by A. E. Grace
He grinned at her. “I wouldn’t in this lake.”
“Go, go put on your clothes,” she said, waving him off with her hand.
He went back to the pier, picked up his jeans and t-shirt, and got dressed. When he returned, she was no longer laughing.
“I understand why I thought you were so off now.”
“Off?”
“Different. Weird. You’re kind of twitchy. It’s because you’re a shapeshifter.”
“You know of our kind?”
“No. But I’ve read about them in books.”
“Well, we’re nothing like how we’re portrayed in books,” Liam said. He sat down beside her on the grassy bank, and their shoulders rubbed.
“I have so many questions,” she said a moment later. “Gosh… this is just incredible. You know, I always wanted to believe in the paranormal.”
“Well,” Liam said. “I won’t have your answers. I don’t know much about our history. We are few, and I am one of the last in this world I suspect.”
“Why?”
“The shift awakens in few, and we have been hunted in the past.”
Terry shook her head. “I wonder why there is no record of shifters in history?”
“There is, in the form of myths and legends. Truths became tales.”
“So when you said there was a wolf hunting you?”
Liam lowered his brow. “He has hunted me for a long time. I have been on the move for a very long time, and he has been on my scent for as long.”
“Why?”
Liam shook his head. “I don’t know.” He met her eyes. “Today I went to the place I last saw him as my bear. I thought he was close, and he would have followed me there. But he didn’t show up. So I am guessing he’s not anywhere close… yet.”
Terry looked off, and a grin parted her lips. He watched as they peeled back over her teeth. He never wanted more to kiss anybody else than he did her at this moment.
“I feel like I should be more surprised,” she said after a moment. “I feel like… I don’t know. Just this is not the reaction I’d expect myself to have. Can you shift bits of your body, or does it have to be the whole thing at once?”
“The whole thing,” he said.
“Does it hurt? I heard your bones snap.”
“A little.”
“Why a bear?”
“I don’t know why,” he said. “The shift awakened in me as an adolescent.”
He told her of when he was a child, he came across a brown bear in a stream, waiting for the salmon to return. He had been playing, but his friends had run off, leaving him alone. His feet were glued to the cold bed of the stream, and he had watched the bear, locked eyes with it. The beast and the boy had stared at each other for minutes, and then the bear had walked away, turning its back on the boy, its large rear swaying left and right as it left the stream and disappeared into the tree line.
Liam explained that he could feel that something had changed in him, but he didn’t know what. It wasn’t until he was scared one night, lost in the woods after foraging for a medicinal root at his father’s request, when he first changed. It was a reflex; the shift was something he couldn’t control, but he could control the beast. He didn’t know what he had become. He couldn’t see himself. But he thought of that bear, and when he calmed, he changed back into a boy.
It was after that they set sail for Asia. Where they would later form their clan.
“That’s amazing,” she said. “You just had to connect with this bear in the stream? Was it weird? Psychic?”
“I don’t know, Terry. All I know is it was that moment that changed me.”
“Gosh, I wish it had happened to me! But all we have in England are foxes and badgers and rabbits, and somehow, I don’t think I’d want to be a rabbit shifter. I’d take a fox, though.”
“I have heard of fox shifters existing,” Liam said.
“And it’s just the one animal?” Terry asked eagerly. “You can’t change into anything else? Always just one?”
“Yes. Just the one.”
“That’s so cool,” she said, grinning, delighted.
She leaned back onto two palms, and so did he, and they sat shoulder to shoulder for a few silent moments, staring out at the shimmering lake.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked her.
“No plans yet. I was just going to sort of wing it for a couple of days.”
“Do you want to come out into the jungle with me? We can rent a truck and drive out there.”
“What are we going to see?”
“My old clan’s camp grounds,” he said. “Where I used to live. You asked me if I had been to Vietnam before. I lived here before. We had a small community. Shapeshifters always feel more at peace in non-urban environments.”
“Sure,” she chirped. “God, I’m pretty buzzed right now. I think that’s why I’m taking it so well. You know, you being a shapeshifter. I had five really stiff drinks tonight. Honestly, I’m amazed I’m even still walking. I’ve always been a lightweight.”
“Come on,” he said, standing up and giving her his hand. He pulled her to her feet, and their hands lingered together. He looked at her, felt a swell in his chest. “We should get back. We’ll have an early start tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
Together they walked back to the guest house, and their hands brushed, touched, and sparks were sent shooting up his nervous system. Eventually he took her hand, and she held it back tightly, and she leaned her head against his shoulder as they walked in silence.
*
“Oh my God, steps!” Terry moaned at the second floor landing of their guest house. “Why did I have to be put on the top floor?”
“It’s the best room.”
“But all these steps!”
Liam smirked at her. “We’re waking everybody up you know.”
“The hell with it.”
“I could carry you.”
“Please,” she said.
He leaned forward and scooped her up easily off the ground, and took the steps up two at a time. Terry clasped onto his neck, shock in her wide eyes. Her face was so close to his he could smell her gin-laced breath. It was heady, intimate. He wanted to bend down and kiss her.
“Let me guess,” she said. “More of your shifter bleed through?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Clever girl.”
“Must be nice. Do you get that body because you’re a shifter?”
“No,” he said. “But it comes naturally to me anyway.”
“Aren’t you lucky…”
Liam, sensing a shift in mood, set her down on her feet at the fifth floor. He cradled her face, forced her to look up at him.
“You are a beautiful woman that any man would be lucky to have,” he said. “Every inch of you.”
“You’re just saying that.”
He shook his head. “No.”
He took hold of one of her hands and squeezed it. The air between them was charged, and when he could hold himself back no longer, he leaned forward and he took her lips in his.
Liam felt as if he was a horse just out of the gates. His kiss turned feverish, possessive, and he crushed himself against her, held her tight, and she pulled at his hair and devoured his tongue. They fell into a passionate embrace, hungry hands roaming and groping. He pushed her up against her door, squeezed her ass, ran his hands up and down her sides, loving her curvy body. Her breath hitched, and she gasped when he pushed his leg in between hers, bringing his knee slowly up to her crotch.
She let out a small whimper as he broke their kiss, buried his face in her neck and smelled her. She smelled so good. It was the very first sense of her he’d ever had, her smell, back on that train carriage. He loved it. It was sweet, sexy, and he wanted more. He kissed her behind her ear, down the side of her neck, before biting the top of her shoulder.
“Oh, God, Liam,” she hissed, her hands rounding his waist. They moved toward his crotch, and he felt her cup
his hardness.
“I want you,” he growled. “I have since I first laid eyes on you.”
“Me, too,” she confessed, her voice breathy. “Come inside.”
He kissed her hungrily one last time, savoring the taste of her on his tongue and lips, before pulling back. “Not tonight,” he said.
She was stung. “Why not?” she asked, exasperated.
“You’re drunk, Terry.”
She blinked.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, okay?”
“Really?” she asked.
He nodded. “Really.”
She jabbed a finger in his face. “You still owe me a frying pan.”
He laughed. “I do.”
Terry unlocked her door, and he met her eyes as she was closing it.
“Night,” he said.
“Good night,” she said. She grinned, and he returned it, and then she shut the door.
He stood on the landing for a few minutes, feeling the tingle of her kiss on his lips, the yearning of his hands to once again caress her curves, squeeze her ass, devour her body.
He thought about her warm breath on his face, her sweet, sweet scent, her bright eyes.
God, he wanted her. His heart was screaming, and he had a knot of anticipation in his stomach. He glanced down his body, saw that he was still hard, tenting his trousers. He looked ridiculous.
“Go!” she said through the door, startling him.
He grinned, and took the steps down to his floor two at a time.
*
“Wow, so this is it?” she asked, looking around. Her eyes were heavy, and she felt the faint lingering of a hangover at the edges of her mind. Fortunately she had gulped down a big glass of water before bed, and even if she had needed to wake up to pee, it meant that she wasn’t at least dehydrated in the morning, and with a headache.
Liam looked at her and grunted. “My clan’s camp,” he said a moment later. He put his hands on his hips and walked away, facing the jungle tree line.
Terry gazed around the ruins. She saw the footprints of small buildings or huts. They were arranged in a scattered way, surrounding a stone well that had long since dried up.
The jungle had not yet crept fully into the clearing. Small bushes and grasses had, but the trees had not been able to spread their seeds here. The wind could barely penetrate the thick jungle.
“You deserve to know,” he said, voice deep, bogged down by sadness.
“What happened here?”
“We were one of the last known clans,” he said.
“Of shapeshifters?”
“Yes.”
“Where are the rest of them?”
“All gone. Killed.”
Terry bunched her brow. She walked over to Liam and took his hand, but she felt that his body was tense.
“By the wolf that is hunting you?” she asked.
“Yes. I got away, the only survivor.”
“Why did he do it?”
“He hates what he is, what we are. He hates all shapeshifters.”
“Did you have a family here?”
“Parents… sister.”
“I’m sorry,” Terry whispered. She felt a swell of compassion for him, and wanted to hug him, but she sensed it was not what he needed.
“When we were walking toward the border crossing in China, I thought I smelled a wolf. It was just that husky hybrid.”
“But why now? Why here?”
“I was told by a creature in Borneo that Marcus was closing in on me. That he had just escaped from prison in Australia after killing an old shifter there, and had caught my scent.”
“I don’t understand. Creature?”
“A shifter, also a wolf, but stuck in the shift, half-way between man and animal.”
“Oh my God,” Terry murmured.
“Also, he is Marcus’ father.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Can any shifter get stuck in the shift?”
“Not that I know of. It is just him. Leon.”
Liam looked down at her. “I came here yesterday, sure that if the wolf was on my scent, he would meet me here. This is where it started, between me and him.”
“But he didn’t show up?”
“No. Maybe he has not yet tracked me to Vietnam.”
“This is the debt you spoke of?”
“Yes. I plan to stop him.”
“You mean kill him?”
“Maybe.”
Terry gasped. “You can’t. Everybody deserves a chance. There has to be some process, some other kind of punishment.”
“We are animals without a system. We are fragmented and near extinct. There is no process, Terry. He will come for me eventually. One of these days, sooner or later, there will be a snarling wolf at my doorstep. And I will stop him, or he will kill me.”
“Why don’t you team up with other shifters? Band together, find him and stop him?”
He smiled for the first time that morning. “I do not know any other shifters, Terry.”
“What about the creature in Borneo?”
“He is stuck there. He cannot leave.”
“Can you tell me about him?”
*
Deep in the jungles of Borneo, along the invisible border that separated Indonesia from Malaysia, a monster walked.
Liam felt a stab of revulsion as he looked at the grotesque form of Leon before him. The thing, Leon, existed in mid-shift, somewhere between a wolf and a man, and only barely resembled something human. Liam could never get used to that sight. At nearly seven feet tall, Leon looked like a monster straight out of fiction.
His muscular, vast, and naked body was long, almost stretched, like he was the walking reflection of a carnival funny mirror. His stringy, vein-riddled arms ended in large and padded palms with dagger-length, mustard-colored claw-tipped fingers. Out of his narrow waist jutted a wide hipbone, and extended two muscular thighs, oval in shape, and beneath perpetually-bent knees were rhomboid lower legs with an odd curve just before the ankles, which was broken-bone body horror enough to make anyone gag.
Long, matted and shaggy gray hair growing down the back of his entire body gave off the impression that he was wearing some kind of camouflage suit, or that he was a vagrant who had chanced upon a designer fur coat. The half-snout jutting out in front of diminutive yellow eyes, high pointed ears which each had chunks of missing cartilage, was the visage of a monstrous wolf.
“Don’t look so disgusted,” the creature said with a lisp. His voice was deep and hissy, more of a snarl than proper enunciation, and Liam had to struggle to make sense of the words. He continued to be surprised that the half-wolf, half-man was able to form the sounds of words at all. It seemed highly unlikely that Leon’s tongue could work properly like a human’s, especially when considering the inch-long shards of stained enamel that protruded from his gums.
The hot and sticky jungle humidity hung thicker than usual, as though the air itself was congealing. Water vapor poured upward from vents in the soft muddy ground.
“You do look disgusting,” Liam responded.
“You think so?” the beast asked him. “I think I look quite fabulous, myself.” He strutted toward Liam before executing a playful pirouette. For such a large and hulking thing, the creature had surprising agility. Even grace, Liam had to admit, and he allowed himself a small smile.
“Did you really forget how to change?” Liam asked. The hard line of his brow dropped as he considered the half-man monstrosity before him. “Or are you just doing this for my benefit?”
“Your benefit?” Leon said, shaking his wolf-head. “You spoke to Keegan yourself, did you not?”
“I did.” Liam had met the angel-faced boy in Brunei, had seen him party it up in one of the city’s most happening gay bars.
Keegan had told him that night, through a fog of blacklight-stained cigarette smoke, above the din of thumping dubstep, and amongst the throng of drunk and high half-naked men, that in the jungle
, wandering aimlessly up and down the border, there lived a wicked thing, half a man and half an animal.
“And didn’t he warn you of my appearance?”
“He did.”
“He was my lover,” Leon lamented, staring up at the jungle canopy. There, vines and leaves and branches and twigs were all so intertwined it was like looking at a gigantic green bird’s nest. The sun could barely penetrate the thicket. “But he felt spurned. Sensitive boy. I think I am not suitable for love anymore.”
“He seemed a little resentful.”
“Oh?” Leon’s interest was evidently piqued. “And what did he have to say about me?”
“That you were worse on the inside.”
“Ha!”
“I saw him in a bar. He was drunk. Drunk people say things they don’t mean.”
Leon boomed, his hideous mouth throwing out rasping, heaving laughter. “Don’t worry about my feelings, boy. I’ve been alive so long that they don’t get hurt anymore. Besides, look at me, look at what I am. Soon I will be more. Soon, I will be greater than anything you can imagine. Soon I will mate with Her.”
“Her?”
“Mother Nature, dear boy. She grants life, she doles out death. She gave you the shift. We were fated to be as one.”
“Is that right?” Liam asked, frowning. He had no idea what Leon was going on about. The beast seemed unhinged.
“It is. So, tell me, what were you doing in the bar? You don’t strike me as… well, being of a similar… inclination. Though admittedly, once upon a time, both men and women interested me.”
“Research. I was tracking you down.”
“Ah, you were asking about someone from both our shared pasts, were you not?”
“Yes,” Liam admitted. He was surprised that even though Leon had a half-snout, and a wolf’s eyes and ears, he was still somehow capable of emoting, and not just the basics, either. There was a remarkable degree of facial expression.
“Worry not, my boy. That wound has long since stitched itself shut. He is hunting you, is he not? My dear son.”
“Yes,” Liam confirmed. The grotesque creature seemed to be one step ahead. He wondered how. Someone had to be feeding him information.
“You want to know if I can speak to him? Call off my dog? Well, let me tell you, he is not mine anymore. He has forsaken me, his own father.” A terrible and sad sigh trembled out of Leon’s body. “No matter. I will have more children soon.”