by M. Raiya
“No, it’s not one of mine. And even the vet thought it was odd you’d gotten it that deep in your back.”
“Well, it’s such a coincidence that the vet takes that—thing—out, and suddenly I can shift again. For all I know, my grandfather takes everyday objects and uses his magic to turn them into elans.”
“Would he have had access to guitar picks?”
“Yeah. He played.”
“You’re sure he actually put something in your back?”
“Yeah, it hurt for weeks.”
“And are you sure you couldn’t shift out of owl form, or did you just think you couldn’t?”
“Jesus, Vin! I fought that thing for days, trying to shift.”
“Okay, okay, chill. I just—I don’t know. I’m getting a weird feeling about all this. Like your grandfather wants everyone to think he has way more power over everybody than he really does. Just suppose he sticks a guitar pick in your back and tells you it’s an elan, and you’re so conditioned to think you couldn’t shift that you couldn’t, until you think it’s out, and then you suddenly can again?”
I was shaking my head, but he kept on. “And then the great horned owl that attacked you. It just seems like such a coincidence. Could it have been another shifter he sent down to?—”
That did it. My alarms started shrieking. Just hearing him say “great horned owl” made me look wildly around, and I was so glad there were no windows in ICU. Even though I tried to tell myself no owl would attack a human in a hospital, those big yellow eyes burned before me, and I found myself screaming until someone turned up my drugs. I saw Vin slumping pale and exhausted in the chair, and then sleep claimed me again.
TIME WAS starting to blur strangely. I had no idea how much of it was passing or when it was daytime or nighttime or anything except that Vin was always there. When I surfaced again, he was still next to me, sleeping curled up in the recliner. The only indication that I was getting better was that the oxygen mask had been replaced by a nose cannula, which was a lot more comfortable. I lay still. Watching Vin had been one of my favorite things to do, and I knew I would never get tired of it. I knew every detail of his face—his eyebrows, his long eyelashes, the line of his nose, the curve of his lips…. That smile. I looked back to his eyes and saw they had opened.
“So what do I call you?” he asked softly. “Gab? Gabes?”
“Riel,” I said. “No one else does.”
“Okay. Riel.” He smiled a little shyly. “You can call me Vin because I don’t think I’d answer to anything else. Sorry I got you so upset.”
“Not your fault. I’m just pretty twitchy about—stuff—right now.”
“Understandably.”
He reached up with his left hand and stroked my hair, smoothing it free where the strap holding the oxygen tube was holding it. “It’s as soft as your feathers,” he said, sounding awed. “And the same color.”
I smiled a little.
“It was you,” he added. “The one I was dreaming about ever since the squirrel.”
“Huh?”
“And you have the same eyes as the owl,” he said, gazing at them. “So deep. Soulful. I’d know you anywhere.” He paused a moment. “I thought I would die, the first time I saw you here. Tied down. Your wings….”
I shuddered. How could I explain that I felt so much safer now, even here, like this? I mean, I wouldn’t mind all the tubes coming out, but….
“I thought maybe I should have just let you go.”
“No way. I didn’t want to die. But that great horned owl scared me, Vin. I never want to shift again. Ever. She was going to eat me. Alive….”
Vin whimpered, and his fingers convulsed on mine.
The water I’d drunk began to churn in my stomach. In an instant Vin lunged for a plastic bowl, and all I’d drunk came back up, and it didn’t taste anywhere near as good the second time. And it hurt my throat so bad that tears burned my eyes.
“Okay, I think we need some more antinausea meds on board,” Charlie said. Evidently, he’d heard me barfing and come in while I’d been occupied. “I’ll page Dr. Locere. Don’t worry. This is normal. But now, Vin, it’s nighttime, and you need to get some sleep. There’s a couch in the lounge just down the hall. You really ought to crash there awhile.”
“No!” we both cried at once, and then I groaned and clutched at my throat, the pain suddenly overwhelming. Charlie did something to the machine, and everything started going fuzzy.
I wanted to see Vin walking at his graduation, and I wanted to kiss him again, and I wanted him to be right about my grandfather….
He didn’t let go of my hand.
The lovely, fearless day in the kayak might have happened to two different kids. We were in very deep, dark water now.
But we were still floating. Barely. But floating….
I TRIED to stretch. Every muscle burned. My back was on fire. My throat felt like the worst case of strep I’d ever had. I was lying on my side. It took all my strength to flop over onto my back. Which hurt. It took me a while to even remember where I was. Vin looked equally groggy in the chair.
“Shit,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to be feeling better soon.”
“Good morning,” said a way-too-cheerful woman in the doorway. She pushed in a red cart. “Blood time. I need your arm, please.”
With a groan I held out my right arm and tried not to wince while she put a tourniquet on me and poked and prodded and finally jabbed me with a needle. What a way to wake up. Poor Vin turned green and looked pointedly at the floor.
“Thank you much,” she said and went away with a vial of my blood in her cart.
“Vampire,” Vin said, looking after her. “I really believe in them now. And werewolves and everything.”
I managed a laugh. “Never met any. But don’t go by me.”
Vin suddenly laughed. “I’m going to write a book. Of Men Who Eat Mice.”
We were both laughing a little hysterically when another woman in scrubs pulled back the curtain. “Good morning,” she said, not quite as cheerful as the phlebotomist but clearly more awake than we were. She looked like she was all business. “Happy Monday. Gabriel, you are going to have a bath and breakfast, and then PT is going to get you on your feet. If everything in your blood looks good, you’re getting booted out of ICU later today. And you,” she said, turning to Vin, “are going to go down to the cafeteria and get a hot meal in you.”
We both opened our mouths in protest.
“I am Priscilla,” she said shortly in a tone that clearly indicated that that was all she needed to say. A second later Vin was gone and I was naked and being gone over by a washcloth as rough as a cat’s tongue.
“I liked Charlie better,” I said, fighting my urge to squirm away from her.
She snorted. “There’s a reason he’s a night nurse. He’s all kindhearted and soothing. We get work done here during the day. And there will be no more throwing up, do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Right,” she said, unhooking my finger from the oxygen monitor and removing the blood pressure cuff so she could wash beneath them. “You are done with this for now too.” She pulled off the oxygen cannula. “And how wedded to the catheter are you?”
“Please,” I said, liking her more by the minute.
“Close your eyes, and draw a deep breath.”
A couple embarrassing minutes later, it was gone. She finished my bath—I felt strong enough to take the cloth away and wash down there—and then she covered me up and called an aide to help wash my hair in a basin. That felt good. Then she put a clean gown and robe on me, changed my sheets, sat me up, and then I found myself eating a little plastic tub of applesauce and drinking some hot tea with a lemon floating on the surface. It seemed to wash the pain out of my throat.
As soon as the applesauce was clearly going to stay down, I was brought in some beef broth. The minute I saw it, I froze.
“Um,” I said, stomach clenching. “No meat.
”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Priscilla said. “You should have told us you were vegetarian. Are you vegan?”
I shook my head.
“How about some yogurt?”
“Thank you.”
She took the broth away. I rubbed my head. I hadn’t known I was a vegetarian until just now. Eaten alive…. Never again could I eat flesh.
I ate blueberry yogurt and finished my tea, with the promise that if it stayed down nicely, there would be ice cream later. Unfortunately, on the heels of the culinary delights came the business office with a mountain of paperwork I needed to fill out. I had a momentary panic, but then I drew a deep breath and put down my parent’s address and the name of the insurance company we’d used three years ago. I knew that meant my grandfather would know I was alive and human again for sure. But I was not going to spend the rest of my life hiding from someone who could find me anytime he wanted to.
I had no idea how my clan had explained my absence, or even if they’d claimed that I’d died. I’d leave that to my grandfather to sort out. Once he’d put an elan back in me, he would probably simply say I was some imposter using his dead grandson’s name trying to commit identify fraud. I also knew that calling my parents’ home would be a very bad idea. Owl or human, I was still shunned, and contacting them would only bring my fate to them.
Physical therapy arrived next. I was exceedingly nervous about trying to walk, but I couldn’t explain why to the woman who wanted me on my feet. After all, I was supposed to have been strong enough to hike from one end of Vermont to the other last week, and I certainly still looked fit enough, though underweight, despite the weakness caused by the infection. She let me take my time, though, sitting on the edge of the bed, gradually putting my weight on my slipper-clad feet. It was far easier to plunge out of a thirty-foot pine than it was to stand, but I finally did it. It felt like my head was too far above the ground, and as I’d feared, I had no sense of where my center of gravity was any longer. It was a long time before I could take the two steps to Vin’s recliner and sit down, and I felt like I had just flown out of the nest for the first time. My back burned with the movement. But I had survived it.
Priscilla rewarded me with a cardboard cup of chocolate ice cream. Then a member of the psychiatric staff arrived and wanted me to talk about my recent traumatic attack by bear. It wasn’t her fault that I hadn’t been attacked by a bear but couldn’t possibly tell her the truth. Except that I had been attacked by a wild animal, so I talked to her about my fear of going back in the woods, which was real. She kept saying it was important that I didn’t give up what I obviously loved—hiking. I transposed that into my mind as “flying,” and knew she had a point. We talked about all the logical steps to keep myself safe from bears, like carrying food in airtight containers and not keeping it in my tent. But there was no way to really keep myself safe from great horned owls except to never shift again.
After she left, Priscilla helped me back into bed. When it was quiet, echoes of what Vin had said the night before stirred through my mind. What if he was right, and my grandfather wasn’t as powerful as we’d been taught to think? I knew he was a powerful shifter, I knew he had magic that other shifters didn’t because I’d inherited it from him, though it had skipped my mother. But what if he’d put a guitar pick in my back and made me think I couldn’t shift? Yeah, I’d tried like hell at first, but maybe that had just been a temporary spell. I hadn’t tried again for years. But why would he do that?
A few very chilling reasons slid into my head. As the only other shifter with magic, I was the one who would eventually take over his position, unless another had been born since I’d left the clan. Had he thought I wouldn’t be content to wait until the natural course of events made me leader? Had he thought I would challenge him?
That made no sense. I’d always been content with my life. I’d dreamed of becoming a veterinarian because I loved animals and I loved helping people. I was perfectly content to wait to become clan leader until I was far older. Why would I have wanted his position sooner?
Yes, he ruled with a hard line that seemed to get harder every year, but everyone accepted it, because that was how things were. I’d planned to be a much gentler leader, but on the other hand, I knew there were probably things I didn’t know yet but would in time that might justify his iron grip on everyone. If I found out he was lying to us, ruling us so hard just because he wanted to, and could, would I feel like it was my duty to the clan to expose him and take over?
Yeah, maybe.
Banishing me forever would be a handy way to prevent that. With no one to replace me as heir apparent, since no one else had magic, he would be guaranteed to lead until the end of his days. And if that was all he cared about, then it would not matter that there was no one to lead after him.
Damn. It was hard to reconcile my memories of my kind, gentle grandfather—who had read to me as a child and helped teach me how to fly and how to use my magic—with a cold-blooded monster. On the other hand, he had banished me without ever listening to my side of the story, and that had never felt right to me. I shuddered. I didn’t know what to believe any longer. The one thing I knew was that without Vin, I never would have considered any of these possibilities.
The image of the great horned owl slipped into my mind. Vin had started to say that something about her bothered him, but he hadn’t gone on because I’d flipped out. Had there been more to her attack than simple predator and an unwary prey? No way, I told myself sternly. Next I’d be convincing myself that she was a shifter my grandfather had sent after me because he’d suspected I was getting too close to the truth. That was the stupidest thing my brain had ever come up with.
Still, I could run the thought past Vin. Not that I agreed with what he’d come up with about my grandfather, but he had a way of looking at something with fresh eyes that was helpful.
Vin. Shit, he’d been down in the cafeteria over an hour. Not that I grudged him the break—Lord knows, he’d earned it—but it struck me as out of character for him not to be back in under ten minutes. Maybe he’d gone for a shower—no, his little bin of personal items was still on the shelf by the curtain. Probably he’d been so tired he’d dozed off at his table.
Life had been so much simpler as an owl. A hole in a tree and mice. That was it.
Cursing my weakness and the IV line that tied me to my bed, I was reaching for the Call button to summon Priscilla to see if she could ask someone to go check on him when I saw Vin’s hand on the edge of my curtain. My surge of relief turned to nausea when I saw his face. He was terrified. I sensed someone behind him. A bolt of panic went through me at the thought of my grandfather stepping around the curtain.
But it wasn’t my grandfather who came in. It was Vin’s father. And behind him was Vin’s mother. And they looked furious.
They know, Vin mouthed at me and looked like he wanted to die.
I’m sure Vin saw my momentary panic, but then I locked it away. I forced myself to lie utterly motionless as his parents looked at me for the first time. Silence fell, allowing the beeps and hums of ICU to fill the air. I heard Priscilla get up from the nurses’ station and head this way. I forced myself to look away from Vin’s parents to Vin himself. His stricken gaze met mine, and I felt an almost physical blow as it registered how much this was costing him. He had given away my secret to two more humans, and he had no idea how I was going to react. I could tell he thought he’d betrayed me. I thought he was about to pass out.
I sent him a gentle nod. I didn’t blame him. I’d never expected him to lie to his parents.
Priscilla stepped into tension so thick she might need a scalpel to get through it.
“Well,” she said brightly. “I’m so happy that Gabriel has more visitors, but we only allow one person in ICU at a time. So if two of you would wait out in the hall, that would be great. Vin, are these your parents? You look just like them.” She made a general shepherding motion toward the curtain, getting herself neatl
y between them and me.
“Yes, we’re Vin’s parents,” his mother said.
“I’m Jack, and this is Coleen,” Jack said, his voice falling like ice cubes into a metal cup. “We’re just here to bring our son home. Vin, say your goodbyes quickly. We’ll wait right here.”
“Oh dear,” Priscilla said.
Vin adroitly eased around her and to my side. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Jack drew himself to his full height, towering over Priscilla. “That man,” he said, pointing over his shoulder to me, “is dangerously insane. He has attempted to brainwash our son. You would do well not to trust him alone with other patients. Would you please call security to keep him under control while we remove our son?”
“What? Our Gabriel? You’re mistaken, Mr.—Thatcher, isn’t it?”
Jack pulled out his phone. “I shall call 911 and request a police presence if I have to.”
“Dad, no,” Vin said, and my heart broke at the anguish in his voice. “Please, you’ve got to believe me.”
“I think,” Priscilla said, voice going a little lower and sterner, “that you should sit down as a family and have a nice conversation. Somewhere not in my ICU.”
Jack raised his phone. Priscilla started to reach for my Call button. Part of me found it vaguely hilarious that they were both going to call security over someone too weak to take more than two steps. This was going nowhere good, so I steeled myself, knowing it was going to cost me, and drew up my power. There. Trying not to let pain show in my voice, I said, “Thank you, Coleen, and you too, Jack, for helping me when I most needed it.” And then I raised my right hand from under the blankets and held out a soft, brown, owl feather.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“Well, isn’t that pretty,” Priscilla said, trying to keep the peace. “Now, please, step out into the hall.”
Jack swore, lunged forward, and yanked the blankets off me as though I were hiding a real owl under there. Priscilla screamed, Vin yelled, and I leaped off the bed on the far side and landed on my feet with strength I didn’t know I had. Vin vaulted over the bed and came down next to me. He put his arms around me protectively, and I clung to him for balance. Instantly, my curtains were yanked aside and about a million members of the hospital staff flooded in. There was a lot of yelling.