The Turning Season (21 page)

“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.”

“We're coming out there,” Bonnie says.

“You're welcome, of course, but—”

“How did you find him?” Aurelia interrupts me. “Was he able to get back to your house under his own power?”

I lift my eyes to Joe's and give him an apologetic smile. He can't hear their side of the conversation, but I'm sure he can fill in the blanks. “He was a deer when he was hit. He shifted. The hunter brought him back to me.”

There is absolute silence on the other end.

Joe motions for me to give him the phone, but I switch it to speaker before I hand it over. It's like the worst conference call you can imagine. Joe says, “It was me. I shot him. I'm so, so, so sorry.”

“Who is this?” Bonnie demands.

Aurelia, of course, is the one who remembers. Aurelia remembers every face, every voice, she's ever encountered. “It's that Joe fellow. The one who's dating Kara.”

“You shot our boy?” There is no leniency in Bonnie's voice at all.

“I was aiming at a different animal. He jumped in the way. Almost like he did it on purpose.”

“That excuses nothing,” Bonnie says sternly, but Aurelia has a different take.

“He probably did do it intentionally,” she says. “Alonzo hates to think of animals getting hurt. Of anybody getting hurt.”

“We'll be out there in a half hour,” Bonnie says.

“Forty-five minutes,” I correct her, but she's already hung up. I look over at Joe. “Better run while you can.”

He shakes his head. “I'll stay. Gotta man up.”

It's what I expected him to say, but the reply pleases me anyway. This is someone who doesn't run from the consequences of his actions. “Then can I feed you something? Fortify you against the ordeal to come?”

“That would be great,” he says. “And I'd love another beer but I think I'd better not.”

“Yeah, the only thing Bonnie would hate more than someone who hurt Alonzo is someone who hurt Alonzo and then got drunk.”

Turns out the anxieties of the past hour have burned through all my reserves, so I'm starving, too. I'm not up to cooking, so I defrost some chicken casserole and open a bag of chips. We talk quietly as we eat. Mostly Joe asks more questions about my life, my transformations, my injections, my limitations. He seems more intrigued and less astonished with every passing minute, so I find myself relaxing, growing more eager,
wanting
to tell him the minutest details. I can't help wondering if this is what it was like for Bonnie's old girlfriend Derinda when she first told an outsider her own story. Terrifying and exhilarating and, in the oddest way, comforting.
I don't know how I know this, but I believe this person will never betray me.

Bonnie never betrayed Derinda, of course. I guess it's too soon to know about Joe.

“You can't tell anybody, you know,” I say as we gather up the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “
Anybody.
Mark. Your brothers. Your next girlfriend. Whoever you marry. Even if we have a huge fight and you decide you never want to see me again, you can't get back at me by talking about this.”

“First, really hoping we never have that kind of fight,” he says, closing the dishwasher door and snapping it in place. “Second, I tend not to be a big blabbermouth anyway. Third, nobody would believe me. So I'd look like an idiot if I talked about you.”

“Ah, male pride,” I say. “The one thing I can rely on even if everything else fails.”

I've been watching the clock, so I'm not surprised by the sounds of tires rolling across gravel and car doors slamming shut. Bonnie bursts through the kitchen door first, her bony face set in grim lines. I'd lay money that she was the one driving.

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs in his room.”

She gives Joe one look of burning reproach before hurrying toward the stairwell. Aurelia enters just as Bonnie exits, her pace more leisurely and her pose a little less strained.

“Bonnie's convinced he's at death's door, but I'm thinking you didn't lie to us,” she says. “And he really will be okay.”

“I'm worried about infection, and there could be some damage to his shoulder muscles, but aside from that, I swear to you I think he'll be fine.”

Joe came to his feet the minute they drove up, and now he squares his shoulders. “I can't apologize enough,” he begins.

“Probably not,” she says. “But I don't see how we can blame a hunter for shooting a deer. And believe me, I would blame someone if I could.”

Joe risks a quick look at me, unprepared for the reasonable tone. I give him a faint smile. “Aurelia's done some hunting in her time.”