Beasts Like Us

by Feral Sephrian

  “I’ll split that with you,” Kuhma said.

  Mateo smiled at Dazi, trying to bring up his friend’s spirits. “Does that mean we can share a meat lover’s?” An image flashed into his mind that he quickly shooed away. Just because they had shared their sexual history, that didn’t mean they had a sexual future together. No matter how much I want to feel you beneath me again.

  Dazi merely shrugged. “I guess.”

  Damn it, Dazi, don’t tell me you’re going to lock up because your friends are back. There wasn’t much Mateo could do but continue being friendly. Kesi’s attitude had improved over the course of the day, and Kuhma seemed to have received his wake-up call, so he felt more comfortable around them. The issue was that Dazi didn’t.

  The pizza place near the convention center was busy, but Mateo liked it there. The employees had always been nice to the furries. Mateo respected respectful people, and he was glad to give this parlor his patronage. His opinion was validated when a group of fursuiters walked in shortly after he had placed his order and the guy at the counter threw his hands up in victory.

  “Dutch angel dragon!” he exclaimed. “That was all I needed to complete my bingo! Buddy, I hope angel dragons like soda, because you get one on me.”

  The angel dragon played coy for a moment, then said in a clearly female voice, “Okay, if you insist.” Mateo later spotted the two of them chatting and wished them a happy friendship, relationship, or whatever sparked between them.

  Speaking of which, what is going on between Dazi and me? They were attracted to each other, that much was apparent. Mateo would have had to walk around with tissues stuffed up his nose not to smell that. However, most large cats weren’t known for their monogamous tendencies. Would we have a one-night-stand like regular big cats, or try to start a relationship like humans? Neither of them had had much luck with relationships, as far as Mateo knew, but that reminded him that he didn’t know a lot about Dazi, yet.

  Their group made idle chat while they ate. Mateo and Dazi talked about the animation panel, Kesi and Kuhma described the other furries at the Therianthropy panel. Kuhma spoke about them sympathetically, which was encouraging. Mateo hoped Tommo wasn’t spreading vicious rumors back at their tribe, and that testament from Dazi, Kesi, and Kuhma would be enough to counteract them if he did. Kuhma mentioned Mateo returning to the reservation with them again as though he knew Mateo planned to accept anyway.

  “I can drive myself, though it would be best if one of you rode with me as a navigator.” Mateo turned to Dazi. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Dazi was halfway through a bite when Mateo asked. He stared at Mateo for a moment while he chewed. Swallowing, he said, “Sure.”

  Mateo smiled warmly at him. That would give them time to talk alone. He was looking forward to it.

  After their meal they wandered back to the Con-fur-ence. They caught the end of karaoke night, though none of them participated. They went to the dance for about fifteen minutes before Dazi said he was tired and wanted to go to bed more than anything. Kuhma concurred, and Kesi said she would go if they did, so they all returned to the hotel. Dazi showered for a while, and Mateo found himself wanting to join him. He was slightly disappointed when Dazi curled up on the floor and said goodnight to everyone. The bed felt lonely without him.

  In the haze of his dreams, Mateo saw the face of his grandfather. “B’a-yal,” he said, calling Mateo by his title, the first-born son.

  Mateo left his body to sleep while his spirit got up to walk with his grandfather. He stretched his paws out in front of him, feeling the strength of his spirit form. “Hello, mam,” he said, replying with the Mayan term for his mother’s father.

  “Thank you for waking,” his grandfather said. Neither of them truly spoke, but there was an understanding of words between them. “Your father is worried. He hasn’t heard much from you.”

  “I’ve been occupied.” Mateo gestured for his grandfather to see with him. “I made new friends. They will interest you.”

  The pair looked over the darkened hotel room. Through their spirit eyes they could see, not only the sleeping Mukua’poan, but their puha as well, beside them and inside them simultaneously.

  “Ah, yes.” Mateo’s grandfather smiled. “I have sensed their kind before, though they walk outside our territory. Men with souls clothed in animal skins. Interesting, as you said. Why did they come here?”

  “Curiosity. Fear. They think the furries want their power.”

  “A reasonable fear. One I expressed to you before your first trip.”

  “And I proved you wrong, yes?”

  Mateo’s grandfather chuffed. “You are a master of shadows and deception. If they knew what you could do, they would fear you. They would hunt you. You proved you can hide among them, that is all.”

  “These ones are good at hiding, too, but they’re afraid nonetheless.”

  “They hid from me. That is impressive. Then again, I had no real reason to look. This land has its old spirits and its remaining gods. I do not disturb them. Birds may be small, but to incur the wrath of a flock is unwise even for an old jaguar.”

  Mateo’s internal sigh manifested as a gray wave passing over his fur. “We don’t have reason to fear them either.”

  “So you say. The one you like has something dark in his heart, it seems.”

  “Dazi isn’t bad.”

  “Yet it’s clearly there. Doubt. Guilt. Something selfish, but it’s connected to something that cares for you.”

  “Can you see what it is?”

  Mateo’s grandfather was silent for a moment. “Punishment. His heart cowers like a dog expecting someone to strike him. He has wronged someone, and he knows it.”

  “He was forbidden from coming here. When he returns to his tribe, they will reprimand him.”

  “There is something deeper. You intend to go with them.”

  “Only for a few days. They invited me.”

  “Be careful, b’a-yal. These three mean you no harm, though the elk is not fond of you, but I cannot say what their kinsmen will do in your presence. Remember, even a jaguar cannot fight a flock.”

  “I know, mam, but I do not intend to fight.”

  “And I hope you do not need to.” He put his hand on Mateo’s shoulder. “I will tell your parents you are well, and not to expect you home for some time.”

  Mateo dipped his head in a nod. “I will be in touch, either here or by phone.”

  “Good. Now rest. You will need your strength.”

  “Mam? My judgment is clouded by personal feelings. What does Dazi think of me?”

  Again, Mateo’s grandfather took a moment to focus. “His dreams are elsewhere, but as I said, there is a part that connects to you in a caring way. I won’t get your mother’s hopes up, nor yours, though I wouldn’t give up on him. Still, be wary of the darkness. The punishment he fears may fall upon you as well.”

  “Thank you, mam.”

  Mateo lifted his heavy head from his pillow. He was awake and back in his physical body, but he had shifted to his jaguar form. The short travel and change made him thirsty, so he climbed out of bed on silent paws. As usual, it felt weird to walk around as a jaguar wearing boxers, but Mateo was used to it by now. Two nights in a row is odd though. Tonight wasn’t surprising because of Grandfather’s visit, but I wonder if Dazi’s presence had anything to do with last night’s. He stopped on his way to the bathroom in order to watch Dazi sleep for a moment.

  What darkness are you hiding from me? What punishment do you face? Do you care for me as a friend or would you rather be more? Mateo wasn’t about to get answers to any of his questions, so he trotted into the bathroom.

  He nudged the door mostly closed so the sound of the sink wouldn’t awaken the sleeping skin-walkers. Even with years of practice, it was a struggle to operate the sink with his paws. Mateo wasn’t ready to be human again yet, but he wished he could change just his hand. According to his grandfather, the old shamans could control the
ir changes like that, stopping halfway through or otherwise choosing the extent of their change, but Mateo had never managed to do it. He always felt a polar pull, gravitating between all jaguar or all human, unfailingly snapping to one or the other if he tried staying somewhere between them.

  After drinking his fill, Mateo put his head under the running water to clear the light throbbing in his head. He hadn’t expected his grandfather to visit like that. A warning text would have been nice so Mateo could have prepared. The water was soothing. Mateo liked swimming, especially on warm sunny days when he dried quickly without having to groom himself. If Dazi were the one grooming him, he might not mind as much. He chuffed a sigh, turned off the sink, and shook the water from his fur. His grandfather had said not to get high hopes, but not to give up either. Mateo wished he knew what that meant. He rubbed his damp head against a towel and pawed the door open again.

  The main room smelled different. Sometime in the last few minutes, Kuhma had shifted into his elk form. He was curled up as though asleep, but Mateo wasn’t sure. Kuhma had said elks don’t sleep much. Mateo padded quietly over to him to sniff him. Does he sleep-shift, too?

  Without warning, Kuhma whipped his head around, slamming his antlers into Mateo. Mateo yowled in pain. His shoulder felt like it had been caught in a bear trap. Be human be human be human don’t fight come on be human and you’ll heal…

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dazi exclaimed. The sound of his voice helped Mateo anchor to his human form. His hearing faded and came back in time to hear Dazi say, “—that kind of shit here! What if you had killed him?”

  “I’m okay,” Mateo said, his voice slightly distorted by the teeth that hadn’t completely reverted to human yet. Fully aware that he was almost naked in a room with a jumpy elk and a confused coyote, Mateo sat back against the bed and grabbed Dazi’s pillow as a make-shift shield. He panted, “No lasting damage. Look.” He flexed and rolled his shoulder to demonstrate how he had healed during his transformation. “Besides, I told him he could break a bone if he thought I was attacking him.”

  Dazi’s eyes grew wide. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “No, I—”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Are you okay in there?”

  The three Mukua’poan froze. Mateo called out, “Yeah, tripped over someone’s stuff. Nothing broken, I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?” their concerned neighbor asked. “You screamed pretty loudly.”

  Mateo pushed himself to his feet. “Just startled, that’s all. I’ll be bruised by morning, but I’ve had worse.”

  “Okay. Be careful in there!”

  The following silence was so thick Mateo expected to hear ominous thunder in the background. Dazi looked halfway shifted to his mountain lion form with rage. “What. The fuck. Is wrong with you?” he hissed.

  Kuhma shifted back into human form, pulling his pants on as he did so. It was odd watching the antlers shrink back into his skull, but Mateo could see the resemblance now. Kuhma snorted. He said quietly, “He was prowling around late at night and he said he gets hungry when he shifts. I shifted to defend myself, and what do you know, he started sneaking up on me.”

  “I was checking to see if you were asleep,” Mateo said. “I thought maybe you had sleep-shifted.”

  Kesi, still a coyote, growled, her tail swishing against the floor. Mateo couldn’t tell who she was mad at, but either way her displeasure was obvious.

  “Look, I’m fine,” Mateo said. “This was a misunderstanding, nothing more.”

  “Well, actually, it was a test to see if you could be trusted,” Kuhma said. “The shamans would have similar concerns, though they’ll have more efficient methods.”

  Mateo cocked his head to one side. “What?”

  “You know, when they—” Kuhma froze. Dazi lost his anger as Kuhma swiftly gained it. Kuhma turned on Dazi, his chest puffed up and his feet splayed in a powerful stance. “You didn’t fucking tell him, did you?” Kuhma’s voice was barely above a whisper, but it was as strong as a bellow.

  “Tell me what?” Mateo could see what his grandfather had meant. All of Dazi’s guilt and doubt was rising to the surface. He shrunk away from Kuhma, eyes to the ground. Mateo wanted to comfort him, but he had the feeling he should be upset as well. The punishment was coming, and Mateo did not yet know how it would affect him.

  Kesi growled again, but this time it was clear she was angry at Dazi. Whatever he hadn’t said was important. Dazi bit his lips shut and took a step back.

  “Dazi,” Mateo said sternly. “What didn’t you tell me?”

  “You’re going to die,” Kuhma said.

  “That’s not true!” Dazi exclaimed.

  “Oh, good, you can still talk.” Kuhma cracked his knuckles. “You tell him now, or I will.”

  Dazi rubbed his mouth with the palm of his hand, eyes not sure where to settle. He finally stared somewhere to the left of Mateo’s face and said, “Mukua’poan law says that anyone who learns about our abilities must have their memories altered, if they are found unworthy of keeping them.”

  Mateo furrowed his brow. “What?”

  “It means if we can’t trust you, you’re not allowed to remember what we are,” Kesi said. At some point during the argument she had found time to return to human form and slip on some clothes. “The shamans will make you think it was a dream, or some stupid TV movie you saw at two in the morning when you weren’t really watching, or you’ll remember seeing a person and an animal, but not that they were the same being.”

  “But that’s only if they can’t trust me, right?” Mateo looked from person to person. “Have I done anything this weekend to make you doubt me?”

  “You were here in the first place…” Kuhma muttered.

  “Yeah, I’ve been here four years in a row and no one has noticed I’m not entirely human, or if they have they kept it to themselves because it sounds crazy to say they saw someone with a real tail at a furry convention.” Mateo tail twitched, jerking the fabric of his boxers. “Did I run around screaming, ‘Hey, these guys are shapeshifters’? Or tell any of my friends here that they could fulfil their dreams of being animals if they perform your ritual?”

  Kuhma wriggled his nose. “No, you haven’t.”

  “Then I should be fine, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” Kesi said. “We know you can be trusted, but that’s because we’ve spent nearly every waking minute with you for a day. For all we know, the moment we let you out of sight, you would tell someone, like that poor otter girl who would rather die than be human the rest of her life.”

  “But I wouldn’t,” Mateo insisted. “Outing you would out me, too. How else would I prove that you’re real without you there? If I walked up to someone and said, ‘I know people with magic animal skins,’ they would think I was insane and probably have security drug test me. I already know my blood shows up weird on tests, so that’d end badly for me. Everything I could do to harm you would come back and hurt me. I’ve been keeping my secret for thirty-two years and—”

  “And we’ve been keeping ours for centuries,” Kuhma said.

  Mateo scowled at him. “If you want to play that game, my kind have been hiding from the Europeans since the 1500s. And not all of the people we protected could disguise themselves as animals. If anything, you could learn a thing or two from us.”

  “Enough, goddammit!” Dazi snapped out of the haze he had been in since his confession. He gripped both sides of his head and took a deep breath. “This is pointless. It’s not up to us what happens to him. Kuhma, I know you’re not going to stand up for him, but can you at least see that he has a point?”

  Kuhma folded his arms and asked something in Shoshoni. Dazi hesitated before he answered, also in Shoshoni, which made Kuhma roll his eyes. Mateo balled his fists. “Okay, no more secrets. You tell me what you just said.”

  Dazi cast a glance at Kuhma and bit his lip. “I said I was going to tell you, earlier today.”

  Mateo s
ighed. “By the fountain, right?”

  Dazi nodded.

  “And when I misunderstood what you wanted to talk about, you jumped at the chance to change the subject, didn’t you?”

  His eyes to the ground, Dazi nodded again. “I was afraid you would try to run.”

  “Run? Why would I run?”

  “Because…that’s what I would do,” Dazi admitted. “If someone I had just met told me that, because of something he had said to me, I had to prove myself to three powerful magicians or they would go into my head and rearrange my memories, I would have tried to run away and save myself.”

  “Like you tried to get away from talking to me about this.” Mateo dropped the pillow. It smelled too much like Dazi anyway. “Dazi, from what I know of you, you’re…conflicted. You’re trying to do the right thing, except you’re not sure what the right thing is. For the record, avoiding this was not the right thing. We could have talked and worked this out.” He sighed. “Since you skipped your last chance, when were you going to tell me?”

  Dazi bit his lip. “I don’t know, definitely before we left, but…”

  Mateo gestured for silence and nodded. “I get it. You don’t know me that well, you didn’t know how I’d react, but you didn’t want to wait until we were stuck in a car together to tell me. Well, guess what, I’m not running. Like my ancestors before me, I know when it’s time to stand my ground. That means you are going to be stuck in a car with me, and we are going to have a long talk.”

  Kuhma nodded his approval. “Good, because—” he narrowed his eyes at Dazi, “—tell him what would happen if he didn’t come willingly.”

  Dazi’s shoulders bunched. “We would have had to hunt you down and drag you back ourselves, in one piece or…otherwise…” He looked at Mateo with apologetic watery eyes. “That’s the law.”

  Mateo snorted. “I’ll come quietly. I know you wanted to stay and get your money’s worth, but maybe it’s best if we leave as soon as possible tomorrow.” He gave each of them his best commanding gaze. Dazi had closed his eyes and hung his head, which triggered some sympathy in Mateo’s heart. Even so, he had to be stern. Dazi had lied to him. “Get some sleep.”