The Turning Season (9 page)

“Wait for me,” he says, then parks, returns the keys to Celeste, and jogs back to the Jeep and climbs in.

To my delight, I remember I have a pair of jeans in the backseat, and I don't waste any time grabbing them and slipping them on. When I'm dressed I feel a hundred percent better about the evening. This whole time, I'm watching Celeste in my rearview mirror. She's talking with her usual animation, smiling with her usual charm. She doesn't look worried or upset or frightened about any of the things that might have been set in motion this night.

“Should we wait till he's gone, then go in and make sure she's all right?” I ask.

“I don't think so. When I handed her the keys she said, ‘Talk to you guys tomorrow. Drive safe.' So I think she's ready for us to go home.”

I'm trying with limited success to suppress a yawn. “And I am so ready to
go
home,” I say. “What a night.” I switch on the ignition and back out. “So where are you parked?”

“Over by the Square. About a block from where you guys were. But you don't have to take me back to my car.”

“Sure I do. It'll only take a few minutes.”

“I meant—maybe we could go somewhere else. There's a Denny's that's still open. We could get breakfast. Pancakes, yum.”

“No shirt, no service,” I remind him, because I can't remember the last time I was in a restaurant that admitted half-naked customers, even if they were as finely sculpted as Ryan. “Besides, if I eat pancakes at one in the morning, I will fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Then don't go home. Stay at my place. Go home in the morning.”

By this time I've pulled out onto the street and am traveling back toward the Square. I glance over just as a streetlight flashes its illumination through the windshield, and I can see Ryan smiling at me.

I try to clamp down on the sudden bounding of my heart. “I don't think that's such a great idea,” I say.

His smile widens. “Hey, you can have the bed to yourself. I'll sleep in the living room.”

“Yeah. Still not a great idea. Anyway, I can't. I have all the animals to take care of.”

I see the annoyance flit across his face. “You'll be back in the morning.”

“Yeah, but I don't like to be gone more than twelve hours. Stuff happens. If Daniel was there, he'd shift back to human shape and feed everybody if I didn't show up on time, but he's not. There's no one on the premises right now I trust to take over if I'm gone.”

Ryan lifts a hand and strokes my cheek with his knuckles. “That's Karadel for you,” he says softly. “Always taking care of everyone else. Not letting anyone else take care of her.”

I jerk my head away. “I don't need to be taken care of.”

“Doesn't everybody? Some of the time?”

I force a laugh. “This from the man who's not famed for his caretaking skills.”

“I don't want to be responsible for the whole world, that's true,” he acknowledges. “I don't want to build a private
zoo
on my property and take in every distressed animal or shape-shifter in the bistate area and nurse it back to health. But one or two people? Yeah, I think I could watch over them.”

I hold my peace. We've had this conversation before, only it was much more heated.
You're so selfish. You don't give a damn about anybody or anything but yourself
had been my contribution. He had volleyed back with
You're just afraid to
live
! You hide here at this clinic and pretend it matters because you can't face what waits out in the real world!
I doubt Ryan has forgotten the specifics of that exchange any more than I have.

I turn off the main drag and into the honeycomb of streets that make up the Square. Still pretty lively, even at this hour. “So where
exactly
are you parked?” I say.

“Left here, then right on Maple. About halfway down. So, still ‘no' on the pancakes? Have some coffee, you'll stay awake for the drive.”

I've spotted his car, a black convertible. He drives it with the top down even in January. Ryan's never so happy as when he's got the wind in his face. That means he's in motion. That means he isn't trapped somewhere. Even better if he's not trapped
with
someone. I bring the Jeep smoothly alongside his car.

“Still no,” I say. “But thanks for the offer.”

He doesn't open the door right away, just watches me in the yellow light coming from a beer sign in the window of a nearby bar. “Can I come out one day next week and visit?” he asks.

I try not to show how much this flusters me. Like Celeste, like Alonzo, he used to pretty much have the run of my place. I assume he still has a key, as they do, and if he doesn't, he knows where I keep a spare. But he hasn't been out to the property for two months now, not since our last disastrous fight. We've talked on the phone, e-mailed, seen each other a few times when Celeste was around, but we've kept a physical distance along with the emotional one.

“Sure, yeah, anytime,” I say.

He's smiling again. “I need to get my shirt back,” he says.

“Oh! Yeah, but— Hey, I have an old sweatshirt in the backseat. If you wait a minute I'll just—”

“It's fine,” he interrupts. “Keep it. Anyway, that's not all I need.”

I take a deep breath. Surely he's not going to launch into an
I need you in my life
speech. That's not Ryan's style. “Yeah? Then—?”

“Last spring. You made me some kind of drug. I think I want more.”

I turn my head to appraise him. I like the change of topic. It toggles me back into a professional mode, puts me at ease. “I thought it made you too sick to your stomach. You stopped taking it.”

“Yeah, I did, over the summer, but I started using it again in the past few weeks. I still feel like I'm gonna puke, but that feeling wears off a little faster each time. And the drug works. I don't mind throwing up a couple of times if it gives me a little more control.”

Ryan's particular shape-shifting pattern is one I've never found in anyone else. Every five days, he switches to one of three animal shapes—cat, fox, or falcon—and he holds that shape for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Once he returns to his human form, it'll be another five days before he'll shift again. Though his body takes the three animal shapes in a set cycle, and he can't influence that, he has a little say in the timing, because he can transition out of his human body anytime he chooses. So if, for instance, there is some event occurring on a Saturday for which he absolutely must be human, he can shift on a Tuesday, return to his own form on Thursday, and be certain of being a man over the weekend.

My drugs successfully provided him with more time between transformations. Up to two weeks, if he injected himself every day.

“Well, great. I'd be happy to mix up more formula for you. Might take me a couple of days, though.”

“Okay. So I should come see you—Tuesday? Wednesday? How does that sound?”

“Sounds good.”

He smiles, and again touches my cheek with the back of his hand. His fingers are so warm they scorch my skin. “Sounds good to me, too,” he says. For a moment he just watches me, and I think he might lean over and kiss me. Then he shakes his head, drops his hand, and climbs out of the car.

“See ya,” he says. “Drive carefully.” And he shuts the door and vaults into the convertible. By the time I've made a U-turn, he's already pulled out of the parking space and shot down to the end of the street.

The entire drive home, down 159, down W, past sleeping houses, empty cornfields, and moon-washed trees, I can feel the touch of Ryan's hand upon my face.

T
he next few days pass in a blur of activity. Aurelia brings Alonzo out to spend the weekend and stays to chat for about an hour. She's so different from Bonnie that I sometimes wonder how they ended up together. Whereas Bonnie usually looks like she's dressed for hiking through the Rocky Mountain National Park—a little rumpled and über granola—Aurelia's image is cutthroat Wall Street or high-stakes politics. She's always wearing expensive tailored suits, full hose, designer pumps, and carefully understated jewelry; of the five closets in their house, three are hers, and some of her wardrobe leaks into Bonnie's as well. Her fine hair—a delicate flame-red that's entirely natural—is usually pulled into a sleek bun or clipped back with a matte gold barrette. I envy her skin, a translucent milk-white that I have never seen marred with a blemish. Her eyes are a guarded gray.

Everything about her screams heartless bitch, which I've told her a million times, but she just smiles. “Some of the people I face in court are soulless bastards, and I have to make them think I can play their game.” She
can
play it; she was profiled recently as the Illinois lawyer with the best win-loss ratio in the state. She looked great in the photos, too.

Most people who know her only from the courtroom would be astonished at her softer side, which is on full display today. She's wearing comfortable jeans and an untucked denim shirt, and her red hair is in a long braid that hangs over her left shoulder. I watched from the window when she drove up in her BMW and she and Alonzo climbed out. Before she let him run off to the kennel, she caught his arm, drew his head down, inspected some mark on his forehead, and kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled back, she was smiling up at him as if he had brought her the secret of eternal life. He ducked his head, offered the tiniest of smiles in response, then ambled off with Scottie to feed the dogs.

“How's he doing?” I ask her as we sip tea at the big oak table in the big airy kitchen.

“I'm not sure. He's studying, so the home schooling is turning out to be okay from an academic standpoint, but I can't tell if he misses his routine at school. Sometimes he plays pickup basketball games down at the high school, so we thought about putting him in a league somewhere, but we haven't done it.”

“Bonnie said he has friends who come over.”

“He does. Not good friends. No one I think he's really close to.”

I make a derisive sound. “Do men
ever
allow themselves to get close to anybody?”

Her smile is instant and wicked. “Well, I'm not an expert on men, but most of the ones I know are emotionally—What's the politically correct term?—delayed.”

“So maybe Alonzo's just being a guy.”

“Maybe. But I think we need to find something he really loves—something he can pour his energy into—and then he'll start finding soul mates.”

“When is he happiest?”

Aurelia shakes her head. “Still figuring that out.” She glances around the kitchen. “He likes being here, although when I asked him if he'd want to live here full time—”

“What? Oh, I don't know that I'm ready for that.”

“Don't worry. He said no. He said it wouldn't be special anymore.”

“Well, he's only, what, fourteen? How many of us knew what we were going to love when we were that age?”

“I did,” Aurelia says. “I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I watched lawyer TV shows and read lawyer books and had mock trials with the dolls and the stuffed animals.”

“Dolls and stuffed animals,” I repeat. “Wow. So girlie.”

She laughs. “Well, the dolls usually ended up going to jail while the stuffed animals were set free, so, I don't know, maybe there was some racial or diversity bias there. You know. Always working on behalf of the ‘other,' the one that doesn't quite fit in.”

“That's my Aurelia,” I say admiringly.

She looks at her watch, mutters, “Shit,” then shrugs and refills her teacup. “What about you? What did you want to be when you were fourteen?”

Oh, that's too easy. “Normal.”

She tilts her head to survey me. “Not a shape-shifter?”

“Hell, yeah, not a shape-shifter. I was turning into dogs and goats and deer and ostriches and an elephant once—an honest-to-God
elephant
. I hated my life and I hated myself. There's nothing you could have asked me to do,
nothing
, that I would have refused if it had meant becoming an ordinary girl with an ordinary body.”

Her gray eyes glitter. Aurelia loves exploring people's personal limits. “Would you have killed someone?”

“At the time I told myself I would,” I answer honestly. “I even went through the list of people I would and wouldn't kill. There were a couple of neighbor kids I would have been totally fine with murdering in cold blood. But my dad? My aunt? The cute guy three houses down? No. I knew I couldn't hurt them.” I sigh. “And I'm sure I couldn't
really
have done it, even if the opportunity arose. At least, that's what my adult self likes to believe.”

“So when did you come to terms with it? When did you say, ‘This is who I am, I love myself, I will make the most of my life'?”

It's a long time before I reply. I swirl the dregs of tea in my cup, I look away, I look back. But Aurelia has infinite patience; she'll wait through the apocalypse if that's what it takes before you answer. “I haven't,” I say at last.

“Really? But you seem so—I guess the word is content. You have friends you care about, a job you love, a house that I personally would kill for, and I say that knowing all the drawbacks to homicide—”

She makes me laugh, but in my head I'm replaying that old argument with Ryan.
You hide here at this clinic and pretend it matters because you can't face what waits out in the real world!
“I'm here because I'm protected here,” I say softly. “It's a bonus that I have the skills and knowledge to help other people who are like me. Even if I didn't, I'd still be here. There's no place else that's safe.”

“Do you fantasize about running away?”

“All the time.” I would never admit that to Ryan, of course, but it's a relief to speak the words aloud to Aurelia. She's so familiar with the world's evil that nothing shocks her. “And if I ever perfected the serum that would let me wholly control my shifting? I'd be gone. I'd lock up this place and go.”

She nods. “It's interesting that you think so.”

I'm a little affronted. “What? You don't believe me?”

“I think maybe your circumstances helped mold you into a certain kind of person, but I don't believe that person could be pried out of you now if you took a chisel and split your body in half. Okay, maybe you could walk away from this clinic—but you'd set one up somewhere else. Or open a stray rescue foundation. Or start working with hunger charities. I don't believe you know how to live a life without meaning.”

“That's not true. I can be shallow. I know I can.”

She smiles. “Well, then. I hope you find the right medical formula so you get a chance.”

*   *   *

O
nce she's gone, I work alongside Alonzo in the barn until the first client of the day shows up, leading a dachshund with a bad limp. Three more people from town arrive before the day is over, but their animals are simply animals and their problems are routine.

Right around nightfall, when I've released Alonzo from work and let him start playing his video games, a couple of shape-shifters come to the porch. One's a black wolf, and he looks so much like Cooper that for a moment my breath catches in my throat. He even has a little silver around his muzzle, like Cooper did in those last couple of years, but this one is still strong and healthy. He has a good five years left, I'm guessing, maybe more.

His companion is a mixed-breed dog, maybe part shepherd, part chow, with rough curly dark hair and root-beer-colored eyes. She's got a gash in her left foreleg that's deep, ugly, and not very old, but it's already starting to show signs of infection. Not fatal, though, not yet; she's arrived in time.

I'm pretty sure I've never seen either one of them before, and neither one chooses to or is able to take human form and talk to me, but I'm positive they're shape-shifters who know about me through the informal grapevine of our strange community. For one thing, true wolves don't generally show up at my door and look around with quite this degree of focused curiosity, showing no alarm when a woman steps outside and begins speaking to them. For another, feral dogs don't usually extend their injured limbs in a silent request for attention, then wait patiently when I say, “Let me get some supplies—I'll be right back.”

I clean and bind the wound, giving my patient care instructions that include “Come back and see me in a few days and I'll change the dressing for you.” I also give them a tour of the compound, showing them where they can sleep if they want to spend the night. When they settle into one of the unoccupied lean-tos, lovingly outfitted with blankets and other amenities, I say, “Give me a minute and I'll bring food and water. You can stay as long as you want. And if you're here in the morning, I'll check your leg again.”

Alonzo puts the video game on pause so he can help me bring out bowls of supplies. He seems fascinated by the wolf, but he doesn't get too close. He pets the dog, though, and she licks his hand.
Just another instance of women being more open and approachable than men,
I think with a grin. But, honestly, even I find the black wolf a little intimidating. He's a man at least some of the time, yes, but that doesn't mean he's civilized. In this state, at any rate, he looks as wild as they come.

*   *   *

W
hen I wake up Sunday morning, I'm instantly aware of the weight of another living creature on the end of my bed. Too small to be Scottie, too big to be one of the cats. I sit up and peer through the half-light permitted by the curtains. A not-quite-full-grown raccoon stares back at me, his dark eyes unblinking. Between his front paws rests an apple that he probably stole from the bowl in the kitchen.

“Alonzo,” I say. “I'm guessing this is a surprise.”

I yawn and reach for the cell phone I keep on my bedside table. It's barely 8
A.M
., but Bonnie answers on the first ring. She's probably been up before dawn, re-siding the house or serving breakfast at the homeless shelter.

“Hey. Alonzo shifted overnight. He's a raccoon. Isn't this a little early for him?”

Bonnie's voice is concerned but not anxious. “It is. We thought he had another three or four days.”

“Well, you know. Teen hormones. They can interfere with everything.”

“I was going to pick him up this afternoon, but should I come get him right now?”

“He's probably better off out here, don't you think? He can stay until he shifts back.”

“If it's not too much of an imposition.”

“Not at all. Hell, I won't even have to feed him, since it looks like he can forage pretty well on his own.”

“It's usually two or three days before he's human again. Call us when he's ready and one of us will come get him.”

“All right. And don't
worry
. We'll be fine.”

Alonzo, in fact, seems quite happy. He scurries out the front door when I open it for him and immediately heads over to the trash containers. I take a shower, eat a quick breakfast, and make my rounds among the animals, Scottie at my heels.

The shape-shifters are gone, which I take as a good sign. If they were worried about the leg wound, surely they would have stuck around longer. Daniel, on the other hand, is back, again in Doberman shape and again not looking very congenial. I refill his water bowl and leave him in peace. The puppies bark hysterically after I let them out into the fenced run and Alonzo sidles up on the other side.

“Oh, you're just trying to rile them up,” I say in exasperation. “I should drop you over the fence and see how amusing you think it is then.” But of course I don't. The turtle seems immune to all the commotion.

Once all the animals are taken care of, I spend a couple of hours in the lab, mixing up more serum for Ryan. And another few doses for myself. I take another injection of the Baxter-and-Isabel mix, though I'm thinking I might want to try a different formula later in the month, maybe mix a little of Lanita's blood into the formula and see if that helps me control the shapes I take. Or maybe I'll design a number of different concoctions and start alternating doses—one week the serum that limits how often I change, one week the formula that turns me into a cat. Might be safer, and might be just as effective.

Sounds like a brand of birth control,
I think, and snort with amusement.
Better living through chemistry.