I can’t believe what happened. I can’t really believe what I did. It was Colton. Colton!
I took out one of his eyes!
His beautiful ice blue eyes! At least I think I did. He had his hand pressed up against his left eye and there was blood welling up under his hand.
I used my claws on him! I had to stay after school to feed the animals in the Advanced Biology classroom. The forest service keeps animals there because Mr. Miller works with them doing rescues. I volunteered to feed them on Friday nights so they would be okay until he went back in on Sunday morning.
When I was leaving, the lights in the school halls were off. I grabbed my homework from my locker and turned around and he was standing in the middle of the hallway! Colton was! He was just standing there and suddenly he looked so different than before. He seemed taller and… I don’t know. Thicker or something. Older maybe.
He started saying shit in some language that I don’t know. Was he speaking Russian? It could have been German. I suck at languages. What am I saying? I can’t believe I’m actually here writing this! I’m going to wake up any second now. Please!
Colton freaked me out, and I started backing off. But when I did that, he stopped talking and he looked surprised or confused. He looked angry. He started after me, walking fast, taking these long strides. His eyes looked even lighter than usual, like they were glowing!
Something about him right then scared the hell out of me. I started shifting. Just my teeth and my claws. I never let anyone see my claws! But holy shit, he’s seen it all now! In fact, he was right in front of me suddenly and I don’t even know how he got there. I didn’t see him move! He was just there, and his hands were on my arms and he was squeezing a little and… I freaked. I attacked him.
And the next thing I know, he’s stepping back and holding his face and there’s blood everywhere and I’m running. I ran home, grabbed my things, and then kept on running.
And now I’m here.
My hand is shaking so bad. I can’t stop thinking about how everyone else is in their homes, wondering about the clothes they’re going to wear tomorrow or what they’ll have for breakfast or stupid shit like weekend softball games or – I don’t know, just shit. Every day shit. But I can’t see past the next few seconds of my life now. Even thinking of any kind of future right now seems like a dream. I don’t have a future now. I have no idea where to go or what to do. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I have thirty-seven bucks.
If I couldn’t hunt, I would probably die.
I can’t go back to Aunt Faye and Theodore though. They’ve tried to protect me long enough. This will bring the world down on them. Maybe they’ll get sued or maybe – I don’t know. Maybe the news reporters will get ahold of them or the government.
I just can’t make them suffer any more.
May the gods help me.
Chapter One
(Early winter, 1992)
Sam flinched and yanked her hand down to look at the red that slowly seeped up where she’d chewed her nail past the quick. Again. Then she stuck her finger back into her mouth and sucked hard to stop the bleeding before she shoved both fists into the pockets of her zip-up hoodie. She blinked. For some reason, having drawn her own blood made the squirmy feeling inside her lessen a little, as if she’d bled the anxiety out along with her blood. She wondered at this as she looked back at the front of the building she’d been watching.
About a dozen feet away, the sliding doors of the grocery store opened and shut once more. This time, it was a family that exited the grocery store. A middle aged woman and two children, one boy, one girl. The boy looked to be about seven. The girl looked to be about thirteen or fourteen.
Close enough, thought Sam. She’d been waiting about an hour for just the right person to leave the grocery store. Now all she needed was for the mom to do the one thing Sam really needed her to do.
She watched in nervous silence within the shadowed cowl of her hoodie, now chewing on the thumbnail of her other hand. The woman turned to say something to her daughter, who made a discontented grunting sound and rolled her eyes. Come on, come on. Just do it, thought Sam.
A few seconds later, the girl huffed off ahead of them, storming in big, stomping steps toward one of the vehicles out in the parking lot. The mother pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache, and the boy beside her said something, but Sam couldn’t hear what it was. The mother smiled from behind her hand and then lowered her hand, chuckling softly. The boy laughed too, and the mom hugged him to her side with one arm.
With her other, she glanced down at the receipt in her hand, and then tossed it into the nearby trash bin. The lid swung back and forth as the woman walked away.
Bingo!
Sam waited until the two had walked out into the parking lot, leaving the storefront unoccupied and barely lit by the overhead lot lights. Then she moved to the garbage can and pulled the top off. Then she peered inside, looking for the tiny white slip of paper on top of the heap.
The store would be closed soon. She’d cut it close. But the darkness and lateness of the hour were both necessary components. She found the receipt she was looking for, grabbed it, and held it with a shaking grip as she turned back to face the store.
She waited another minute, counting the seconds down in her head – one-one-thousand, two-two-thousand – and then she walked into the store, the sliding doors parting for her like a red sea.
Once she was inside, she went directly to the aisle carrying the most expensive item on the receipt, and grabbed one. Then she went back to the front of the store and stopped to look around before heading to the nearest register. The chances that she was getting a register that the family who had just left hadn’t gone to were pretty good; there were five registers. So, one in five. Plus, she’d waited for just the right people to exit for a reason. If it was the same register, the checker wasn’t likely to remember exactly what the teenage daughter of the woman who’d paid had looked like.
“Excuse me,” she said, trying to behave the way she knew the woman’s daughter would have behaved – embarrassed and put-out. “My mom decided at the last minute that she didn’t want this, and she made me bring it back inside for a refund.”
She plopped the receipt onto the counter, and the bottle of wine right on top of it, then waited, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jacket so the checker couldn’t see them shaking. She made a point to look the checker in the eye. Don’t evade, she reminded herself.
Just give me the refund, she thought next, as if she could force the command into the checker’s young mind. He couldn’t have been much older than her, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, stick thin, and covered in acne. His nametag read “Chuck.”
Give me the goddamn refund, Chuck.
Chuck took a deep breath, glanced at his watch, and picked the wine bottle up off the receipt. “I just saw you in here with your mom, so I won’t require you to go and get her, even though normally we would since it’s alcohol.”
Sam held her breath. She had the sudden urge to look at her bleeding fingernail or even pick at it to make it worse.
Chuck pressed a button on the cash register and it dinged open noisily. He pulled out a ten, a five, two ones, and a bunch of change, then turned back to face her again. “That’ll be seventeen fifty-two in cash.” He held the money out and waited for her to take it.
Sam forced herself not to rush it. Don’t be so eager, she reminded herself. Act like it’s not your money, but your mom’s. She took the money and folded the bills and shoved it all into her pocket. “If I could just get you to sign the bottom of the receipt to acknowledge that you received the refund?”
Sam took the pen he offered, scribbled some nonsense on the bottom of the white slip of paper, and then handed both back to the checker. “Thank you,” she said casually and with a touch of impatience. Because that is how she imagined the real daughter would have done it.
“No problem. Have a good night,” s
aid the checker with absolutely no conviction. He even glanced at his watch as he said it, and the lights overhead flickered as someone turned half the store’s lighting off for the night.
Sam walked out of the grocery store with seventeen stolen dollars in her pocket as the same checker began to make closing announcements and the elevator music was silenced mid-note. When the glass doors slid shut behind her, she released the breath she’d been holding. But she wasn’t in the clear yet.
She took slow, even steps along the front of the store and turned the corner with determined calm. Once she’d made it around the side of the building and into the alley behind the grocery store, she ran a shaking hand over her face and leaned against a private fence. Her legs were weak and wobbly. Her stomach felt tied in strange, fluttering knots. And she knew this was only the beginning.
She was lucky she could obtain food in other ways so she could save the money she “earned” with refunds. Over the course of the months since she’d run away, she’d learned it was easy to stay fed if she begged for scraps as a dog, ate leftovers as a raven, or bought her way with cuteness into a bowl of milk as a kitten. She used a little money to buy cartons of clean water, toothpaste and a toothbrush, dental floss, and soap. She kept those on otherwise inaccessible rooftops, where she would fly as a bird then transform into a human. There, she would brush her teeth and take sponge baths before sleeping.
What money she didn’t spend, she kept in a pillowcase she’d purchased from Goodwill. She had plans for it. She had goals. As long as she kept those goals in sight and worked toward them, she managed to keep the panic attacks at bay. At first, she’d taken to carving long lean lines into her arm with her fingernails. But somewhere along the way, she’d experienced a personal victory. And now only those same fingernails suffered the repercussions of her actions as she chewed them to the quick.
“One hundred down,” she whispered there in that alleyway as the store employees got into their cars and drove away. “One hundred to go.”
Chapter Two
(Modern Day)
“Easy,” said the man dressed in black as he reached out tentatively to the wounded animal. “It’s going to be okay. Hear me. Hear my voice Jacob.”
“He’s been gone too long, Colt. He’s forgotten what he is!”
But the man in black ignored the men who made a wide circle around him and the injured horse. The animal pulled at his reigns, his eyes wide and terrified. He foamed at the mouth, stamping on its broken leg as if he couldn’t feel the pain through his fear.
Jack Colton waited until the horse’s latest fit passed and the animal settled a bit before he slowly circled the beast to stand before it. Then he released the reigns and took the horse’s head between his hands. The animal stilled, like music that had been turned down. The horse seemed to vibrate in place, an outward of calm with an undercurrent of insecure tension.
“Jacob,” said Jack softly. “You are not only this, and you are not alone.” His voice, calm and deep, rang out through the stillness like a spoken lullaby. “Remember what you are. You are a shifter. Remember that you trust me. You trust me enough to shift in front of me.” He lowered his head to the animal’s, their gazes drawing near and personal. “Do it now, Jacob, so that I can help you.”
The animal turned his head to the side, but his wide eye focused on Jack. He made a slight whining sound, the kind you would not expect to hear from a horse. Then he clamped his hoof down in one final stamp before he went still once more. This time, there was magic in his stillness. That magic hummed, as if a machine were whirring to life or an orchestra were tuning up before a show.
Jack slowly dropped his hands and stepped back, maintaining eye contact with the beast. The horse raised his head and his dapple-gray fur began to glow. At first, the fur gave the appearance of just having been brushed; it glossed and shined in the extreme. But the glow intensified, and before long, the horse looked as if he were lit from the inside by a fallen fragment of star.
Jack had seen it a million times. But it didn’t make it any less bright. He raised his hand before his face to shield his eyes just as the light went supernova, flashed, and then died.
He lowered his hand. A few feet away, a man knelt on the cement of the large storeroom, his head bent and his body hunched. He was shaking hard enough for it to be visible, and his dirty arms hugged his body as if he were in pain. Which he was.
Jack got down to one knee beside him. “Jacob, nice job,” he said, complimenting the shifter. On either side of him and behind him, he felt the other men moving in. He focused on the kneeling man. “You’ve done very well. Now look at me.”
Still shaking violently, Jacob Blackwater slowly looked up. His eyes were a pale gold in his tanned face, beautiful and stark. They also reflected oceans of pain. “You’re going to be okay, do you understand?” Jack said.
Blackwater hesitated, then nodded.
“Good. Now we’re going to get you fixed up.” Jack looked over his shoulder and nodded at the closest of his men, a shifter named Frank Wells. Wells was an avian shifter who was also a veterinarian. By night, an owl, by day the one and only ER vet for Hazelton, Pennsylvania. Right now, he waited at the ready with the healing salves he’d procured, and when Jack gave him the nod, he moved into begin working on Jacob’s torn leg.
His right tibia was a compound fracture of a mess. Hence, the first thing to do would be to tend to Blackwater’s pain, or no work would get done at all on the wound. He would fight them all to the death before passing out and bleeding to death. Already, there was a puddle beneath his kneeling form. Jack alone was responsible for the fact that the young shifter hadn’t yet attacked any of them.
“Hey Colt,” came a call that at once had Jack’s attention. He turned to glance over his other shoulder, where one of his men was nodding toward a third man at the outskirts several yards away. “Looks like The Cat needs you again.”
Liam Shaw gave him a silent nod. Shaw was also a shifter; every man in the storeroom that night was a shifter. Shaw, however, worked with the Shifter King, Darius Walker. He was always sent to find Colton when a more dangerous rescue was at hand. Darius Walker was “the Cat.” Of every non-mythical human-shifter combination possible, he was arguably the rarest. His shifter form was that of a snow leopard. And as far as anyone knew, he was the last of his kind. So they called him “the Cat,” and everyone knew who the name referred to.
Jack turned back to the other men. “Take it from here,” he said softly as he met Jacob’s eyes again. “You’ll be okay, Jake. You’re home now.”
Slowly, tentatively, Jacob nodded. Jack stepped out of the way. His men moved in, taking his space in record time. He watched them get to work on Blackwater’s injuries and then turned to face Liam. They moved into the far recesses of the warehouse together.
“Is he going to make it?” Liam asked.
Jack nodded. “He was captured in the wild in New Mexico and as usual, fell under the effects of the Stayme. When his leg broke, the humans who thought they were his owners were going to shoot him. We barely found out about him in time to get him out of there before the bullets started flying.”
Shaw eyed him for a moment, and Jack knew he was wondering what his team had done with the humans.
“We left them alone,” he said preemptively. “They’re all sleeping off a spell, in fact. After all, it isn’t their fault Jake fell under the Stayme. And in their bumbling human ways, they honestly believed they had no choice but to put Jake out of commission.”
The Stayme was quite simply short for “Staying the Same,” an effect that sometimes befell shifters when they were caught in their shifted forms by humans in the wild. Everyone had their theories as to why the Stayme existed, where it had come from, and why it was getting worse. Theorists claimed the Stayme had been created by nature to protect shifters from human detection. And now that there were more humans, the Stayme was stronger.
Once shifters had been under the effects of the Stayme fo
r long enough, they began to forget their humanity altogether. It took only a few short weeks for a shifter to lose the ability to recall his human form and shift back into it without help. The shifter then either died under the careless supervision of humans, or lived out his life as a seemingly ordinary non-human animal.
Thousands of shifters died while under the effects of the Stayme. They were euthanized as dogs or cats, sold into racing and then “put out of their misery” as horses, or killed for their fur by the fur industry. Sometimes they were murdered for sport and then mounted on the walls of homes belonging to rich bastards everywhere.
Getting a Staymed shifter out of the dreadful situation they had found themselves in was not easy. It took hunters of another kind to track them down and move in for a rescue.
Jack Colton was one such hunter. Darius Walker was another. They were few and far between, and their services were required at a relentless pace as more and more animals were threatened by an exponentially growing human population. At the moment, in fact, Walker was healing from an injury he’d sustained during their last hunt, one that had left him wounded in a way he’d never been before.
“Well, that’s good news,” said Shaw, looking at the ground as if gathering his thoughts before going on. He sounded tired. Now that Jack really looked at him, he noticed a darkness beneath the man’s eyes. Shaw took a deep breath and looked back up to meet Jack’s gaze. “Walker needs you to case a place in the Texas panhandle. Rumor has it one of our own is caught up in something nasty.”
Jack considered Texas and how very far it was from the last place he’d tracked Sam’s progress. He had things to do. He needed to play catch up. It seemed the closer he got to his quarry, the more the world wanted to put distance between them.
But when the king asked you to do something, you did it, or you risked attention you really didn’t want. “Very well,” he said. “But I’m not hanging around for the cleanup. I have business of my own elsewhere right now.”