The chestnut shifter immediately morphed, and his clothes shrunk as he did. Mariella, in spite of her concern over Logan’s well-being, was instantly intrigued. She melted into her human form.
“How did your clothes do that?” She asked.
“We have a lab on site. Does all kinds of things. Bring him to the hospital, I need to get him on a monitor.”
Mariella didn’t move. “How do I know I can trust you?” she asked.
He tore his eyes away from Logan’s face and gave her a hard look. “Do you have anyone else you can trust?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. They were both fully aware that the only people who could help him were right here. After a moment of silence, he nodded briskly. “Bring him,” he said. “Unless you’d rather my orderlies do it.”
“I’ve got him,” she snapped. She followed the man into a large, square building, then into an elevator. The man pushed the button for the basement.
“What’s your name?” Mariella asked.
“Dr. Henry Snow,” he said. It sounded a bit awkward, as though he wasn’t used to introducing himself. She supposed he wouldn’t be, everyone he saw had known him for at least ten years.
“Mariella Walker,” she said. “No doctor or nothing.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Walker. Tell me…no, never mind. Broderick will want to discuss that with you himself, I imagine.”
“Who’s Broderick?”
“The high alpha here. Or mayor, if you prefer. He’s the nephew of the late Regis Thyme, and founder of this city.”
“I thought the city was founded because y’all had nowhere else to go.”
“That’s the why. Broderick is the who. Follow me.”
She carried Logan through a long, dim corridor to a long, dim room at the end. The room was comfortable, more comfortable than she would expect to see in a hospital. Dr. Snow gestured for her to lay Logan on the extra large bed, and she did so. He went to work immediately, stripping Logan out of his upper clothes, unfastening his pants, and removing his shoes. Then he stuck little circles which were connected to multi-colored wires all over Logan’s body. Then he wrapped a thick belt with a plastic disk in the middle around Logan’s hips, and tucked it under his waistband. A few more gadgets and gizmos were attached to Logan at various points. The information they gleaned was fed into a computer, which the doctor frowned at pensively.
“What is it?” Mariella asked, suddenly feeling the fear that she’d been ignoring all day.
“The second change,” the doctor said absently. “Usually works itself out without intervention, but occasionally… yeah. He’s severely dehydrated, and appears to be malnourished. That’ll cause some problems.” He hit a blue button on the wall and ordered IV fluids and something that sounded intimidatingly medical.
“What was that?” She asked.
“Feeding tube, essentially,” he said. “This man…what is his name?”
“Logan Kim.”
“Mr. Kim is malnourished, so we need to feed him in order for his body to complete the process. He’s also dehydrated, so we’ll be hydrating him through an IV. When did this start?”
“Last night, I think. Maybe around midnight, I don’t know. José was the only one with him, and he hasn’t been real talkative.”
“Oh good,” Snow said, sighing with relief. “Then it isn’t too bad yet. Once they hit the fourth or fifth day, it starts to become a problem.”
“What are you talking about? What’s happening to him?”
“Are you romantically involved with him, Ms. Walker?”
“What? No,” she said, putting a little more emphasis on the ‘no’ than she needed to. She’d been crushing on Logan pretty hard for a few weeks, and the question left her flustered.
“Good,” Snow said, oblivious to her discomfort. “José is, then.”
“What?” This time she was legitimately confused.
Snow breathed a short, frustrated sigh. “Somebody had sex with him,” Snow said. “I don’t care who, that’s your department. When a male shifter receives…okay, the act of mimicking mating alters the structure of the male shifter who is receiving. His body is rearranging itself to make room for the cluster of new organs, glands, and orifices that go along with being the one who carries and grows the child. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Mariella shook her head.
“He’s growing a uterus,” Snow told her. “It usually takes a three-day coma to complete the process.”
“He’s growing a uterus,” she repeated slowly. “He’s turning into a woman?”
“No,” Dr. Snow said. “He’ll still have all his current bits and hormones and whatnot, he’ll just have the other parts as well.”
“So…what, he could get himself pregnant?”
Dr. Snow stared at her curiously. “You know, that’s actually a good question,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I don’t know! Huh. It would be worth a try, if someone was willing. Wonder who I could ask….”
“Seriously?” Mariella interrupted.
He didn’t have a chance to respond, as the room was suddenly swarmed with nurses and orderlies. They inserted the feeding tube through Logan’s nostril and the IV into his wrist. He looked small and weak, lying there on the bed, and the image made Mariella angry.
“So hold up,” she said, after the nurses cleared out. “Y’all knew that butt sex would put shifters in a coma, and y’all didn’t say anything to anybody?”
“We told the shifters,” Snow shrugged. “We didn’t think the humans had any need to know.”
“It ain’t just humans out there, doctor,” Mariella said, punching her fists into her hips. “The four of us? We’re not even the tip of the iceberg. We are the seagull shit in the crack on the tip of the iceberg. It’s a jungle out there, doctor.”
Snow frowned thoughtfully and considered her. “I haven’t heard anything on the news about new shifters for…oh, must be ten years now,” he said.
“Yeah,” she snapped. “And you won’t. Because when y’all stopped taking shifters or whatever, the government took over. Shifters been going to hospitals and not coming back out. Shifters been snatched up off the streets. We’re getting disappeared out there, so no. Nobody’s gonna wake up a shifter and turn themselves in, that’s just stupid.”
“Come with me,” Snow said. “I think Broderick needs to hear this.”
Chapter Four
The first thing Logan became aware of was the tube in his nose. He could feel it snaking down his throat, and he gagged on it. The second thing he was aware of was a pair of strong, gentle hands pressing his shoulders.
“Hold still, I’ll pull it out,” a soft male voice said.
The tube slid out through Logan’s throat and nostril, gagging him and making him cough. He opened his eyes and his head throbbed. The world was hazy for a moment, then a face came in to focus. It was framed in brown hair which was pulled back into a pony tail. The man’s eyes were soft, and the same color of his hair. His nose was very straight, which highlighted the attractive crookedness of his smile. Logan blinked once, then again. The man was far older than he appeared, he realized. He didn’t know how he knew, exactly. Something in his eyes, he guessed.
“You made it through,” the doctor said. “Congratulations. You’ve survived your second change.”
“Second change?” Logan croaked, then coughed.
The man held a straw to his mouth, and Logan drank deeply.
“Yes,” he replied. “Your second change. Shifter bodies respond to various stimuli. Yours was encouraged to be a receptacle for genetic material. You’ve grown a womb and eggs, among other things.”
Logan squinted at the man. “I can get pregnant?”
“You can,” he replied. “I can help you break the news to your partner if you like.”
Logan shook his head. “No partner to worry about,” he said.
The man looked at him curiously, but Logan had said all he i
ntended to about that. He pushed himself up to sit, and took the cup from the doctor. He looked around the room. Brown walls, brown tiles, cream trim. Boring. He felt that he was underground, but couldn’t be sure. He could just be in a windowless corridor of some other floor. There was no one around, no calls coming over the PA system, nobody rushing through the halls. He was definitely in a hospital, he decided. Just not the usual hospital.
“How did I get here?” he asked.
“Your friends brought you,” the man said. “An interesting female alpha and two males, one of whom claims to be your partner.”
“We have different definitions of that word,” Logan said. “What’s your name?”
“Dr. Henry Snow,” he replied.
Logan nodded slowly. “Who’s the other male?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew.
“Um…Roy? No. Ronald?”
“Robert?”
“Robert! Yes. Apologies, I’ve lost the knack for remembering new names these past few years. You four are the first new shifters we’ve seen since the epidemic officially ended, aside from the children of course.”
Logan nodded. “It never ended, you know,” he said.
“That’s what I hear,” Snow said, nodding solemnly. “Could you tell me about that?”
Logan shrugged. “People got sick of getting shipped off,” he said. “The spread kept going, but people weren’t willing to lose their jobs and families over it. Or their lives, in a lot of places. Someone figured out that silver bullets kill shifters, and spread the word. There are people who make a living off of killing shifters. ‘Yellow-eye panic’ is a legal defense for murder these days. We stay out of sight. Keep off the grid. You been keeping up on homeless statistics lately?”
“I saw some headline or other about it,” Snow said.
“Quadrupled in the last ten years. Globally. Shifters who get found out by people who wouldn’t think twice about outing them take to the streets. Got shifter camps set up along every lake and river on the continent. We migrate like damn birds to stay alive.”
“Why don’t they come here?” Snow asked.
“Where’s here?”
“Regis Thyme.”
Logan stiffened and glared. “Who brought us here?”
“Your alpha, I assume.”
“Mariella brought us to Regis Thyme? Backstabbing little….”
“Woah, woah, hold on there. What’s wrong with her bringing you here?”
Logan glared at the doctor for a moment.
“You a shifter?” He demanded.
Snow extended a hand, which rippled into a claw before Logan’s eyes. Logan nodded, satisfied.
“Rumor has it Regis Thyme is a prison where the only sentence is death.”
Snow’s eyes widened. “Where did that come from?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Logan said. “I was fourteen when I heard that shit. Haven’t heard anything since to make me think otherwise.”
“Well thank God your alpha did,” Snow said seriously. “If you’d been left to do the second change on your own, you might not have woken up.”
“What is it, then?” Logan asked, ignoring the implications of what Snow said.
“It’s a community,” Snow told him. “A community of shifters. Self-sustaining. We grow our own food, dig our own water, farm our own energy, and make our own clothes. We’ve been here since the beginning of the epidemic. Haven’t had any trouble with humans as long as we stay inside these walls. Why would someone spread a story like that?”
“You really have to ask?” Logan said incredulously.
“Well I don’t understand it,” Snow said, shrugging. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Logan said, crossing his ankles and arms. “You tell humans that there’s a town full of shifters doing God knows what, they’re going to start panicking about terrorism or some shit. They’ll cry for protection from the scary monsters, and…what do you guys do for the government here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because if you weren’t worth protecting, they wouldn’t have bothered to spread the story.”
“You think the government itself is behind the rumor?”
“Answer the question.”
“Our lab is the top ranking biology lab in the world,” he said. “We create medicines, track outbreaks, grow meat protein… we patent these things, of course, but we routinely do projects on commission from the government.”
“Just the US government?”
“Oh no, we work with all the allies.”
“Right. And how do you think the people in those allied countries would feel about eating kill-free meat developed by werewolves?”
“Werewolves?” Snow grinned. “Is that what we are now?”
“Colloquially, yes. I don’t think you’re getting it, Snow. We’re monsters. People are terrified to touch anything we touch, walk anywhere we’ve walked, piss anywhere we’ve pissed. If the reality of this place was common knowledge, you’d be fighting off trebuchets full of burning mortar on the daily.”
Snow opened his mouth to respond, but a tap on the door got his attention.
“Sorry, doctor,” a man said, peeking his head in around the door. “You’re needed in Delivery Two.”
“Right, right,” the doctor said, standing up. “Hail, do me a favor and stay with the patient for a while. Make sure he stabilizes before you release him. Broderick wants to meet with him as soon as possible, but don’t push it. I trust your judgment.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
Snow stepped out of the door, and Hail virtually skipped inside. He was tall, with a strong jaw and curly red-brown hair. A smattering of freckles coated his cheeks and nose, and his emerald eyes glittered with mischief. Logan liked him immediately.
“So is it true?” Hail asked, turning the chair around to straddle the back. “Are there really shifters on the outside?”
“There’s me,” Logan said with a small, amused smile, “and the people I came with.”
“Are there more? What’s it like out there?”
Logan studied the man’s face carefully. He seemed eager, but Logan didn’t get the sense that he was manipulative. He relaxed slightly against the pillows.
“Yeah, there’s more,” Logan told him. “Whole camps full of us, all over the place.”
“But what is it like? Is McDonald’s still a thing?”
Logan laughed. “Yes, McDonald’s is still a thing,” he said, catching his breath. “How long have you been here?”
“Eleven years,” Hail said dourly. “I mean, it’s great and everything, but there’s only so much excitement you can have in a place like this. I came when I was twelve. I was the shifter that proved that kids weren’t immune. It sucked, too, because none of my family changed, so they sent me up here by myself, and…Oh! Have you seen any new movies? We get internet here, but it’s like I get to see the trailers and I’m all hyped up for it for a year until it comes out, then I sort of forget about it, then it’s like another year before you can stream it from anywhere and by then it’s gone completely out of my head. Have you seen any?”
“No,” Logan said, shaking his head. “Dark rooms with a singular light source are bad news for people like us out there. No matter how calm you are, the yellow shows. Might as well wear a target on your forehead.”
“Oh,” Hail said, sounding disappointed. “So they’re still panicking about us.”
“Oh yeah,” Logan said. “It’s gotten worse since you’ve been here. Werewolf hunters make bank.”
Hail’s eyes darkened and his cheeks flushed a deep crimson. “Werewolf hunters,” he repeated. “They’re hunting us?”
“Yep,” Logan said. “It’s all low-key. Not publicly sanctioned or anything. Hell, we aren’t even publicly acknowledged. They’re still trying to tell everybody that the epidemic is over, that shifters don’t exist except for in here, blah blah blah. The second you turn off the TV, you can see it. Us, lurking in th
e shadows. Them with their silver bullets.”
“That’s insane,” Hail said fiercely.
“It is what it is,” Logan shrugged. “You learn to live with it or you die. You got it easy in here, man.”
“I know,” Hail said despondently. “I’m itching to go somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
“Everywhere else wants to kill you,” Logan pointed out.
“Well you survived,” Hail said. “How long have you been a shifter?”
“Eighteen months,” Logan said. “Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all flowers and candy before that, but the whole shifting thing added a whole new layer of crap to navigate.”
“Crap navigator. Is that your official title, or…?” That twinkle was back in his eyes, and Logan found himself soaking it in like a drug.
“Nah,” Logan grinned. “My official title is puppet master. The crap navigator position is voluntary.”
Hail laughed and clapped one of his hands on Logan’s. The heat was immediate. Electricity shot through Logan’s blood, and his heart thudded wildly. He felt his eyes turn, and knew he had a choice. The tone of Hail’s laughter made it an easy one. He looked up and met Hail’s eyes full on, letting him see exactly what his touch had done to him. Hail saw it, and his laughter quieted. He didn’t pull his hand away, didn’t break the gaze. They sat there, playing a strange game of chicken, for a long time. Logan never lost this game. He turned his hand over under Hail’s and trickled his fingertips along Hail’s palm to his wrist.
Hail’s eyes turned then, glowing golden in the soft light. Still, he never broke the gaze. Logan gripped his wrist and pulled him closer, sliding his chair along the floor with a great, squeaking racket. Still, Hail never broke his gaze. Logan’s body was electrified with the promise of a challenge, with the whisper of sex, and he brought his other hand into play. He tested the boundaries, touching Hail’s knee, sliding his hand up his thigh. Hail nearly faltered then, but he kept his gaze steady. Logan brought his hand up to trace Hail’s strong jaw and velvety soft full mouth. Hail’s lips quivered against his finger, and out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw fiery red fur ripple down his spine and melt away again. Logan smiled. He was in that sweet spot, where no matter what happened, he would win.
Dying to Live: The Shifter City Complete Series Page 3