Dying to Live: The Shifter City Complete Series

by Liam Kingsley

  “Uh…nice to meet you, I guess,” Pan said. “My name’s Pan.”

  “Credence Floyd,” Pink said with a grin.

  “Alice Hitchcock,” the woman corrected as she rolled her eyes. “The redhead is Philip, and the kid’s Jacob. Where did Ru pick you up?”

  “Over by the river,” Pan told her. “I had a…moment last night, and I’m not sure where I am.”

  “You’re about three miles outside of Omaha,” Philip said, gesturing at the hazy skyline. “Where’d you come from?”

  Pan raised his eyebrows in surprise. “About two hundred miles west of here,” he said. “Are you sure we’re that close?”

  “Positive,” Ru interjected. “That’s what happens when you double dip, dude. Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to do that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Ru sighed in frustration and gestured helplessly to Alice. She smiled kindly at Pan and took his hand, leading him into the tent. “Here’s how it works,” she said. “You got the beast shift, right? Those bug things or a bite, whatever. That change takes three weeks. Then you have the baby maker shift if you’re a boy omega. That takes three days. With me? Okay. Then you have the wolf shift. That takes like a week. If you get bit by a wolf within the beast shift weeks, you’ll spaz out. Your body’ll burn up. Never saw anybody survive that. Never saw anyone get wolf bit during the baby maker shift, so I don’t know how that goes. But if you’re wolf bit and you do the baby maker mambo, you run. You kill. You eat. You fuck. You’re one hundred percent instinct for three days, sometimes less. Some people die doing that, some people don’t. Since you’re walking and talking and all, I figure you’re pretty much at the end of your baby maker shift.”

  Anxiety quivered in Pan’s chest. The last thing he remembered before waking up in the river was talking to Killian. What if he’d killed him? What if….

  “What day is it?” He asked, interrupting his own internal babbling.

  “Wednesday, October twentieth. What’s the last day you remember?”

  “Monday,” Pan whispered.

  “Oh, yeah, we’re going to have to get you the hell out of here. You don’t remember anything?”

  Pan shook his head.

  “Didn’t really expect you to, nobody ever does. Credence!”

  “Yes,” Floyd said, ducking his head into the makeshift tent.

  “This shifter double-dipped and lost a couple days.”

  “Right. Pan, you with us?”

  “I…um….”

  “It would be best for you,” Alice said quickly. “There’s no telling what you did or how many people saw you do it. You need to get out of here. If you don’t come with us, we’re going to have to leave you behind. The humans are lashing out violently, every wolf, shifter, and hairy-looking human is in mortal danger right now, and they always follow the destruction. We can keep you safe, but we have to move out now.”

  “Okay,” Pan said impulsively. “I’m with you.” I can figure the rest out later, he told himself. One way or another, he was going to make it back to Regis Thyme.

  “Did you have any enemies between where you were and where you are now? Anybody at all, even someone who looked at you funny or said something rude?”

  Pan opened his mouth to say ‘no’, but then reconsidered. He didn’t know how long he’d been inside the walls of Regis Thyme before ending up in the wilderness. It was entirely possible that he’d wreaked destruction through the shifter city streets before leaving. He closed his mouth again, and Alice gave him a hard look.

  “Nobody between here and Regis Thyme,” he said finally. “But maybe some people in there.”

  “Regis Thyme?” She repeated, her eyes bulging out of her head. “You escaped Regis Thyme?”

  “Doesn’t take a whole lot of effort,” he told her, mildly confused. “They’ll let you out if you ask nicely. Or hell, you could just open the gate yourself from the inside and walk right out.”

  “Bullshit,” she said, but she sounded excited.

  “No…what do you think Regis Thyme is, a prison?”

  “Well, yeah. Hunters use it as a threat. Rumor has it that the first wave shifters built the prison walls and dug their own graves. They went in thirteen years ago and never came back out.”

  “I mean, that’s all true, except for the prison part. And we dig each other’s graves when we need to, which isn’t often. We only have two headstones in there so far, and one of those is for a human. We went in because the humans forced us to. We didn’t come back out because when we did they attacked us. Regis Thyme isn’t a prison, it’s a refuge.” He realized that all five shifters were watching him with rapt attention as he talked, and for a moment he felt like a preacher or a snake oil salesman. He cleared his throat and grinned at them. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Shifters are pains in the ass to live with, it isn’t heaven or anything. It’s just home.”

  “Well then, Neverland,” Ru said with a bright grin. “Take us home!”

  “Can’t do that,” Floyd told Ru. “Path of destruction. We’ll go around. Follow the river down for a day, then head west. Think you can find your way from there, boy?”

  “Uh… yes. I think so. Anybody have a phone?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Alice told him. “I’ll pull up the map once we’re out of the city. GPS is not our friend. We turn it on for two minutes at a time, max. Hunters are getting smarter, faster, and more organized. They knew before anybody else did that shifters were going full-wolf now, and ever since they figured that out, they’ve been on top of us. That’s why we’ve been sticking to the cities. Hunters don’t want to take us down in public, because if the government gets involved, it’ll kill their profits.”

  “Not a whole lot of real cities between here and Regis,” Pan said doubtfully.

  “Then we better be smarter than the hunters, and pray they aren’t combing the prairie for stray dogs.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The TV droned on and on. Canned laughter repeated again and again, responding to jokes that weren’t funny. The smell of stale beer and rotting wood had faded from disgusting to mundane, only entering into Killian’s awareness when they were emphasized by the sharp smell of urine or the greasy scent of processed food. The clock on the wall told him that he’d been trapped for twenty hours, and that he hadn’t pestered his captor for thirty minutes.

  “Hey! Are we done yet? I have things to do!” He shouted.

  “Shut up, dog,” the man grunted in response, rearranging his bulk on the sagging, ancient couch. “You ain’t going nowhere till I get my money.”

  “They aren’t coming,” Killian said. “You called them yesterday. If they wanted me they would have come for me.”

  “You don’t know shit,” the man said. “And you’re pissing me off. Shut up before I pump you fulla buckshot.”

  Killian pulled at his restraints in frustration, but they only clanked against the ring which had been anchored to a pillar of cement which rose up through a hole in the floor. The trailer itself would be tissue paper under his claws, which only frustrated him further. His throat, wrists, and ankles were bound in heavy steel shackles coated in silver. He’d tried shifting, but had only managed to crush his own bones together and burn his skin on the silver. In his human form, he wasn’t close to strong enough to break the chains, and all attempts to pry the ring out of the cement had been futile. He closed his eyes and sighed, cursing Pan, who was the reason he was there in the first place.

  His captor switched to the news, grunted, and opened yet another beer. The news began, and Killian’s ears perked up.

  “The science teacher, Timothy Barnes, has taught at the South Hills High School for twenty-five years. He was well-respected by the community and his fellow teachers, and the principle tweeted this morning that he would be missed. This attack flies in the face of the predictions that we heard only last week, given to us by a respected wildlife biologist, Doctor Peter Douglas. Dr. Douglas declined to comment on this
morning’s news, however, we have his colleague, Dr. Maureen O’Conner, on the line.”

  Killian craned his neck to see the TV, and had to stifle a gasp when the doctor’s image came on screen. For a split second, the light source in the room illuminated the pale gold behind her emerald irises, revealing her true nature. For her sake, Pan hoped that the humans watching wouldn’t have noticed; or if they had, that they wouldn’t know what it meant. His own human captor didn’t seem to react, but after a twelve pack of beer and a truck load of nachos, Killian didn’t expect him to react too much of anything. The gold halo was unique to shifters. It was a signature that most shifters had developed a habit of looking for, even within the walls of Regis Thyme; that momentary reflection of a kindred beast, the unique physical property of a shifter in human form.

  “Thank you for speaking with us today, Maureen. What can you tell us about the wolf attack?”

  “Dr. O’Conner will do nicely,” the doctor said, raising an eyebrow. “Having not been to the scene, there isn’t much I can tell you.”

  “Witnesses say that it was a wolf attack. Now, Dr. Douglas stated previously that these wolves weren’t interested in attacking humans. Witnesses also report that this particular wolf bypassed several dozen students before attacking Mr. Barnes. Can you explain that behavior?”

  “Wolves are wild, unpredictable animals. Lone wolves are more violent and unpredictable than those within a family group. Wolves are predatory animals who rely on their olfactory senses to identify and track prey. It is possible that the teacher was wearing something which attracted the wolf.”

  “There has been speculation that this wolf had a personal vendetta against the teacher. What are your comments on that?”

  “My comments? That respectable news sources should not get their speculative stories from children on the internet.”

  “Do you agree that it is possible that these wolves are connected to the werewolves we saw thirteen years ago?”

  Maureen glanced down at her hands for a moment. Killian’s heart skipped a beat. She was hiding her eyes, which meant the question had evoked an emotional response. She was hanging onto her self-control with the skin of her teeth; Killian wondered just how new she was to the shifter life.

  “No,” she said, addressing the camera with clear eyes. “Shifters were an entirely new species on earth. Wolves have been here for sixty million years. Evolution is an ongoing process, Ms. Jones. While it is unfortunate that a human suffered due to this new phase of wolf biology, it is not unexpected, and no more tragic or personal than a human dying from a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

  “But you can’t deny that the shifters we saw before bore a striking resemblance to wolves. Isn’t it possible…I apologize, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties. Well, while we try to get Maureen back, here’s some good news for you: a sixth-grade student has built an incredible business for herself. What’s her secret? Ducks! More on that, after the break.”

  “Liars,” Killian’s captor laughed from the sofa. “Keep lyin’.”

  “Yeah,” Killian sneered back at him. “Can’t get your blood money if everybody knows, right?”

  The man just laughed and threw an open can of half-rotted beans at him. Killian made a face and swallowed hard; he was starving, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat that. He wished he’d thought to bring food, but there obviously hadn’t been time. After he’d climbed out of the river, he’d stopped at a gas station to use the phone, intending to call Broderick. But while he was waiting his turn in line, he’d heard a conversation which made his blood run cold.

  “Got one heading east. Ate a bunch of chickens.”

  “Call Clyde. He’ll hold it for you.”

  “Yeah, and take half my cash. I’ll get this one myself.”

  “If it’s eating chickens raw, it’s turned all the way. Those things are fast as hell. You ain’t gonna catch it alone.”

  “Bet.”

  “Fifty bucks says you need Clyde.”

  “Done.”

  The two men shook as Killian slipped out the side door. He’d caught his bearings and turned east, hoping to catch up with the chicken-eating shifter before the hunters did. Once he was out of sight of the populated area, he had shifted to beast form and ran. That was his second mistake. He stuck to shrubs and trees, keeping out of sight, but in the end it didn’t matter. A cluster of trees around a languid spring had been his downfall. A buried net snagged him in mid-stride, swinging him ten feet in the air. Each fiber of the net had been coated in silver dust which burned his skin, and his screams echoed across the plain. Within moments, the fat slob (who was now sitting on the couch, covered in beer suds and Cheeto dust) had appeared below him, armed with a tranquilizer dart and a tobacco-colored grin.

  Twenty hours and eighteen minutes. The clock ticked. The TV blared. Killian dropped his head onto his hands and sighed heavily, wishing he’d taken the time to call Broderick before running across the wilderness. Twenty and a half hours. Time to bug him again.

  “Hey, asshole! You gonna unlock me, or what?”

  Clyde didn’t answer. Killian heard the sound of another beer can popping open. He hoped that Clyde would drink himself to death, but not until he did something about these damn shackles. Clyde had sneeringly told him that the hunters would be there to collect him and skin him for his fur, which had terrified Killian at first; but the longer the day dragged on, the less he believed it. His fear had dissolved into annoyance and discomfort, and now he was prepared to return the favor.

  “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts,” Killian sang. “There they are a-standing in a row….”

  “Shut up, dog.”

  Killian sang louder. He forgot the words to the song, and just sang those few again and again, hoping to drive Clyde to do literally anything. Clyde, however, was the most dedicated sloth that Killian had ever met. He occasionally tossed trash and stray, soggy Cheetos at Killian, but never once moved from the couch. Not, that was, until a knock sounded at the front door.

  “Shut up, dog,” Clyde said again, heaving himself up off the couch. “Your ride’s here.”

  Killian shut up, not because Clyde told him to, but because he wanted to get a sense of what he was facing before they came for him. A stout man with an excessive goatee and dark sunglasses entered the room wearing a floor-length leather jacket and heavy boots. Something about him seemed vaguely familiar, which made Killian uneasy. There were very few people who Killian should recognize, and the fact that he couldn’t place this one disturbed him.

  “That it?” The man asked, his voice lower and gruffer than Killian expected.

  “No, I chain all my guests to the floor,” Clyde said snidely. “Cash first.”

  The man handed Clyde a bulging envelope, and Clyde counted the contents gleefully.

  “Did you tell anyone else about this?”

  “No sir, not a soul. As we agreed. You keep paying me triple, I’ll keep bringin’ them to you.”

  The man nodded briskly and handed Clyde a set of free shackles. “You do the exchange,” he said. “I don’t touch those things.”

  “You got it, right away,” Clyde said with a broad grin. He waddled over and swapped his shackles for the stranger’s, then yanked Killian to his feet. “Want me to load it for you?”

  The man nodded, and Clyde yanked Killian through the door and down the rickety steps. Killian found it difficult to keep his balance after spending so long sitting on a hard floor, and he stumbled a bit. A black pickup truck with a camper shell was outside, and the stranger dropped the tailgate. A steel t-shaped bar rose from the center of the bed and connected to either side. The two men tossed him into the bed and Clyde chained him to the bar. As they closed the tailgate, Killian went over the last few minutes in his mind, trying to determine if there had been any point during that transfer in which he could have escaped, if he’d been quick or brave or smart enough. After an extended moment of obsession, he decided that ther
e was nothing he could have done. The truck began to move, sliding him and jerking him this way and that, and he had no more time to think as every last ounce of mental energy was spent avoiding the collision of his skull with the steel bar.

  His muscles were strained and sore, and he had more than his fair share of bruises by the time the truck began to slow. The sound of the engine changed from an open-air rumble to an ear-splitting echo, telling him that they had entered a very large garage or a smallish air hangar. The engine cut off, and his heart leapt with something between anxiety and anticipation as he waited for the next opportunity to escape.

  “Got him!” The man shouted. His voice was higher and less raspy now, closer to what Killian had expected, which led Killian to believe that the man had deliberately disguised his voice earlier.

  “Alive?” A woman’s voice, vaguely familiar as well, asked.

  “Alive and pissed off. He was with Clyde all night.”

  “Ugh. Poor thing. Do we really need Clyde?”

  “He’s reliable. You tell him you want them alive, he delivers. A lot of the trappers are too trigger happy to be useful.”

  “Alright. What are we looking at? Alpha?”

  “I’d say so. Alpha, thirty to fifty years old, fully capable.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Woman says a wolf ate thirteen laying hens about a mile from where I picked him up, but no one saw him shift.”