by Lexi Aurora
“Hey!”
“Jesus Christ!” Jared exclaimed, sloshing hot coffee all down the front of himself as he jumped halfway up to the heavens in surprise. “You scared the shit out of me, you know that?”
“Sorry,” Jade answered uncertainly, her brow creased with worry. “I didn’t mean to. I thought you knew I was here.”
“But you weren’t here,” Jared answered sharply, at a total loss as to why he was as annoyed with her as he was. “At least not until a couple of seconds ago. I woke up, and your side of the bed was cold.”
“Did you miss me?” she said playfully, a tentative half grin on her face that almost softened his anger toward her. “It’s okay if you did. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m just saying, I thought you took off once I went to sleep. Which means what you just did is still technically sneaking up on a man. You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that, not after everything that’s happened. You’re liable to get yourself shot or something.”
“I’m sorry. But I didn’t sneak off!”
“You didn’t? Then I’m imagining you just popping up this way?”
“No, you aren’t. What I mean is that I wasn’t just sneaking off someplace for no good reason. After you fell asleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about the town assembly thingy.”
“Okay,” Jared answered slowly, staring at her face intently as he did so. He could tell that she was telling him part of the truth, but he could also tell that there was something not quite right here. It was in the way she fidgeted, the way she couldn’t quite keep eye contact with him. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and he knew it. What he didn’t know was why she felt the need to keep secrets. “So you couldn’t stop thinking about it. That meant you had to get up and what, go for a long walk in the middle of the night? Not a smart choice.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. Or at least it wasn’t exactly like that. It’s just that last night was the first time I’ve had any clue of what I was supposed to do. It was the first time I’ve felt like I had a purpose since this whole awful thing happened, and I couldn’t wait for another second to get started, not even to sleep.”
“So let me get this straight. You got up and wandered off in the dark, by yourself, with a bunch of fucking monsters running around, to try and get started on finding out where Dr. Crazy’s been hiding out this past year?”
“You shouldn’t call them that,” Jade frowned, her face growing bright red as she did so. “Shouldn’t call them monsters, I mean. It could have happened to any of us, you know.”
“Sure, fine. Whatever. You’re not telling me anything I haven’t heard before, Jade. But semantics aside, is that what you’re telling me? You got up and left to try and get a head start on that whole thing?”
“Not to try.” She grinned again, looking a whole lot like the cat that got the canary. “I did it.”
“What do you mean, you did it? You did what, exactly?”
“I found him. I know exactly where he is. Not only that, I know which path to take to get to him.”
What followed was an argument that would have fit perfectly into any one of those stupid television dramas that had become extinct along with everything else after the Great Reckoning. Jared, who had never been one to request any more information than he expressly needed, didn’t bother asking Jade how exactly she had gotten this done so quickly. He didn’t care what methods she had used or what kinds of resources she’d had to draw from. All he wanted was the location, which Jade gave him gladly. That was where the two of them stopped agreeing on things. It turned out that the doctor’s house was a close hike from them, which Jared now figured was why their little part of Texas had racked up the highest death toll of any place he’d yet heard of. When he began gathering up some things to put in a pack, Jade had started adding some things of her own. That was when she made it clear that she had no intention of letting him go confront the guy responsible for all of this devastation on his own, and no amount of argument on his part seemed to make a difference.
“Look!” she finally yelled into his face, or as close to his face as she could get considering she was almost a foot shorter than him. “I’m the one who found the information you needed. I’m going!”
“I don’t need you to go! I don’t need anyone to go, in fact. This is something I’m going to take care of on my own.”
“Bullshit! This didn’t only happen to you, Jared. It happened to all of us! And you were more than willing to let me do the work of figuring out where he was. As far as I’m concerned, that means I’ve earned the trip.”
“But—”
“And on top of that, I’ve already told you. I know exactly how to get there. So the way I see it, you can go on your own, and I’ll go, too, but separately, or we can just go together. Your choice, I guess. Either way, I’m going.”
“Fine,” Jared answered through a clenched jaw, hardly able to believe that he was conceding defeat so quickly. “But you better not get in my way.”
“That’s funny,” she retorted, a flinty look in his eye that made him want to take a step backward. “I was just about to say the same thing to you.”
Chapter Six - Jade
“This is it. Holy fuck, Jade, that’s it.”
“I know it is. Why do you sound so surprised?”
“I don’t know,” he answered thickly, running his hand through his hair in a move that could either have been from anxiety, anger, or both. “I guess I didn’t really expect it to be here, you know? After everything that’s happened, everything that’s gone down, it just felt too easy.”
“I’m pretty sure this part was the easy part,” Jade whispered, crouched down in the thick woods surrounding the massive three-story house made almost entirely out of glass and metal. “Finding it, I mean.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Um, yeah. I told you I knew where it was. I don’t know if you know this, but I was kind of a computer genius before the whole world went to shit. Even post-apocalypse, I can still do some pretty neat things when it comes to technology.”
“I wasn’t trying to say I doubted you, Jade, I was—”
“It’s cool. I get it. It doesn’t matter what you thought about my abilities to get this done anyway. Like I said, I have a feeling this was the easy part. This was the only thing we knew was a sure thing. Everything that comes next? Those are all completely unknown variables.”
Jared didn’t say anything in response, but Jade could feel him giving her a sideways look. The closer she and Jared had come to this house, the more on edge she had become. At the start, it had all felt like an adventure. It had felt like freedom not to be in her little shifter encampment, not to be avoiding the townspeople, either. With Jared, she could be a normal person. She could be something of who she was before the Reckoning had ever occurred. The two of them had spent the night around a small campfire, trading stories that were really memories. For that one night, the state of the world hadn’t mattered. It had just been a man and a woman with the most insane chemistry ever, getting to like each other more and more with every passing moment. But now? Now they were about to break into the doctor’s house, and once that happened, Jade was pretty sure her grace period would be done with. She had no idea why she was so sure of it, but something told her that going into that house was going to show Jared what she really was. The two of them were only just getting to really like each other, but as soon as he knew what she really was, Jade knew that Jared wouldn’t want her anymore. She would be lucky if he didn’t try and kill her.
“Look,” Jared said quietly, looking at the house instead of her, “if you don’t want to go in there, don’t. You’re right. I don’t know what we’ll find. He’s probably not even there, and if he is, you may not want to be there to see what I’ll do to him.”
“Maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t go in there, then.”
“And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
&nbs
p; “It means we aren’t trying to get revenge on Dr. Strong. We aren’t supposed to be going in there to kill him, Jared. We’re supposed to be looking for a way to make things better. We’re supposed to be looking for a cure.”
“And if he doesn’t have one? If it turns out he’s just some fuck sitting here in his glass castle while the rest of us deal with what he did?”
“Do you even care about that? You think shifters are all monsters, right? Because if that’s so, then you don’t care about trying to help them.”
“I don’t know what they are, okay? I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that he should have to answer for his crimes.”
“And that doesn’t mean that you can just walk in there and shoot him. It’s not the right thing to do, and it won’t help the people who need it. And that’s what this is supposed to be about. Helping people, even those ‘monsters’ running around in the woods. Because whether you like it or not, they didn’t choose to be that way. They should at least get to choose, Jared. It shouldn’t be something that was just done to them.”
She was sure he was going to yell at her. He even opened his mouth to do it, but after a moment he shut it again and nodded once, tersely. He started toward the house without any further conversation, and that was good. Jade was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to talk to him anymore because what she had just said had made her own impending struggle all too clear. Suppose Dr. Strong really was in there, and suppose he had actually come up with a cure. It seemed unlikely to her, but what if? She would have to make a decision. She had spent the last year trying to get used to this new creature she had become. If there were a cure in that home, she would have to decide whether or not to give it up and go back to the way she had been before or to continue on her new path.
“Come on,” Jared whispered, snapping her back to reality as he slowly opened the large glass front door. “Stay sharp, Jade. And stay behind me. We don’t know what we’re going to find in here, but we do know that if the doc’s inside, he’s a quack. And we know he’s dangerous.”
She nodded and for once in her life did as she was told. The house seemed even bigger on the inside than it had appeared looking at its exterior, and she remained behind Jared as they searched one room after another. By the time they had ruled out everything but the attic, Jade was sure the trip had been a bust. It was when she saw the strange blue light seeping out from beneath the closed attic door that she knew she was wrong.
“Come in, won’t you?”
The voice was high, unstable, sounding to Jade as if its owner had been sucking on a tank of helium. She didn’t know what a mad scientist’s voice was supposed to sound like, but she didn’t think it was this. It was almost enough to make her laugh, except that all she had to do was look at the rage on Jared’s face for that laughter to dry right up.
“Jared—”
“Don’t. You already said what you needed to say. Don’t, okay?”
Without giving her the chance to chime in with an opinion, Jared swung the door open, leading Jade into a place unlike anything she had ever seen. Everything was pristine, made out of chrome and glass just like the rest of the house. She couldn’t tell where the blue light was coming from, only that it cast its light everywhere, and the attic was as cold as a meat locker. The walls were lined with rows and rows of shelves, each one of which was full of beakers and vials. In the dead center of the room sat a young man looking directly at them with the most unsettling sort of smile. Jade clutched at Jared’s back, wanting to tell him to stop, but he only moved forward and took her along with him. Whatever reaction they had set into motion, there was no stopping it now. She could no more stop what would happen next than she could turn back the hands of time.
“You know, I’ve been wondering when somebody would come to see me,” Dr. Strong tittered. “Waiting and wondering. Truth be told, I’ve been hoping. I was starting to think I’d done too good a job, that things were too chaotic for anyone to realize where I was or consider coming to see me at all. I’m so pleased to see that I was wrong.”
“We’re not here to please you, Strong,” Jared snarled, his rage barely contained beneath his seething surface. “Let’s get that straight right now.”
“No, of course you’re not. But what, pray tell, have you come for?”
“A cure. We’ve come for a cure. We can’t bring back all of the people you’ve killed, but we can give the others, the ones you’ve changed, a way back to their humanity.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe they don’t want to go back?”
“That’s not up to you,” Jade cut in, so full of adrenaline she thought she might burst. “You don’t get to make that choice. Not for anyone.”
“And what about you, sweetheart? Will you change back? Because there is a cure, I’ll tell you that right now. It’s even in this room. And what will you do when you hold it in your hand? Will you change? Or will you remain the beautiful, evolved creature you have become?”
“What?” Jared said in a shocked voice, turning to look at Jade as he spoke. “What’s he talking about? He’s not saying… are you? Are you one of them?”
Jade didn’t want to answer, and as it turned out, she didn’t have to. Although most of her attention was now trained on Jared, her senses had been heightened when she became a shifter. Despite her focus on Jared’s obvious confusion, she could clearly see Dr. Strong behind him. She watched as he lovingly caressed a small refrigerator set closely beside his chair and then as he pulled a shotgun from behind his chair. The grin on his face when he pulled that gun up was one she would remember for a long, long time to come, but at the moment she hardly had time to register it. Before she knew what she was doing, she was moving, shifting as she leaped clean over Jared to get to the crazy doctor. She felt her body grow, felt her strength quadruple, and as she landed in Dr. Strong’s lap, she let out a snarl of rage. The shot he fired into her flank did nothing to stop her. The pain didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was stopping him before he hurt Jared. She pounded on him, ripping the arm that held the gun so that he shrieked in agony and dropped his weapon. She wanted to kill him. She had thought this whole time that it would be Jared who’d do it, but it was her. It was Jared who stopped her, pulling her lion's body off Dr. Strong before she could inflict permanent damage.
“Jade! No! You don’t want to do this! I know you don’t—it’s not you! You’re not a monster, Jade, you’re not! You’re you! You’re still you, and you’re wonderful. You… I think I could fall in love with you, Jade!”
The words were like magic for her, and almost as quickly as she had shifted into her lion form, she shifted back into a human. She collapsed as she did so, Jared’s arms the only thing keeping her from hitting the floor. She was losing blood quickly and could feel herself growing faint, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had done what she had set out to do. What mattered was that she wasn’t a monster—not to Jared and not to herself.
“You mean it?” she said hoarsely, completely ignoring the now badly hurt Dr. Strong. “Do you mean those things, or were you only trying to control my shift?”
“No, Jade,” he said with a thick voice that sounded very much as if it were beginning to fade. “Not trying to control you. I get it now. I get it, Jade, and I don’t care. Please. Please hold on. Hold on for me.”
Those were the last words she heard before everything went black.
Epilogue
Jade
“Mm. Turn it off, babe.”
“Turn what off?”
“The light. I don’t want to get up yet!”
“Ha! I can’t turn it off, Jade, it’s the sun. You want me to turn off the sun?”
“I wouldn’t turn it down if that’s what you're asking.”
Jared laughed and pulled her close to him, so close that she could smell the scent of the wood he must have already been out chopping. His scent was one of her most favorite things about him, and on more than one occas
ion she had asked herself if she would have noticed how amazing it was if she weren’t the way she was—if she weren’t a shifter. There was no way to be sure, but she had a feeling she would never have run out of things to love about him even if she’d merely been human. It had been almost a year since their confrontation with Dr. Strong, and every morning she woke up to him lying beside her, she grew to love him more.
Jade’s memories of that confrontation were dim at best. Most of what she knew of its conclusion came from the things Jared had told her. After she had passed out from the gunshot wound she had sustained at Dr. Strong’s hands, Jared had used some of his more persuasive methods to entice the good doctor to fix her up again. The fact that she was a shifter had helped because it helped her heal at an accelerated rate, but without Dr. Strong removing the buckshot, she might not have survived. Once that was done, Jared had tied up Strong and carried both her and the cure all of the way back to town. He’d sent a team of people to retrieve the doctor, who was now a rather unwilling member of their society, one who helped both cure and care for shifters who needed his care. It was slow progress, and it was clear now that things would never go back to the way they had once been, but it was a start. It was the beginning of change, not the least of which was Jared’s view of the shifters. Jade had been sure he would give her an ultimatum—either take the cure or lose him—but he’d never done any such thing. What he had done was bring her to his home, and once he’d done that, she hadn’t ever left.