by Grace, A. E.
The man laughed then, rubbing at a bruise on his ribs. “You’re just a cub,” he shot back with contempt. “I don’t kill children. But when you’re all grown up,” he sneered, “then I’ll slash your throat and watch you bleed to death.”
“Like you did to Charlie Kinnear?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Exactly like that.”
He began to climb to his feet again, and Dylan stepped forward. “Don’t.”
“I’m in no shape to keep fighting,” he said. “Let me stand, at least.”
Sighing, Dylan relented. He needed answers. “Who are you?”
“My name is Marcus,” the man said, standing slowly. Even hunched over, apparently in pain, he was taller and wider than Dylan, a thick man lacking his lean stringiness. It was odd, then, that Marcus turned into an animal so lithe and nimble, while he turned into a bear, large and thunderous.
“Marcus,” he echoed. “Dylan.”
“I don’t care.”
“Why did you kill that old man?”
“He was a shapeshifter. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Dylan said.
“Oh?” Marcus asked, sounding amused. “How?”
“I saw a photo of him from decades ago.”
“Ah,” the wolf-man sounded. “Accidental. You were not looking for him.”
“No,” Dylan said. He pointed a finger at Marcus. “I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
“To get answers.”
“Ask your questions, then.”
“What are we?”
Marcus looked confused for a moment, and that confused Dylan in turn. Then the gigantic man burst into laughter. “This poor young cub knows nothing of our kind.”
“This poor young cub,” Dylan said. “Just kicked your ass, and he’ll do it again.” Dylan closed the distance between them, but noticed something unexpected in the man’s posture. He was putting all of his weight on both legs.
Had Dylan felt that tendon snap? Or was it just the thrashing? Was Marcus as wounded as he thought?
“Just tell me,” Dylan began, but he was silenced. He spotted the first punch, but not the second. The initial glancing blow that grazed his chin was just a feint, and the second balled fist charged toward his cheek, splitting the skin on the bone beneath, and sending his vision into a dizzy mess.
“Argh!” he groaned, his body whipped around from the booming force of the blow. He carried the motion through, using its momentum to turn, as if he was performing a discus throw, and drove his fist into the hard sternum of Marcus, sending the giant man staggering backward, and gasping in winded agony.
Marcus dropped to one knee, and Dylan approached him, rubbing his cheek. His palm was dripping crimson when he pulled it from his face.
“I only want answers,” he said, pointing a finger at the man. “Just tell me what I want to know.” But he shook his head when he heard the response.
“Today, I’ll break you. Tomorrow, I’ll kill you.”
Marcus rose to his feet, his chest heaving, his muscles swollen with adrenaline, and charged, like an angry rhino. Dylan was caught, surprised by the speed of his burly adversary, and had a shoulder jammed into his abdomen. He felt his whole body rise into the air, and prepared himself for what he instinctively knew was coming.
Marcus slammed him back-first against the dusty ground, and plumes of red were sent streaking into the air, like it was an asteroid that impacted the earth. Dylan, his turn to be winded, coughed and spluttered, and sent an elbow into the side of Marcus’ head, catching him in the temple, but sending streaks of pain shooting up his own arm. He felt the dislocation, a tremor in his bones, and it was half a second later that the white-pain agony hit him.
He rolled to the side, clutching his elbow, getting to his feet, not taking his eyes off Marcus. “Why are we fighting?” he asked. “Why won’t you tell me anything?”
“Idiot child,” Marcus said through gritted teeth.
“Why are you so angry with me?” Dylan shouted. “What don’t I know, Marcus?”
The man’s head shot up to meet his eyes, a fiery ferocity in them. “You want to know something about yourself, boy?”
Dylan stepped backward, and extended his elbow, biting his teeth together from the pain. He felt something click, felt his whole arm jolt, and then the stinging ache began to subside. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me something about myself.”
“You are an abomination!” Marcus hurled. The redwood of a man climbed to his feet, and Dylan saw then that he had drawn blood, for Marcus’ temple was bleeding profusely. The skin had broken open from the sheer force of the hit.
“What? What about you?”
“So am I.”
Dylan knew that the man was going to charge again, and so he pounced forward, jabbing his right fist at Marcus’ face. But the blow felt slow, sluggish, and he knew the moment he had released it, as he watched his arm spring forward in slow motion, that he was going to miss.
Marcus ducked and rolled to the side, and in an instant shifted into an enormous wolf, hair growing out of his skin in time-lapse, and claws erupting from his nail beds.
He watched as Marcus’ face elongated into a thin and cruel snout, knife-like whites of enamel bared, and promising a messy death.
He stared at Marcus’ body, time slowed, and watched as it grew larger, leaner, thinner, until it was canine, a wolf, dark grey hair hiding beneath it a lithe structure that could leap meters high, and strike with eviscerating force.
How had he changed so quickly?
Dylan turned to run, catching a glimpse of the yellow eyes full of cloudy hatred and seething savagery. He ignored the snarl, the brutal bark, and sprinted as fast as he could, not daring to look back at the wolf that was no doubt in pursuit.
He began his own shift, then, falling onto all fours, growing in size to such an extent that even he wondered where all the extra mass came from. But he could not change with the haste that Marcus had. And as he slowed, shifting, no longer able to run, his internal organs and limbs and joints a mess in the middle of two forms, two species. The wolf caught up to him, and Dylan did notice a slight limp, but it was not enough to prevent the beast from jumping on top of him.
He felt the wolf’s teeth sink into his back, coil around his spine, but he ignored it, focused on the shift, and soon the wolf was hoisted off the ground, on the back of Dylan’s moon bear. And, like he had done before, he rolled. He heard the wolf’s yelp as it was crushed beneath his weight, and free of the canine threat, he squared up, staring out of his beady black eyes at the wolf’s nightmarish yellow orbs.
The two circled an invisible central point, wolf tracks in bear prints, kicking up enough dust that it formed an isolated fog of war around them, between them. Dylan was nearly twice the size of the wolf, but he knew that Marcus had speed and agility on his side.
Dylan growled, and lunged at the wolf, the full force of his bear charge containing enough crushing power to fell a horse. But the wolf dipped, and then sprang into the air, back curved like a boomerang. Dylan felt the wolf’s claws split open skin and fur on his back, and he was certain the carnivoran had just exposed his backbone to the dry desert air.
Roaring with rage, Dylan spun his body, flinging the wolf off. He heard the wolf thump against the ground, bones rattling and a cry of pain piercing the silent night. He reared himself onto his two hind legs then, and swung downward with his two paws, aiming to crush the wolf’s hips, to stop the beast from moving once and for all.
But again the wolf was too quick, rolling awkwardly away, before climbing to its feet, snarling and drooling blood-stained saliva. The snarls grew louder, more savage, and the wolf snapped at the air between them, as though making a promise of what was to become of Dylan.
Blinded by anger, Dylan charged again, this time catching the front left leg of the wolf in his jaw. He lifted his head up, and flung the wolf against the ground, and each time the great big body of the wolf slammed against the arid sand,
Dylan felt his rage ebb.
Whimpering, the wolf’s body went limp, and Dylan let it go. He shifted back into a man, his body receding in a sickening fashion, lumps of hair and meat and muscle disappearing seemingly at random, as though he were trapped in some kind of bubble that spanned across two different dimensions.
Then, naked, crouched, he rose to his feet, standing over the wolf. Dylan dropped to one knee, and with his large hand wrapped it around the wolf’s snout, clamping it shut. The wolf, still whimpering in pain and kicking its legs uselessly at the sand, tried to resist, but Dylan punched it in the abdomen, halting the protest.
“Change,” he ordered, blood dripping from his nose and his split lip. “Change back.” The wolf did not respond, and so he hit it again, and again, thumping his fist against the wolf over and over.
The wolf halted all protest then, and Dylan let go of the snout, and backed away. “I only want to talk.”
He watched as the wolf rolled onto his legs, and, trembling from injury, rose to its feet. He realized, then, that he had made a mistake. The wolf growled at him, ferocious, angry, full of hatred, and Dylan knew it had been a feint all along.
He dropped into a squat, intending to start the shift, but he was too late. The wolf pounced. Time slowed. Dylan saw the great lupine body, stretched out like a hurdler’s, teeth glistening in reflected moonlight. The yellow eyes were fogged, filled with a violence that he could not understand.
Dylan shut his eyes. There was no time to do anything. There was no time to react. But an earsplitting shriek of pain filled the air around him, and he opened his eyes to see Sasha’s car rumbling past him, and the wolf, caught mid-jump, flinging off high into the sky, body loose like a ragdoll, and blood showering the already red desert sand.
He closed his eyes again, and shook his head. Sasha had killed the only other shapeshifter he knew of.
*
“Are you okay?” Sasha asked, climbing out of the car. She ran to Dylan, bleeding and bruised, and helped him to his feet.
“Why did you hit him so hard?”
“What? He was going to kill you!”
“Maybe,” Dylan said. “I hope you haven’t killed him.” He looked at his body, seemed to do a mental check to see if he could still feel everything and move everything, and then he looked at her. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Sasha said. “I was wearing my seatbelt.” She walked up to him, held his jaw in her hand. “You need stitches.”
“I think he cut open my back,” Dylan said, and he turned, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder. Sasha put her hand to her mouth. She could see bits of backbone, and Dylan was bleeding profusely.
“Fuck!” she cried, running back to the car and grabbing his shirt from the front seat. He ambled back toward her, and she pressed it against the open wound on his back. Dylan inhaled sharply, but did not complain.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We clot faster.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“What, are shapeshifters super-human, too?”
“If there was such a thing,” he replied. “Come on, we need to check on him.” He lurched off after the body of the wolf, and Sasha followed him, looking back at her bonnet quickly. The metal had crumpled and dented due to the force of the hit. Superintendent O’Neill was not going to like that, even though it was the crappiest unmarked car the station owned.
Following Dylan, she came across not the body of a wolf, but a man. He was huge, hulking, and so thick in the middle he looked like a beastly power-lifter.
From the way his body was lying, it was fairly obvious that he needed to get to a hospital, if he was even still alive. She took her hand off her sidearm, knowing it wouldn’t be necessary. Both of the man’s legs were broken, and in more places than one. They lay at gag-inducing angles that made her turn away.
“Damn,” Dylan said. “You really messed him up.” She looked over her shoulder and watched as he lowered his ears to the man’s mouth, and then looked up at her. “He’s still alive, though. Don’t think he’ll ever walk again, though.”
Sasha thought of something. “Does it affect your shift?”
“Does what?”
“Like, if you’ve got a broken bone and you shift? Does it fix it?”
“I don’t know. Good question, though. I’ve never been this banged up. Don’t know that I’d like to experiment.”
“Yeah.”
“Come on,” Dylan said. He stooped down as though to try and pick up the massive man.
“No!” Sasha cried, putting her hands out. “Don’t touch him.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know if his neck is broken or what. You can’t move somebody like this, you can sever the spinal cord. Come on, this is basic shit, Dylan. We need to call the ambulance.”
“Where do we tell them we are?”
“I’m a police officer, remember?” Sasha said, and she turned and jogged back to her car. “My radio’s got GPS in it!”
*
Interviewer: Did you know at the time what Marcus wanted all shapeshifters dead?
Dylan: No.
Interviewer: Were you shocked when you found out?
Dylan: Of course I was. That he would kill for no reason other than the fact we were…
Interviewer: Shapeshifters?
Dylan: Yeah.
Interviewer: So who first told you about Marcus, and the kind of person he was?
Dylan: [Laughs.] He did. [Points.] But to be completely honest, when I first bumped into him, I thought I was in for another fight.
- Excerpt from full transcript of Interview with a Shapeshifter by Circe Cole. Printed with expressed permission.
*
“Yeah, you’ll definitely need stiches. But there’s no need for corrective surgery. You’re actually very lucky, you know. Not just that your spinal cord wasn’t damaged at all, but that you had someone there to help stop the bleeding.”
Dylan winced as the young male nurse cleaned his wounds. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
“How did this happen, anyway? It looks unusual. Did he bite you? These look a little like tooth punctures.”
“I don’t know,” Dylan lied.
The nurse sounded unconvinced. “Right. Well, anyway, we’re going to need to prep you, so I’ll be back with a gown. You need to undress.”
Dylan looked toward Sasha, who was sat on an empty bed opposite him, evidently lost in thought. She was fingering the keys to her handcuffs that she’d ordered the doctors to use to restrain Marcus to the operating table. She had insisted, even when they told her there was no way he would wake up from the anesthetic.
She only had to tell them that he was responsible for the two wounded officers that came in earlier, and that he did that with his bare hands. The doctors had agreed to keep him restrained to something as much as they could.
Dylan wanted to ask her what she thought handcuffs would do. If he shifted, his wolf’s paw would easily slip out. But he didn’t, not just because there were others around now, but because it had seemed a symbolic gesture, something that helped Sasha.
After all, this was her man, her prisoner. More than that, he represented something new and chaotic that she could not control. Though just a guess, Dylan was pretty sure that now everything had slowed down, now that there was no more fighting and ramming with cars, Sasha’s brain was starting to go through the process of understanding shapeshifters, of parsing them into her worldview.
Dylan wondered if it was difficult for her. She seemed resilient, open-minded, and it didn’t look like the sort of thing that would make her either retreat into denial, nor mania. “You alright?” he asked. She turned to look at him, but her stare was vacant.
“Just thinking… what to do about him.” She gestured upward with her head, and Dylan guessed that was where the operating theater was.
“You’ll need to, you know, make sure your department knows he’s very dangerous.”
“I
know.”
“I mean, armed supervision.”
Sasha lowered her voice. “What’s to stop him from shifting?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” Liam said. “But I think he’s pretty old. Lived a long time. He called me a cub, and I’m eighty.”
“What’s your point?”
“I mean,” Dylan said. He put out an arm, gesturing her to come to him, but she hesitated. “Come on,” he said.
“You don’t look as good anymore, with all those cuts on your face.”
“They’ll heal.”
“Maybe I don’t like scars.”
“You’ll learn to.” He smiled at her, arm still outstretched. A feeling came over him, like the ground was falling away, and he was waiting for someone to take his hand and pull him to safety. It scared him. But the waking nightmare of emotion was quashed when she stepped forward and took his hand, running hers up his arm, and sitting down beside him.
“You mean what?”
“Well if he’s old, obviously he doesn’t shift in front of people. Otherwise, surely someone would know by now. I mean, unless he absolutely has to, like today with the police.”
“They had him cornered,” Sasha agreed.
“Yeah. I mean, otherwise people would know, right?”
“Makes sense.”
Dylan paused before asking, “There something on your mind?”
“No,” Sasha replied, sighing. She looked at him, and touched his jaw. “It’s just been a long day. A lot to think about.”
*
“All done?” Sasha asked. She saw Dylan walking toward her, still wearing his blood-stained t-shirt. She’d used it to stop the bleeding on his back, but with no other clothes in the car, he had to put it on.
“Yeah,” he said. “Said I don’t need to spend any time here. They keep calling me lucky.”
“You don’t think you were?”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he said, shaking his head at her. “I do think I’m lucky.”
“You could’ve died tonight, you know. Think about it.”
He walked up to her, and put an arm around her shoulder. Sasha expected to have an impulse to shrug it off her, but the gesture instead kicked up a storm of emotion inside her. She almost wanted to cry. He must have sensed it, because he hugged her tightly.