Babysitter Bear

by Zoe Chant

  "That's not what I need to talk to him about." Austin mumbled it, staring down at his backpack.

  Dan worked on keeping his voice level and calm. He remembered what it was like to be that age, when everything seemed vitally important and every problem was the biggest problem in the world. He'd run away a couple of times too ... though of course he was running away from group homes and not from a loving mother and sister. "Look, the, uh—problem that you needed to talk to your dad about—could you talk to me about it instead? I know it can be hard for teenage guys to talk to their moms about things, but I'm a guy. And I promise that I won't judge you, and I won't tell anyone."

  Austin shook his head vigorously, but he didn't move toward the door. Dan felt that they were getting onto more solid ground now.

  "Hey," he said gently, resting his good elbow on his knees. "Whatever it is, I bet I've been there. Drugs or trouble at school, I've been there and got past it. Shoplifting? Girl problems?"

  Austin was shaking his head at every suggestion. He drew a hitching breath. "I don't think anybody ever had a problem like this one before."

  Yeah, that was a fifteen-year-old talking, all right. "Austin, I can assure you," Dan said in that same gentle voice, like he was trying to calm down Derek's horse or coax Mina out of hiding under the bed when she was having a temper tantrum. "Every problem you've had is probably something a lot of guys your age have gone through. Like I said, I'm not going to tell your mom." Though he hoped that was a promise he could keep. What if Austin was in really serious trouble—with the law, say? Maybe he could take it to Derek and Ben, and they could find some way to help.

  More vigorous headshaking. "No, you're wrong, you—listen, there's no way you can help me. Nobody can help me except maybe my dad, but I don't even know how to find him!"

  His voice cracked with desperation.

  "Try me," Dan said. "I swear to you, no matter how embarrassing or—or bad it is, we'll find a way to—"

  "I turn into a monster!" Austin blurted out.

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he clapped his hand over his mouth and looked wildly around the bus station. This late at night, no one was around to pay attention. Even the woman behind the bulletproof glass in the ticket station had earbuds in and seemed to be watching a movie on her phone.

  And Dan had to fight with all he had to suppress a grin of pure relief. Out of all the problems he'd expected, this wasn't one of them, but at least it was vastly easier to deal with than just about anything else he had thought of. And he was the perfect person to do it.

  "What kind of a monster?" he asked quietly. "Dragon? Giant bear?"

  Austin jumped up off the plastic seat. "You're making fun of me," he snapped, his voice shaking.

  "No!" Dan said quickly. He got up too, picturing the kid running out into the winter night. "I swear I'm not. I've ... dealt with problems like that before. Kid, I turn into one too."

  Austin stared at him. A range of expressions passed over his face, desperate hope warring with suspicion and anger. "You're just saying that. There is no one else like me, except maybe my dad, but I don't know and I can't find out. Maybe our family is just cursed."

  "There's nothing wrong with you. You aren't cursed. It's called being a shifter," Dan said. "I turn into a bear."

  Austin's eyes went briefly wide, then narrowed in teenage suspicion. "You're lying."

  "No, I swear I'm not. I can prove it, but not—" He glanced around. "Not here. Get in the car with me and I'll take you somewhere that I can show you. And you can show me too."

  "This is stupid," Austin muttered, but he shoved his hands in his pockets and slouched toward the door with Dan. A fragile hint of hope quivered in his voice, cracking it. "You're lying. You're just going to take me to my mom's house."

  "I'm not. I'm going to find the nearest patch of woods and show you what a grizzly bear looks like."

  He tried to push down the nervousness rising in his chest. He just hoped that when it came down to shifting for the first time in years, he would be able to actually do it.

  He texted Paula from the car. He's in the car with me. I'm gonna take him to get something to eat & talk about things before we head home.

  "What are you doing?" Austin demanded.

  Dan showed him the text before he sent it. "I promised to tell your mom what's happening, and I'm keeping that promise. But I'm also keeping my promise to you. Not a word about monsters. I always keep my promises."

  "You're a regular Captain America," Austin muttered, slouching down in the passenger seat. But he didn't jump out of the car.

  Not knowing the area well, Dan decided to just randomly drive until he found a side road that looked like it headed into an uninhabited stretch of woods where they could shift unobserved. It helped that it was the middle of the night, so there was almost no traffic. He drove slowly, the heating vents beating back the chill.

  And he tried not to think about the fact that the last time he'd shifted, he'd had two good arms, and four good legs as a bear. He knew he hadn't lost touch with his animal entirely, which was a risk for shifters who hadn't shifted in a long time, but would it come out for him after all this time? He was trying very hard not to worry about that.

  "So you're not gonna tell me what you turn into?" he asked.

  "I don't believe you turn into a bear," was Austin's reply.

  "It's pretty easy to prove, and I'm about to prove it as soon as I find a—aha, this looks good."

  He turned onto what looked like an old logging or hunting road. Vehicles had driven over it earlier in the winter, flattening down the snow, but the road surface was loose and sloppy even with the car's all-wheel drive. He stopped just a few yards in. All he needed to do was get off the road where he couldn't be seen. He didn't want to get stuck.

  "This is so stupid," Austin said, but when Dan got out, he got out too.

  It was very quiet in the woods, and very cold. The snow had the soft luminescence of a north-country winter night.

  Dan inhaled deeply. The sharp, cold air seared his sinuses. This was going to be chilly, although he knew that he would stop feeling the cold as soon as he shifted. He took off his coat and then stripped out of his shirt.

  Looking up, he saw Austin staring at him.

  "Uh, whoa, what's going on?" Austin asked. "Did you just go crazy or something?"

  "Gotta take off my clothes so I don't wreck 'em. You can look away. Watch for cars for me."

  "Oh, so you can do your magic trick without me watching," Austin said, but he turned his head to look at the road.

  "Yeah, kid," Dan grunted, stripping off his jeans. Goosebumps prickled his skin. "Because a grizzly bear is so easy to hide in a Subaru Outback."

  All he had on now was his T-shirt and prosthesis. He stripped that off too, and put it inside the car carefully.

  As he'd feared, his bear was being worryingly reluctant to come out. He stood naked in the snow, standing with his bare feet on top of his folded jeans to avoid flash-freezing his feet. He was already starting to shiver.

  Come on, bear, don't be like this. It's gonna be pretty embarrassing if I have to tell the kid that I WOULD have turned into a bear, except my bear wouldn't cooperate. That's really going to help get him to cooperate and listen.

  He focused on his bear in a way he hadn't had to do since he was a very young kid, still struggling to control his shifts. He had spent most of his early life terrified that someone would find out that he was a bear and put him in a zoo. He hadn't been able to understand much about himself, but he had known that most people didn't turn into zoo animals.

  Come on, bear. Let's go.

  "So is this going to take much longer?" Austin asked in the classic tones of a bored teenager. "Because—"

  "I'm trying to focus here," Dan said. "Give me a minute."

  He became aware of his bear, a dim ursine presence deep inside him. It was reluctant. Well, he had figured that part out already.

  What are you doing in th
ere, you furry menace? You've been pushing at me to give you this for years. Now here we are, we're in the woods and you can shift and run, just like you want to.

  I ... His bear's mental voice was unusually hesitant.

  Normally it was the instinctive animal part of himself, the part that didn't suffer from doubts and fears. His animal self knew exactly what it wanted and went for it. It wasn't supposed to be hesitant, needing to be coaxed out like a shy barn cat.

  They couldn't both be uncertain. If his bear wasn't sure, then he had to beat back his own doubts and have enough certainty for two of them, the same way he'd had to keep up a front of strength for Paula earlier.

  You can, Dan told it. Come on, I'm freezing here. I didn't take off all my clothes in freaking JANUARY just so you can get shy on me. Man up, or bear up, or whatever, and get yourself out here!

  He wasn't sure if it was the encouragement or the goading or if his bear had simply needed that long to work itself up to it, but suddenly it rushed up out of the back of his mind.

  He fell into the shift, as easy and effortless as it had always been. Instinctively he dropped forward, trying to catch himself on his front paws—but there was only one front paw, and he wobbled before he managed to stabilize.

  He was right, the forest felt much warmer now that he was covered in a bear's pelt. He breathed deeply of the night air. Its winter bite in his lungs was more of a pleasant tang, and it was full of the rich scents of the wilderness. He'd almost forgotten how much he could smell in his shifted form. He could smell mice under the snow, and the tingle of pine needles, and the hot feathered bodies of owls hunting in the woods.

  "Whoa," Austin whispered.

  Dan swung his shaggy head to look toward the kid. The one sense that wasn't sharper as a bear was his vision. Bears weren't as nearsighted as some people thought, but he couldn't see colors and he didn't have particularly acute night vision. Austin looked like a dim blob in the moonlight, just the same as he had to Dan's human eyes.

  "You really do turn into a bear," Austin said. His voice cracked.

  Told you, Dan wanted to say, but of course in this form he couldn't.

  Instead he took a step forward—or tried to. He had forgotten, again, about the missing leg. His forequarters dipped alarmingly and he caught himself by swaying backward, centering his weight over his one foreleg.

  This was what he had been afraid of. He could feel panic beginning to set in. All his instincts were closer to the surface in this shape. He forced his rational mind to remain in control.

  There had to be a way to walk like this. There were three-legged dogs and cats and even deer. He knew it could be done. It was probably going to look a little silly as he figured it out, and he would have preferred to do it without an audience, but ... hell. If this made Austin feel better about his own transformations, wasn't it worth looking a little silly?

  He took a cautious, hopping step. That worked okay. That's the key, he thought; he just had to get used to hopping a little when he moved. It would probably have worked better, or at least looked more graceful, on a fifty-pound dog than a thousand-pound bear, but he could do it. In fact, he found that it was much easier when he just kept moving and didn't try to stop between steps. His back legs could do most of the work, his front leg worked mostly to prop up his front end, and he took a few hopping steps over to Austin.

  Austin smelled fascinated rather than afraid. He reached out cautiously to touch Dan's coarse, shaggy fur. "You know," he said, "I guess I never wondered how a three-legged bear would work."

  Dan gave a coughing grunt. It was meant to be agreement and rueful laughter, but Austin jumped a little. Okay, he thought, let's keep down the sudden noises and movements when I'm bear-shaped.

  Anyway, it was about time to shift back, since he couldn't talk when he was bear-shaped either, and they were starting to need to have a conversation. He turned and shuffle-hopped back to the car. This wouldn't be fun, but it wasn't the first time that he had shifted and gotten dressed in the cold. He braced himself as if for a dive into an icy pond, shifted, and snatched up his jeans as he stamped his feet into his cold boots. He had to take out one foot at a time to get his underwear and jeans on. Skin prickling, he reached for the coat and swung it around his shoulders, and then turned to look at Austin.

  "Proof enough for ya?" he asked.

  Austin shook his head and grinned. "Okay, yeah, that proved it. You're right. There's no way to fake that."

  "Nope," Dan agreed. He pulled the coat closed over his bare chest, one-handed. "Your turn now."

  Austin tensed, his body language reflecting anxiety. "Do I have to? I mean, I believe that you believe me now, and we can just go back to Mom's—"

  "Kid, you just saw me turn into a bear. How much worse can it be?"

  "You'd be surprised," Austin said. His voice was grim and old for his years. "You're a bear, which is at least pretty normal. I'm not. I'm something weird."

  "How weird? I know people who turn into dragons."

  "Really?" Instantly Austin dropped the jaded-old-man persona and reverted back to a kid. "Dragons are real too? Whoa. Cool. Can I meet one?"

  "Not yet," Dan said, backpedaling hastily. "I'll need to ask them first. It's a big secret, you know. Like me being a bear. We don't tell it to just anyone."

  "I know. I mean, I can guess." Austin fidgeted with the zipper of his coat. "But seriously, I'm not a dragon, and I'm not a bear, and maybe it's coming out like this because I don't know what I'm doing, okay? Maybe if I, like ... practice a little more, I'll be able to turn into something nice, like a glorious eagle or something."

  What the heck did he turn into? All the shifters Dan knew personally were pretty normal types, like Derek's bear and Ben's panther. He knew that there were shifters who turned into most kinds of mammals, a few reptiles and birds. And dragons, of course. Ben had once said something offhand about gargoyles, so apparently those were a thing too.

  How unusual could Austin's shift form be? It was probably a platypus or something. Unusual to him, but not that weird.

  But now Dan's curiosity was churning in earnest. What else was out there? He decided to offer some more painful honesty as an enticement.

  "Hey, you got to see me learning to walk as a three-legged bear. That's the first time I've turned into a bear since I lost my arm."

  "Really?" Austin asked softly.

  "Yeah. Really. It hurts shifters a little bit not to be able to shift, once we grow into our animal form. You might have noticed it too. You probably have to struggle not to shift sometimes."

  Austin gave a reluctant nod.

  "I've been fighting it," Dan went on. Now that he'd warmed up a bit, he slipped the coat off his shoulders and reached inside the car for his prosthesis and shirt. It gave him something to do rather than focusing on the words that were coming out of his mouth—the brutally honest words, the words he'd spoken to no one. "I didn't know what would happen when I turned back into a bear. I didn't know what it would feel like, or what I'd look like. I was—scared," he admitted. "I was scared, and I didn't want to face it, until tonight. I know it's not the same thing, but believe me, kid, I know what it's like to be afraid of a shift and have to face up to your fears and get it over with."

  He turned to look at Austin square on.

  "You don't have to," he said quietly. "If you decide not to, that's your choice. I'll take you back to your mom's, no questions asked. But the longer you put it off, the harder it's going to be to make yourself do it at all. And right now, tonight, is about as good an opportunity as you're going to get. We're in the middle of nowhere with no one around, and you just watched me push past my fears and turn into a three-legged bear. Whatever you turn into, I won't laugh and I won't judge you. You don't have to show me, but I'd be honored if you'd trust me that much. And then," he added, "we'll find an all-night burger joint and get something to eat, because I am starved."

  Austin hesitated. Then he gave a strange, twisted little smile, barely
visible in the moonlight.

  "Okay," he said softly.

  He turned around, turning away from Dan. At first Dan thought that he meant to strip off his clothes and was prepared to look away to preserve the boy's modesty, but Austin didn't do that. He arched and rolled his shoulders, stretched out his arms, and hunched over a bit.

  He's not expecting his clothes to tear up, Dan thought. Only mythic shifters take their clothes with them. What the heck IS he?

  Austin arched his back and gave a soft, pained cry, and in the moonlight, a great feathered mass of wings burst from his shoulders.

  Dan had been expecting something to happen, but not that. He took a step back, and another as Austin's body contorted and seethed.

  He had absolutely no idea what to prepare himself for. Austin's head bent forward, his back humped up, and he hit the snow with all four legs. His head had extended into sleek feathers and a beak. A long tail with a tufted tip lashed at his flanks. He turned to look at Dan, cocking his head to the side since an eagle's eyes were not well suited for looking at something right down the center of its beak.

  "Oh, hey!" Dan said as he finally figured out what he was looking at. "You're a griffin. Cool."

  Austin snapped his beak. He stretched and half-spread his wings in the moonlight. Like all adolescent animals, he was gawky and awkward, with gangly legs out of proportion to his lion body and oversized paws. His wings weren't fully fledged yet, with downy tufts of baby fluff sticking out between the half-grown flight feathers.

  "Yeah, you're a griffin," Dan said. "Do you know what that is?" Austin slowly shook his feathered head. "I've read about them in storybooks, just didn't know they were real. Then again, I didn't know dragons were real either, until recently. Griffins are part eagle, part lion. You look amazing, kid. Two really cool animals in one. Do you mind if I touch you?"

  Austin shook his head again. The effect was very strange on his lion-eagle body. He held still while Dan cautiously stroked his neck and shoulder, feeling the transition where eagle feathers changed to soft, tawny fur.

  "So yeah. You're no monster, you're a mythic shifter. Your dad must be a griffin too, since Paula sure isn't. No wonder you wanted to find him. Can you change back?"