Shifter's Destiny

by Anna Leonard

  “We’ll go get her.”

  That put a halt on Elizabeth’s bloody-minded thoughts, and she shook her head in refusal. “You can’t. You have to...”

  “Elizabeth.” He reached for her, pulling her unresisting body into his arms, and she was suddenly very aware that he was clad only in a sheet he had pulled off the bed and wrapped around his waist, and that underneath that sheet, his erection was stirring. “Elizabeth, don’t fight me on this. Maggie’s safety is the most important thing. And whatever or wherever these beasts come from, it has to be dealt with, before anyone else gets hurt. Everything else...nothing else matters. Not right now. You know that. We both do.”

  She rested her cheek against his chest, feeling the warm skin, and the steady pulse of his heart. There was no sense of peace in this embrace, but she felt her determination, her strength, returning, nonetheless.

  “We’ll go get her back,” she said, agreeing. “And shut Ray down, once and for all.”

  Even if her dreams said otherwise.

  Chapter 13

  It had been four days since they left the Community. Elizabeth felt, somewhat unfairly, that it should take them four days to get back. Instead, rolling down the highway in Kit’s old pickup truck, they were there within a few hours. So much time, and they had only managed to get that far? If she had pushed harder, if she had used their money to buy bus tickets somewhere far away, if she hadn’t relied on local contacts that betrayed them anyway...would Maggie be safe? Would they have escaped Ray’s reach? Would...

  “You can second-guess yourself until the sun burns out,” Josh said, somehow knowing exactly what she was thinking, reaching out with the hand not on the steering wheel and lifting her hand to his mouth, kissing her knuckles gently. “It doesn’t help. You did the best you could, and Maggie should have known better than to pull such a boneheaded stunt.” He let go of her hand and added, grimly, “Once she’s safe, I’m going to put her over my knee.”

  “I’d pay money to see that,” she said, but despite his reassurances, and the tingling sensation in her fingertips, her heart still ached with self-blame. “And I feel bad about the truck,” she murmured, looking out the window as the sun rose over the trees to their right, the sky turning to a clear blue as night was chased away. As long as she was wallowing, might as well do it properly.

  “You would have felt worse if we’d stopped to wake them up and try to explain what was going on,” Josh said. He was right, but it didn’t make her feel any less like a bad houseguest. The note they had left had been unavoidably brief, and it wasn’t as though either of them had enough cash to leave that would make a difference, assuming the older couple was even willing to take it.

  “We’ll get Maggie back, we’ll return the truck, and you and Maggie will be free of this bastard forever,” Josh said, but despite the hard confidence in his voice, she couldn’t take any comfort from his words. The surety of her dreams was fading with every mile they came closer to Ray, as though his very presence was enough to suck the strength out of her. Needing something to do, she rummaged through the glove compartment, finding the insurance and registration information, and a small notebook and pen. Tearing out a sheet of paper, she printed Please return to owners, with our apologies on it, then wrapped the paper around the documents and put it back in the glove compartment. If the cops found the truck, if, for whatever reason she couldn’t return the vehicle in person...

  Not thoughts she wanted to have, but Elizabeth had never shied away from unpleasant truth before, and she wasn’t going to now. Ray would kill Josh without blinking. He would kill her, too, if he felt he didn’t need her anymore. He wouldn’t kill Maggie, not so long as he needed her...but what kind of life would she have? What...

  “We’ll find her, we’ll get her out of there.” Josh didn’t look away from the road, but his right hand left the wheel again, touching the back of her hand.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes. “He has more of those monsters.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes. I do.” She did. Somehow, she knew. And she knew that he wasn’t going to pull them back this time. Whatever he had been planning, it wasn’t going to stay hidden much longer.

  His hand covered hers more securely, although he never took his eyes off the road, and she leaned back against the seat and tried not to think too much.

  They skirted the nearest town, and pulled over about halfway between there and the borders of Community land. The two-lane road was bordered by woods on one side, and farmland on the other, and had a wide shoulder for emergency stops.

  “We can walk from here,” Josh said, taking the keys out of the ignition and placing them on the console between the two seats.

  By the time Elizabeth got out of the truck, Josh had already gone to the back, and pulled out a small metal box.

  “What’s that?” she asked, even as he used a rock to break open the lock. He opened the lid, and her question was answered: inside the box was a small handgun...black metal, deadly-looking. He ignored her indrawn gasp of shock, and lifted the gun out, then swiftly, with the ease of a man who knew what he was doing, removed a box of ammunition from the case and loaded the bullets in a precise manner.

  “Here.” He handed it to her, and she took it, almost automatically. It didn’t weigh as much as she thought it would, and her hand closed around the grip without conscious thought.

  “You ever shoot anything before?”

  “A rifle,” she said. “When I was younger. We all learned, a safety class in school. But not since then, and never...”

  Never to point at a person. Never to point at any living thing, just a paper target.

  “It’s the same theory,” he said. “Point firmly, pull gently.”

  She didn’t want to take the gun, wanted to drop it, throw it away, scream at him for giving it to her.

  For Maggie, she took it.

  The safety was on, so she felt somewhat comfortable fitting it into the side pocket of her backpack, wrapped in an extra T-shirt to make sure nothing could jostle it. Not easy to reach in case of an emergency, but if it were that much of an emergency she wasn’t sure what use the gun would be, anyway.

  The monsters had claws and teeth that could take down a unicorn. What could she, a thin-skinned, defenseless human, do against them?

  Elizabeth shook herself, mentally. She had a brain. She could think, and plan. Those monsters, they didn’t seem smart, just animal cunning. They relied on someone else giving them orders. How? How was Ray controlling them?

  When she looked up again, Josh had stepped back, and had the look in his eye she was already able to recognize: he was about to shift. Apparently “walking from here” meant that he would walk, and she would ride.

  She forced herself to watch the transformation carefully, trying to see a moment when Josh went to Mustang, some instant when the human became unicorn. But no matter how she tried not to blink, it all blurred, the magic that allowed the transformation shimmering and blurring her view, so that it seemed like an almost seamless transition, one to the other.

  Impossible, that the bulk and mass of the unicorn could be contained within Josh’s strong but human form. She had touched that body, felt it, cared for it...and she had ridden the Mustang. They were nothing alike. And yet, they were the same.

  He snorted at her, clearly saying stop gawking and mount up. So she did, tangling her fingers in his mane and using the bumper of the truck as a mounting block. His back was warm, the feel of his neck under her hands familiar, and when he started walking, Elizabeth realized that her body moved with his almost naturally, as though she had been on horseback—unicorn-back—her entire life.

  She leaned forward to whisper in one pointed ear. “Your four-legged form is useful. But I’m not going to let you be stuck in it for the rest of your life.”

  Th
e ear twitched once, backward, then returned to a determined forward angle, and she got a very clear sense of him telling her to stop worrying about him and focus on what they were going to do. She rested her cheek against his muscled neck, and let him carry her the remaining miles, trying to focus only on Maggie. For Maggie, there would be no fear.

  * * *

  “Scout reports incursion at the western boundary.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Community scorned excessive technology. Mostly Ray approved of that—he might want to change the way some things were done, but he had no beef with the original aims of the Community, to rely on self, rather than external devices. He did admit, though, that being able to set up electronic sensors around his property would make guarding it much easier.

  However, the beasts did the job almost as well; while they could not give him specifics, they could sniff out anything new or unusual well before it reached the main buildings, and their noses were never wrong.

  Maggie was seated on the couch across the room from him, her left arm bound in a silver manacle, the chain leashing her to the heavy piece of furniture. She had walked in of her own accord, but he did not trust her to stay there. She looked at him with those dark eyes, and the venom in them made him smile.

  “You don’t even know how miraculous you are,” he said softly. “All my work, all my effort to create the perfect merger of man and beast, is nothing compared to you, and you merely...appeared.”

  “I’m normal,” she said, her voice as cold as anything her sister could have managed at her most spitting mad. “Your monsters are—”

  “Monsters. I know.” He nodded in agreement, refusing to take offense. “They are the best I could do, with what I had available. But with you here to control them, we will be able to breed them better. We’ll raise them to the next level, and learn how to help humanity at the same time. Isn’t that what the Community was founded to do? To make humanity better?”

  Maggie closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the couch. “Whatever.”

  She had no intention of helping him. He knew that. But he also knew how to convince her otherwise.

  “Your sister is on her way to rescue you.”

  He was gratified to see her eyes open again at that. He didn’t know for certain that it was Elizabeth who had been scented, but really, who else could it be? He had known them since they were children, and the one thing he knew for certain about Elizabeth was that she would die rather than abandon her sister.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maggie. I’m hurt. I have never lied to you.” He hadn’t. He had never lied to anyone. Mainly because nobody had ever asked him the questions they didn’t want answered. They took his leadership and the benefits that came with it, and never wondered out loud what means had gotten them there. Perfect sheep, all of them. But sheep were boring, after a while. At least Elizabeth and Maggie gave him a challenge. Maybe he should consider breeding them as well as his monsters.

  The thought made him smile. Maggie was too young, and too useful in other areas, but Elizabeth, now there was an idea. He might even breed her himself, once Maggie was secured. If she wouldn’t leave her sister, she definitely would never leave her children. A bonus: that bond would tie the still-undecided members of the Community even more to him; he had no personal desire for a wife or children, but to become part of the Sweet dynasty, father of the fifth generation of the Founder’s Line? Yes. A pity he hadn’t thought to do that before the girls ran....

  “You should be scared, if they’re coming,” she said then, and closed her eyes again, but he could see the strain in her body, dispelling any illusion that she wasn’t worried. Ray watched her a moment longer, then turned back to the man who had brought him the news, who had been standing there quietly since then. Glen would never think to oppose Ray, or object to any decision his leader made, but Ray could see that holding a teenaged girl in shackles did not please his assistant. Especially since he had known that girl since she was a newborn.

  “Have the sentinels back off,” Ray told him. “If it is Elizabeth, she is not to be harmed.”

  He had always known that he could not have Maggie without Elizabeth. Her parents might eventually have been swayed by his promises, his appeal to their parents’ original goals for the Community, to raise generations that were stronger, smarter, wiser than their parents, and his contention that Maggie was the unexpected, almost despaired-of step toward their future.

  But Elizabeth would never see Maggie as anything other than her baby sister, and would never have let him guide the girl’s future without her input. So be it. He was a reasonable man, but there were only so many allowances and compromises he could make. Now it was time to show his hand.

  * * *

  They had just left the cover of the tree line, and stepped into the backyard of the Yancy house, a small white clapboard house with a huge garden Elizabeth remembered weeding when she was a kid, to earn a few dollars, when Mustang stopped. Elizabeth slid down off his back even as the shift took place, and Josh was standing next to her.

  “Leave your bag here,” he told her. “We’ll come back for it later.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice. Placing the bag on the ground at the edge of the garden, where it would be hidden by the tangle of tomato plants, she reached in and retrieved the pistol. It felt heavier now, in her hand, and the cool metal made her shudder.

  For Maggie, she thought. To save Maggie. She slid it into the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

  “Come on,” Josh said. “You know the town. Where would they keep her?”

  Elizabeth had to stop and think. “Nowhere public,” she said, and her voice cracked embarrassingly on the last word. “If anyone saw her they’d ask where I was. And Maggie...she’s not going to keep quiet, not even if threatened. She’s got a mouth on her.”

  “I’d noticed that,” Josh said, and squeezed her hand gently, to show that he was joking.

  “So he’d want her secured, but private. Not his own house—he has a housekeeper I can’t think would put up with that, Mrs. Malloy’s ancient but fierce and knows Maggie too well. Everyone knows everyone else.... He’d need somewhere that was private but secure, but he could still be without anyone asking questions...he’s not going to let her out of his sight if he can help it.”

  She hadn’t known that she knew Ray’s thought process so well, but the moment the question was asked the answers came to her, the same way her dreams did, without hesitation or doubt.

  “So...his office? You said he was the local herd stallion, is there a place that people only go by his invitation?”

  “No. That’s the point of the Community, everything’s open to every other member. Anyone can walk into the committee offices, and... No. Wait.”

  She stopped, and stared up at the sky, thinking. “I remember my father talking once, about a meeting he’d been to. Before the flu came and he got sick. He made a joke about going underground, that they were meeting underground because Ray hated sunlight so much—he’s pale, and burns easily,” she explained to Josh. “But I don’t know of any place that’s underground—most of the houses here don’t even have cellars because it’s all rock underneath. The only place it could have been was the hall—there’s a storm cellar there, but it’s never been used, not in all the time I can remember.”

  “And nobody would think twice about this bastard spending time in the hall?”

  “His office is on the second floor,” she said. “If he’s not home, he’s usually there.”

  He started to walk forward, but she grabbed at his elbow, pulling him back. “Not that way. Here.” There was a dirt path that led around the town, that all the kids used when they were ditching class, or just wanted to stay out of sight of the adults. It had been years since Elizabeth had used it herself, but it was still there. They
had to duck under low-hanging branches, and squeeze through some narrow passages behind garages and tool sheds, but eventually it wound them around town, to within sight of the two-story Community Hall, and Ray’s office.

  “There.”

  There were a scattering of people on the street, as was normal on a weekday morning, people running errands or on their way to and from work. School had just started, and a few tardy teenagers went by on their bikes...it was all peaceful, almost serene. Exactly the way she remembered it all the years of her childhood. Her bakery was there, the quiet little storefront with the dark blue awning, and she was pleased to see activity inside.

  Josh sniffed at the air, as though he’d be able to pick out Maggie’s scent, and then blushed a little when he realized what he was doing. “I’d feel better if I could shift,” he said. “I’d be more useful to you.”

  “You’re here. I’m not doing this alone.” The idea of facing Ray by herself made Elizabeth quail. Having Josh beside her... “No matter what form you’re in,” she said, “you’re Mustang. Herd stallion, protector of yearlings and smasher of monsters.”

  The words had come without conscious thought, trying to distract herself from what they were about to do, so she was completely unprepared for Josh’s reaction. Before she had finished speaking, he had her pushed up against the wall of the house they were standing by, out of sight of casual bystanders, his hands holding her wrists up against the wall, his lower body pressing her flat, keeping her from resisting. Not that she had intended to, even if she wasn’t so astonished.

  “Wha—?” she started to ask, and then his mouth descended on hers. Not gently, not sweetly, but with a fierce rush that took the rest of her breath away. Had anyone else done that, laid hands and mouth on her like that, she would have resisted, fought back, possibly with a knee to their delicate area. But the anger and frustration she could feel in him, in that kiss, was tempered by something even more primal, more ferocious, and it melted her resistance and roused an equally fierce response within her.