“Karadel. Thank heavens,” she says, bending down to pick me up. In human shape, I don’t often seek out casual physical contact, but this particular body craves affection. I like how she cradles me against her thin chest; I respond with a low purr of contentment. She takes a moment to pet my head and scratch my chin, but Bonnie’s not one for lingering on niceties, especially when there’s work to be done.
“Let’s get you home,” she says, opening her car door.
I prepare to jump inside, but my claws catch on Bonnie’s arms to halt my forward motion when I realize there’s somebody in the passenger’s seat. Alonzo looks over with his usual deadly serious expression.
“Hey, Karadel,” he says.
I squirm in Bonnie’s grip, trying to get a look at her face, and attempt to express my opinion. What’s going on? It comes out, of course, as a musical burble. I could as easily be asking for dinner.
“I know, I know, he’s fourteen years old,” she says. She has known shape-shifters for most of her life and never seems ill at ease conversing with them in animal form. “But you know he knows how to drive. He can go on first in the Jeep and we’ll come along behind him. If he has any trouble, well, we’ll just pull over and leave the Jeep on the side of the road.”
Of course I know Alonzo can drive. I taught him myself—in my Jeep, as a matter of fact—but we stayed mostly on my property and were never this close to a well-traveled road. It’s true I’ve never seen cops on W, but they’re constantly patrolling 159, and that’s entirely too close. Bad enough that Alonzo’s too young to get a license; he’s also African-American, and most of the cops in this district are white.
When I try to get this point across to Bonnie, she just shrugs. “She’s worried that you can’t handle it,” she says to Alonzo.
He nods. “I’ll be careful. Keys in the car?”
“That would be my guess.”
He climbs out of the station wagon, unfolding his lanky body with care. He’s taller and skinnier than Bonnie, growing taller and skinnier every day, though I know she and Aurelia feed him enough calories to turn him into a linebacker. But it’s not just adolescent awkwardness that makes him move so stiffly. He was an abused child, a shape-shifter whose father feared and hated him, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know the extent of the damage done to him. Bonnie says his torso and limbs carry dozens of scars, though she hasn’t seen a physical reason for the precise way he moves and holds his body. But I’ve never seen him loosen up, even for a minute. Never seen him dance with abandon or run with joy. I don’t know if he can.
I give up trying to argue and make myself comfortable on the seat still warm from Alonzo’s body. It’s a matter of moments before Alonzo starts the Jeep and edges it past the station wagon and Bonnie takes off after him. In this shape, I can’t accurately judge speed or distance if I’m not moving under my own power, but it seems to me that we’re traveling pretty sedately. If we don’t, in fact, encounter any police, we are home free, because Alonzo is the most careful driver on the planet.
Bonnie talks for the duration of the trip. “I don’t know how long you won’t be human, but I thought I’d leave Alonzo with you for the next few days,” she says. “He can do the chores and feed the animals and call me if you need anything.” She glances over at me. “We’ve taken him out of school for the semester—thought we’d try homeschooling for a year and see if that goes any better,” she adds. “He does have a couple of friends, and they’ve been coming over in the evenings but the classes just weren’t—they weren’t—I don’t think Quinville Middle School is the right place for him.”
Bonnie and Aurelia have been taking care of Alonzo for the past two years, ever since Ryan rescued him and brought him to us. They’re the perfect foster parents. Bonnie’s a retired teacher and Aurelia’s a lawyer, and they’ve fostered kids off and on for the past ten years, so they both know the system. Oh, it might seem like a black kid from an urban neighborhood wouldn’t find the best home with two whiter-than-white lesbians in a rural setting, but I can say this for certain: When he came into our lives, he wouldn’t speak. He was afraid to touch anything. He only ate when no one else was looking. He slept on the floor for the first three months, seeming to believe that climbing into the bed made up in the room set aside for him would result in punishments too dire to describe. And now he eats and sleeps like a normal kid, and he answers direct questions, and once in a while he ducks his head and smiles.
And when he changes shapes into a deer or a badger or a coyote, no one chains him to a pole in the basement and beats him on the head with a metal pipe.
So, yeah. I think he’s where he belongs.
“I left a message with Ryan and actually spoke to Celeste before I found you,” Bonnie goes on. “Celeste says she can come out over the weekend, so maybe I’ll come get Alonzo then and she can take over.” She glances at me again. “Am I wrong, or is this not your usual time to shift?”
Mrrrr, I answer.
“Right. Well. You can tell me later,” she says. “But I’m under the impression that your cycles have been a little out of whack lately. And if that’s the case, you might start thinking about more permanent solutions to your situation.”
Right, I want to say in sarcastic echo. If I had the faintest idea how to come up with a permanent solution to “my situation,” I’d have implemented it long before now.
But I know she’s not referring to my random and unpredictable shifts into alternate shapes. She merely means that someone who’s caring for close to thirty animals on a remote property needs to display a certain level of responsibility—needs to make sure that if she’s not going to be available to put out food and clean out cages every single day, someone else will be around to do the necessary chores.
There’s a lot of irony here. I’ve always been the most responsible person I know. I have never shirked a task. I have never let my own dreams and desires interfere with the duties I knew I had to assume. I’ve never even allowed myself to entertain too many dreams and desires. Mine will be a short life, but a rich one, built around a guiding imperative: to care for a distinct group of wild and exotic creatures who have no one to defend them but me.
It is only on days like this, in shapes like this one, when the buried feral instincts briefly come to the fore, that the traitorous thoughts even have the power to rise to the surface of my mind.
What if? I think on days like this. What if I could just run away?
* * *
It’s still bright afternoon when we arrive at my property. Alonzo, with utmost care, turns from W onto the rutted gravel of my drive. The Jeep doesn’t even jounce along the track as it usually does under my impatient heel. All of us climb out, and Bonnie and Alonzo turn toward the barns and cages. There’s not much I can do to help them, so I just head for the porch of the rambling old farmhouse and hop up on the wooden bench set under the overhang. I sit there, tail curled around my front feet, and take a moment to glance over the property.
From this vantage point, I can only see part of the compound, which consists of about ten buildings clustered together in a relatively cleared and cultivated area, and another fifty acres of land that has been left entirely wild. The house, the barns, the toolshed, and a couple of trailers—housing for visiting shape-shifters—were already here when I arrived eight years ago. At the time, the place was a veterinary office run by a woman named Janet Kassebaum, who specialized in shape-shifters. I inherited her practice when she left. In the past five years, I’ve made some changes: adding corrals, fencing in dog runs, turning one of the barns into a sort of animal dorm. I needed to have places to keep all the creatures I was collecting, the injured birds, the lame dogs, the tortured cats. Sometimes I heal them and let them go. When they’re too badly hurt, I heal them and give them homes for life.
It takes Bonnie and Alonzo about an hour to feed and water the animals, and by then it’s coming on toward
sunset. Bonnie ushers Alonzo into the house to make sure I have human food supplies on hand as well, before she pushes back out through the door to tell me good-bye.
“He says he’ll be fine out here on his own for a couple of days, but I’ll call in the morning, of course, to make sure everything’s all right,” she tells me. “As soon as you’re human again, give me a call, and we can talk over a few things.”
I don’t answer, of course, and she sighs. “Known shape-shifters for more than forty years and I still forget that they can’t talk to me,” she says. She comes close enough to scratch the top of my head with her short, blunt fingernails. “Catch you later.” Five minutes later, she’s gone, her car lights sending a brief searching arc of illumination across the barns and trailers and clumps of grass as she makes a U-turn and drives away.
I hear Alonzo rummaging in the kitchen, then I catch the beep of the microwave. I wonder what he’s found in the freezer that appeals to him. I’m not a particularly inventive cook, but I like to make batches of chili and stew and soup and freeze them against the erratic onslaught of company. There are weeks at a time when I’m the only human for five miles. Then there are weeks when I have five or six other people staying on the property. I like to be prepared to feed them, at least till they’ve had a chance to lay in their own groceries.
The door creaks and Alonzo steps outside to join me on the bench. It’s chilly, but that never bothers Alonzo; he likes being outdoors in all kinds of weather. He’s balancing two plates and has stuck a can of soda under his left arm. One plate holds a steaming pile of chili con queso so thick it doesn’t need a bowl. The other features a small mound of canned tuna and a slowly melting scoop of vanilla ice cream.
The chili’s for Alonzo. The tuna and ice cream are for me. I don’t care much for fish when I’m in human form, but this shape loves it—and Alonzo, being Alonzo, remembered that.
Ice cream I love in about ninety out of a hundred of my incarnations.
The thoughtfulness makes me wish I could put my arms around Alonzo and give him a big hug, but instead I rise to my feet and prance around on the bench to show how excited I am about the prospect of a meal. He sits down, placing my plate on the bench where I can easily reach it and resting his own on his knees, then pops the top of his soda. We settle in to eat in companionable and satisfied silence. He must be as hungry as I am, because we’re done in about ten minutes, and—being Alonzo—he straightaway takes the dishes in to wash them.
When he comes back outside, he’s already got his iPod in his hand and his earbuds in place; unlike Bonnie, he’s not going to attempt to make conversation. But he sits next to me again, which for Alonzo is a striking overture of friendship, and he gives my head a cursory pat. I feel my mouth stretch in a huge feline yawn, exposing all my wickedly sharp teeth, and I lick the last trace of ice cream from my whiskers. I’m tired again, and I curl up in a ball beside Alonzo, close enough so my back rests against his thigh. He lays a gentle hand along my rib cage and I hear him laugh out loud when I begin to purr.
I think, for this short period of time, anyway, Alonzo is actually happy. All in all, the day that started so disastrously has brought with it its own extraordinary gifts. Not at all what I expected.
CHAPTER TWO
The next two days pass harmoniously enough, with Alonzo taking Bonnie’s phone calls every morning and evening, spending a couple of hours a day caring for the animals, and the rest of the time playing video games or reading. He’s not a natural reader, but Bonnie has insisted he finish a book a month and she’s told me he’s found a few authors that he actually admits to liking. Most of them appear to be horror and science fiction writers, both of which she regards with deep suspicion, but she’d never renege now. My guess is that he’d rather watch television or surf the Internet, but I get crappy reception out here and my selection of DVDs has never held much interest for him in the past. But he makes do. God knows he wouldn’t complain. And he still seems—if not actually happy—content. Which for Alonzo might be the best that it gets.
There’s obviously not much for me to do, but I spend part of each day prowling through the various animal shelters, making sure all is well. None of the avian species like it when I pace past their cages; the songbirds flutter and chirrup, and the birds of prey bridle and fidget. The hawk with the broken wing watches me with unnerving intensity, and I’m just as glad there’s a wire crate between us. I’ve never actually seen a hawk kill or carry off a cat, but I’ve been assured it’s possible, and this particular one looks like he’s ready to make the attempt, broken wing and all.
None of the birds react this strongly when the barn cats stalk through the aviary, eyeing them with longing and calculation. Maybe the birds know the cages keep them safe, but I really don’t think that’s it. I think they can tell there’s something different about me—something wrong—I’m a danger that they can’t identify, so they can’t assess it. I’m not quite cat and I’m not quite human. Not quite prey meat, not quite rival. Something to fear and revile.
It’s even worse in the kennels, where the dogs start barking as soon as I nose through the door. In fact, the three beagle puppies, eight weeks old by now, will not shut up the whole time I’m in the barn. Two of them whine and paw at the gate that holds them in their little enclosure; the third usually stands with his feet on the top of the fencing and barks without ceasing. The short, sharp, indignant sounds are designed to express outrage, raise the alarm, and let me know in no uncertain terms that he is not afraid of me. My plan is to give all three of them away, and soon, but I wouldn’t mind if this little guy found a permanent home with me. He’s got tons of personality and boundless energy, and he’s wriggled his way into my heart.
The only two dogs that never raise a ruckus while I’m visiting the kennels are Scottie, my ancient setter, and Daniel, who’s currently a Doberman but is human about half the time. Daniel spends most of his days lying on his side on a blanket in one of the unlocked enclosures, and he barely looks up whenever I pass. He’s not very social in either of his forms and he’s happiest when everyone leaves him alone. Scottie usually greets me with a faint whuff and comes over to inspect me. He touches my small nose with his big wet one, wagging his tail just enough to show he’s friendly. He was freaked out the first few times he encountered me in an alternate state, but over the past eight years, he’s gotten used to my transformations. Now it seems as if he recognizes me no matter what shape I’ve taken.
I can’t express how comforting I find that to be.
Most of the rest of the animals—the rabbits, the raccoon, even the turtle—don’t seem to notice or care when I stroll by. Either they’re less sensitive or more miserable; sometimes it’s hard to guess. In any case, they all appear to be in good shape, and I assume they will be fine under Alonzo’s careful attention.
I never know how much time I’ll spend in animal shape, but it’s usually not more than four or five days. So surely it won’t be long before I am myself again, before we can all go back to normal.
* * *
If I’ve remembered my calendar correctly, it’s Saturday morning when Celeste arrives, taking the turn onto the gravel driveway way too fast and coming to a halt with a noisy jerk. When she climbs out of the SUV, she’s loaded down with burdens—a laptop carrier, a suitcase, and a couple of bags of groceries. She looks like she’s run away from home or has arrived at the kind of summer camp where you need to feed yourself. At any rate, it’s clear she’s poised to stay for a while.
Alonzo has just let the dogs into their fenced corral, but the minute he locks the gate, he ambles over to greet her. He’s actually smiling; if he was capable of it, he’d be beaming. But his voice is reserved, even a little cool, when he says, “Hey, Celeste.”
“Zo! My man!” she exclaims, slinging her laptop bag farther back over her shoulder so she can free one arm to hug him. “So you drew the short straw, huh? You were the o
ne who had to come babysit Karadel and all her critters.”
“I don’t mind. I like it here.”
She looks around comprehensively, taking in the buildings (some of them a little weatherworn, I admit), the tangled acreage (prairie grass and a few scrubby trees), and the general air of isolation and solitude. She doesn’t have to say the words aloud to make it plain this is the last place she’d want to be stuck for any length of time.
If ever someone was made for a sophisticated urban environment, it’s Celeste. She’s got a thin model’s body, and she wears the most outrageous ensembles with the negligent ease of someone who knows she looks fabulous no matter what she has on. She doesn’t step out of the house without full makeup, brightly polished nails, and the perfect belt for her ensemble.
Plus, she’s gorgeous. Her astonishingly diverse racial heritage has bequeathed her an exquisite face—high-sloped cheekbones, tilted black eyes, full lips, and a smattering of freckles across her café au lait skin. Her dark hair has a tighter curl than Bonnie’s and she wears it longer, so when it’s not pulled back in a ponytail it makes a Medusa-like swirl of shadow around her face. The physical grace notes were gifts from a broad international ancestry. Although some of her antecedents are a little murky, she knows that she has at least one forebear who was Japanese, one who was Nigerian, one who was Scots-Irish, and one who was Sioux.
And one who was a shape-shifter. Can’t forget that.
She’s my best friend, but sometimes when I’m around her I feel gauche and dull and excruciatingly ordinary. My mother used to read me a bedtime story about Country Mouse and City Mouse, and I have long ago repeated it to Celeste. She’s the pampered, pretty city girl; I’m the dogged, homespun country girl. It doesn’t matter that, in the book, Country Mouse learns that there’s no point in envying someone else’s lifestyle. Everyone wants to be City Mouse. Everyone wants to be Celeste.