There was someone moving nearby.
Something weak.
Leo strode back into the clearing. “I got your leaves, Cam,” he said. “You can do your spell—oh god.” His eyes went wide and then he was gone.
In his place was a rabbit, standing in a pile of jeans and a letterman jacket.
Prey.
10
Shifts
The little brown rabbit bounded this way and that, trying to escape. I grinned as I chased it. It would tire soon and then I would catch it. A rabbit was no match for a human in the long run. Humans had stamina.
The rabbit dashed across the yard, zigzagging toward the house. I followed. Around the bushes, across the yard, up to the brick patio.
The rabbit was so little, so tiny. I could scoop it up in my bare hands and …
I ran smack into a man in a button-down shirt wearing strong cologne.
The scent filled my nostrils, replacing the smell of wood fire and ginger. I was jolted back into reality. My shadows and leather jackets faded slowly into my normal self.
“Oh my goodness,” I said. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“Who are you?” he asked, very politely for someone who has just been assaulted by a strange teeth-baring girl in his own backyard.
“Cam,” I said, holding out a hand to shake. I hoped he hadn’t seen anything funny. But it was dusk, and no one really expects to see someone’s clothes mutate, so probably he hadn’t noticed. “I’m here with Leo.”
Leo, who was momentarily a rabbit. A very naked rabbit. He had bolted back toward the gazebo. I hoped he was in a fit state to come out soon.
The man relaxed. “Oh, lovely,” he said. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache and a kind smile. “I’m delighted to see him bringing his friends around again. He’s been … out of sorts the last few weeks.” He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and smoothed out his shirt where I had bumped him. “And where is Leo?” he asked mildly.
Mm. “Leo?” I said to the backyard.
There was a tense waiting pause and then Leo came strolling out of the gazebo, tucking his shirt in. “Hi, Dad,” he called from the back of the yard. “Hi, Pops.”
“Pops” turned out to be a slight man with an equally warm smile, except Dad looked Caucasian, and Pops looked as though he might be Thai. He had just now come out onto the patio and was crossing to us. “Hi, kids,” Pops said with a hint of an accent.
Leo made the introductions. “This is Richard, also known as Dad; Tanapol, also known as Pops; Cam, also known as a friend from school; and Leo, also known as Leo.”
“Would your ‘friend from school’ care to stay for dinner?” said Richard.
I checked the time on my phone. The witch hadn’t texted me yet, but there was a limit to how much I could push her. I was way behind on after-school chores, including her stupid cauldron-stirring.
“We’re, uh, working on a science project thing,” said Leo. “Outside. Gathering leaves.”
“Lots of leaves this time of year,” I said helpfully.
“But after you gather the leaves,” Richard said patiently.
Leo looked at me. “Cam?” he said.
“I’d love to,” I said. “But … my mom is kind of strict, and I still have a bunch of chores to do … can I take a rain check?”
“Anytime,” assured Tanapol. He squeezed his partner’s shoulders.
“Run along, kids,” said Richard. “Go do your … ‘science project.’”
“Have fun,” said Tanapol. They both beamed at us.
Leo and I trudged across the lawn. The evening was dark and the mood was awkward.
“Parents,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
We left it at that for a little bit.
We sat down on the porch swing in the gazebo and I finally broke the silence. “Well,” I said heartily. “We know you can turn into a rabbit. Now we need to figure out how to have you not turn into a rabbit.”
“Brilliant deduction, Holmes.”
I tugged a book out of my backpack. “So we might have to approach this backward.”
“What is that?” He flicked on a flashlight just as I tried to cover up the title. “Thirteen Ways to Force a Shifter … What is that thing?”
“Don’t judge me by my parents,” I warned. “And I’m not going to let you see some of the stuff in this book. But I did find one interesting thing.” I flipped toward a page near the end that I had bookmarked. It said:
“The ability to shift lies completely in the mental control of the shifter. However, it is true that at times of high stress (such as if you are coercing a shifter to shift) the necessary control may be hard for the shifter to summon. It is recommended at that time to try an herbal remedy. The scent of cardamom is known to be an aid to shifting.”
“Coercing?” he said.
“Cardamom,” I said firmly. “Think about cardamom. Do you have some?”
“My dads cook a lot,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something they use frequently, but we might have an old jar sitting around. Let me run in and check.” He loped off, leaving me sitting in the dark and cold November evening. The gazebo would be really nice with a fire going in the brazier, I thought. A couple forlorn jack-o’-lanterns sat off to the side, their faces falling in. I could imagine the smell of roasting pumpkin. It would be lovely to sit here with no worries to speak of. No witches to stop from ruining the high school. No witches to stop from destroying my new friend’s life.
No worries that I would destroy Leo.
I fiddled with one of the maple leaves, breaking it into bits. Okay to scare him a little bit, I admonished myself. Not okay to eat him. Go easy on that Power spell.
Leo returned with the cardamom and sat down on the porch swing next to me, sending it rocking. He stilled the swing with his feet as he held out the jar.
“So we don’t know how to make you stop turning,” I said, “because witches aren’t exactly concerned with that.”
“You’d think they might be,” said Leo. “I mean, what if they caught a shifter and he turned into a bear and ate them?”
“You have a totally valid point,” I said. “It does say you can use a pentagram to contain the shifter, so perhaps that’s what they use. But that won’t help you. At any rate, what you need to know is how, if you’re about to turn into a bunny, you can stop it and come all the way back. And it doesn’t tell us that. So we’ll try the cardamom and see if that sparks a change. It’s as good a place as any to start.”
I held out the spice jar to him and he took it. He looked over the jar at me. “Cam,” he said seriously, and his usual smirk was gone. “I don’t know how to thank you for this.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’re dropping everything to help me, and you barely know me. It makes me feel so … safe, I guess, even though I’m in danger. To know that someone with as much power as you is willing to try to help me.”
I snorted. “I am not powerful,” I said. “I am the beginningest of beginning witches. I barely know any spells.”
He touched my hand. “Don’t sell yourself short. I saw what you looked like when you did that spell just now. That wasn’t a different person, Cam. That person is also you.”
I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say to that so I just motioned to the cardamom. “Let’s do it.”
Slowly he uncapped the spice jar. He leaned over and breathed it in.
The first thing I noticed was the spice jar falling. Reflexes made me reach out and grab it.
The next thing my reflexes made me do was run.
Standing before me was a giant wolf.
* * *
I raced across the lawn with all my might. The wolf tore after me. I doubled back and forth. “Leo!” I shouted behind me. “Leo, snap out of it!”
The wolf doubled back around and chased me into the deep forest that backed onto his property. I dodged in and out of the trees. I coul
d hear my breathing, hard and fast. The wolf bayed and followed behind me, breaking off twigs and branches. My foot caught a tree root and down I went, hard. I rolled over onto my back—
—and suddenly the wolf was on top of me, licking my face all over.
I scrabbled backward even as my heart slowed. “You’re not a wolf,” I said, laughing hysterically. “You’re a big dog.”
He gave my face one final lick and sat back on his haunches. His tongue lolled out in a doggy laugh. With shaky fingers I held out the jar of cardamom—and then yanked it back. “Wait a minute. Clothes.” I led him back to the gazebo and threw one of the old blankets at him before setting the cardamom in front of him. He snorted in a giant doggy whiff as I turned around. There was the flappy noise of a dog shaking his head, ears and tongue snapping out, and then—
Boy laughter rumbled behind me. “You should have seen the look on your face.”
“About like you, just before you became a bunny?”
“So we’re even.” There was rustling behind me as he dressed.
My face was slimy where he had dog-kissed me all over, and I rubbed it off with my sleeve, trying not to read anything into it other than that dogs have no manners. “Good thing your dads weren’t out here,” I said.
“They’ve seen worse,” he said, and I could hear the laughter in his voice. “Okay, you’re in the clear.”
I turned around to find him with his jeans on, busy pulling on his shirt and jacket. “Better get the leaves out of your hair.”
He brushed them off, sobering. “But why did I become a dog?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What were you thinking about?”
“The last animal I had in mind was a bear,” he said, “because we were talking about becoming a bear and eating a witch.”
“Hate to break it to you,” I said, dusting mud and leaves off my jeans. “But that was no bear.”
“No,” he mused. “I remember thinking that I would have to really envision the animal to turn into it, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a bear, not in real life or anything. So then I was remembering the wolves at the zoo, and then how my neighbor had a dog I always thought was a wolf growing up.”
“Huh. Did this dog look like your neighbor’s dog?” I said.
“I didn’t stop to look in a mirror.”
“If you try again I could take a picture…”
He looked around. “Too dark,” he said. “We might have to table this for another day.” The grin flickered back into place. “Unless you want to go up to my bedroom and try shapeshifting there while my dads smile significantly and tiptoe around the hallway.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
He nodded. “I’ll take you home.”
We gathered our stuff and headed out to his car. He took us down the long driveway and out onto the twisty roads that ran down the hills from his house.
It was quiet for a few minutes. Dark. The inside of his excessively nice car was excessively nice. Sort of like being cradled in a cocoon of handcrafted artisanal hummingbird feathers and butterfly wings. You could feel the old money wrapping you in a nest of comfort. And Leo, too, was as comfortable as his car. Ease and comfort rolled off him. This was not one of those football players who was going to end up flipping burgers in a few years. This was one who was going to go to an expensive college and play with his equally moneyed friends for fun. And some of those boys were nice and some of them weren’t. But I thought this one was.
The realization that I had been looking at a pair of very close lights in the side mirror for about a minute jolted me out of my reverie. “Is that car really close to us?” I said. I turned to see the outlines of a giant SUV right on our tail. The lights blinded me and I couldn’t tell who was driving it.
“I’ll speed up,” Leo said. “This car is faster than theirs.” He put his foot down and we accelerated. The roads were pretty darn curvy and he whipped around the next curve so fast that I grabbed the handle above the door.
“You could pull off in a cul-de-sac,” I suggested.
“And let him win?” said Leo. “It’s probably one of the guys. They think it’s funny. But you can’t let them win.” He whipped around the next curve. The SUV tilted a little as it kept pace with us. “Whoever it is, their car doesn’t take corners the way mine does.”
I held onto the handle tightly, my life flashing before my eyes. “Soooo maybe it doesn’t matter if he wins,” I suggested.
“Sure, sure,” said Leo. But he didn’t slow down.
“Is that—are those blades on his car?” I said.
Leo’s eyes widened. “I haven’t seen that before.”
“Maybe we could turn off now? I mean there are limits to these chicken games, right?”
“I can’t turn off here,” he said. “He’s actually going after us. If I go into a cul-de-sac this jerk will catch up with us.”
The SUV bumped the back of our fender, jolting us. Leo growled as he pushed down on the pedal.
“I don’t think this is some crazy football player,” I said. “Occam’s razor and all that.”
“You think…”
“A witch. Yeah.” The car bumped us again. “Oh god.”
“All those destroyed cars,” said Leo. “And we’re next.” We skidded past a poor kid walking his bike up the hill and he yelled at us as we squeaked past him.
I didn’t want to tell him that the other cars were probably the handiwork of my mother. “Those cars were destroyed in the lot,” I pointed out.
“Then what makes this car so special?” His mouth was set tight and his knuckles were gripping the wheel and it was suddenly clear what they hoped to obtain.
“It’s you, Leo.” The words burst out in realization. “The fear trigger. Trying to get you to turn into something. Whoever it is suspects you’re a shapeshifter.”
He glanced at me. “If I turn into something right now we wreck in a fiery crash.”
I swallowed. “Don’t think of any animals. Think of uh, majestic ice floes.”
“Polar bears,” he shot back.
“Ocean beaches.”
“Sharks.”
“Daffodils!”
“Bees!”
I refrained from yelling at him, as that seemed likely to stress him out. “You are going to drive around this curve like a calm, collected person”—the car bumped into us again, rattling our teeth—“until we reach civilization, which can’t be much farther.”
“Three more curves,” he said. “There’s a well-lit grocery store. We can pull off there till the witch drives on.”
“This is a nice relaxing drive in the country,” I said through gritted teeth. I tried to prepare for what might happen if he turned into a rabbit at seventy miles an hour. Would it be better for me to pull the parking brake, which I could reach? To unbuckle my seat belt and clamber across, grabbing the wheel? That seemed like a Really Bad Idea for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that the witch hadn’t let me take driver’s ed yet.
Three curves. Two curves.
The SUV swung wide, trying to pass us. Leo swung his car into the middle of the road, blocking her way. “Look out,” I shrieked, and he swung back into his own lane as another car passed us going the other way.
Last curve.
The streetlights and grocery store were visible up ahead.
Also visible was a police car.
The traffic light was yellow.
At the very last second, Leo took a sharp right into the parking lot, slamming on the brakes. The SUV zoomed on past and through the intersection.
Across the way, the police car put on their lights … and swung out after the SUV. We were smaller fish to fry, apparently. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Leo’s knuckles released their death grip on the steering wheel. He shook his fingers out. And then he slammed his hand on the dashboard several times, cursing whoever it was who had ruined his car.
I waited patiently until his anger wore
itself out.
“No rabbit?” I said. “No wolf?”
“None of the above.” He shook his head. “My poor car. I don’t even know what the dads are going to say.” He opened the door and leaned out to take a picture of the scraped and slashed metal. His fingers flashed on the phone as he texted the picture—possibly to the dads, but more likely to friends, I thought. Then he tossed the phone on the dash and sighed. “C’mon, let’s get you home before either the witch or the cop comes back. Where’s your house from here?”
I gave him directions, and sedately he drove me the rest of the way home.
“Do you really have chases like that down the streets?” I said. It wasn’t behavior I’d associated with him so far.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I mean, usually not with a date in the car.”
I ignored that particular word choice. “So you have some experience with controlling yourself in high-stress situations, I guess. Between that and football.” It seemed like that should help him with his shifter problem, even if sometimes he was the person to get himself into the high-stress situation. What was it that made a bunch of dudes start acting like dudebros? Even Leo, the least dudebro football player I had ever met, apparently still had that dudebro thing that came out once in a while. I drummed my fingers on my leg. “I wonder why this shifting only started now. Did you just have a birthday or something?”
“Like on my seventeenth birthday, woo-woo stuff starts happening? Yeah, no. My birthday was in September. I mean, I guess it could have started then, for all I know. If I need the right circumstances for it to happen automatically.”
It was a puzzle. I wished that witches had helpful information about shifters instead of just ways to destroy them. But then, maybe there were more tidbits buried in the book. I should read the whole thing, as much as I hated to spend time reading about the sort of horribly vicious things that were in that book.
Leo pulled his poor battered car into my driveway and I grabbed my backpack. I leaned over and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll beat this.”
He didn’t let go of my hand. “Thanks, Cam,” he said. His eyes were dark and his gaze intense. “Your help means a lot to me.” Slowly he leaned toward me—
Seriously Shifted Page 14