by Grace, A. E.
“Maybe.”
She switched off the light, and lay in his arms. They seemed to swallow her up, and resting on his naked chest, she couldn’t think of a time she had felt more comfortable, more at ease. She leaned up and kissed him, and when their lips locked, she knew that would not be the end of it. It had been like that every night. It was just… she was at a loss for words for how to describe it.
Though it was early still, the passion seemed to have only switched into a higher gear, rather than cooling off.
It was a little strange, something she couldn’t describe using mere words. Animalistic was the closest she came, and given the circumstances, that wasn’t all that unusual.
But she felt it in herself as well, and paired with a piqued interest in shapeshifters in general, her curiosity was more insatiable than ever. Though she had taken care to not bombard Dylan with questions, many of which he admittedly did not know the answer to, the thirst for knowledge and understanding was leaving her parched the way the desert did a throat.
Even while they kissed, while Dylan grew hard against her body, and while his hands explored her curves over and over, as though for the very first time, she found a portion of her mind was distracted. She could not stop thinking about what it must be like to be a shapeshifter. She wondered if they were simply born that way, or if one could become a shapeshifter.
Of course, the latter seemed positively absurd. The science behind it was already something that she couldn’t even begin to guess at with her rudimentary every-person understanding. But, as far as she knew, genetic mutations didn’t exactly happen like this.
Was this the result of a botched experiment? If Dylan was really eighty years old, then that period was rife with strange and unethical experimentation across budding superpowers on the brink of war, not to mention the great mass of red lying to the east of Europe.
It seemed unlikely, and Dylan himself had given no indication that was the case. Her best guess was that he was simply born that way, and she felt a possibly misplaced sense of disappointment.
And even while they made love, with an unending need to pleasure her, and pleasure himself with her, she found that distant portion of her mind, not caught up in the kissing and the sex and the passion and the heat and the sweat and the panting, was almost lamenting the fact that… she was not like him.
Those stewing thoughts that had bubbled slowly to the surface of her mind had no congealed, and while she shut her eyes and clenched her teach in climax, her nervous system ablaze with fireworks, that same part of her distracted mind was sad.
Sad that she would never be a shapeshifter.
Dylan, for the first time sated after just one time, fell asleep quickly. Sasha stayed awake, trying to imagine what it must feel like to be an animal.
*
Dylan nodded at the armed angel-faced policeman standing outside the single-bed hospital room. He returned the gesture, but other than that, the two pretended as though they didn’t know each other. Dylan was quite sure the young man remembered stopping him in the street just days prior, palm on his pistol, though. But it was probably best not to bring any of it up, and save the effort and awkwardness altogether.
The door to Marcus’ room was wide open, and through the doorway he could see two legs attached to stirrups of some kind, and elevated into the air. On both of them were thick white plaster casts.
“Detective.”
“Not at the moment,” she replied with a smile.
“I heard. Unfair, if you ask me.”
“World’s unfair, Jack. How’d you get this post, anyway?”
“Asked for it.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Bastard put a cop in a coma, and another one will be lucky if he can ever breathe properly again. I wanted to be a part of making sure he never gets free.”
Dylan, already half a step into the room, backed out again. “Did you know?” he asked Sasha. She shook her head.
“Coma?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
The young policeman shrugged. “Who knows?”
“I’m sorry,” Dylan offered, and he stepped in into the room.
Marcus’ arms were in plaster casts, too, and half his chest was wrapped up in some kind of supportive elastic. He had bandaged wrapped around his head.
“Go away,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Are you having a sulk?” Dylan asked, and he motioned for Sasha to shut the door.
“We’ll call if we need you,” Sasha whispered through the gap before she shut it.
“What do you want, Dylan?”
“I want some answers.”
Marcus raised his eyebrows, and his lips curled into a mocking grin. “The cub wants to learn. Isn’t that cute.”
“Don’t deflect, and you can dispense with the tone. Look at you. Broken, beaten, and under twenty-four hour surveillance. They’ve got a camera in here, you know, an armed guard outside, and you’re restrained across your hips and chest. What are you going to do, Marcus? Shift? With all those broken bones?”
“Have you ever tried the shift with a broken bone, boy?”
Dylan blinked. “No.”
“Well, it’s quite painful, and quite useless, too. I know the situation I’m in. Either way, at some point in time, I’ll hunt you down, and I’ll kill you.”
Dylan pulled a chair up beside the bed, scraping the metal against the floor. “Why?” he asked, going back to pull another chair next to the first. He motioned for Sasha to sit down next to him, but she waved him off with a hand, instead choosing to stand at the foot of the bed.
“Why will you kill me?” Dylan pressed. “What am I to you?”
“Something unwanted,” Marcus said quietly.
“Will you stop being so vague, and just talk to him?” Sasha said, hands on her hips. “Are you capable of that? Or are you just insane?”
“I’m not insane, no. Though I know insanity when I see it.”
“Why?”
“My father is insane,” he said, smiling and lolling his head back on the pillow. “He did this to me.”
Dylan glanced at Sasha, confused. He mouthed her a silent ‘What?’ before returning his gaze to Marcus. “Did what to you?”
“Made me.”
“He is insane,” Sasha said, frustration obvious in her voice. “Come on.”
“Just wait,” Dylan urged, putting up a hand. “Made you? From what?”
“I don’t know.”
Dylan pursed his lips. “Then into what?”
“Like you.”
“A shapeshifter?”
“Yes,” Marcus breathed then, and Dylan saw that the huge man’s eyes were wet.
“From a normal human being?” Sasha cut in, stepping forward. Dylan looked at her, and saw that Marcus now had her interest.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Is your father still alive?” Dylan asked. “How long do we live for?”
“He is,” Marcus replied, ignoring the second question.
“Then where is he? Where can I find him?”
“He’s not what you think he is, boy… cub.” Marcus turned to look at Dylan, and the reverie seemed to disappear from his eyes. In those orbs Dylan saw a smoky fury return.
“If he turned you, has he turned others?” Sasha asked, snatching Marcus’ attention away from Dylan.
“No,” Marcus said. “Not to my knowledge, at least.”
“But can he?”
“I am not sure. He… lost something when he turned me. He lost a part of him.”
“What part?” Sasha demanded. Dylan noticed she had her hand wrapped around the plastic rail at the foot of the bed, and her knuckles were going white.
But Marcus didn’t answer, and Dylan watched the array of emotions play out on Sasha’s face. First irritation, annoyance, followed by a forced patience.
“Where is he?” she asked, and her eyes met Dylan’s.
“Yes,” Dylan murmured, lo
oking between the two. “Where is he?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I need to learn more about what I am,” Dylan said.
“You,” Marcus growled, “are an abomination. But I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to your… mate?”
“I’m police,” Sasha said. “Of course I want to know if he’s making more of you.”
“Ah,” Marcus sounded, his voice dry. He coughed, winced, and then smiled at Sasha. “I am the way that I am because he took advantage of me when I was just a young boy. No, it’s not what you think,” he added, in response to Sasha’s look. “All I mean is I trusted him, and he turned me against my will. I had no means of defense. I doubt he’s doing it to others in his current… state.”
“I’m sorry,” Sasha offered. “But I still need to know.”
“I don’t believe you, policewoman,” Marcus said. Dylan, still looking between the two, was beginning to realize why Sasha seemed so interested. But he ignored it for now. He’d return to it later, because for now, their goals were aligned.
“Tell me anyway,” Sasha urged.
“I see no reason why not,” Marcus said. “It will do you no good, though.”
“That’s fine.”
“He’s in Borneo, along the Indonesian border.”
Sasha frowned. “Where along the border?”
“He walks along it, up and down.”
“All the time?”
“Yes,” Marcus said with a wheezing chuckle. “He is quite strange.”
Sasha looked at Dylan, and so he urged her to continue. She was actually making headway. She nodded, and spoke.
“What’s his name?”
“Leon.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“What does he look like?”
“Oh,” Marcus murmured, mocking in his intonation. “You’ll know him when you see him. I’m bored now, and I’m not going to talk anymore. Take your filthy bear cub with you.”
Dylan got up, and left the room.
*
Sasha found him waiting outside the hospital, sweating in the sweltering heat. “Why did you leave so quickly?” she asked, pulling out her sunglasses and putting them on.
Dylan turned to face her. “What was that about?”
“Not here, Dylan. Let’s go get a cup of coffee, yeah? There’s a small place just across the road.”
Dylan nodded. He took her hand at first, but then wrapped an arm around her and squeezed her against him. “Thanks for getting all that stuff about Borneo out of him.”
“He wasn’t going to talk to you,” Sasha said. “You need to work on your interview technique.”
“Teach that at the academy, do they?”
“Yes, actually.”
Once seated, and with two iced coffees in front of them, hers a mocha, she studied him a bit, and could see that he was obviously failing to hide an uneasiness he felt.
“What is it, Dylan?” she asked.
“I want to know what all that was about. What you just did.”
“I was helping you,” she replied.
He smiled that easy smile. “That’s not all you were doing.”
“Fine,” Sasha said. She might as well come out with it. “I’m intrigued. That he was changed into a shapeshifter, rather than born one.”
“Oh?”
“Interested. It’s… piqued my curiosity.”
“That all?”
“No,” Sasha admitted. “This Leon guy, he made Marcus a shapeshifter, right?”
“That’s what the man said.”
“How, do you suppose?”
“I’m not an idiot, Sasha. I know where you’re going with this.”
“What’s wrong with where I’m going?”
“I never said there was anything wrong with it.”
Sasha unfolded her arms. “If it’s possible, then I wouldn’t mind… you know.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes. Why not, right?”
“You could turn out like him,” Dylan said, jerking out the window with his thumb.
“I won’t be like him.”
“You don’t even know if he was telling the truth.”
“I got a nose for that,” Sasha said. “I think he was.”
A silence settled between them, and they sipped on their coffees for a while. She stared out of the window, her mind racing. For a few days now she’d been thinking about it, about what it would be like to be a shapeshifter. She had never expected that it wasn’t something you were only born with, though, if Marcus was telling the truth.
What if it was a latent capacity inherent in all human beings? What if it just needed to be unlocked?
And why wouldn’t she be interested? She thought she might have sensed a kind of protectiveness or defensiveness about Dylan, but she also suspected that maybe she was being defensive, too. It was a bit crazy, for sure, but it’s not like she wasn’t a somewhat impulsive person. She knew that now that her mind was fixed upon it, she wasn’t going to shake it easily… or at all.
The idea was certainly seductive. To look the same age when she was eighty, or one hundred, or perhaps even more. Who knew how long they lived for? It was practically the equivalent of immortality relative to the typical human lifespan. The thought of how much she could do in that time, how much she could learn, could see… it was intensely intoxicating.
She knew that if she ever had an opportunity, she’d take it, and without any sort of hesitation.
“So what now?” she asked him, putting her hand on his and tickling the spaces in between his knuckles. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I still want answers about what I am. And now I know of one other shapeshifter out there. Marcus is crazy, and he won’t talk to me. So I guess it’s off to Borneo, and see if I can pry some answers out of this Leon guy. Hopefully, he’s more receptive, and not a murderous psycho.” He paused, before adding, “What about you?”
“I want to come with you.”
Dylan grinned at her. “So do I. But your reason is different now, isn’t it?”
“Come on,” she said, tilting her head to the side and raising her eyebrows. “Can’t a girl have two reasons?”
He nodded. “But can you come with me?”
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t supposed to stick around town or something during your suspension?”
“I didn’t read the fine print. I don’t really care right now, either.”
He laughed. “Fine,” he said. “Then you’re coming with me.”
“But first,” Sasha chirped, putting a finger up into the air. “We need to spend some time doing a bit of sightseeing. Relax for a bit. Have a holiday.”
“I can do that.”
“You know,” she said. “The beach! Sand… sun… and the sea.”
“Don’t you get enough sand and sun out here?”
“You know what I mean.”
Dylan got up then, and moved around to the seat beside her instead of opposite her. He pulled her against his body, and nuzzled his head by her ear, smelling her there, and then down her neck. He kissed her, his lips soft on her skin, from her collar bone to just behind her ear, eliciting a shiver from her.
“Aren’t you forgetting another s-word?” he asked.
Sasha leaned back against Dylan’s topless body, feeling the warmth of his skin burn into hers. She was cradled in between his legs that were stretched out around her, and his arms held her around her waist.
Before them, the scene was like that of a travel office’s poster in some metropolitan subway. A sky blazing blue, save for smudges and wisps of both thin and puffy clouds, and a sea with surf, white and frothy ridges on translucent green-blue waves, slapping the sand along the shore again and again and again.
“I’m so glad I did this,” Sasha said. Her voice was barely above a whisper, barely audible over the light breeze that carried on its arm the laughter of other tourists, a
nd the screams and shrieks of children playing. “Because I really, really needed this.”
“So am I,” Dylan said. He held her tighter, for just a moment, before loosening his grip, and letting his fingers dance upon her hips. He walked with two fingers an imaginary tightrope along the lip of her sarong, and then pushed a finger underneath both that, and the lip of her panties beneath.
“Don’t,” she whispered, pulling his hand out. She turned in his arms, planted a quick kiss on his lips, and pointed a finger at him. “Not here. Try and be good, okay?”
“I can’t help myself,” he said, grinning at her.
“You’ve already told me that.” Sasha turned back again to look out at the sea. The beach stretched for nearly equal distances to her left and her right, and along the entire beach were other people, mostly tourists.
“Yeah, but I really mean it.”
“Stop being such a sap,” she said, squeezing his thigh right above his knee, and making him jolt. She saw her finger and thumb had left a pale pink imprint on the big glob of the teardrop-shaped muscle that connected to his kneecap.
“Hmm,” she said, and she pinched his skin again, and moved his leg outward so that she could get a glimpse at the inside surface of his right thigh. “You’ve got a scar here.”
She felt Dylan lean over her, and her head was momentarily pushed forward so that her chin was nearly touching her chest before he leaned back.
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember that one.”
“What happened?”
“Scratched it climbing over a fence.”
Sasha laughed. “Really? That’s it?”
“Yup.”
“I thought it would be because of something more exciting.”
“Why?”
“Because… I guess it’s because you’re a shapeshifter. Now that I think about it, though, I don’t really know why that matters.”
“There is plenty of down-time in my life, Sasha. But living as long as I have… lots of opportunity for excitement, too. Not all of it good, like our run-in with Marcus.”
Sighing, Sasha looked up behind her at Dylan, and touched his face. His hand went to her armpit, and then he stroked the bit of flesh that joined her breast.