by Lexy Timms
“Okay, that one was me. I did it so you could tell the difference.”
“You really think you’re getting lucky tonight after that?”
“Of course.” He smiled and pulled her in his arms. “You’re as horny as I am.”
“Lucky for you!” She pushed him, but it was playful and her heart wasn’t in it. “So I’m trapped, am I?” She looked up at him.
He nodded solemnly.
She rolled her eyes. “I need to wash my hands and do other things in the bathroom. You go and start without me, I’ll be right there.”
He snorted, and kissed her forehead. He watched her go into the bathroom, admiring the wiggle she didn’t even realize she had. When the door closed he pulled off his shirt and stretched out on the bed, listening to the water run in the sink.
Finally.
I’m home.
It was his last thought before sleep took him.
TAYLOR OPENED HIS EYES and froze.
For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The room didn’t look familiar. A few seconds later it all came back to him. This was Angelica’s place, the apartment they gave her at the clinic. Her apartment. With her. The fact that they hadn’t seen each other in months and she was right there, and he was—WTF—still dressed?
Just how tired was I?
He sank back against the pillow and smacked his forehead, spending a solid five minutes finding new cuss words for his particular kind of stupid. He checked his watch, but found it wasn’t all that helpful. He had no idea when he’d gone to sleep or what Angelica’s schedule was. Given that the apartment had the quiet echoey feel of a place that was decidedly empty, he figured she’d had probably gone back on duty. He glanced outside. It was dark now. Night-time kind of dark. No, wait. Early morning kind of dark. He’d slept a lot.
CRAP.
He gave himself the luxury of feeling sorry for himself until his body’s needs became known. With a sigh he sat up and stretched. Definitely past time to get back into motion. He went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face. It helped him wake up but didn’t do much for his mood. Back in the bedroom he walked the perimeter of the room, twice, pacing while thinking. Every time, he tried to work on the questions at hand, things like ‘Where’s the girl?’ ‘What was she, and how could he fall asleep like that?’, he kept coming back to the idea that he needed a good run. Something to clear the cobwebs out and pass the time until she returned. Here he was in the wild jungles of Africa, and though the refugee camp was at the outskirts of a city, on the other side he wasn’t too far away was actual primal jungle. This was one of the few places in the world where he could run and stretch and hunt and spread out over the bough of a heavy tree without someone calling the city zoo to report an escaped tiger.
Which brought his thinking back around to the girl. Someone with her capabilities should be able to disappear into the jungle. Had she simply left? But, then, how had she come to be here in the first place? She should have been difficult to capture in this habitat. Though she wasn’t necessarily used to jungles. Lions lived more on the savanna than in jungles.
Displaced? She is a refugee after all. And maybe new to the lion form?
As a boy, his ability, if that was what you wanted to call it, never manifested. Among his kind it usually didn’t until the body stopped growing, which was once the bones and organs were set to their full growth or something near to, probably somewhere in the midst of puberty. That first change had been horrendous. It’s hard enough growing hair on your crotch and listening to your voice crack and break, but try puberty when you could change into a tiger at a moment’s notice. It was like getting an erection. At first, he couldn’t control it. It would happen at night, or when he was simply hot or cold or eating or drinking or reading a book. It just happened, and it took time and effort to control it.
If this girl was able to wait to change—to hold off the lion—then it wasn’t her first time and she was likely older than she looked. Or she’d started early. Or worse yet, she’d changed so many times in a short period that she was able to control it long before she should have been. The way he and the vanishing few of his kind he knew had gotten through that rough time was by the grace of parents who had prepared them for the change and planned it out long in advance.
This girl had to have the same support system, or she wouldn’t be able to fight the change as she did. If so, where were they now? There’d been no mention of parents or even siblings.
Taylor decided to find a piece of paper and pen to help him think and looked up in surprise when he realized that he was squatting on the back of the couch, perched much as a cat would. He climbed down as deliberately human as he could, stretching one leg and shifting his weight to it while taking the other off the couch instead of hopping down like his body seemed to want to do.
That was... strange. Think people would notice if I started climbing furniture? How about if I shred the curtains? I am way too overtired. What the hell?
A little uneasy and not feeling quite himself, he took a few deep breaths and removed his shirt. He dropped to the ground and fired off 30 pushups as fast as he could and on the last, leaped to his feet. Exercise always cleared his head and made him feel better. He checked his watch and decided to indulge in a small workout, including sit-ups, 50 more pushups, and a couple dozen crunches.
Afterward he took a shower, redressed, and looked at the time again. He’d only killed a bit more than an hour. How long was Angelica working anyway? He knew from experience that her shifts were long. He likely still had hours to kill. He looked over the single table in the room and found a yellow legal pad and an assortment of half-dead pens. One of them was useful and he began writing notes, trying to solidify what he knew.
Item one: Girl appears to be 14-15 yrs. old.
Appears being the operative word.
Well, he hadn’t seen her, but Angelica did. The ability to change shape had never altered anything about age or mortality as far as he knew. Men and women still lived and died at the same rates as anyone else, though it seemed less than fair. If anything, having to be a wild animal once in a while should at least grant you a few extra hundred years on this planet. Not so. Since Angelica was a doctor, and a damn good one, the odds of her calling the girl’s age wrong was unlikely. Assume that the age is correct.
Item Two: She resisted the change.
He circled that one. The body will always fight to heal itself. People who are sick will sleep more, because the body needs it. People who are bothered by dander or pollen will sneeze or sniffle, because the body is trying to rid itself of the intruder. For those who can change forms, the best and easiest way to heal is to change. Taylor had once tried climbing a telephone pole as a teen. It was a warm summer day and he was bored. He was also cocky and thought the stunt would be daring and might earn him a few points with his friends when he told them about it. But a few of the pins on the pole were too loose to hold him. He’d fallen a good twenty feet, and while not critically injured it had broken his arm and twisted his knee quite severely. As he was alone, he shifted and then back again, and all he had to explain was a shredded shirt.
In order for the girl to fight the change she had to have some pretty impressive self-control—or... she was scared to change. Scared enough that she would fight what would have to be incredible pain to not change. She only changed after a) she was given a pain med that relaxed her guard and b) she was in a relatively safe place where only Angelica was there to witness.
Item Three: She was deliberately hurt.
The injuries Angelica described were brutal, but they were specific. They were also pointless. It wasn’t the sort of thing you did to extract information. Interrogation was 90% anticipation and being forced to see the instruments that were going to be used on you. This was a brutal attack from a bully... or from someone who just wanted her to hurt. Why would they want her to hurt? To see if she would heal. Presume that the bone-breaker knew something about shifters; they w
ould know that she would need to change to heal, and that the temptation would be incredibly strong to do so. Break her bones, give her deep bruising, and she would change right in front of you. If you were lucky.
What if they’d been wrong? What if she hadn’t turned out to be a shifter at all? Then what? You have a girl with a lot of broken bones, all of which would heal in time. How did one justify that kind of experimentation? In this particular case the girl had resisted, so whoever did this would have given up, assumed that she wasn’t a shifter, and that this was only a failed experiment. At least until she came back whole, and without any marks on her. Which would tell them, whoever ‘them’ was, that either she had shifted after all or she’d found a magical healing formula from a fantasy novel. Since that was highly unlikely, she’d given herself away when she was able to change finally and heal herself. And that was because Angelica helped her. Then she’d reverted back to human and was visibly healed.
Someone with access to the clinic had been watching for just that.
Who? Taylor circled this and started an indented list.
Doctor
It had to be a doctor. A nonmedical staff member, like a janitor or even an orderly, couldn’t risk lifting the sheets off a teenage girl to check her body for marks. A nurse might, but then they would be limited to their area for patients and would look suspicious if they were off staring at naked teenagers in a ward that wasn’t their own. A doctor, though... A doctor could and would examine anyone he or she chose without garnering attention.
What was it Angelica was saying last night... well, earlier today for that matter. She was angry with her supervisor. One of the things she was spitting out like venom was that he’d “examined her patients without asking.” Dr. Manchester had taken it upon himself to examine the girl who was under orders to be watched for 72 hours and then overrode the medical orders of another doctor and released her back to the camp where she later disappeared.
Taylor balanced the point of the pen on the pad and twirled it. The calisthenics had been good, but he still needed that run. A good, long marathon to stretch and blow out the dust and rust. He sighed. Staying inside left him feeling like a tiger in a cage. It’s why he despised zoos.
What do you think you’re going to do? Go jogging? He sighed. A large American male running along the edge of a refugee camp might draw a few sideways glances. But a tiger in the night, running through the jungle, wouldn’t be seen.
FOCUS! You’re here for a reason!
Of course, there was the stash...
Not knowing how his sudden appearance would be taken, he’d left a bag with a change of clothing and his pistols and ammo stashed at the tree line. Now that he had been accepted into the camp he could come and go with some impunity, trading on Angelica’s reputation and good name. Whereas he’d been searched before, now that he was an established visitor he could just... leave. Especially if he was using the reporter alias. Then he was just a guy walking into the deep jungle for an exclusive story.
At night? You’re nuts. Forget it.
Taylor walked to the kitchenette and foraged around until he found enough coffee to make a pot. The smell and comforting gurgle of the coffee maker helped enormously, and he poured himself a cup before it was complete. He needed the coffee to focus more than anything else. He returned to his paper and his thoughts.
Other doctors?
He stared at the words on the paper. But it was Manchester who had examined her. It was Manchester who released her. What did the old woman say? ‘They’ took all her people; she was the only one left. Assuming this Manchester knew about the shifters, and it was logical that he did, what the hell would he be doing with so many? What purpose would he have? Research? What could he learn? Genocide? Again, why? What’s the motive? He’d said that Charra had returned to her grandmother. The old woman swore Charra was no relation. Had Manchester assumed that they were related?
Therein was the problem. If he was taking all of her people for ‘testing’, then why didn’t he take the old woman? If there was a question about ‘Grandma’ being a shifter, he would have subjected her to the same broken bones test. Unless there was an alternative reason. Maybe he took them only at a certain age, for example. And if that was true, there might be more out there that were too young or too old to fit the profile.
The old woman hadn’t been bothered as far as he could tell.
He sipped the coffee and leaned back in the chair until it creaked. The image of darkness and the vision of cats ran through his head. How he would prowl the back woods of Minnesota as a boy, loping through the trees and hunting rabbits and scaring the crap out of the occasional lost dog. He never hurt them. In fact, he’d wanted a dog all through childhood. But sometimes they jumped when they suddenly saw an almost fully-grown tiger behind them.
Taylor smiled at the memory. There was a German shepherd mix a mile from his house who loved to slip his chain and explore the forest. For some reason, when Taylor tried to spook him the dog had whirled and wagged his tail furiously and lowered his head in a ‘play with me’ posture.
After that they would occasionally meet in the woods and explore and wrestle, and for a glorious summer Taylor had the dog he’d wanted. But in the fall Taylor went back to school, and in the end the dog was just a dog and not his.
“I want a dog,” he announced to the room and threw the pen in frustration. “One day. Not now, but someday in the future.”
Wouldn’t it be grand to go out into the jungle again? Just like the woods. Get the bag with the guns, climb a tree. He looked at his watch. He’d killed four hours. Angelica would be on the clock for at least another four, maybe more if he remembered her schedule correctly from all the times they’d talked on Skype. She was a dedicated and busy soul.
I should be out looking for the girl.
But where?
If she was taken, then she wasn’t in the camp anymore. He wondered if the cat could get a sniff of something...
He brightened. A chance to run after all.
He locked the door behind him and headed outside under the darkening skies. Probably should have left Angelica a note...
Chapter 9
Well, if that isn’t just my luck. After three months I finally get to my hands all over him—and he’s bloomin’ asleep! Angelica made her rounds, feeling a little resentful, even though she knew full well she could have woken him. He wouldn’t even have minded. But the doctor in her had already diagnosed the exhaustion and made the decision to let him sleep, even if her libido demanded satisfaction.
Down, girl. Do your job. He’ll still be there when you’re through.
She focused on her work, putting in deeper concentration than she needed while checking the patients. One man had lost a finger when he tried to save his daughter from falling. He’d saved the girl, but his finger caught in the truck bed she’d fallen from. For a while it looked like he might have gone into shock, but they were able to treat him quickly since it had been the clinic’s truck in the first place.
In the States, he’d have a settlement and emergency surgery. Here, he gets the wound cauterized and sent back to the camp. For a moment, she was tempted to refuse to sign the discharge orders just because she was still angry about the way Manchester had treated Charra, but on a practical note there was a severe need for the bed space and she couldn’t justify not freeing it up.
I went to a lot of trouble switching my watch and getting permission to take the afternoon off to spend with my fiancé, and he falls asleep on me. Of course, he rushed everything to get here and jumped from a plane, so there is that... I mean, really, he travelled halfway around the world. I don’t need to be acting like a spoiled brat just because I didn’t get laid today.
Still, he wasn’t the only one who’d been having a rough go of things. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her, maybe more. And it was she who insisted they find Charra first before doing anything else. She sighed. Okay, so she was being an idiot.
Angeli
ca’s mind went back to the girl. Someone had caused those injuries deliberately. She’d thought at first it was a family issue, an abusive parent, and the old woman was covering up for whoever had done it, but the girl didn’t seem to have a family.
So, someone had beaten that poor child and left her broken. What had the old woman said? Everyone was safe until Angelica tried to help? How would she have put anyone in danger? All she did was examine the girl. As far as the transformation, that all took place behind closed doors; no one was there to see.
Angelica’s mind was half on the business at hand and half on the girl. But, then, upset stomachs and diarrhea didn’t necessarily take a lot of concentration to diagnose or to give orders for. She finished with her thirteenth patient of the day with such symptoms and wondered how many more she’d see before her shift was over.
Vibrio cholerae secrete a toxin that causes the small intestinal cells to secrete, rather than absorb, fluid and electrolytes, causing severe dehydration.
And if the dysentery didn’t get under control, most of the camp was going to be in serious danger. She shook her head and signed off on orders for an IV for the middle-aged man she’d just seen, and moved on to the next exam room, leafing through the file for the next patient without seeing a word of it.
“No danger until you helped.”
The words rang through her mind. She leaned against the wall next to the door to think. People pushed past her in the hallway. Patients ushered by orderlies to exam rooms, off to x-ray. A hundred things going on at once.
A hundred thoughts in her head.
The old woman had cursed at her. Well, she couldn’t take the blame for all of that. She hadn’t done anything other than hide the girl and let her change in peace.
Peace. She’d been in pain when they brought her in; that was why she was in the clinic. When she’d entered, she was black and blue with broken bones and groaning against the pain, and when she’d left she was relaxed and resting and had no contusions or abrasions. The last Angelica had seen of the girl, she’d been asleep. What had happened to her afterwards? Had she actually left the clinic safely like they’d said, even happily now that she’d been healed? Or had something more sinister happened to her?