Feral Nights

  No way am I defiling anyone’s dead body.

  “Well, go on,” she says. “What are you waiting for?”

  It’s a good question. Taking a breath, I haul off and slug her in the face.

  I had no idea it hurt so much to punch someone. I’m shaking out my hand as she falls and hits the back of her head. While she’s dazed, I work as fast as I can with bruising fingers and use the canopy drape to secure her to an upright pole.

  Paxton has vanished from view, and it turns out that only the closest guard-intern has been eliminated. I’m forced to mosey at an unsuspicious speed past the rest, back toward the lodge.

  Fortunately, shifters have excellent hearing. As I pass Clyde and the Lion, I call, “Sit tight. I’ll return for you both as soon as I can.”

  “Aimee!” Clyde replies. “Don’t just leave me here.”

  I have to. Any second could be Yoshi’s last. “I’ll be back. Trust me.”

  What’s more, Clyde can barely walk and he’s practically worthless to the snowmen. If he becomes a problem, the interns will shoot him without a second thought.

  Silently praying for Yoshi, I barrel into the empty lodge kitchen, pull out a leftover bowl of yak-potato stew, and pop it into the microwave. It’s thick, hearty.

  Hopefully, Frore won’t taste the sedative.

  I’m arranging sesame-seed crackers on a plate when Cameron rolls in. “That slutty vampire couple ripped through the housekeeping interns.” He puts his hands on his hips. “The second-floor maid’s entrails are hanging from a curtain rod in the sunroom.”

  “All the interns?” I exclaim, wondering if that’s what Sandra had meant when she said she’d take care of “room service” for the clients. “They couldn’t need that much blood in such a short time.” Of course vamps don’t redecorate with human organs because they need sustenance. They must’ve gotten antsy waiting for the hunt to begin.

  It’s the sort of thing that happens when you deprive the undead of Internet access.

  Cameron taps his foot. “You, me, Sandra, and the drones standing guard are all that’s left, and that, Cinderella, makes you priceless as far as I’m concerned. Someone’s got to sweep the floors, change the linens, and scrub the toilets. Rumor has it that the deific’s bowel movements are epically craptastic, if you get my meaning.”

  As the microwave beeps, I grimace at the thought. “Sandra asked me to run some stew to Frore in the security room.”

  Cameron takes out the bowl and sets it on the kitchen island. “Weird. She normally does that herself,” he says. “It gives her an opportunity to kiss hairy ass.”

  I hope he’s speaking metaphorically. “Oh, um . . . she’s busy —”

  “Uh-huh.” Cameron rests his bony elbows on the counter. “Sweetie pie, I’m a demon. I can smell deception a continent away. How ’bout letting old Uncle Cameron in on the fun? Come on, spill it. What’re you up to?”

  Busted. He may be attracted to chaos for its own sake, but that’ll only help so much. Evil is selfish. There has to be something in it for him. I risk marching to the silverware drawer for a spoon and slip the sedative out from my bra. Then I artfully position the bowl in the middle of the circle of crackers on the square plate and stir in the sedative. “I’m going to make you a deal.”

  Cameron claps his hands. “How intriguing! You do know of course that making deals with a devil, even a minor one like me, is considered the exclusive territory of the criminally stupid, pathetically desperate, and utterly doomed.”

  Whatever. Reaching for a tray, I say, “I need a distraction, a big one, and if you can pull that off for me, I’ll help you fulfill your dream of working as a fry cook in hell.”

  He tilts his head. “Why should I believe that you can do such a thing?”

  “Where I come from, we have this little thing called faith.”

  “SMOKE.” In the thin moonlight, Noelle’s hair turns golden. “It smells like burning wood, and a lot of it. We can’t stay here, caged like this.”

  She’s right. From what Paxton told Yoshi, Aimee is going to try to lower the high-frequency barrier (Possums have good ears, too). If she succeeds, we may have serious reinforcements in the form of the other shifters. Assuming they’re not all dead. I’m still barely getting around. Noelle’s limping. We could use that kind of muscle.

  Thank God Aimee’s okay — she looks okay, anyway, at least from a distance.

  I can’t freaking believe she blew me off like that. I know she has someplace to be, but would she have cruised by Yoshi without stopping for a cupcake kiss? I doubt it.

  “What are you doing?” Noelle asks. “What happened to your hammock?”

  “Fishing,” I reply. People always forget that shifters like Possums have teeth and claws, too. I’ve detached one of the big metal hooks used to hang my hammock, cut loose a long cord, and freed it from the woven swing. From there, I tie the rope to the hook.

  As Noelle looks on, I cross to the corner where Travis said my crutch rested on the cage ceiling. I stick my arms out between the bars, wind up the rope, and yank it up and backward. The hook clangs on the top and falls back empty. I try it again, again, another twenty-two times, until Noelle says, “This is all very entertaining, but —”

  I shush her. “I’m concentrating.” The last time, the clang of metal on metal sounded a little different than it had all the times before.

  Praying for a lucky break, I try once more, adjusting for the angle, and I feel the hook catch. I pull gently, slowly, until the crutch topples off the side and into my hand.

  Within seconds, I blast through the bars. Then I half climb, half fall out onto the ground. “Stand clear,” I say, and free Noelle the same way.

  She leaps out, landing on her good foot, and scans the cliff. “Where did they go?”

  That’s strange. The two guards we can normally see from here are gone.

  As I try to make sense of it, my nose itches. Vision blurs. Gut contracts.

  The threat of fire, taste of freedom, curves of Noelle’s butt — it’s too much.

  I’m losing control, shifting whether I want to or not.

  “You okay?” she asks, reaching to steady me. “With your injuries . . .”

  It’s like her hand is on fire.

  “Don’t touch me,” I grit out. I falter to my knees, whimpering in agony. What will she think of my bald tail? My beady eyes?

  “Grow up.” Noelle rips off my shirt. She breaks my jeans zipper, and tugs them off, too, ignoring my candy-cane boxers and the way that they’ve tented from her touch.

  During our time in captivity, I’ve fantasized once or five times about her tearing my clothes off, but there’s nothing sexual in this, at least not on her end.

  It’s practical. She’s only trying to prevent my changing form from becoming tangled, possibly further injured, in the material.

  Wracked with pain, my joints grinding, I wave her off. “The sound barrier should be down soon, if it’s not already. Aimee will be here any minute, looking for us.”

  Noelle heard the whispered exchange between Yoshi and Paxton, too.

  I point. “Wait for her between those trees. I don’t want you to see me like this.”

  “Like what?” Noelle takes a few halting steps backward. “Clyde . . .”

  “Go,” I say. “G —” It’s the worst, the most excruciating transformation I’ve ever experienced. The damage to my body must be too severe to respond naturally.

  My heart thunders. My scalp prickles. My rib cage threatens to bust out of the skin.

  As best I can, I take inventory. Whiskers? Check. Claws, yes, but they’re enormous, and where did all this muscle come from?

  My head weighs a ton. My legs — long legs? — can barely support me.

  What happened to the satisfying, familiar release of my thin, naked tail?

  I shut my eyes and risk inhaling, expecting my signature scent, like rotten eggs. This time, I smell blood and mud and water and sex. Or at least what I’v
e imagined sex smells like. Noelle’s scent, not mine, except . . .

  The pain fades from pounding to throbbing to a faint ache. Then, as if wiped clean by the breeze, it’s gone. I haven’t felt this healthy and whole since before Michigan.

  Did I die? Am I a ghost now like Travis?

  Is that why the pain has disappeared?

  I dare to open one eye, then another, staring at enormous golden-brown paws.

  My enormous golden-brown paws? I curl one, retract and extend the claw.

  I force myself up, first anchoring my shaking front legs, then my back.

  I can’t get over how I’m not sore anymore. Not at all. Not from the shift or my prior injuries. Changing form so drastically must’ve forced my whole system to reboot. Realign. Heal. Revealing, oh God, a part of me that I never knew existed.

  The shock of it mostly retracts my shift, sparing only the body fur and whatever’s left of my human face.

  “Clyde?” Noelle covers her mouth. “Clyde!” She claps her hands, marveling at the change. “In human form, you smelled like a Possum.” She begins laughing, a little hysterically. “You’re a Wild Card shifter, part Lion. You’re a Lion like me!”

  “I’m more surprised than you are,” I say, for the first time feeling the full weight of my proud and enormous golden mane.

  ONCE THE HORN BLARES, my instincts urge me to flee. But Luis warned us not to expect garden-variety hunters. With the supernatural in play, there’s nowhere on this island where we can’t be found, and we’re too far from any other landmass to swim for it.

  Fine. As a Cat from landlocked Kansas, I’m not a fan of large water, anyway.

  We have speed, strength, teeth, and claws, but they’ll expect all that. It’s our cunning that makes us unpredictable, a challenge worthy of bragging rights.

  In the near darkness, I hear Luis’s rumbling voice from another tree, a lower branch. “Our predecessors defaulted too much to their inner animals. We won’t make that same mistake. But, as we all know, the fight-or-flight instinct is a huge shift trigger. If transforming looks like your best bet — or you can’t stop it — trust in that.”

  He adds, “Just remember: the hunters have come for animal-form trophies. If you can avoid changing, they may not even bother firing at you, except in self-defense.”

  I hold my ground, or at least the tree trunk, waiting.

  With their Wolf ears, I’m sure Mei and James caught all that. But they have taken point outside the ring of traps surrounding our campsite.

  Each four-foot-deep pit is camouflaged with greenery and armed with twenty upright, three-foot-tall bamboo stakes, sharpened to vicious points.

  “Do you see anything?” Teghan whispers.

  “Not yet.” Since her failed attempt to entice me with her middle-school wiles, she’s defaulted to a sort of kid-sister mode. I don’t mind. Someone’s got to look out for her. The Bears are both good-natured guys, but I can see where their girth might intimidate her, and the newlyweds tend to keep to themselves.

  “Breathe,” I reply. “Use your ears, your nose.”

  “Are you scared?” Teghan adds. “You don’t seem scared.”

  I’ve never been more tempted to fully shift. On the upside, Cats have the largest eyes of any carnivorous werepeople on land, and I’ve embraced my inner animal just enough to capitalize on that advantage. “Growing up, my grams used to shoot at me for fun.” That’s an exaggeration, but she is a gun-happy crone. “If bullets start flying, duck.”

  Teghan nods like it’s the most original advice she’s ever heard.

  We sift through the noises. Mosquitoes. Monkeys. Frogs. Hogs. Rustling leaves. Wind. A bird flying overhead reminds me of Toucan Sam.

  Finally, I hear footsteps, bickering, a blade slicing vegetation again and again.

  “I don’t see why you needed to act so chummy with them,” a man remarks. “Where’s your spirit of competition?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I need someone new to talk to?” a female voice replies. “We’re always with the same boring people doing the same boring things.”

  “Really?” he exclaims. “You always stalk shape-changers in the jungle?”

  “You’re so mean to me. I don’t know how I’ve stayed married to you.”

  Teghan whispers, “They’re cocky, coming straight for us.”

  “They’re armed,” I reply. “Murder doesn’t bother them. It’s why they’re here.”

  I resume listening. The husband had apparently caught his wife fooling around in the shower with one, no, both of the other hunters. The only other hunters.

  So there are four altogether, just like Luis said to expect.

  Killing them if it meant escape sounded easier before they became people to me. Even people I already don’t like.

  The middle-aged couple wanders into view. They’re wearing night-vision goggles. He has a rifle slung over one shoulder, and she’s carrying something in her palm.

  A few more steps and we’ll have skewered them before they can get a shot off.

  I can let this happen. I have to. I have my new friends, a kid included, to think about. Besides, Aimee needs me. She never would’ve gotten caught up in this mess if she weren’t such a fine person, if she hadn’t cared enough to follow me that night to the parking garage.

  “Something’s wrong,” the woman announces. “The arrow hasn’t wavered.”

  Did they enchant that trinket to track us? If so, what else can they do?

  “When we started out, it made sense that the compass directed us into the heart of the jungle,” the wife adds. “Now it should be swinging back and forth, pausing to indicate individual creatures . . . unless they’re all straight ahead, waiting to ambush us.”

  She unlatches a leather pouch attached to her belt, grabs a fistful of I’m-not-sure-what and tosses it into the air, muttering in . . . Latin, I think.

  Trails of glossy-looking white smoke emerge from her palm, coil, and dance.

  They hover, then spread like filmy blankets over all our traps.

  I hear Teghan swallow hard as the couple gingerly approaches the border of the closest pit. The husband bends to scoop up a hefty stone and tosses it in.

  It crashes through the vines and fern leaves to collide with bamboo.

  As the white smoke dissipates, the husband peers in and then scans the treetops. Teghan flattens herself tighter against her branch. I instinctively do the same, angling as much of my body as possible behind the trunk.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” the man calls, reaching for his rifle. “All of you.” He aims upward and says to his wife, “I’ll flush them out.”

  He begins shooting, hoping to get lucky. Hoping we’ll panic and show ourselves.

  A bullet whizzes between me and Teghan, but we don’t flinch.

  Suddenly the wife charges the shooter from behind.

  With outstretched hands, she shoves him into the pit.

  The barrel of his gun jerks up as he squeezes off one last round.

  His scream is short. Punctual.

  I didn’t see that coming.

  “I know you’re watching,” the wife — widow — yells, walking slowly backward the way she came. “I won’t try to kill you if you don’t try to kill me. I didn’t want to come on this stupid hunt in the first place.” Retreating, she adds, mostly to herself, “I wanted to hit the menswear fashion shows in Milan and Paris. Maybe buy myself a male supermodel. Now, that would’ve been a fitting twentieth-anniversary gift.”

  No one moves or breathes until she’s well out of human hearing range.

  “Luis said the hunters were monsters,” Teghan whispers. “Dead inside.”

  “Not all monsters are supernatural,” I reply.

  NOELLE BURIES her long, tapered fingers in my hair. “How did you not know?”

  That’s when it clicks — my parents’ separation, how Mom’s first pregnancy brought them back together. Dad isn’t my biological father. Some Lion is.

  D
oes Dad even know? Why didn’t Mom tell me?

  I’ll have to worry about it later, if there is a later.

  I turn toward the jungle. “I have to find Yoshi.”

  Noelle holds me back. “I thought you didn’t like Yoshi.”

  “He’s not the only wereperson out there.”

  “Clyde!” she exclaims. “You’re a male werelion. Every hunter’s dream trophy!”

  I move to embrace her. “Then I should be able to distract them if —”

  She kisses me. It’s one of those deep, wet, teeth-and-tongue kisses. My first real kiss from a girl. It should suck or be awkward, but not even.

  Noelle hooks a long leg around my waist, and as I grip her hips in greedy hands, she wraps herself tight around me with the other. If not for her drawstring pants, we would’ve gone from zero to paradise by now. It’s perfect, except . . .

  Breaking away, I ask, “If I were only a Possum, would you be doing this?”

  “What are you talking about, ‘only a Possum’? What kind of nonsense is that?” Noelle disengages her body from mine. “In point of fact, I started thinking you had real potential when you were telling me about Clint, Claudette, Clara, and Clement. I love babies. I love men who love babies.”

  “Not ‘Clement,’” I reply. “Cleatus.”

  Noelle chuckles. “Cleatus. My, what a burden to put on that poor child!”

  “Like ‘Clement’ would’ve been so much better,” I mutter, presenting her with my electro-charged crutches. “Take these,” I say, briefly explaining how to release a blast.

  I don’t need a weapon anymore. I’ve become one. And her foot is still injured.

  “You know, Clyde, you ought to talk to someone about your low-self-esteem problem.” Noelle tilts her perfect, smudged chin. “The fact that you’re a Lion just means you’ll have the stamina to keep up with me.”

  It doesn’t matter that our buddies ditched me and Aimee to visit scenic Vermont. It doesn’t even matter that I’m sans the Bone Chiller. My sidekick days are history.

  SEATED IN A REINFORCED CHAIR in front of the console, Frore doesn’t lower his copy of the Wall Street Journal or otherwise acknowledge my existence.