by Lola Gabriel
He waited, as if she might do as he asked. She did not. Ash leaned back in his chair and pushed back his curls. He looked at the ceiling tiles to try and get his breathing, his sobbing, under control.
“I have Pickles. He’s in the car. He’s okay, I cracked the window. He’s a hero. It was Rebecca’s sister and Pen’s old nanny… Easton, everyone doesn’t hate us! It was just a couple of angry psychos. Pickles nearly tripped her up, and I grabbed Penelope. They’re being dealt with. I don’t want to know how… Easton, I don’t know how to look after cats, so you have to come back and take care of Pickles…”
Again, he waited. Nothing. Of course, nothing. Again, he took a breath, glancing at the ceiling tiles.
“Easton, I need to make a decision for you. If you aren’t coming back on your own, I need to bring you back. And the only way to even maybe do that is to turn you. Uh… to turn you into one of us. A shifter. And we were going to talk about this, eventually, and if you wanted it, we were going to do it, and if not, I was going to love you until you were very, very old and then went. And that would have made me immeasurably sad, impossibly sad, but it would have been your choice. Because this should be your choice. And I messed it up, and now it’s my choice, and that’s not fair because I shouldn’t have that power, but I do. So, if you’re here anywhere… any bit of you, can you give me a sign? Something? Just a little thing?”
Nothing. Ash closed his eyes, bent into himself, and sobbed hard for a couple of minutes. Then he looked at the ceiling again, got his phone out, and called his sister.
“Hi, big brother, how’s the love affai—? Ash, are you crying? What’s happening?” Hearing Avery’s voice, Ash could hardly get his words out.
“Hospital… Easton… dying…” was all he was managing, it seemed, but Avery appeared to be getting the general idea.
“Oh, woah, Ash, I’m on my way… Pen?” Ash took a gulp of air.
“Pen’s okay,” he said. “Can you come and get her? Nurses’ lounge… with Helena…”
“I’ll be fifteen minutes,” Avery said. “Do I take her to my place? And do I need to come and see you?”
“Yes, your place. No, just take Pen. It’s bad… It’s bad… It’s my fault… I left them alone.”
“Okay,” Avery said, “one, it is not your fault. And two, why don’t you turn her? You have Helena…”
Ash wiped his eyes and took another breath. “I… I can’t make that choice…”
Avery scoffed. “That girl loves you. I could see it last night. How she looks at you, how she is with Penelope. You think she wants to leave you right when she found you? Absolutely no chance, Ash. Stop being all moral philosopher about it. You can save your mate. Do it. You’re only moving up the scheduling a little anyway, right? She was going to want all the time she could have with you. You know that.”
Ash opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“All right, big bro, I’m at my car. I’ll have Pen in fifteen minutes. I’ll text you when she’s with me.” With that, Avery hung up, and Ash was alone with Easton again. At least, Avery’s diatribe had shocked him out of crying. He looked hard at Easton. Was this what she would want? He hoped so, of course he did, but he couldn’t know so. If he didn’t do it, he’d never know. And not doing it was taking a choice from her, too.
Ash was tired. His eyelids were drifting closed despite his best efforts to keep them open.
In the dream, Ash walked into a kitchen. It wasn’t his kitchen—it was smaller, cozier, but still full of light. Easton was sitting at the kitchen table, feeding a baby who wasn’t Penelope. A boy, maybe, with curly black hair and blue eyes.
“Daddy’s home early!” Easton said. She looked just like herself: twenty-something and lovely and radiating happiness. A teenage girl was sat at the end of the table, papers that might be homework spread out in front of her.
“Our father is very busy and important, Jack,” she said. “We’re lucky he has graced us with his presence.” But then she looked up at him and smiled. “Hey, Dad,” Penelope said. “Trigonometry?”
Ash felt himself hold up his hands and shake his head. He heard his own voice say, “Sorry, never my strong suit.” He felt his legs walk around the table, his hands on Penelope, and then a kiss.
The baby laughed. From the end of the table, teenage Penelope screamed.
“Gross!” Then she said, “Dad, can’t you just write a note? ‘Penelope doesn’t need advanced math, she’s going to be alpha, and therefore your boss one day’?”
“Straight out of school?” he heard himself ask. “Are you wishing me into an early grave? I, for one, am hoping you have to have a career first. Maybe an architect, they’re big into trigonometry.”
Penelope made an irritated noise and stuck her tongue out at him. He looked back at Easton. She was making eyes at him, then pulled him by a hand into the hallway. She kissed him hard on the mouth, pulling him against her.
“Missed you,” she said. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“Avery and Amy are taking Jack tonight. We can go run about in the woods with Pen… help her get used to those new paws.” He was smiling, hard. His face almost hurt.
“I remember you tripping over a lot,” he said. “She’s already far more graceful than that.”
Easton hit him lightly on the shoulder. “Not the same, idiot. I had no warning.”
He kissed her again.
“Best decision I ever made…” he said. “Hardest, too…”
She rolled her eyes. “You always say that, but what would I want except to be with you?”
Ash woke with a start. Helena had a hand on his shoulder, and she was saying his name.
“Ash, Earth to Ash…”
He blinked. His subconscious was not subtle. He glanced as his phone. It was a message from Avery, containing a picture of his smiling daughter. He looked up at Helena.
“Okay,” he said, mouth now even more dry from sleep. “Let’s do it.” Helena moved around to the opposite side of the bed.
“Go on then,” she said. “You have to bite her.” Ash blinked at Helena.
“You don’t need, like, stuff?” he asked.
“Nope.” Helena tapped her temple. “It’s all up here. The incantation. It’s about timing, really. You might need to hold her down, after you bite, okay?”
This did not help Ash’s nerves. “You really… You want me to… I just bite her?”
“Absolutely,” Helena said. “Ash, would I joke about this?” Ash shook his head.
“How hard?” he asked.
“Really hard.”
Easton’s blood filled Ash’s mouth. He didn’t want to spit it anywhere, but he didn’t want to swallow it, either. Eventually, he did the latter. It was thick and hot going down his throat. He would be able to feel it in his stomach, he thought for a moment. He looked up at Helena, who nodded. Apparently, he’d bitten hard enough.
Suddenly, in a room that had been silent except for the beeps and hums of machines, Easton gasped. Her eyes were open, but Ash could only see the whites. They were completely rolled back in her head. She seemed to be trying to rise up from the bed, her body as stiff as a board. Panicked, Ash pushed her shoulders, but he didn’t want to hurt her, and she was still semi upright.
“She’ll heal!” Helena said quickly. “Hold her down!”
Ash closed his eyes and pushed. He heard cracking. And then Helena’s incantation began in Old English, and in a few moments, Easton was limp. Ash opened his eyes. Helena continued the spell. She was impressive in full witch mode. Her eyes were ablaze, her sensible ponytail blowing in a wind that wasn’t there.
As she spoke her strange patterns, Easton began to look… It was impossible to describe. She just began to look less dead, less mortally injured. Color returned to her cheeks. Her bruises dimmed. She just looked asleep. And then she was choking on her breathing tube.
Helena stopped talking. She morphed from witch to nurse and jumped into action. She pul
led out the tube and switched off the machine that had been breathing for Easton.
“Is it done?” Ash asked, quivering with tension. “Did it work?!”
Easton’s eyelids flickered, and then her eyes opened. For a moment, they were unfocused, and then she coughed, sitting up.
“Woah,” she said, very croakily, “I had a dream… We had a son, Ash… I feel weird!”
“You didn’t have a dream,” Helena said, “you were close to brain dead.”
“I did too,” Easton argued. “We lived in a cottage. It was lovely.”
Ash was crying and laughing at the same time.
“Helena,” he said, “you’re a witch, and you don’t think we could have had the same dream?”
Helena was down at Easton’s feet. “Let me get this leg healing. Of course you can have the same dream, but not when someone’s brain dead.”
“You said ‘close to brain dead,’” Easton offered, “and you’re a witch, huh? Are you my doctor?” Then she looked at Ash. “You dreamed about Jack, too, and sassy teenage Pen, and… Oh…” Easton stopped smiling, looking slowly up to meet Ash’s eyes. “In the dream, I was… What did you do? What did the witch do?!”
“It’s Helena, thanks,” Helena snapped. “Thought I’d like you, as Ash loves you so much, but so far, you’re very rude.”
“Sorry,” Easton said. “Just distracted by maybe being a… bear person now?”
Helena sighed. “Fine, I’ll let it go this time. But it’s shifter, not bear person, and I expect a thank you sometime in the future.”
Easton nodded, but she was looking at Ash.
“Ash,” she said, “I’m scared.”
Ash smiled and nodded. “Me too.”
19
Easton
“Pickles!” Easton knelt down to her cat, who was purring and rubbing around her legs. He stood on his back legs and planted his paws on her knees. She put her face down to him, and he rubbed his soft, whiskered cheek against her. “Pickles, you’re a hero!” she said. “You’re going to get so many treats.”
Ash laughed. “Pickles is actually on a diet. I took him for a check-up for you, remember? Overweight for his size and age, but otherwise healthy?”
Easton waved this idea away.
“He’s got to celebrate his victories, Ash. Then he can go on his diet. Right, Mr. Pickles?” She petted the cat behind the ears and stood up. She looked around the room. Ash had rented a small, two-bedroom house for them to live in temporarily until they could find a more permanent home. He insisted on starting fresh with Easton.
“I wonder when we’ll find the cottage from the dream,” Easton said, taking in the living room of the small, but cozy, house she was coming ‘home’ to. Ash smiled at her.
“Do we have to take it that literally?” he asked.
Easton pouted, but she didn’t mean it. She was happy to be out of the hospital, and home now was wherever Ash and Penelope were. Her miracle recovery had been the talk of the hospital for a while, and her quick healing times after that had been even more widely discussed. One attending had even asked to do a paper on her, possibly also trying awkwardly to flirt. Easton had declined.
They had kept her in observation for a week, which had felt like an eternity, especially when she was alone. Ash came every evening, often bringing Penelope, and Avery popped in most afternoons. This had started off awkward, but then she’d started telling Easton classic stories from Ash’s past, which had lightened the mood considerably. And all that time, Easton had been feeling herself fill with an incredible new sense of strength. Not a physical strength, exactly, but a fizz of new knowledge at the base of her skull. A desire to be outside and to touch the world out there. A pulsing wildness.
Easton rolled her shoulder, and she stretched and unstretched her fingers and hands.
“Does it keep feeling like this?” she asked. It had been the healing of the broken bones that had most baffled doctors. Of course, Ash had made sure that everyone assigned to her case was a shifter (and more than you would expect worked at the hospital, as everything from cleaners to surgeons), but that hadn’t stopped word spreading and knocks on the door.
“Guess the X-rays must just have been wrong,” her doctor told the huddled white coats, and when someone said they’d seen her leg all twisted, he had shrugged and added, “Memory is a very fallible thing. You know that, Murphy.”
Ash looked at her from across the room. “Like what?”
“Like I’m being asked to let the world in,” Easton replied. “Like it’s knocking on my skin, and I want to allow it in, but I don’t know how.” A slow smile spread across Ash’s face.
“No,” he said. “I’d forgotten about that. For us, it’s a slow ramp up, and all muddled in with the usual teenage hormones and worries. And then, suddenly, it’s this thumping beat, and you have to follow where it leads you, where it pushes you.”
“But it goes away?” Easton asked, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. The feeling was ecstatic, but it was very distracting.
“You learn to control it, maybe,” Ash said, correcting himself. “To harness it and use it in your day to day life, both as a human and when shifted.” The mention of shifting sent chills down Easton’s spine. It had looked… painful? Or certainly difficult. But maybe that was just because she wasn’t used to seeing it. Her eyes simply couldn’t understand what was happening in front of them.
Ash was searching her face, his green eyes full of worry and excitement.
“Do you think… Do you think you’re ready to try?” he asked her. Easton wasn’t sure, though the thought excited her as much as it scared her. She nodded and met Ash’s smiling eyes. He held out a hand. “I made sure this place has a massive yard. For Pen’s party, and for this. And don’t worry, there are only shifters in this building.”
“Will it hurt?” Easton asked.
“No,” Ash answered. “Well, maybe the first few times. It feels unpleasant, at least, but just the seconds as you shift. After that, it’s… it’s the best feeling. Apart from one.” He caught Easton’s eye here, and they both grinned stupid teenage grins. “Put on something light that you don’t mind completely ruining,” Ash said. Easton was glad he was taking into account her first-timer’s embarrassment and not asking her to go into the yard in her underwear.
While Easton had been recovering, the weather had fully turned to spring. The yard was brightly catching the sun, the grass was green, and it was very close to warm. Once they were outside, Easton took a moment to close her eyes and face the sun.
“Vitamin D,” she said as she basked. “I’m used to a lot of it down in California. Or, I was.” Ash came up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, and kissed her neck. It sent those electric tingles all down her, and she wriggled.
“Sorry,” Ash said, “stuck in the land of vitamin D half the year only. Maybe we’ll get you one of those sun lamps.” Easton twisted so she was facing him and kissed him softly.
“I’ll take the trade,” she said. Then she pushed him away, stepped back a little, and jumped up and down a little as if doing a warm up. “Okay!” she cried. “How do I do this?”
Ash shook his head at her, smiling.
“You’re ridiculous, Easton.” He looked as though he was trying to remember something. How this had been explained to him, maybe. “You know that feeling you explained earlier? That throb all through you? You just let it take over. Lean into it. Let it fill you up.”
Easton knotted her eyebrows. “Vague.”
“What were you expecting? A button? A spell?”
“Hey, a spell isn’t too crazy! There are witches, it turns out. And I’ve been… spelled… before. I know you don’t have a button, though, I’ve seen all of you.”
“Simmer down,” Ash said. “I’m going to wait for you to do it, okay? And then if you’re okay, I’ll join you.”
“If?” Easton asked.
“I just mean, if you manage to shift this time. You might ne
ed to wait for a full moon, or…”
But Easton couldn’t hear Ash anymore. She felt her body twist in ways it wouldn’t usually. She fell to her knees, but were they even knees? And then, for a moment, she wasn’t sure what up was and what down was. Her mouth hurt. Her teeth… hurt? Her vision blurred, and then it was black, different, and she felt herself getting big, then being big, then…
Easton cocked her head and looked at Ash, who she was now as tall as. She tried to take a step and toppled over. The ground felt so strange against her fur.
Woah, fur! She righted herself, tried again to walk, and fell again. She tried to talk and remembered that was, of course, impossible when a growl ground itself out from her, filling her throat and then the air.
In just a moment, Ash was by her side, his big grizzly-bear self. He pushed against her, letting her lean on him. He rubbed his snout against hers and licked her. It felt so strange, her skin being under all this thick fur.
I wonder what I look like, she thought, but her human thoughts, her thoughts that were pretty much sentences, felt far away. Like she was reading with the wrong prescription in her glasses. With Ash beside her, Easton could take a few wobbly steps. Her legs felt powerful, and she desperately wanted to run, to head into the forest and explore her new heft, her new body. But she couldn’t. Not yet.
Ash kept his big snout propping her up, like hands held under a novice swimmer, and slowly, Easton began to get used to the order in which to move her legs. It was like learning to knit or drive stick. Sometimes, for a moment, she had it, and she would bound ahead a little, and then she would lose it again and have to stop short and wait for Ash’s balanced presence.
After a lap of the sunny garden, Ash suddenly pushed his snout into her so that she fell sideways. He batted at her. Play fighting… What are we practicing for?
But this, she could do. Her paws felt great moving through the fresh air, connecting with Ash’s rippling fur, his solid chest. She managed to roll him over and get a paw on his face. She was panting, really feeling how different bear anatomy was.