by Zoe Chant
There. She’d start there. Natalie grabbed his pajama top by the collar and ripped it open. Little buttons flew everywhere. His muscular chest was slightly stained with blood, but there was no wound that she could see. Nor could she see any movement.
Her own heart lurched.
“Not now!” Her voice rose up, shrill and echoing.
By sheer force of will, she made herself draw in a deep breath, then another. Calm, calm, calm. She couldn’t help him if she passed out herself.
Her heart steadied. She laid her head against his chest, feeling and listening. There was an agonizing pause, and then she heard a heartbeat. Pause. Another. Then a breath, so faint and shallow that she almost missed it. Heartbeat. Pause. Heartbeat. Breath.
That was wrong. That was all wrong. He was alive, but something was horribly wrong and she had no idea what it was and no one she could call for help.
Terror again threatened to overwhelm her, but she forced it back. Closing her eyes, she visualized her panic as a mob of tiny spiky creatures, waving their matchstick arms and screeching at her. She imagined dropping a huge, thick carpet over them, squishing them to the floor and muffling their cries. There. The panic was still there, but stifled and shoved to the back of her mind where it wouldn’t stop her heart.
She opened her eyes. Ransom was unconscious and bloody, Heidi was pawing at him and howling, Wally was barking in a corner, and someone in the room next door was banging on the wall.
“Be quiet,” Natalie whispered fiercely. “Heidi, Wally, shush!”
The puppies quieted down, and the other motel occupant stopped pounding on the wall. Good. Now at least she wouldn’t have someone banging down their door. She stood up, looking around the bathroom for some clue to what the hell had happened, broken glass or—
There was a tiny vial in the bathtub, almost full of a silvery liquid. She picked it up. The silvery color was familiar. She could swear she’d seen it before, but the only silver liquid she knew of was mercury, and it didn’t look like that. Maybe she’d seen it when it wasn’t liquid…?
At that, she knew what it was. She’d seen it at the circus—they had some handcuffs embossed with shiftsilver, for dealing with unfriendly criminal shifters, like robbers. Touching shiftsilver forced your inner animal down into the depths of your mind, so deep that you couldn’t shift. But drinking tincture of shiftsilver forced you down along with it.
Natalie had never seen it in its liquid form or known anyone who’d actually used it. But she’d heard that it was sometimes used as a last-resort remedy for shifters who’d somehow lost the ability to shift, to allow them to get back in touch with their inner animal.
She’d never seen Ransom shift. For an instant, everything seemed to make sense: he couldn’t shift, and he’d gotten so desperate that he’d tried an incredibly dangerous cure. She could understand that…
…but no, that made no sense. He’d offered to cure her with a bite, and that would only work in his hellhound form. And she’d told him it wouldn’t help anyway, so he couldn’t have done this in the hope of saving her.
Whatever his reasons were, something had obviously gone terribly wrong. Setting aside that mystery, she wet a washcloth and sponged off his face. It looked like he’d been in a fight. His nose was bleeding—that was where the blood had come from—and there was a blackening bruise on one cheekbone.
He made a very soft sound, just a slightly deeper inhale. Heidi barked sharply.
“Ransom?”
He didn’t stir. But a patch of skin over his ribs turned red. Horrified, Natalie realized that it was a bruise. What was happening to him?
The panic under the carpet began to screech and thrash, but she threw another mental blanket over it. She needed to think.
He was trapped inside himself with his inner hellhound. There was no antidote to tincture of shiftsilver, which was one of the reasons it was so dangerous. But Ransom wasn’t careless. He was thoughtful, cautious, and smart. He’d planned to do this, so he’d have calculated the exact dosage he needed and not a drop more. It might be possible to just… wake him up.
Natalie turned the shower on to cold, full blast, and stepped in. Air hissed through her teeth with the shock of it—it felt maybe two degrees above freezing.
“Good,” she muttered, and dragged Ransom in with her.
She kept his head turned so he wouldn’t breathe in any water, but the rest of him was drenched instantly. She was shivering already, but he didn’t stir. Her heart sank.
“Come on,” she murmured, her voice barely inaudible to her own ears against the hammering water. “Come on, Ransom. Wake up.”
Heidi jumped into the shower, followed by Wally. Both dogs seemed unaffected by the cold, though Natalie’s teeth were starting to chatter. They nosed at Ransom, but he didn’t respond to them any more than he’d responded to her. The bruise across his ribs darkened and spread.
“Come back. I love you. Come back to me.” She bent down and kissed his cold lips, water running down her face like tears.
Ransom awoke, gasping and clutching at her. They held each other tight, wet hair mingling and wet skin pressed together, until he said, “You’re shivering.”
“You too.”
But it was another minute or so before either of them could let go of each other for long enough to turn off the shower. When they did, the sudden silence felt deafening.
A trickle of red traced along the bottom of the tub and swirled down the drain. Natalie watched it, puzzled. Ransom’s nose had stopped bleeding, and everything else she’d seen had been bruises. Then she saw Heidi frantically licking his ankle and whining apologetically.
“I think Heidi bit you,” Natalie said. “She was trying really hard to wake you up.”
Ransom rubbed her ears until she stopped whining. “Good girl. You did what you had to do.”
“Do you have a first aid kit?”
He nodded. “In my duffel bag.”
She fetched the entire bag. “I’ll bandage it after you get dressed. You’re freezing. Yell when you’re ready.”
She grabbed a towel for herself and retreated from the bathroom, then bolted back in, catching a startled Ransom taking off his shirt. Natalie snatched up the vial of shiftsilver and went out, shutting the door behind her. She dried herself off and dressed in under thirty seconds, a skill she had learned from making quick-changes at the circus, then stashed the tiny vial in her bra along with her lockpicks.
Wally appeared on her bed, shook himself all over her and it, then curled up at its foot. She wiped the doggy shower water off her face.
“Natalie?” Ransom called from the bathroom.
“Coming!”
But he came out himself, in a dry set of black pajamas and not even limping, and sat down on the edge of his bed, across from her. Heidi followed him, but had the grace to shake off in the middle of the room instead, sending droplets all over the TV. Then she jumped on to Ransom’s bed, also curling up at the foot.
He stroked her, then pushed up his pajama leg to reveal a pair of band-aids on his ankle. “She really didn’t do much damage.” The color had come back to his face, but the bruises remained. He looked exhausted. Worse, he looked defeated. But he lifted his head to look Natalie in the eyes, and said, “I apologize. I had no intention of putting you through… that. I thought you’d sleep through the whole thing.”
“I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” She heard how stiff she sounded, but decided to move on rather than back. “Listen, I took the vial of shiftsilver. I know what it is, but only in theory. I’ve never seen it before, or known anyone who’s used it. What exactly were you trying to do with it?”
“If you know what it is…” he began, sounding puzzled, then shrugged as if it wasn’t worth pressing the point. “I was trying to kill my hellhound, of course. But I—”
“You WHAT?” Natalie burst out. “You can do that? Why would you do that?”
He gingerly touched his bruised cheekbone, then dropped
his hand. “I think we’re not operating out of the same knowledge set. Let’s get on the same page. Stop me if I say something you didn’t know or don’t think is right. This is tincture of shiftsilver…”
“Yes.”
“In solid form it stops shifters from transforming into their animal. In liquid form, it enables you to go inside yourself and confront your inner beast…”
“Yes.”
“And fight it.”
“What? No!”
“If you can kill it, then you lose the ability to shift and any other powers that went with it, and it never speaks to you again. If it kills you, then you die.”
Natalie hadn’t been angry at him until that moment, but that touched her off like a match tossed into bone-dry weeds. “And then I wake up in the morning and find you dead in the bathroom?”
He flinched. “I wasn’t intending to die.”
That only fed the flames. Her voice rose and rose until it was a full-fledged yell. “But you knew you could! And you nearly did! I’m pretty sure you were getting your ass handed to you when Heidi bit you and I kissed you!”
A loud bang made them both jump. The room vibrated, and a book fell off the table. From the next room over, a man yelled, “Keep it down in there!”
“Sorry!” Natalie shouted.
“We will!” Ransom called. Then, pitching his voice low, he said, “You’re right. I was losing. You and Heidi saved my life… but I still have my hellhound.”
He looked and sounded so bleak that Natalie got up, lay on his bed, and tried to pull him down beside her. Resisting, he said, “You don’t want to do that.”
“I’m not going to do anything dangerous. I promise. The kiss was just because…” She stopped before she could say, “I love you.” Instead, she said, “Because I care about you and I thought you were dying and I panicked.”
He cupped her cheek in one hand. It sent a tingle down her spine, making her shiver. “Natalie. You don’t have to apologize for that. I only wish I’d been more… present… for it. But that wasn’t what I meant. I’m going to tell you everything. All my secrets. I was wrong to keep them from you. But once you know who—what—I am, I don’t think you’ll want to be in bed with me.”
He made it sound so ominous, as if he was about to rip off his human mask and show her a monster.
“I don’t believe that,” she said. “No one who loves puppies and has a favorite Ballet Shoes sister can be that bad.”
“Some serial killers are very well-read,” Ransom said glumly.
“Puppies though? Are there any who love puppies?” When he gave a doubtful shrug, she added, “Also, are you a serial killer?”
“No, but…” While he paused, seeming to struggle to speak, she recalled the moment when she’d seen him sleeping and realized that he was much younger than she’d thought. But now the lines in his bruised face had deepened, and his eyes held a hundred years of weariness and guilt. Finally, he said, “I was responsible for something that killed a lot of people.”
“You mean, when you were a Marine? You didn’t spot a bomb or an ambush, and you feel like it was your fault that people died?”
Ransom was slowly shaking his head. For the first time, Natalie felt a chill. She’d been so sure that whatever he felt guilty about couldn’t be as bad as he was imagining, but now she wondered.
“This was before I became a Marine,” he said. “And it’s so much worse than you’re imagining.”
Chapter 19
Ransom’s Story
My father was a Marine. When I was a little boy, he’d want to play catch, and I’d want to read. When I was a teenager, he’d want to play pickup basketball, and I’d want to work on a science project. That’s why I got into competitive shooting, so I could do one thing he’d appreciate. And he did appreciate it. Only he thought I ought to join the Marines and be a sniper, and that was about the last thing I wanted to do. We didn’t get in fights about it—he knew better than to try to force me to be someone I wasn’t—but it was always in the back of my mind that I wasn’t the son he wanted.
I went to college and majored in biochemistry, and I co-authored a few papers with some of my professors. I was getting job offers before I even graduated—from pharmaceutical companies, from the Department of Defense, you name it. I could have taken a cushy job in a big company and made lots of money making tiny improvements to existing medications, or worked on weapons with the military. But neither of those were what I wanted. I wanted to do something useful, and I wanted to do something new.
I thought I was in luck when I got an offer to do both at once. It was from a man who had a start-up working on a very unusual project, a process to enhance intuition. We have lots of medications to treat mental illness, and of course there’s drugs that make you high. But we don’t have much intended to make the mind work better.
I was approached by the CEO, a man named Jager. He was a biochemist himself, which was unusual—but then, this was a small start-up with a big budget. Think of Steve Jobs creating Apple computers in his garage, only with chemistry and in an actual lab.
We worked on the enhanced intuition project for years before we were ready to do human testing. That’s very strictly regulated for safety and consent. And because the purpose of our process was so unusual, we couldn’t get permission to try it on humans.
The process was Jager’s idea, but I was the one who’d made the conceptual breakthrough that we thought would make it actually work. I was so sure it was my life’s work. I imagined how many lives it would save if we could give doctors that extra edge of intuition to know which patient was about to have a crisis, or soldiers to spot the hidden bomb, or firefighters to know that the roof was about to collapse. But if we couldn’t test it, that would be the end of it all.
One night Jager and I were working late after everyone else had left. We were talking about how we couldn’t let everything go down the drain because of regulations. He said we should apply again, but say it was for something more normal, like lowering blood pressure, and secretly test the subjects for effects on intuition. I said that was illegal and unethical and out of the question. I suggested testing it on ourselves.
Jager wouldn’t go for it. He said it wouldn’t be a valid experiment, since it was only two of us and there wouldn’t be any control group and we might just imagine that our intuition was better. And that was all true. But I wanted to try it anyway.
I asked him if he had any better ideas. He said he did. But everything he suggested doing was totally unethical – all sorts of variations on experimenting on people who didn’t know what they’d be getting themselves into. Over the years we’d been working together, I’d gotten the impression that there was something a bit cold and sketchy about him. But it was nothing I could ever put my finger on. Everything I actually saw him do, he did by the book. And I was so invested in the intuition project, it didn’t even occur to me to leave because of some vague bad feeling.
How’s that for irony?
It was Friday night. Jager told me we should go home, get a good night’s rest, clear our heads, and check back in on Monday. And he left. It didn’t occur to me then, but now, I think he was afraid of trying it himself. He must have understood the risks better than I did—which makes it even worse that he was the one who wanted to give it to people without their informed consent.
But I still didn’t get it. I thought he was proposing all those unethical experiments because he didn’t see a better alternative, and if I gave him one, he’d drop it. Also… I really wanted to try the process. I thought it would work. But I couldn’t know until we tried it on a human subject. And I really, really wanted to know.
That night, I ran the process on myself.
I was very careful. I used the lowest possible dosage and setting. But I was still flying blind. It was targeted specifically to the human brain and didn’t affect animals, so we only had theories on what it would do to a person. I figured either it would work or it would have no ef
fect at all, and I’d just be very tired and disappointed by Saturday morning.
Halfway through, I started feeling… strange. Disconnected. Dizzy. I was seeing movement out of the corner of my eyes and hearing sounds I couldn’t identify. I’d be sure something terrible was happening somewhere, but I had no idea where or what it was. My head ached. My joints ached. I started running a fever. I felt worse and worse. At one point I decided I had to call Jager because I wasn’t sure I could finish it on my own, but I couldn’t figure out how. I looked at my own cell phone and I had no idea what it was.
Jager found me on Monday morning. I had a bad feeling about him, but at that point I was having bad feelings about everything. I felt like the fluorescent lights were watching me and the air was toxic and there was always someone behind me. I knew it wasn’t real, but that helped less than you’d imagine. So when he told me I shouldn’t go to a hospital because any medication they gave me might interact badly with the process, that sounded reasonable to me.
He got me into his car and said he was taking me home. I was lying down in the back seat with my arm over my face. The light hurt my eyes. Everything touching me—the seat, the seatbelt, my own clothes—felt… wrong. Alien.
All of a sudden, I knew something. I yelled, “STOP!”
He slammed on the brakes. I think it was mostly out of reflex. If I hadn’t been belted in, I’d have ended up on the floor.
Jager said, “Ransom, what—”
And then I heard him gasp. I grabbed on to the back of his seat and hauled myself up so I could see the road. A tennis ball was bouncing across it. A second later, a dog came bolting straight into the road, right in front of our car. There were bushes blocking our view of its front yard, so it seemed to come out of nowhere. At the speed we’d been going and given where the dog ran out, if I hadn’t made us stop, we’d have hit it.
The dog picked up the tennis ball and ran back into its yard.
Jager said, “It works.”
I was in such bad shape, I couldn’t even reply. But I remember how proud and happy I was. I thought, This is the greatest moment of my life.