Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  Five years after we met Evan, we were able to make substantial progress toward this goal. My years of obsessing about Cooper’s biological changes had convinced me that I wanted to specialize in veterinary medicine, but eventually I concluded that I really wanted to conduct biomedical research. Who knows, maybe I was influenced by the fact that U of I had both a vet school and a specialty scholars program in veterinary medicine. My career interests dovetailed perfectly with my keen desire to stay in a geographic location that had become familiar to me and comfortable for Cooper. I had been accepted in both programs, but it might take me close to ten years to finish both of them. A long time to wait to start fulfilling the dream.

  I was still in school when Evan came to us with a proposal. He and a few well-funded colleagues would buy a house for us as far out in the country as made sense for me to still make the daily commute to campus. In exchange, I would begin supplying free medical treatment to any shape-shifter who could make it to our land. It went without saying that we would also provide shelter to any of these half-human creatures who needed a place to stay even when they didn’t need medical attention. So our property would include a house, an artist’s studio, a research lab, and a few cabins, kennels, and lairs where our strange assortment of friends could bed down, no matter what shape they had currently taken.

  I had initially protested what seemed like overwhelming generosity, but Evan, always blunt, had won me over. “We have no one like you among all our friends,” he said. “Someone who can help us when we’re hurt or sick. We have lost so many because we couldn’t risk taking them to a hospital or a vet, even though they might have needed nothing more than a shot or a few stitches.”

  “I’m not a licensed practitioner yet,” I warned him. “I need another year or two of school—”

  “You’re already better than any other option we’ve got,” he said. “We want to get you set up as soon as we can. We’re already looking at property.”

  It was impossible not to love the place Evan and his friends eventually bought for us, a rambling farmhouse on about fifty acres of land. It was close enough to civilization that it was wired for electricity, but its water amenities included a well and a septic tank. The house was old, crumbling in places, and in desperate need of updating, but otherwise it was perfect: It had two stories, ten rooms, a cellar, a garage, and a barn. A small stream wandered along its back border, and although its main agricultural products appeared to be prairie grass and the occasional stand of wild corn, it was obviously fertile enough to sustain a diverse garden of vegetables and fruits. Trees were not plentiful, but the tall grasses and occasional oak supplied enough cover for animals moving in after nightfall. We could not have asked for something better.

  Evan oversaw the heavy work of renovation, dealing with contractors and deciding we needed new features such as a backup generator. Cooper and I picked the colors and materials for the new bathrooms and the remodeled kitchen, painted some of the rooms and hallways, and did all the work required for turning the barn into a studio.

  “I think this is the happiest I’ve ever been,” Cooper told me one day as we took a break from sweeping out the debris of reconstruction. It was a Sunday afternoon in autumn, sunny and warm. We sat outside with our backs against the barn, drinking soda and marveling at the colors all around us. The few trees were flaming with an insistent scarlet, but the long, thin prairie grasses had turned a subtle shade of vibrant brown I could only describe as “fawn.” Cooper had spent one whole day trying to mix paints that would capture the exact shade, but he had eventually given up.

  I pushed my sweaty hair out of my face. “You mean, thinking about moving out here when it’s all finished?”

  “Not even that. Not even looking ahead. Now. This minute. Working here with you. Working toward something. Making—” He gestured with the hand that held his root beer. “Making a home for ourselves. Who would have thought we’d ever reach this point? That we could have so much? I didn’t have anything when I met you. You gave up everything to be with me. And now look at us.”

  I leaned in to kiss him. “Now look at us,” I agreed. “Already so rich, and poised to have so much more.”

  “So I just wanted to take a moment to impress it on my brain, in case someday I need to remember,” he said. “This is what happiness feels like.”

  * * *

  I was happy, too—God, how could I not be, blessed with such gifts?—but I was also anxious. Every year brought me nearer to my degree, every week brought us closer to our move-in date, every day brought me some sweet exchange with Cooper, whether he came to me as a wolf or a man. We had friends, Cooper’s art career had begun to take off, and I had already started to provide medical treatment to the local shape-shifting community. I’d saved more than one life, too, which filled me with a deep and triumphant sense of satisfaction.

  But I was no nearer to solving the puzzle of Cooper’s blood. I now had samples from ten or twelve other shape-shifters—vials drawn when they were human and when they were animals—and I studied these under all kinds of conditions, adding heat, adding chemicals, changing temperatures, switching compounds. I had discovered, somewhat to my chagrin, that I could inject Cooper’s wolf blood into a sample of his human blood and cause the whole test tube to change over to the lupine composition. If I kept the samples live for long enough—generally two weeks—the transformation would reverse itself. The two samples would separate, the wolf’s blood collecting in the bottom of the test tube, the human blood at the top.

  But the reverse did not hold true, no matter how big the relative sizes of the samples. The human blood could not convert the animal’s. The wolf’s genetic makeup was dominant.

  We had tested the theory in a couple of experiments, one of them a little unnerving. I had learned from Evan that shape-shifters could rarely tolerate blood transfusions from other donors, but it had seemed safe to inject human Cooper with a serum made from his own wolf blood. He had almost immediately taken animal shape—a week before his normal schedule. To say I was horrified would be inadequate. I could not sleep, I could not work, I could scarcely breathe for the next three weeks, wondering if I had inadvertently and permanently turned Cooper into a wolf. When he came to me in the middle of the night, human again, I began sobbing violently in his arms.

  “No more experiments!” I wept into his shoulder. “You’re fine the way you are. Perfect the way you are.”

  But he wasn’t, of course. That was the problem. I could see it already in the skin on his face, in the slow, gradual decline of his energy. He was aging. At twenty-six, Cooper should still be in the prime of life, almost as fit and healthy as a teenager. But he wasn’t. Fine lines rayed out around his eyes; the flesh along his jaw had grown heavier. Every time he reappeared in human shape after two weeks in the wild, I traced a few more lines of silver in his dark hair. He slept more, had a softer stomach, complained now and then of a stiff knee. He was still healthy, still in good shape, but he no longer possessed a young man’s body. He was middle-aged. He was at least halfway through his life.

  But I was not halfway through mine.

  I wasn’t sure if he realized how frantically I worked to find a cure for his condition; I’m not sure if he knew why. In fact, once we moved to the house, once our lives took on the contours and rhythms we had worked so hard to attain, Cooper seemed to lapse into a state of absolute contentment. He even told me once, “I don’t mind it anymore. Taking wolf shape. I even like it sometimes. Now that I know other shape-shifters, now that I see how other people live—it seems natural somehow.”

  “That’s because it is natural, for you,” I replied.

  “I just wanted you to know. In case you can’t ever find the cure. It doesn’t matter. You can stop looking if you want.”

  For just a moment, I felt my heart stop, my breath suspend. For just a moment, I couldn’t think how to answer. I have to find the cure, don’t you understand? If I don’t, you’ll die, and I will never be ready f
or you to die. Instead I said, as breezily as I could, “Oh well. I’ve put this much effort into it. Now I’m curious. Now I want to beat it, if you can actually beat a biological imperative.”

  “And maybe someone else will want the vaccine,” he said. “If you can ever figure it out.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “So there’s no stopping me now.”

  * * *

  I was thirty-three and Cooper was thirty-two—though he looked more like fifty—when I first started experimenting with my own blood. I spent hours, days, weeks, trying to analyze how the composition of mine differed from the composition of Cooper’s—and Evan’s and that of the other shape-shifters I knew. I can’t remember what story I told Crystal and her husband and one of their artist friends to convince them to donate vials of their blood so I could conduct additional tests in my never-ending quest to determine where the difference lay between the human and the beast.

  But I do remember the series of experiments I carried out that summer when I decided to mix serums made of Cooper’s blood with samples that were entirely human. I was not surprised, when I added the wolf’s blood to mine, to see it undergo the transformation I had watched in the past. As always, the wolf’s blood was dominant; soon the entire sample took on its composition. I stored the mixture carefully in a refrigerated container to see how long it would take for the two samples to separate out again once the transformation had run its course. I figured that my human molecules would put up a mightier fight than Cooper’s since they weren’t diluted and frequently seduced by the lupine influence, so I expected the reversal to come within a few days.

  But it didn’t. Two weeks passed, and still the transformation was not undone; a month went by. Six months. I knew the sample had degraded so much it might no longer be viable, but I was still astonished and rocked by the implications of that single vial of mutated matter.

  I repeated the experiment, of course—with Cooper’s blood, and samples from some of Evan’s friends. I mixed them with mine and with the donations supplied by Crystal and the others. In every case, the results were the same. The animal components overwhelmed the human markers, and not just temporarily. The changes were permanent.

  A person injected with a shape-shifter’s genetic material would conceivably take on that shape-shifter’s same animal form. And never again be human.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MELANIE

  This is the pattern we follow for the next four months.

  Ann promises to be good, to keep her animal shape no matter what the provocation. But every time she reappears in civilization, after weeks of roaming the countryside in her canine state, she backslides. She becomes a laughing, willful, mischievous young woman who very quickly turns into a pale, exhausted, frighteningly weak human girl. She sleeps away two or three days. Once she wakes up, she is properly chastened. She apologizes, makes more promises, and disappears at William’s side.

  And then the cycle starts again.

  I try to thwart her. Though it nearly kills me, I decide not to visit Ann the fourth time she arrives at Maria’s. I listen greedily to all the details Maria can give me over the phone, but I don’t drive out to her house. If my presence is the lure Ann cannot resist, I will remove the temptation. I won’t let her see me. And when Maria calls me a few days later to say, “Well, they’re gone, and neither of them ever reverted,” I think my strategy has worked.

  But that night when I come home from work, I find Ann slumped on the front porch, leaning against the siding, already deep in that drugged sleep from which there will be no waking her for days. I suspect she’s naked under the dirty tablecloth that William must have dragged from the patio furniture out back. He’s sitting beside her in human shape, wearing a pair of ragged jeans I keep for him in a bin by the front door, and he jumps to his feet as I come running up from the edge of the lawn.

  “I couldn’t find the key,” he says. “And I couldn’t move her.”

  He carries her inside and we go through the usual ministrations, cleaning her up, trying to get her to rouse enough to swallow some juice or water, wondering aloud what we should do. Once we’ve managed to get a nightgown on her and arrange her comfortably on the bed, William stands there for a few moments, just staring down at her still form. For almost the first time since I’ve known him, I see strong emotions on his face, but I’m not entirely sure which emotions they are. Fear? Anger? Loss? Pain? Love? All of them?

  “She’s careless,” I say in a soft voice. “She always was.”

  “It’s getting to be too hard,” he says. Shaking his head, he steps out of the room, and I hear the front door open and close. He moves so quietly that I probably wouldn’t be able to hear his footsteps anyway, but I imagine that he has melted into setter shape and gone soundlessly trotting down the road, not once looking back.

  With all my heart, I hope that is not the last we see of William. But I find that I won’t be able to blame him if it is.

  * * *

  Ann will not wake up.

  At the end of the third day, when I have barely been able to get her to sit up and swallow water, I have become frantic. I break down and call Dr. Kassebaum again, even though I know there’s nothing she can do. There’s no answer at her office or on her cell phone, and my panic ratchets up a notch. Oh God, Ann needs medical attention, and no one else in the world can help me.

  “We can take her to the ER,” Brody says, for possibly the hundredth time.

  “I don’t know—maybe—I can’t think,” I reply, also for the hundredth time.

  But Dr. Kassebaum calls back around dinnertime. “I’m sorry, I’m at a conference, and I’ve had my cell turned off,” she says. “Has there been any change since you left your message?”

  “No—not that I can tell. She doesn’t seem to be actually comatose—I can make her take a few sips of juice or water, and she’s spoken a few words—but then she just falls back into this deep, deep sleep. I’m so worried. What if she—”

  “Listen, I’m actually in St. Louis,” she interrupts. “I can pick up some supplies and come to your house in the morning. If nothing else, I can give her an IV and some fluids. But Melanie—”

  “I know. I know. It’s just that she won’t—she says she’ll be good, then she—I don’t know what else to do.”

  “We all make our own choices, and sometimes no one but us understands why we make them,” she says.

  “She’s making the wrong choices,” I whisper.

  “Maybe not for her. Give me directions to your house, and I’ll be there in the morning.”

  * * *

  If anything, Ann is worse the next day—her skin hot to the touch, the few words she utters impossible to understand. If I had not known Dr. Kassebaum was on her way, I don’t know what I would have done. Taken her to the emergency room, most likely. Thrown away a twenty-year-old secret in the desperate hope of saving her life.

  But Dr. Kassebaum arrives before nine, dark and serious and professional, and despite the fact I know she cannot truly heal my sister, I am instantly calmer when she walks through the door. She’s carrying a leather satchel and a plastic bag that looks like it came from a grocery store, except it has a caduceus printed on the side. Looks like she stopped at a handy medical-supply store on her way to Dagmar.

  “How is she?” Dr. Kassebaum asks, but I just shake my head and show her to Ann’s room.

  She wants privacy, so I head back to the kitchen to make tea. Brody’s gone to get groceries, and William still hasn’t returned. I stand in the kitchen with the hot mug in my hand, straining to hear any sounds from down the hall. I feel as alone and abandoned as I have ever felt in my life.

  Brody’s shouldering through the front door, bags in hand, as Dr. Kassebaum steps out of Ann’s room and heads to the bathroom to wash her hands. A few moments later, we all group around the dining table, drinking tea and eating Krispy Kreme donuts Brody picked up along with a list of healthier menu items. I eat two of them, almost withou
t pausing to chew. My body is in such a high-stress mode that it’s gone through all my caloric reserves. I feel like I’m starving. At the same time, I feel like I could start throwing up. I suppose the two reactions have the same root cause.

  Dr. Kassebaum appears to be ravenous, too, because she downs a whole donut before uttering a word, then she speaks with her usual precise gravity. “I’ve got her stabilized. Part of the problem today was dehydration, and the IV is helping with that. But she’s very weak, and I imagine it will be a few days before she’s up and moving around.”

  I nod. “And once she is?”

  Dr. Kassebaum looks at me directly. Her eyes are such a dark brown that they look too heavy for her fine-boned face. “She’ll need to make some pretty big decisions. I would expect her to recover enough strength to change to her animal form again—and, in fact, I would encourage her to do so, because she seems much stronger in that state. But I’d also tell her that that should be the last transformation she ever makes.”

  It takes me a second to absorb that. “The last—you mean, she should take her husky shape and then never—never become human again? Ever?”

  Dr. Kassebaum nods. “Every part of her human body is seriously compromised. Her heart is struggling, her lungs are struggling—they simply can’t attain the size they need to sustain her in this shape. I would expect that, if she makes the transition one more time from animal shape to human, it will be the last time she changes at all. I doubt she would survive the transformation for more than a day.”

  I stare at her, and I cannot speak.

  Brody reaches under the table to take my hand. “And if she takes her husky shape and doesn’t shift? How long will she have in that body?”

  Dr. Kassebaum considers. “It’s impossible to predict these things with any accuracy. Six months at the minimum, I would think, and two years at the maximum. Most likely, somewhere closer to a year.”