by Jade White
Darius circled around her curiously once more, pausing to sniff at her tail, and she knew he was getting a few ideas that it was perhaps a bit too early to be getting. Pointedly, she sat down, her tail lashing through the grass. Darius jerked his muzzle away from her, his head lowering as he made a low, contrite grumbling noise.
Still, the sun had long since gone down, and Darius seemed to be taking the fact that they were both shifters as some sort of sign that they were closer than they were. Amelia was already getting tired of it.
After waiting for Darius to back up to a more polite distance, Amelia stood back up and began delicately padding her way back through the underbrush, making her way back toward the bush they had left their clothing under. With some reluctant rumbling, Darius fell into step behind her.
When they made it to the bush, they transformed in silence and put their clothes back on, thankfully without any other inappropriate behavior. After that, they began to make their way back to the hostel. It was easier to appreciate some of the sights this time, when Darius wasn’t trying to sprint his way along. Even with the awkward silence, it was more relaxing than the trip to the woods had been.
Halfway back, Darius wondered casually, “How long will you be in the area?”
Well, if he wanted to just pretend everything was normal, Amelia supposed she could let him get away with it. “Until tomorrow morning,” she replied, shrugging one shoulder.
“Leaving so soon?” he asked, frowning slightly.
“If I want to see as much as I can, then I can’t really loiter,” she explained easily.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. “That’s unfortunate.”
They lapsed into silence after that, until they made it back to the hostel. Once they stepped inside, a pair of young women greeted them.
“There you are!” one of them exclaimed, latching onto Darius’ arm.
“We thought you had run off without us,” the other scolded, punching his opposite shoulder.
The family resemblance made it rather obvious that they were his sisters. Amelia slipped away to bed while the women dragged him away.
*
Amelia began the next day with packing. She probably should have done it the night before, but she was not immune to procrastination.
When Darius handed her a cup of coffee the next morning, Amelia didn’t think anything of it. She sipped it lazily as she haphazardly shoved things into her backpack. Even when the mug was empty, though, she wasn’t feeling any less drowsy.
“You are not doing your job,” she groused, glaring at the dregs in the bottom of the mug.
When she only got drowsier, she started to get concerned. She sat down beside her bag and rested her forehead on her bunk. A moment later, the mattress dipped as Darius sat down, watching her expectantly.
“What’d you do to the coffee?” Amelia asked, her words slurring lethargically. Darius patted her on the head and didn’t deign to actually answer. Instead, he picked her up and carried her out of the room and out of the hostel entirely. The world tipped and twisted around her as he carried her, until her eyes drifted closed against her will.
When she woke up sometime later, locked in the pitch darkness of the trunk of a moving car, she screamed until her throat was hoarse. She battered her hands against the floor, the lid, and the seats. And she realized she was stuck.
*
Aibek paced through the kitchen, the window open and a frigid breeze drifting in. As if he hadn’t even noticed the cold temperature, every so often he paused in front of the window and leaned closer to it. A cup of coffee sat on the counter, going completely ignored.
“You seem tense,” Anara remarked, the straw of her drink caught between her teeth. She twisted back and forth on the stool at the kitchen island, the toes of one foot dragging back and forth across the tile.
Aibek waved her off and slammed the window shut. He shook his head, breathing out heavily through his nose to clear the smell from it. It didn’t really work, but it felt good to try.
“That was shockingly non-descriptive,” she added, her eyes narrowing, as if she could scoop whatever was bothering him straight out of his skull if she stared at him hard enough. Aibek did not actually doubt that she could manage it, if given enough time. “Seriously, what’s up?” Anara ceased her twisting on the stool, planting both feet on the floor with enough force that her stool rattled.
“There are other shifters in the mountains,” Aibek explained, still glaring out the window. “They are getting too close.”
With a sigh, Anara set her soda down and heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll go get Sezim.”
“What—?” He jerked around to face her, his head cocked to one side in confusion.
Her eyebrows rose, and she looked distinctly unimpressed. “You’re going to focus on this until you get to see who’s out there for yourself,” she stated flatly. “So you, me, and Sezim are going out to take a look around and either scare off whoever’s out there, or ease your mind that we aren’t in any danger. Yeah?”
Aibek sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “Yeah, alright,” he agreed. “I will meet you outside.”
*
Amelia allowed herself about half a minute for panicking before she asked herself sternly, ‘What would your mother tell you?’ She fell still, forcing herself to ignore the adrenaline pounding through her veins. She groped for an emergency trunk release in the dark, and her heart soared when she wrapped her fingers around it. She pulled it one way, then the other, and then wrestled with it for a few moments before she finally let it go and conceded that whoever had snagged her had been aware of the trunk release and had disabled it accordingly.
Instead, she rolled onto her stomach and dragged her fingers along the edges of the carpet until she could yank it up. She felt her way around the bared space carefully until her fingers curled around a cable. Presumably the trunk release cable. She wasn’t going to pull it and launch herself out onto the street while the car was cruising down the road, though. Getting out of the trunk wouldn’t do her much good if she wasn’t in any condition to flee.
She knew whenever the car stopped, but typically it wasn’t for long. Just long enough for the driver to switch places with one of the passengers. On the few instances it stopped long enough to refuel the car, she could hear muffled conversation surrounding the car. Tossing herself out of the car wouldn’t do much good if she were immediately grabbed again.
Amelia wasn’t sure how long she had been in the trunk when she realized the car had slowed, drastically. If she really paid attention, she could feel it swerving slightly, as if it was on unstable terrain. And just like that, she knew she had the perfect chance to flee.
She wrapped a hand around the release cable and pulled it toward the front of the car. There was a hiss and a pop as the trunk released and the bottom opened a crack. A blast of frigid air crept in, but she steeled herself. She kicked her shoes off, squirmed out of all of her clothes to make sure she wasn’t hampered by anything, and transformed.
She stood up on all four legs, forcing the trunk hatch to rise, and she leapt from the car, landing on white, snow-encrusted pavement. She stumbled a few steps, tumbling down to splay out on her belly, but she hopped back to her feet and bolted, surging off the road and straight into the snow.
The chill bit through her fur, but she kept moving, bounding through the snow like the deer that she used to chase with her mom when she was little. She wouldn’t be able to keep the pace up for long, but she could already hear voices shouting behind her, turning into snarling as her captors abandoned the car to chase after her. But if she could keep up her pace just long enough to lose them, perhaps she could find somewhere to hide just long enough to rest for another sprint.
She let her mind go blank until she couldn’t run anymore. When she had to slow to a walk, her muscles ached with cold, and she was pretty sure her whiskers were frozen, but she pushed the thought aside, instead foc
using on where she might be. In the mountains, obviously, but that was not exactly specific. The Balkans, maybe. She didn’t think she had been stuck in the car for long enough to be out of Bulgaria, at any rate.
She couldn’t hear anyone behind her, but snow tended to act as a sound dampener and she knew that, so she knew she couldn’t let herself stop yet. She couldn’t smell anyone, but she could also hardly feel her face, so she wasn’t sure how much stock she was willing to put behind that sense.
So she kept walking, her head low and her shoulders hunched against the cold, her paws dragging through the snow and ice. Just a little farther, she told herself. She wasn’t actually sure where she was going, but eventually, she figured, that had to be true.
Time passed—maybe minutes, maybe hours, maybe a full day, she wasn’t sure and she couldn’t bring herself to care—when her limbs decided they couldn’t do it any longer. She tumbled down in the snow in a heap. Slowly, she dragged herself back upright, but she only managed to trudge a few more steps before she crashed down again.
Slowly, painstakingly, she tried to push herself back to her paws again, but her legs weren’t cooperating. She barely got her front legs beneath her before she collapsed again.
Was this where she was going to wind up, then? Only twenty, hungry, thirsty, and dying in a snowdrift in maybe-the-Balkans. She could imagine the newspapers, puzzling over a mysterious cheetah corpse found so far outside of its range as to be laughable.
She could hear snow crunching, getting closer to her. It sounded too light to be a lion, but what else could it be?
When a nose sniffed at her, it was too pale to be a lion, and it was spotted much like she was (or rather, spotted much like her mother was, considering Amelia’s more stripy nature). She caught a glimpse of mismatched eyes, one an icy blue and one such a pale silver-grey it was nearly white.
Whoever—whatever—it was, they moved away to instead shove their head beneath her shoulder and begin levering her to her feet. When her legs wobbled and she nearly collapsed again, they caught her against their shoulder. There was a low, encouraging grumbling noise in her ear, and slowly, she began to plod forward, one step at a time.
After a few minutes of walking that felt like hours, someone else sidled up against her other side. Bracketed between the two of them, she had no choice but to keep moving. Their heat gradually began to leech into her, numbness replaced by prickling pain like she was moving through glass and needles. She wanted the numbness back, but at the same time, she knew that the numbness was worse than the pain.
A third cat joined them soon enough, darting in close to check in on them before bounding away again, patrolling in circles around them, thick-furred paws carrying them over the snow like snowshoes. Every so often, the third cat would bound close again, as if to see if they needed any help, but bounced away again.
They were bulky, all three of them, with white fur so thick that Amelia was half-convinced she could disappear in it, and decorated with black spots. Their paws were enormous. Snow leopards, the part of her mind that was still capable of some semblance of logic supplied eventually.
They came to a steep incline, and the snow leopards started up it as easily as Amelia might climb the stairs in her parents’ house. She groaned and sat down until the third snow leopard bounded up to her and bonked their heads together gently, urging her onward. With an effort, she hauled herself back to her feet and started climbing, her claws digging in because each step felt like she was dragging herself up the side of a cliff.
It felt like it took hours to get up the incline, and they emerged into a copse of pine trees, the needles laden with snow and drooping. The wind and the snow had picked up by then, and Amelia could hardly see more than a few feet in front of her. She didn’t know how the leopards knew where they were going, but she didn’t have much of a choice except to follow them.
When she came to a staircase, she tripped over the lowest step, face planting into the frigid metal. One of the snow leopards nudged her back to her feet and began steadily prodding her up the steps until she was standing on a platform. She wasn’t sure who opened the door in front of her. She supposed one of them must have transformed, but she didn’t get a chance to look before she was being herded through the door.
It was like walking into an oven, a wall of warmth crashing over her. One of the snow leopards continued urging her toward the fireplace until she was curled up so close to the hearth that it almost looked like she was going to crawl right into the flames. It was certainly a tempting idea, though she wasn’t quite addled enough to actually try it.
Everything after that became a bit hazy. She had a vague recollection of someone throwing a blanket over her, though she wasn’t sure who. She stopped caring at that point, letting her eyes slip closed as she basked in the heat. She rested her chin on her front paws, her back twisted so she could stretch her back paws toward the fire. She curled her tail close, over her hips. Once she was comfortable, she did her best to pretend the rest of the world wasn’t there. She wanted to be asleep before the feeling began to come back to her toes. If any of the snow leopards returned to check on her, then she was completely unaware of them.
*
Amelia woke slowly, her eyes blinking open reluctantly only to close again a heartbeat later. For a few long moments, she simply basked in the heat of the fire and the blanket and the rug beneath her.
Wherever she was, it was warm, and for the moment, the fire was her favorite thing in the entire world. It was followed closely by the blanket on top of her, which was fuzzy, and she sort of wanted to roll up in it like a caterpillar. Behind that was the rug, which was far more comfortable than a rug had any right to be. Admittedly, she was pretty sure the rug would lose some of its appeal once she actually bothered to open her eyes and wake up. Considering that, she was reluctant to do so.
When she finally opened her eyes for real and rolled so that her front legs were gathered beneath her, she was in a small den. There was a long couch and a pair of slightly overstuffed armchairs, along with a small bookshelf that was overcrowded with both books and assorted knick-knacks. She was alone in the room, but there was a pile of neatly folded clothing a few feet away, sitting on the arm of the couch. Ordinarily, Amelia hated wearing other peoples’ clothes—they always smelled so strange—but in that instant, she was glad to see them. Her backpack and everything in it was most likely still sitting in that hostel, just waiting for someone with sticky fingers to go digging through it.
Slowly—so, so slowly, because everything hurt like she had been hit by a car (or like she had jumped out of a car, maybe)—she stood up, the blanket sliding off of her fur to puddle around her paws. With one back paw, she kicked it far enough away from the fireplace that she wouldn’t be worrying about errant sparks. She looked around furtively, making sure there was no one around, and then she transformed. Once she was standing on two human feet again, she stretched her arms over her head, arching her back until it cracked. She let her arms drop and picked up the clothes.
There was a green hoodie with black trim, a camisole with a built-in bra, a pair of black jeans, a belt, a pair of socks, and a pair of underwear that still had the store stickers on them. After pulling the stickers off, she pulled the underwear, the camisole, and the socks on before she stepped into the jeans. They were a bit short at the ankles and a bit large around the waist, but they stayed on just fine once she cinched the belt in place. The hoodie was another story entirely, since it fell down past her hips and the cuffs of the sleeves stopped several inches past her fingertips. If she started flapping her arms, she probably could have used the excess fabric as wings to fly home.
She felt better—a bit more human—with clothes on. Everything still hurt, and she had a dull headache pounding behind her eyes, but those were things she could ignore easily enough. She sort of expected to be hungry, but she wasn’t sure she was. Then again, she could have just gone past hunger to the point that she no longer noticed it.
There was a man standing in the doorway that led to the hallway. He was a hand taller than Amelia, and he had skin the color of coffee with cream. He had dark brown hair, short on top and shaved entirely along the sides. He looked like he was probably around five years older than her. He was also broad enough that Amelia suspected he probably could have walked through a brick wall without much of a problem.
“Hi,” he returned at a more reasonable volume, his amusement clear.
Amelia shoved the cuffs of the sleeves up past her wrists and linked her hands together in front of herself, picking at the cuticle of one thumbnail. “Were you, um…were you the one who brought me here?” Even as she asked, she knew the answer. She recognized his eyes, the left one an icy blue and the right one nearly white.