—a very faint fluttering, a barely noticeable twitching. I didn’t need a pregnancy test to determine whether or not I was pregnant. I already knew. All day, I’d been feeling off. I was light-headed, dizzy, and felt both hungry and queasy at the same time. My emotions were all over the place, too.

  There was absolutely no doubt that I was pregnant with Logan’s babies. Whether it was two, three, or—God forbid—four, I didn’t know, but bunny shifters almost always carried multiples. So in nine months we’d have a very full house, indeed.

  Assuming, of course, that Logan wouldn’t still be rotting in a prison cell.

  That’s the only thing that dampened my excitement. If Logan were here by my s
ide, I would’ve been jumping off the walls, crying happy tears, singing and dancing and doing backflips. Well… maybe not backflips.

  But with him gone and potentially in a lot of trouble... my pregnancy only felt like a nightmare. Could I really handle being a single parent to a big litter of babies when I could barely manage to boil a pot of water without blowing the whole house up?

  My heart ached terribly. I turned my face into the couch’s throw pillow and pulled the fuzzy blanket up over my shoulders.

  All I wanted was to hide from the world.

  Somebody wake me up when everything’s better again... I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  I awoke to a cacophony of sounds outside my window: branches rustling, hooves stampeding, and wings flapping. I jerked upright on the couch in response to a wolf’s eerie howl echoing through the woods. It was pitch black outside my windows—the dead of night. Then came the fierce screech of a dragon.

  I glanced at my grandma’s old clock on the wall. It was 12:18AM.

  Ah, so that explained it.

  The Midnight Shifter Run.

  The shifters must’ve been passing right by my house. I remembered I’d been woken up by a similar raucous last Christmas Eve, too.

  But this time, instead of putting a pillow over my ears and trying to go back to sleep, I got up and opened the front door. I was hit immediately by a frigid chill, so I hugged myself tight as I walked across the icy footpath in my front yard, clad in only PJs and socks.

  I gasped at the sight. A procession of shifters were passing through the trees just beyond my property line. All kinds were present: wolves, bears, coyotes, panthers, bobcats, even dogs and housecats. Above them, the airborne creatures swooshed through the air: eagles, hawks, small flittery song-birds, and a couple huge, majestic dragons, the moonlight glinting off their shiny metallic scales.

  I watched the shifters in awe. They were so beautiful... and so lucky. A sting of bitter envy pierced my heart. I wished I could join them, but of course I couldn’t. I was no bunny shifter. I was merely a human with bunny characteristics. It just wasn’t fair.

  Sighing, I turned to head back inside when I spotted another animal flying silently through the air.

  It was an owl: light brown, with a large wingspan and a scruffy face.

  I recognized him immediately. This was the same damn owl who’d taken my rabbit’s foot!

  Instantly, I found myself consumed by a burning desire to chase this shifter down and see what the hell his deal was. Yes, I’d already found the rabbit’s foot, but I still wanted to know why he’d done it, and I wanted to give this jerk a piece of my mind, too.

  I clenched my fists with resolve, and bolted out into the cold, snowy night. There was no time to put on my boots and coat.

  ***

  I joined the procession of animals and received myriad puzzled looks. I knew everyone was wondering why I hadn’t shifted. I wasn’t sure if there was an explicit rule against humans taking part in the run, but I assumed it had to be generally frowned upon.

  But I wasn’t really taking part in the event; I was just trying to chase down that damned owl. I kept my eyes glued on him as he swept soundlessly across the night sky above my head. My head throbbed and my lungs ached with pain as I strained to keep up. My legs were already sore and my gut was cramping. I wasn’t exactly in the best shape of my life, and my speed was no match for the animals around me.

  Yet I still felt a special kinship with them. As I scrambled clumsily alongside them, for the first time in my life, I felt like I truly belonged. Yes, these were my people. I was one of them.

  My heart began to beat faster and faster, at a rate I didn’t think was humanly possible. Was I okay? I was I gonna have a heart attack?

  Every cell in my body buzzed with electricity, and I felt my blood grow hot as it roared through my veins.

  Um... what was going on?

  Then I noticed that everything around me appeared to be growing larger. The animals expanded in size until they looked like giants towering over me, their massive paws and hooves causing mini-earthquakes with every stomp. At the same time, the trees in the background grew distant, and now looked impossibly far away. It felt like everything in the world was pulling away from me.

  I observed all of this with unusually sharp, acute senses.

  That’s when I realized I wasn’t running anymore. I was hopping.

  Holy shit!

  The world hadn’t grown larger—I had shrunk! I’d just shifted into my bunny form for the very first time!

  Overjoyed, I hopped along as fast as I could. I no longer felt cold. My limbs were agile and sprightly, and I couldn’t believe how quickly I was moving. Yet at the same time, I grew intimidated by the stampede of animals around me. They were all so much bigger than me and none of them seemed to notice I was even there. In a panic, I zigzagged around, dodging them left and right, hoping I wouldn’t get accidentally squashed.

  My first shift had me feeling so excited and overwhelmed that I forgot the reason I was out here in the first place: to chase down that owl. When I glanced up at the sky again, he was nowhere to be seen.

  Damn!

  I kept my eyes and ears on high alert as I pressed on. The owl had to be somewhere around here. I would find him sooner or later—especially now that I was in my bunny form, and could move a hell of a lot quicker.

  I didn’t even hear the owl approach me from behind.

  I just felt his large claws sink painfully into my little body. He latched on with an iron-clad grip, and yanked me up from the snowy forest floor into the cold night air.

  That’s when I remembered that owls eat bunnies like me for dinner.

  Logan

  “Logan Middleton?” A gruff voice stirred me awake from a restless sleep and troubled dreams. A set of keys jangled.

  I opened my eyes to see a guard unlocking my cell, the deputy standing next to him.

  “You’re free to go,” the deputy said.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, still delirious.

  “No, we’re the ones who should be sorry,” he said with a tired smile. “You were right. We made a mistake. I hope you understand we were just trying to do our jobs.”

  I swung my legs off the stiff jail cell bed and rose to my feet. “Of course. It’s fine. What happened?”

  “Well, we found the real culprit,” the deputy explained as we walked together down the hall and into the main office.

  My eyes locked on with another man who could literally be my body double, sitting in a chair next to a desk with his hands cuffed. His sharp green eyes narrowed as he glared at me. His hair was longer than mine and looked dirty and disheveled, and he wore a leather jacket with spikes. Aside from that, he was basically my twin.

  “We caught him trying to break into a house and steal Christmas presents from right under the tree,” the deputy said, shaking his head. “Can you believe the nerve of this guy?”

  “Wow,” I muttered.

  The deputy looked at me with a raised brow. “Are you sure you don’t have a long-lost twin?”

  I chuckled. “No... well, I mean... maybe. I’m gonna have to sit down and have a serious talk with my parents about this.”

  “Eh,” the deputy shrugged. “Everybody’s got lookalikes. With seven billion people on earth, it’s bound to happen every once in a while. I’m just sorry that this had to happen to you now, over the holidays. You’ve got a serious case of bad luck, huh?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. You can say that again.”

  A few minutes later, I had my wallet, jacket, and cell phone back. I stepped outside into the cold night air and pulled up Marlie’s name on my cell’s contact list. But then I thought better of it. He was probably sound asleep and I didn’t want to wake him.

  I’d surprise him at the door instead.

  I smiled and headed off on foot to my sweet omega’s house. My car was currently in the impound lot, and I didn’t feel like dealing with that
headache now. I didn’t mind the walk, anyway.

  My body shook with excitement, and I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off my face. Over the course of just a few days, this had gone from the worst Christmas ever, to the best, to the worst again, and... now it was back to best.

  What a wild ride.

  Marlie

  The world spun deliriously around me. I zoomed through the cold night air, firm in the owl’s grip, my heart hammering spastically in my little bunny chest. I kept wiggling, squirming, and thumping my hind legs in protest, but of course it was of no use. There was no escape.

  After a few minutes, he descended into a small clearing in the woods next to a shabby, run-down cabin. He released me gently onto the snow and settled a few feet away from me, drawing his large wings snugly back against his sides.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. My first impulse was to hop away to safety as fast as I could, but then I remembered my entire purpose for coming out here tonight. I needed to confront this damned owl. Here he was, right in front of me, so it was now or never.

  I felt a tingling sensation. My head swam. My limbs began to stretch out, pulling like a pieces of spaghetti in a pasta maker. I felt the protective layer of fur disappear from my skin, and the fierce coldness of winter hit me like a freight train.

  I was back in my human form, buck naked in the cold ass snow.

  I hugged myself tight, my body shivering violently.

  The owl cocked his head and peered at me for a moment. Then he turned around and hopped into the darkness of the cabin.

  “Hey!” I yelled, my voice cracking, the air steaming in front of my face. “Hey, I need to talk to you!”

  A beat later, an old man emerged, draped in big furry winter coat and carrying a blanket in his arms. He tossed the blanket at me and I grabbed it, and wrapped it tight around myself before raising to my feet.

  “You might as well come inside,” the old man said. “I’ll start a fire. You’re gonna freeze to death out here, son.”

  A spine-tingling wave of recognition swept over me. “Julio?!” I cried.