by Sharon Shinn
He hasn’t touched his beer, though he holds the bottle in his hand as carefully as if it’s a nuclear warhead. His face is pale and his eyes are haunted. This is a man who has just witnessed the end of the world as he knew it.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says in a low voice. He’s staring down at the bottle in his hand. “I can tell you what I saw, but I—I think it’s true, but I—”
“Tell me,” I say more gently.
“My buddies and I had split up. None of us had hit anything in the morning, so we took a break for a few hours in the afternoon, then they went off together and I went a different way. I’d found a good spot, and I’d been in place for a while, just waiting, when I saw the deer come through. Four of them—buck, doe, a couple younger ones. I had sighted on the buck when one of the other ones kind of leapt forward. Right in the way of my arrow. My first thought was, Damn, ruined my shot. I knew I’d only wounded him, knew I’d have to track after him to kill him clean. And then—and then—”
He lifts his eyes and stares at me. “He started flailing. Thrashing around. And he fell to the ground and he—he was a deer but then he—he was a person. He was a child. I saw a deer change into a human being, and it was Alonzo.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He does that.”
He holds the stare for another long minute. “So it’s true,” he says at last.
“It’s true.”
“There are really people who can turn into animals.”
“Hundreds,” I say. “Maybe thousands.”
“Your friend—the one at the bar—who turned into a mountain lion. She really did that.”
“A bobcat actually, but yeah. She really did.”
“So is that what—does it happen when they’re in danger? Suddenly they find themselves transforming?”
I shake my head. “It’s different for every one of them. Celeste can actually choose when to shift between states, though I wouldn’t have said she picked a good time that night with Bobby Foucault. Alonzo’s on a sort of unpredictable schedule, which is often what happens with teenagers. He’ll be human for a few weeks, then animal for a few days. Different kinds of animals. I haven’t seen him be a deer before.”
“Why did he become human when I—when I shot him?”
“I can only guess. Most shape-shifters I know die in their human state. If they’re dealt a mortal blow while they’re in animal shape, their bodies transform during their last moments of life. I think Alonzo’s body didn’t know how desperate the wound was, so it automatically began the transformation.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Joe whispers.
“I know. He knows.”
“When I saw it—when I saw him—when I knew what I had done—”
“Terrifying. Horrifying. I know.”
“All I could think of was I had to get him here. To you.”
“I’m glad you were so close. I’m glad I wasn’t in Quinville.”
He focuses on me again. “At first I wasn’t sure if you knew. About him.”
I take another swallow of my beer, but my throat is tight. I know what’s coming next. I nod.
“But then I remembered your friend. Celeste. And I was pretty sure you knew about her.”
“That’s right.”
“So I figured you knew about Alonzo. And then I thought—”
I wait.
“Your migraines,” he goes on in a thread of a voice. “What if that’s not what they really are?”
I want to lie. I want to reassure him that I’m normal, a little sickly, maybe, but perfectly human. I’m not a strange, fantastical creature whose hybrid body appears on ancient temple walls as the manifestation of evil. But the secret’s already out in the fresh air and bright sunshine. Like a ghost, it can’t survive long without the dark.
“I don’t really have migraines,” I say quietly. “I’m a shape-shifter, too.”
For a moment, he doesn’t move or speak. Then he lifts the beer bottle to his mouth and swallows down most of the contents without pausing for breath. The whole time he doesn’t take his eyes off my face.
Then he sets the beer on the table, pulls out a chair, and drops down, gesturing for me to take a seat as well. I warily comply, though I’m tense as hell. Waiting for what he’ll say next.
It’s simple. “Damn. Tell me about it.”
* * *
There’s not that much to my story, after all. “I was born to a couple of shape-shifters who lived up in Chicago. My own transformations were so erratic that I couldn’t be in public much. My mom died when I was young, but my dad moved heaven and earth to find someplace where I could live in safety.” I glance around the kitchen, but I’m really indicating the whole property. “He met Janet, who was studying to be a vet. She was human, but she was in love with Cooper, who was a shape-shifter, and he needed a safe place, too. So my dad and some friends bought this place and set Janet up in her practice, and I came to live here.”
“How’d you get the schooling you needed to be a vet?”
I smile. “I didn’t. I learned everything from Janet. I’m not licensed. I’m not legal. I live in terror that Sheriff Wilkerson will find out and shut me down.” I rub a hand across my forehead. “Well, it’s just one of the many things I live in terror of.”
He’s gone to the fridge to get another beer for each of us, and he unscrews the cap before handing mine to me. “What else?”
I exhale a breath that’s almost a laugh. “That someday I’ll be out in public and I’ll need to change and I won’t be able to get to a safe spot. That some crazy fear-mongering bastard will find out I’m a shape-shifter—or that my friends are—and start hunting us the way you were hunting deer. That something will happen to Alonzo or Celeste or”—I manage to stop myself before outing Ryan—“or any of the others.” I glance at him. “That you’ll find out. And you’ll hate me.”
He shakes his head. “That won’t happen. I won’t hate you. But I’m still trying to get my mind around it.”
“A process that might take you a while,” I say.
He settles back in his chair and takes a meditative sip of his second beer. “So Bonnie and Aurelia. Are they shape-shifters?”
“No.”
“But they know about you—Alonzo—all of you?”
“Yeah. There are always some—some—normal people who know about us. Usually they’re family members or lovers or people who just somehow find out. Well, most shifters I know try very hard to keep the secret, because they’re all afraid. They know that once the world starts asking questions, life could get very dicey.”
“Seems pretty dicey anyway. I mean—” He gestures toward the door, in the direction of the woodland some miles away where the hunting accident occurred. “If you’re running around as an animal half the time, people could kill you. Like I almost killed Alonzo. I mean, anything could happen.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about every possible terrible scenario,” I say ruefully. “Each one scarier than the last.” I produce the barest laugh. “I suppose the only good thing is that I won’t have that long to be afraid.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I’m already sorry I said it, so I try to speak lightly. “Oh, you know. It’s a hard life, and lots of shape-shifters don’t live that long.”
Now his attention, which has been pretty diffuse as he tries to chase down all his chaotic thoughts, suddenly concentrates on me. “What’s that mean? You don’t live long?”
I just say it straight out. “Every shape-shifter I’ve known has died before turning fifty. Some a lot sooner. Cooper wasn’t even forty. A girl Janet was treating a few years ago—I think she was twenty-two. They didn’t come down with diseases—we don’t seem to get cancer or diabetes or pneumonia. Our bodies give out on us. We die of old age when we’re young.”
Hi
s eyes still fixed on mine, he frowns. “That’s terrible. I hate to hear that.”
I manage a light shrug. “Lot of ordinary people die young, too. Children. Babies. Young mothers with everything to live for. Newlyweds. None of us is guaranteed a long life. I try to remember that. I try to make peace with that—with all of it.”
He leans back in his chair. Still watching me. “That sounds like you don’t much like being what you are.”
“I hate it!” I burst out. “I hate being different and strange. I hate the fact that my body is completely out of my control, that these transformations will take me over whenever they want to, and I can’t guess when and I can’t stop them. I hate living in fear. I hate lying to everyone I know. I want to be normal and ordinary.”
“Nobody’s normal,” he answers, “and you’d never be ordinary.”
My smile is bitter. “I’d like to give it a try.”
Something occurs to him; he sets the beer down and leans forward. “So you resent all the time you spend in animal shape,” he says.
“I do.”
“But maybe you’re thinking about it the wrong way. What if you were born to be an animal? What if that was your natural state? And all the time you’re human—that’s the special time? That’s the gift?”
I stare at him, because this has literally never occurred to me. “I would—I don’t—that doesn’t make sense.”
He leans back again. He’s almost smiling. “It makes as much sense as the rest of it does.”
But I’m not ready for paradigm shifts. I rub my head and feel, suddenly, exhausted. Not for the first time, my day has gone far from the way I planned.
My gesture concerns him. “Are you getting a headache? Are you about to shift shapes?”
I look up. “What? No—no. I’m fine.”
“How does it work? When you change?” he asks. “What does it feel like?”
I stare at him. “It feels—there’s a lot of pain. I actually do get headaches, horrible ones. I’m sick to my stomach. I feel like all my bones are stretching or squeezing down. It’s like—have you ever seen pictures of those contortionists who can fold their bodies down so they fit into a tiny box? That’s what it feels like is happening to me.” I spread my hands. “Then suddenly I’m something else and I feel fine.”
“What something else? What animal?”
“A lot of different ones. I’ve been almost everything over the years. Dogs, cats, deer, raccoons, monkeys, birds—everything.” I sip my beer. “Lately I’ve been trying to control it a little. I’ve been taking injections. Making a serum from the DNA of other shape-shifters, trying to replicate their patterns. Trying to see if I can mimic their timing or mimic their shapes.”
“Wow. I’m impressed. Is it working?”
“I thought so. The past few times I changed, I was the same animal—an orange tabby. But this week I was a dog, so I don’t know.”
It takes me a moment to realize why he suddenly looks so startled. “An orange cat?”
“Yeah.”
“The one at Bonnie and Aurelia’s house?”
I’m surprised into a laugh. “Uh. Yeah. That one.”
“Aurelia was trying to convince me to take you home!”
“Nah. She was trying to piss me off. Which she managed to do. Aurelia—she likes to see what people will do or say under stress. It intrigues her. Don’t be mad at her.”
But he’s wearing a look of unholy amusement. “It’s pretty funny, though, when you think about it. Kind of like, if you could turn invisible, you could be in the room with other people and hear what they were saying about you.”
“Trust me. It’s not as much fun as that.”
“Well, I don’t think the whole thing is as awful as you seem to.”
“That’s because it’s not happening to you.”
But he’s right. Once he made it past his initial shock, Joe has been remarkably at ease with my astonishing tale. Maybe because I didn’t have to first battle his disbelief—he’d already found out in the most dramatic fashion possible that shape-shifters really do exist. Now he just has to figure out how they fit into his worldview.
I tilt my head to one side to consider him. “You’re taking this so well,” I say. “Why aren’t you more freaked out?”
He rubs a thumb along the corner of his mouth, mulling it over. “I’ve been thinking about it, I guess,” he says. “Ever since the night your friend Celeste made such a scene. You and I talked about what it would be like. It’s not like, boom, one day I shoot an arrow into a deer and it suddenly becomes a person and it’s never occurred to me such a thing could happen so I think I’m hallucinating. It’s like”—he squinches up his face—“when you do a crossword puzzle and one of the answers is a word you’ve never heard before, so you look it up. And then the next day, you hear it on the radio, so you already know what it means.”
I’m laughing. “It’s way weirder than that.”
He grins. “Well, it is,” he admits. “But it’s along those lines.”
I shake my head and pick at the beer label with my thumb and don’t look at him. “So—now that you know—you still want to hang out with me?”
“Hell, yeah!” he exclaims. “This makes you the coolest girlfriend ever.”
I grin briefly. “It doesn’t make you think—I don’t know—I’m kind of creepy?”
“No,” he says positively. “It makes me worry about you more—and I was a little worried, anyway, thinking about you living out here all on your own, so far away from town. Now I know why you’re out here, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. Anything could happen to you when you’re in another shape. I don’t like that at all.”
“I have a network,” I tell him. “I usually have time to call or text someone right before I shift, and a lot of times Alonzo or Celeste will come out when I’m in another shape. And there are a couple of other people I can call on when I need someone to take care of the animals.”
“It’s not the animals I’m worried about,” he retorts. “It’s you.”
I toss my head in a sassy-independent-woman way, but to tell the truth, it gives me a warm glow to think he’s fretting about me. When’s the last time that happened? “I’ve made it this long,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
He lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug. “Maybe—next time you’re about to change you could call me? And I could come and help out?”
I stare at him. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“It might be too strange.”
“For you or for me?”
“Both of us.”
He puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. “So what’s it like for you in animal shape? Are you still you? Do you feel the same? Remember everything?”
“Yes and no. I remember who I am and where I am and who people are and all of that, but it feels distant. Not always very important. I’m always thinking about more immediate things—what I’ll eat, where I’ll be safe. My senses are different. I pay attention to different things. I’m easily distracted.”
I gesture, trying to explain. “But I can still think through a problem the way an animal wouldn’t. For instance, if I’d been a deer out in the woods this afternoon, and I’d realized there were hunters nearby, I’d have found someplace to wait out the day. I’d have kept away from the usual trails or water spots. Actually, I’d probably have come back here where I knew I’d be safe, and no real deer would do that. So I’m a crossbreed, basically.”
“Huh,” he says. “So why would it bother you to have me around?”
“Because you’d be looking at me, wondering what I was thinking! Because either you’d pet me on the head like I really was a cat or a dog, or you’d try to talk to me like I was a person. Because I usually transform back to human state when I’m sleeping, and I wake up naked.”
“Now, that I wouldn’t mind seeing,” he says with a grin.
“Because I don’t know you well enough,” I add. “It’s too personal. Shifting.”
He eyes me for a while, weighing his response. “Someday you might know me well enough, though, don’t you think? You might not mind getting—personal.”
“It’s more intimate than sex,” I tell him bluntly.
But he’s already gotten my drift and isn’t about to be rocked off balance now. “Baby steps,” he says affably. “We’ll have sex first.”
I laugh and I blush and I jump to my feet, all at the same time, just because I’m too wired to sit there. “I’m going to check on Alonzo,” I tell him. “Stay here.”
Upstairs, I find Alonzo still in the grip of sedatives; his body is lax, his face inexpressive. Once again, just to have an excuse to touch him, I check his skin for fever, but nothing registers but his usual warm temperature. I make sure the blanket is pulled up to his chin before I leave the room and head back downstairs.
The minute I rejoin Joe in the kitchen, my cell phone rings. “It’s Bonnie,” I say.
“She’s going to flay my skin off.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I reply as I accept the call. “Hey, Bonnie.”
“Good afternoon, Karadel,” she says in her formal way. “We were at the movies with our phones turned off. What’s wrong?”
“Listen, Alonzo’s going to be fine, but there’s been an accident.”
There’s a two-second delay before she responds, and then her voice sounds slightly more distant. I’m pretty sure she’s put me on speakerphone so Aurelia can hear. They’re probably still in the car, heading back from the theater. Great. Bonnie will skin Joe, and Aurelia will grind down his bones.
“What kind of accident?” Bonnie says, sounding calm.
“He was hit by a hunter’s arrow.”
“Fuck. Is he all right?” Aurelia’s voice.
“It went through his shoulder, didn’t hit anything vital. He’s here, I’ve got him sedated, and I’m not sure there’s much you can do for him right now.”