by Chant, Zoe
“I… it’s probably too hot to eat right now anyway,” she said, trying to make a joke out of it and clenching her hands into fists.
What if that lightning bolt shoots out of my fingers again? she thought, staring down at her hands. That’s what happened the last time I got scared. And I could have really hurt Euan – maybe?
Was the flash of light dangerous? Was she dangerous?
“Just relax.” Euan’s voice was low, soothing. Delilah almost jumped when his large hands came to cover hers, coaxing them out of the tight fists she had them clenched into. “I won’t say everything’s okay. But you’re not in any danger right now.”
“I know.” Delilah bit her lip.
I know, because you’re here with me.
“I know,” she repeated. “I guess I’m just… having a little trouble calming down right now.”
“Have you ever felt this way before?” Euan asked.
“No… not really. I’m not that much of an anxious person – just, you know, a little introverted. I like some recharge time after a lot of social mixing.” She smiled wryly. “Usually if I feel like I need to calm myself down or restore my batteries I just do some sketching. That usually does the trick.”
“Well, why don’t you do that?” Euan asked.
Delilah raised her eyes to his. “You don’t mind? It won’t be very exciting for you.”
“It’s fine.” Euan swallowed, his tongue running over his lips. “In fact, I’d really like to see you work. If that’s all right with you, I mean. I was looking forward to seeing you draw the horse for Emma today, but in the end I only got to see the final result.”
“Oh no, of course I don’t mind,” Delilah said. “I’m pretty used to people watching me work – you can’t really get through art school without having to get over being self-conscious of people staring at you while you do stuff. Your teachers are always wandering around poking their noses over your shoulder. But…” She hesitated as she remembered one of the first things she’d thought when she’d been looking at Euan: Gosh, he’d be great to paint. “I… well, maybe this is a bit forward. But I wonder if… if I might be able to sketch you.”
Euan blinked. “Me?”
“You don’t have to agree to it if you don’t want to!” Delilah said hurriedly. “I know it might seem a bit weird! But I really like drawing people, and you just have a – an interesting face.” A thought suddenly struck her as to why Euan might be reluctant to agree. “Oh my God, I don’t mean I want to draw you naked or anything!” Even though I totally do. “I just meant like a head and shoulders portrait! Just something quick and simple! Your clothes can stay totally on.”
“No, I… didn’t think you meant that,” Euan said, his eyebrows drawing together.
Well, great. You really played yourself there, Delilah.
“Oh. Right. Well. That’s good. Because I didn’t.” Delilah stood up, trying to cover her embarrassment by grabbing her sketching charcoal and large notepad from where she’d left them on her cluttered dining table. “But I can draw your face, right? Would that be all right? I won’t if it’d make you uncomfortable, though.”
“No, it’s fine,” Euan said slowly. “I’ve just never had anyone ask to draw me before. It was a bit of a surprise, that’s all.”
Delilah was willing to bet that if any artist had ever seen Euan they’d definitely thought about asking him to model – but they probably wouldn’t have actually asked, given his… well, his demeanor. He was so imposing and had come across as so gruff when she’d first met him that at that time she never would have dreamed of asking him herself, no matter what she’d thought of his looks.
“Where should I…” Euan frowned, as if looking for the right word. “… stand? What do you want me to do?”
“You could sit just by that window,” Delilah said, pointing with her charcoal. The evening light was fading a little, but there was still enough contrast between the light outside and the comparative dimness of her room to create sharp, dramatic shadows across his face, which was just what she wanted.
Euan did as she asked, taking a seat on the stool she used for painting, while Delilah sat on the couch.
“So, I should just sit here and keep perfectly still?”
Delilah shook her head. “No – you can talk. In fact, it’s kind of good when people do. It can sometimes help when you’re trying to capture someone’s, uh, spirit.”
She faltered a little as she spoke. Euan was a fairly reticent person – what if he didn’t want her capturing his spirit?
“What would you like me to talk about?”
Glancing up at him, Delilah found Euan looking out of the window, a serious expression on his face. She couldn’t help but stare a little.
God, he’s gorgeous.
“I – uh, well,” Delilah said, not sure where to start. “I guess… I have lot of questions about, well, you. Not just you specifically, but… shifters. In general. You all told me quite a lot yesterday, but I suppose I was just struggling to take it all in. Now that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it, I guess I’d like to know more. If you want to tell me.”
Almost unthinkingly, Delilah began tracing her charcoal lightly over the page, sketching out the back of Euan’s head, down to his sharp jawline.
“I don’t mind,” Euan said. “You know about shifters now – it’s only fair you should have your questions answered. I can imagine it must’ve been a shock, finding out like that.”
“Just a little.” Delilah glanced up, and then began on the back of Euan’s neck. “I never imagined there could be any such thing, outside of fairy tales. Trent said you weren’t like werewolves, so… I’m guessing you don’t have to be bitten by another shifter in order to become one?”
Euan let out a short, low laugh. “No. It doesn’t work like that with us at all. You’re either born a shifter or you’re not. I’ve never heard of someone who became a shifter. Though I do know about people who changed their shifter abilities – they had two shifted forms, rather than just the one. But that was because they’d let themselves be experimented on – it wasn’t natural, and it didn’t last long. I don’t think it did them any good.”
Euan’s voice had become dark, and Delilah wondered what the story was there, and resolved to ask him one day. But right now, she had other things she wanted to know.
“So… there’s just shifter families living in society right now? Among us?”
“More than you’d think,” Euan said. “Some shifters live normally with humans, and you’d never know unless they shifted in front of you. But most of us prefer to have spaces where we can shift freely – it’s not that easy in a big city like Sydney. Hector’s family has a cattle station they can roam freely on. He and Callan are close friends, so he spends a lot of his free time out there too.”
“Sounds like you grew up in the great outdoors a little too,” Delilah said cautiously. Was that prying? Was she being too forward?
“Yeah. I did.” Euan was silent for a little while, and Delilah didn’t want to press him. She busied herself sketching out the shape of his nose – it was so perfect she wanted to be sure she got it absolutely correct.
“Growing up on the land was good for me in a lot of ways,” Euan continued on eventually. “It’s definitely been a help with my job – I already knew everything I needed to about living off the land, and shifting frequently meant I had a good connection with my… with the form I used to be able to shift into. If you don’t shift for a while, it can make it harder to do later. Shifters need a balance between their human sides and their animal sides. Too much of one and you can start to lose the other.”
Is that how you lost your shifted form? Delilah wanted to ask – but she knew that would be prying. And anyway, it sounded like Euan had had the opportunity to shift pretty often for his work.
“A balance?” she asked instead, since she hadn’t really understood that part of what he’d said.
“It’s difficult to describe. Eve
ry shifter goes through it when they first shift – usually when they’re about thirteen or so, maybe a bit earlier. But the first time you let your animal side take over your form, it can be… hard to control. Sometimes it never stops being hard to control. But if you let the animal take over your mind completely, there’s a chance you might never be able to shift back into your human form. Or you have no choice but to suppress the animal so completely that you’ll never be able to find it again.”
Delilah nodded, trying to sort through everything Euan was telling her. It all sounded so strange and foreign – the idea of sharing your head and your body with some whole other creature! – but she thought it made sense.
It was only a moment later that it fully hit her what Euan was saying, and then she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, “Is – is that what happened to you? Is that the reason why you can’t shift now?”
She bit her lip, lowering her head so her fringe fell down over her face, feeling extremely ashamed of herself. For all her resolutions not to ask intrusive questions, she’d ended up asking them anyway.
“Sorry,” she said a moment later when Euan still hadn’t spoken. “That was really, really rude of me. Please don’t answer that. Forget I said it.”
“It wasn’t rude.” Euan shook his head, before finally turning to look at her. “If anything, it’s me who’s been rude. I should have been more open with you from the start, instead of… what I did.”
Delilah had to admit that Euan had been pretty abrasive when they’d first met. But in between the confusion of everything that had been going on, she felt she could probably forgive him.
Slowly, she moved her charcoal down over the page, gently outlining the shape of his Adam’s apple. She tucked her tongue into the corner of her mouth – only because she was concentrating, she told herself.
“It’s not a very nice story,” Euan continued, turning to look at her. “I can tell you how it happened, but…”
“Only if you want to,” Delilah said uncertainly. “Anything you want to tell me, I’d be happy to listen to.”
“The work the Agency does isn’t always… safe. Or pretty. And sometimes things go wrong – very wrong. Like they did this time.”
Delilah swallowed and said nothing, waiting for him to continue, though her charcoal kept moving.
“It was supposed to be a pretty easy mission,” Euan said, turning away to look out of the window again. “Just some intelligence gathering and surveillance on a group we got word were planning on smuggling some illegal items into the country.”
“Drugs, you mean?” Delilah asked.
“In part. But mainly it was things like… dragon scales. Wyvern blood. Phoenix down. Things that’ve been harvested from rare shifter types – or even just the rare shifter types themselves, taken from their parents when they’re just babies.”
Delilah couldn’t stop herself from gasping, looking up at him with wide eyes. “What?”
“Like you saw with Trent – there’re some animals that only exist in the world in shifter form now. There’s a market for that kind of thing amongst the super rich – imagine the bragging rights to say you have the world’s only living Tasmanian tiger as a pet. Or Honshu wolf. Or woolly mammoth.”
“… I… okay,” Delilah said, though she felt sick to her stomach at the thought of it, the idea of someone being so evil as to steal a baby shifter from its parents to keep it as a pet overriding even the surprise she felt at hearing about the existence of dragons, wyverns and phoenixes.
“You haven’t met Hector’s adopted daughter, Ruby, but she almost fell prey to people like that. She’s an alicorn – a horned pegasus, the rarest of the rare. We didn’t even think they existed in shifter form until Hector found Ruby. She was hatched from an egg that was being smuggled by some bikies. It was lucky Hector and his mate Myrtle found her when they did, or who knows where she’d be right now.”
Delilah stared at him, trying to catch his breath. “So that’s the kind of thing you were working on too?”
Euan nodded. “Me and my partner, Sam, had been tracking these guys for a while, trying to find where they were basing their operations. Shifter criminals don’t need things like private airfields for their operations – not when they can just recruit a condor or albatross shifter and have them carry whatever they need wherever they need it. Not as roomy as a plane, but these guys are usually dealing in very, very small amounts of whatever they have. Dragon scales and phoenix feathers don’t weigh much anyway.”
Euan paused, and Delilah realized she’d stopped sketching – but she was too enraptured by what Euan was telling her to start again.
“Anyway. I’ll cut a long story short. Someone sold us out – or we were spotted. I don’t know which. I never got told the outcome of the investigation into how things went so wrong. It doesn’t really matter to me, anyway – the outcome was the same. We – me and Sam – we got caught.”
Delilah sucked in a quick, horrified breath. She could hear the pain throbbing in Euan’s voice, and she could feel an answering pain in her own chest, squeezing around her heart.
“Sam wasn’t just my partner – he was… my friend, I guess. I wasn’t good at making friends, and I’m still not. But Sam and I entered training at the same time, dormed together, and I guess he just decided to make me his friend. We worked well together, so we were assigned as partners for fieldwork. He was a hawk shifter, so he surveyed the area from the air, while I kept an eye on things on the ground.” He paused, swallowing thickly. “I still don’t know how he got caught. They must’ve been waiting for him – the men we were tracking, I mean. He was already – well, he was already in a bad way by the time they caught me too, and dragged me back to the base.”
Delilah’s hand was shaking. “What happened then?” she whispered, though she thought she knew the answer to that.
“They killed him,” Euan said, his voice quiet and flat. “I suppose they were going to kill me too, if they’d gotten the chance.”
“If they’d gotten the chance?”
Euan was silent for a long moment. “Delilah, do you remember what I told you – about how difficult it can be for shifters to keep their animal side in check? My shifter form… it was a marsupial lion – a predator. It was hard to control at the best of times. So when it saw Sam get killed… I don’t even know how I can explain it. I’d never felt anything like it before. Just pure animal rage I couldn’t control. The animal side of me… it went wild. It forced me to shift. And then…”
Delilah stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I don’t remember what happened next – nothing at all. I know the criminals who captured us had shifted, and I know I fought at least four of them until they couldn’t fight anymore. They weren’t dead, but… they almost were. It was touch and go. The rest of them escaped, with the things they were smuggling. I completely blew the whole operation. Sam had been killed. And I couldn’t shift anymore.”
“Why not?” Delilah asked, her throat almost too constricted to let the words pass.
Euan took a deep breath, his shoulders rising and then falling. “You remember I told you about balance – too much of either the animal or the human, and you can start to lose control. That’s what happened to me. I lost control. For a while, I lost the human side of my nature – the rational side that understands right from wrong, that knew I couldn’t just go on a bloody rampage against the men who’d killed Sam. I had to fight hard to try to get my human mind back – and when I did, I knew I had to stop what I was doing. I had no choice but to suppress my animal side so completely that I’ve never been able to find it again. It’s always a risk – if shifters find they can’t control their animals, it’s a choice they can make, to suppress them utterly and live their lives as a normal human. Or to forget their human sides and live as an animal. I thought I’d learned to live with my lion. It was… a part of me. The other side of me. But now it’s gone, along with the shifter senses I need to
do my job.”
Delilah stared at him, her sketchpad lying forgotten in her lap. Her heart was thudding against her ribcage, as if it was trying to burst free of her chest.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered eventually, not knowing what else to say. She couldn’t even imagine how it must feel – she could barely imagine being a shifter in the first place, but the pain in his voice was stark and clear.
“Don’t be,” Euan said quietly. “It was my own doing. I didn’t have another choice. I can’t say I’ve learned to live with it yet, but spending time with you today… at least it’s shown me that even without my shifted form, I can still…”
Euan trailed off as he raised his eyes to hers. Delilah blinked, a piercing sensation tearing through her chest. It was suddenly extremely hard to breathe.
“There’s some things I know I’ll always regret about losing my shifter senses, though,” Euan said, then swallowed. “Like never knowing when I find my fated mate.”
“Your… your fated mate?” Delilah asked.
“Every shifter has one.” Euan’s voice was a low, steady throb. “Someone who’s meant for them. They know as soon as they touch them – this is the one for me. The bond between fated mates is unbreakable, and one of the most important things in a shifter’s life.”
“Oh – oh, I see,” Delilah said, looking down. Her fingers were clenched around the edges of her sketchpad, slightly crumpling the page with her nearly finished sketch of Euan.
I get it now. He’s trying to let me down gently, she thought. ‘I think you’re really nice, Delilah, but you’re not my fated mate,’ or something like that. I suppose it’s better that he told me sooner rather than later.
She barely registered that Euan had stood up and come to stand by her chair until he was bending down, looking over her shoulder. Blinking, Delilah almost pulled away, wanting to hide what she’d drawn – maybe Euan would be able to tell what she’d been thinking as she’d sketched, and see what was in her heart as she’d –
“Is this really how you see me?” Euan asked, frowning and sounding… puzzled? Sort of?