by A. R. Cooper
“Many know about one of the octopus’ defense mechanisms, ink. But even it has a purpose besides blinding its predators. The ink contains various chemicals such as dopamine and L-DOPA. It is believed that the ink dulls the victim’s sense of smell and possibly touch. So, it’s not a matter of the shark, shown here in a cloud of ink, swimming out and pursuing the octopus, it is unable to until the ink’s effects wear off.”
“Can you do that?” Jacqui flipped her blond hair over her shoulder. “Do you have a shower, Mr. Bender? Beth stinks and we’ve not had one since we left the hotel this morning on the mainland.”
“Thanks a lot!” I crossed my arms. “But I don’t squirt ink.”
“Not exactly, but I think your yell incorporates two of your shifter abilities into one.”
“Really?” Maybe something was going well for me after all this mess.
“Just a theory I have. Eat first. Then I’ll show you the shower and we can talk after.” He dipped out bowls of the steaming chili and handed them to us.
The metal spoons we ate with resembled a toddler’s favorite chewing toy. At least I knew what to buy my dad for father’s day if I ever felt guilty enough to do so… a new set of silverware. Or maybe his birthday. I didn’t even know when that was.
“Umm… when’s your birthday? Mom never told me.” I asked between bites. “Guess I never thought to ask, either.”
“December seventh. I’ll be forty—something.” He winked.
“So, a Sagittarius.” Jacqui twirled her spoon in the air, then dipped it into the chili for another bite.
“Actually, the more accurate astrology has me as an Ophiuchus.”
“Is that a shifter sign?” I’d never heard of it. Then again, I barely knew my own sign.
He chuckled. “No. It’s the thirteenth sign; our planet has shifted and all of the signs or, rather dates, changed with them. The whole point of astrology, or at least the sun sign portion, is the sign the sun is in at the moment of your birth.” He washed the chili pan. “Beth, your birthday is January fifth… so I bet you think you’re a Capricorn.”
“That’s what the astrology books say.” I nodded and ate another spoonful. This was delicious. I’d have to remember how to make this stuff.
“In the old system, it was.” He rinsed out the sud-filled pan. “But at the time of your birth, the sun was in Sagittarius. So you’re…”
“Oh my God!” Jacqueline squealed. “I’ve always wanted to be a Sag. But with my birthday in April, I at least got Aries.”
“Depends on when in April.” My dad dried the pan and set it aside. “If your birthday is before mid-April, then you actually are a Pisces.”
“Fish? That should be Beth’s sign… she’s the one who loves water.” She stood and took our empty dishes to the sink. “I’ll wash these. Have a seat.”
“How do you know so much about the astrological signs?” I asked my dad as he squished up next to me.
“I use the stars to navigate, and it’s standard procedure for shifters to know both astrology and astronomy.”
“Navigating with the stars?” Wasn’t that what GPS was for? “Why not use your compass or something?”
He folded his hands on the table and a dimple rose in his cheek as he smiled. “And if you were alone in the middle of nowhere? Your compass lost or broken? How would you survive?” His smile faded. “What if something came after you like it did tonight and you had nothing on you? How would you know which way was which in the darkness with no sun to guide you?”
“He has a point, Beth. You get lost at the—”
“Shut up.” I tossed my wadded napkin at her as she washed the dishes. She laughed, kicking it aside. Biting my lip, Amar’s heavy breathing reassured me. He must really be passed out not to balk at all this commotion.
“And the two-faced signs, like Capricorn and Sagittarius, point to our history. A time when men knew shifters existed.” His eyes brightened, making them look like the ocean here during the day. “A man with the body of a horse, a goat with a fish tail. It’s all there if anyone knows what they are looking at.” He laid his palms face up on the table, and his smile lingered.
With a shiver, I realized he was right.
“And, as a shifter, you being born under one of them, which you are, would have been celebrated centuries ago. People would have thought you exceptionally gifted and special.” He reached over and patted my hand.
“But I’m not.” I shrugged. “I’m just me. And a lousy shifter.”
“You’ve just not been trained.”
“Cause you weren’t around to train me!” The words blurted out before I realized they’d left my mouth. Now they hung in the air between us, forcing their acknowledgment.
Dad’s cheek’s reddened and his face appeared to twist into sadness and remorse. “I-I didn’t plan for any of this to happen. If I could have been there, I would have, but there are reasons why I did what I did. Just trust me that I only had your best interests in mind.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “But no more secrets or hiding the truth from me.”
The air in the tiny cabin was stifling and, though Dad gave me a smile, the tension pressed in on me.
Jacqui looked over her shoulder at me then went back to scrubbing the dishes. “Do you have a dishwasher hidden in one of these panels?”
“I’m looking at the dishwasher right now.” Dad drew back his hands. She stuck out her tongue.
“Okay, I’m done.” She rubbed her hands down her shorts. “Show us the shower.”
My dad chuckled but led us to the top of the boat. The ocean was quiet, except for the dark waves that lapped against the boat. No seagulls or swimmers. The water appeared to be dark blue, nearly black, except for where the boat’s lights shone on the water and that was a dark emerald color. Would the water still be warm from the sun? Or cool?
On the other side of the cabin door, a metal box was fastened with brackets against the ship’s deck. My dad dug inside the box that resembled a tackle box, but bigger. “Here.” He handed me a bar of soap, then pulled out a bucket on a rope.
Giving Jacqueline the bucket, he closed the box.
“What do we do with this?” She frowned at the yellowed rope in her hands.
“Right.” He took the end of the rope and fastened it around the sail. “Now that you won’t lose my shower overboard, you do this.” Using the metal bucket, he hauled it over the side, then brought up ocean water. “Rinse. Use the soap, and don’t pitch it over the side either it’s my last bar, then rinse.”
“That’s not a shower.” Jacqui crossed her arms.
“Out here it is. We can’t risk going onto land, so this is the best I got. Unless you want to bathe in the sink, but that’s seawater too.”
“This is fine,” I assured him and dragged the bucket closer to me. Once again, we didn’t have clothes with us. I’d wash first, then help Jacqui since the bucket was heavy when it was full. We’d have to re-dress in the clothes we were wearing.
My dad went inside the cabin and closed the door to give us some privacy. As soon as the door was closed, she and I busted out laughing. It was either laugh or get mad and cry.
“And I though the showers in the girls’ locker rooms were bad.” She shook her head, then took off her shorts. “At least there you didn’t have to draw up your own water. Won’t this seawater dry out my skin?” We kept our panties and bras on.
I splashed her a handful from the bucket of water and she yelped, then chased me around the boat after dipping one of her socks in the water. We fell in a heap beside each other at the head of the boat. Our legs pretzeled together as we lay on our backs. Jacqui shifted until her leg was no longer twisted under mine. The crescent moon hung in the sky so low and bright like I could touch it. And the stars… there were thousands of them.
“So, did your dad tell you about navigating with the stars like my dad rambled about earlier?”
“No.” When she shook her head, her blonde hair tickled my ar
m. “Maybe it relates to pirates or ships or something.”
I elbowed her and she huffed.
“Well, at least he’s trying.” She pushed up on her elbows to look at me.
“Who?”
“Your dad. When we came here, he could have thrown us out.” She waved a hand and then flopped back down to stare at the stars with me. “He could have run and left us here. When that thing came, we wouldn’t have known what to do.”
I still felt like my dad was keeping something from me. Something important. He still hadn’t told me exactly why he’d left mom and me, or why he never came back or even tried to contact me. “He’s helped us, yes. Though I feel like time is running out. I know we’ve been here less than a day, but…”
“It’s impossible to cram a lifetime of knowledge into half a day.” Jacqui rose. “Come on, let’s ‘shower’ so we can get some sleep. I’m sure your father will start your training after breakfast tomorrow. God, I hope he has something to eat besides chili or fish.”
I laughed. We helped each other get clean and rinsed off. Redressed, we scurried inside the cabin, and my dad had already laid out blankets across his bed for us. Pillows lined the table’s bench for his bed. Amar was still asleep with the pillow behind his head and a thin beige blanket draped over him. Had he moved at all?
Jacqueline and I said goodnight to my dad and crawled into bed. She stole most of the covers. Eventually, I fell asleep.
***
The next morning, seagulls squawking and the smell of eggs cooking woke me. Still, I let the boat’s gentle rocking cradle me.
“Breakfast.” I nudged my friend, who just moaned and rolled over.
Her blonde hair stuck out around her head like a porcupine. She’d wake up in a bit.
“Morning.” My dad glanced at me. “Hope you don’t mind omelets.”
“As long as I’m not doing the cooking, I’ll eat whatever you make.” I stretched and rubbed my legs as I kicked off the tangled sheets on the bed. Then I clambered out of the bed with its high wooden sides that faced the opening. Guess they had those so you weren’t tossed out of bed as easily during a storm, and the side Jacqui was still sleeping against was the wall with the only port window. I shuffled around the edge of the bed to the table, sitting down on the bench. My dad’s pillows and blankets from the night before were in a pile between his bed and the table. I wrapped my arms around my legs. It was cold. I should have brought one of the blankets from the bed with me.
He chuckled. “Your mom never liked cooking either.” His eyes misted when he glanced at me, then he returned to the pan. “After we eat, I’ll take you out to the water and start teaching you what I know. I realize now that your mom and I did you a disservice by not telling you about your shifter abilities.” Placing an omelet on a plate then handing it to me, he poured out more raw egg into the pan and added cheese and chopped up veggies to it.
Where did he get this stuff? Delivery? At first, I scrunched my nose up at the mushrooms, bell peppers, and spinach, but my stomach didn’t care and gave a loud rumble. I took a bite and everything filled my mouth into cheesy deliciousness.
“This is so good,” I mumbled between bites. “I thought you said you didn’t have any cheese or food?”
“I took the ferry early this morning to Sunset Pier and bought groceries. It’s close enough to the dock that I could dive into the water if the Blood Spirits showed up.” He nodded to a bag next to the bed. “And I got some clothes for you all to change into.”
“No credit card, right?” I hoped he hadn’t done anything to get us caught. We didn’t need Ms. Moor finding us, though maybe it didn’t matter since that Blood Spirit thing had.
“Nope. I keep cash and gift cards around.” He dished out another omelet and set it on the table beside me. “Morning.”
I turned and Amar stood there staring at me. His dark hair still had fragments of black tar in it and his grey eyes pierced into me. With a nod at me, he sat on the floor with his back against the door and devoured the egg. Was he mad?
When he finished, Amar took my empty plate and his and washed them.
“Your wings!” I hadn’t noticed until now. There were gone. My gaze jerked to the floor where he had laid, and only a few feathers stuck in tar there.
“I was able to shift completely this morning back into my human form.”
He looked different without the black shiny wings. Before, it had been hard to look at just him, rather than the wings. Now his handsome face and chiseled muscles filled me with lust. Even his back and ass were sculpted and visible. Like an immortal god visiting his subjects. I wanted to run my fingers over his body and trace where his wings had been. It didn’t help that his shirt was in tatters from last night, revealing his bronze skin.
After he finished the dishes, Amar leaned against the counter while Jacqui ate her omelet from the bed and my dad drank his coffee beside me on the bench.
“Don’t ever pull a stunt like you did last night without training.” The muscle in Amar’s jaw twitched. “You could have gotten killed, or worse.”
So that’s was why Amar was acting cold. Jacqui flipped the TV on to the same channel as last night. It must be ocean week or something. A show talked about crabs scuttling across a beach.
“Speaking of training,” I turned on the bench, straddling it so I was across from my dad and could see him without looking at him from the corner of my eye. “Can you teach me how to do that jump thing again? The one I did with Amar to get to the truck.”
“I can’t teach you that,” he looked at me as if truly puzzled.
But I had seen him leap effortlessly from rooftop to rooftop. I knew that couldn’t have been his octopus talent because I’d never seen one jump. It must have been from his whydah bird thing. Too bad there wasn’t a PBS special on that.
The lady on the TV had moved from the crabs and was rambling about sea turtles. I didn’t care about turtles. I wanted my dad to teach me all his shifting talents. Obviously, I’d gotten both my parental and spirit ones from him. I wondered if that was unusual. Amar had said the spirit shifter totem was different for everyone.
When my dad still didn’t answer, I said, “Like you did on the roofs.”
“But that’s from my other animal, the whydah… I can’t fly as it does, but I can kind of glide a bit, like a flying squirrel.”
I waved a hand. “I want to be able to do it again. It was a powerful jump and I propelled myself and Amar a few inches to safety. I may need to use it again.”
“You don’t understand.” He clasped his hand in mine. “Your other totem animal is not a whydah. It’s a vixen… like your mother.”
Chapter Twenty
“How dare you insult Mom, and me! We’re not shrews.” My hands fisted in my lap, my gaze locked onto my father.
He ran a hand down his beard, the bench under us squeaking as he moved. “No. I mean she was cunning and believed she could keep you safe and escape if the enemy came to our door.”
“And you believed her?” I jerked away when he reached for my hand on the table. “How could you? She was human! What could she possibly do to protect herself against beings like us?” My fury made me shake, and I scrambled up from the bench. I didn’t need him or his teaching. “It’s your fault she’s dead. If you had stayed with us o-or taken me with you, then she’d still be alive.”
“You don’t understand, Bethany…” His voice, pleading and desperate, made me even angrier instead of placating me.
He had known! Being a shifter, and probably being taught and warned from birth, unlike me, he had known the dangers and abandoned us. I was right to think of him as a monster and a jerk.
Stomping toward the door, I shoved against Amar who blocked my path. “Move!”
“Hear him out.” At my glower, he continued. “You don’t have to like it, but I won’t have you unprepared. We’ve been lucky so far; I doubt we’ll be next time.”
Silence clung in the air like a thick fog. Over my
shoulder, Jacqui gave me a half smile.
Amar lifted his gaze. “You say Bethany’s totem is a vixen?”
Crossing my arms, I stomped away, and then flopped down on the bed next to Jacqui. I didn’t want to be around either my dad or Amar right now. Evidently I’d been wrong in the definition of vixen before and it wasn’t an insult, it was a shifter’s animal, but I still didn’t know what it was.
“Not quite.” My dad nodded and pushed his empty coffee cup across the table.
Jacqui straightened and her legs dangled over the bed. “You figured out Beth’s spirit totem?”
“It’s what helped you make that leap into the truck and, with the eerie scream, merged along with the confusion that octopi have in their ink, made the Spirits of Blood revolt away from you and Amar.” He looked past Jacqui to me, but I turned away, staring at the sink with chips in the plaster.
“A Vixen is a fox, right?” Jacqui asked.
“A powerful spirit totem.” Amar took a step away from the door.
My dad shook his head again. “But the vixen is not Beth’s spirit totem.”
“But you just said…” I rubbed my temples, glancing up at him.
“No, the Vixen or female fox is one of your shifter animals, but it’s not your spirit totem.” His eyes twinkled in the corners. Almost like he was proud or something.
“Wait, she has three?” Jacqui asked.
Amar had told me when we met that only the ancient shifters had three animals: a spirit totem and one from each paren—
“Your mother’s.” Dad leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs under the table as he sat on the bench. “You inherited an animal from each of us. But we don’t know your spirit totem—unless you have an idea?” His eyebrows rose.
I shook my head. Both in answer to his question and to sort the jumbled questions and unbelief racing through me.
“Holy Shit!” Jacqui stood up and spun around to face me. “She has three? Beth who didn’t know anything about being a shifter has three of them?” She grasped my hands and hauled me into a hug. “You know, this is so rare! Not even my dad knows someone with three.”