Elements 2 - Shifting Selves

by Mia Marshall

  I knew I was alone, but I still padded quietly around the cabin. I opened the door to the downstairs master bedroom just a crack, to see Sera’s bed rumpled and slept-in, but no Sera in sight. I crept back upstairs and opened Vivian’s door, not sure what I expected to see. It was neat and organized, with only a little clutter on the desk from her computer odds and ends. Various Doctor Who action figures perched atop the monitors. A large spiral notebook sat open, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of a project. It all looked like Vivian might return home any moment. I backed out slowly and closed the door.

  Finally, I hauled myself up the ladder to the loft, though I knew Simon wouldn’t have left the hospital. His space was as neat as Vivian’s, though that was partly because he’d never unpacked from his earlier attempt to leave. His bag still sat on the twin bed. He might be planning to stay in Tahoe, but he didn’t plan to remain with us. I barely resisted the urge to rip the bag open and hide all his clothes, thereby keeping him with us forever.

  Giving up, I wandered downstairs and made some tea and buttered toast. When no one showed up by the time I’d finished eating, I took a quick shower and dressed for the day in a clean pair of jeans and a couple of layered knit tops, preparing myself for whatever weather the mountain chose to throw my way.

  The air held a noticeable bite, and I wrapped my arms around myself during the short walk to Mac’s trailer. Even outside, it remained quiet. The birds found little to sing about on such a cold morning, and the various forest critters had wisely chosen to hide until the weather consistently started to act like it was May. Snow was uncommon at this time of year but not unheard of. If the clouds overhead darkened any further, I suspected a spring snowstorm was on its way. I grumbled to myself and made a mental note to switch out my Converse for boots before I headed out for the day.

  I banged on Mac’s door, louder than I meant to. The silence was unnerving, and I found myself craving the comfort of another voice.

  There was no answer. I knocked again, even louder this time. No one opened the door.

  I glanced around the yard, checking for witnesses before I brazenly entered Mac’s house. The door swung open easily, but that wasn’t unusual. I wasn’t sure Mac ever locked it.

  It was easy to see why. Mac’s trailer held nothing of value. No electronics, no high-end decorations. All his furniture was bolted to the wall. I glanced around the room, figuring it only qualified as snooping if I opened any drawers or cabinets.

  His kitchen counter was clear, the sink empty, and only salt and pepper shakers sat on the dining table. His closet was open a crack, but it was also empty. There were no hangers loaded with suits, no boxes stored at the bottom. Mac’s comprehensive collection of jeans, white t-shirts and flannels didn’t exactly need to be hung up.

  The bedroom was equally empty, with just a dog-eared paperback resting on the desk, an old Dashiell Hammett. It was one I’d seen him reading before. I ran my fingers lightly over the well-loved cover, this single indication of his personality. I thought of the story he’d told me, of simply leaving his family and everything he’d ever known behind to start a new life. Glancing around the trailer, it looked like he was ready to do that all over again. If there was nothing he cared about, then there was nothing it would hurt to leave.

  And yet, I knew he did care. He cared about other shifters. He cared about Sera, Vivian, and Simon. I’d seen it over and over again, in his warm eyes while we hung around the breakfast bar or stayed up late playing cards, chatting and teasing each other relentlessly. And I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he cared about me. How much, and how it might manifest in the future, I had no idea, but I knew he cared. I needed to believe he couldn’t walk away from us without a backward glance.

  The bed was neatly made, and I spared a brief thought for how I’d hoped to spend this morning, waking up next to him in that king-sized bed. Perhaps I’d have opened my eyes to see him smiling at me, hatching wicked plans for how we could spend our morning.

  As nice as the thought was, my general unease was more powerful than the image of rolling around with Mac. Everything was just too damned quiet—unnaturally so.

  I spun around sharply and headed back to the house, ignoring the biting wind that whipped around me. In the kitchen, I headed straight to my phone, planning to call everyone and demand they return home immediately, preferably with hot chocolate in hand. My panic was brought to a screeching halt when I picked up my phone and found Sera’s handwritten note stashed safely underneath. Couldn’t sleep. Gave up and decided to chase some bad guys. Talk later.

  She might have stopped using pronouns, but at least I felt a bit less like the only survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Everyone was fine. I was overreacting. I started to dial Sera from the land line, then promptly remembered her phone would also have been ruined during our unexpected swim in the lake. I had no way to contact Sera or Mac directly.

  I wandered aimlessly for a few moments, but the silence of the cabin proved too much for me. I couldn’t sit still for longer than a moment. I pulled out my journal and waited for that magic moment that always found me once I put pen to paper, the sense of clarity as the words spilled from my head onto carefully lined pages. It never came. I wrote one page, then another, and the words meant nothing. I didn’t want to just sit around. I needed to do something.

  We kept our spare keys lined up on hooks near the back door, and I noticed Sera’s were missing. I grabbed the ones for the Chevy. My car might be a pile of junk, but it could definitely get me to Reno and back.

  It took me well over an hour to reach Diane’s front door, a drive made immeasurably better by the absence of Sera’s music. I used the time to zone out a bit and let The Devil Makes Three’s cool vibe do its best to calm that morning’s unexplained nerves. There were, I was certain, few moods an upright bass couldn’t improve.

  The first forty-five minutes of the drive were spent on the highway from Truckee to Reno. The final thirty minutes were spent driving aimlessly around the suburban development, turning from one identical cul-de-sac into the next and trying to find any characteristics that might distinguish one beige two-storied house from its neighbors. I finally recognized a tastefully painted satellite dish I’d had the opportunity to closely examine during our time on the roof. Unlike most of the other tastefully painted satellite dishes, this one was relatively close to the skylight.

  When Diane opened the door, I relaxed, glad to have found the correct house. She, however, tensed visibly.

  “What do you want?” She did her best to block the door completely, barring me entrance. This wasn’t starting off well.

  I pasted on my most winsome smile. She did not appear convinced. I held out my hands, palms up, the universal gesture for “I come in peace.”

  “I’m just here to talk. Calmly. Without guns or fists.”

  “And you thought to come to the front door this time? That is civil, indeed. Where’s your fire friend?”

  She knew, then. I assumed she must, despite being human. She’d been raised by a shifter family, and if she was at all like Carmen, she might know more about us than we knew about them.

  The old ones felt no need to acknowledge the shifters’ existence. Any strong elemental would find little to fear from a shifter, no matter how sharp the claws or rapid their movement. We had too many ways to defend ourselves and too many ways to heal.

  Because elementals did not fear shifters, they did not respect them. Without respect, there was no reason to learn about them, to understand their ways or their motives. I wondered how many times that deliberate ignorance had bitten us on our collective asses.

  The shifters were in a very different position. The elementals had placed them on the bottom of the magical totem pole and proceeded to sneer at them, to deny their close relation to our own magic and behaved, over and over again, as if shifters simply didn’t matter. The shifters had good reason to know what we were, because we were the enemy. Everyone should know their enemie
s.

  Diane might be human, but she saw my coloring and my build and knew I was a water, as she’d known Sera was a fire. I’d be a fool to underestimate her.

  “It’s just me this time,” I said. “Can I come in for a few minutes? I would really like to talk to you. I’m sure we can both fake civility for a quarter of an hour.”

  She studied me, carefully looking for any threat. I thought calm, watery thoughts, making sure no anger lit my eyes, hardening them as they had at our first meeting. She tilted her head, still watching me. “I know why I don’t like you. You skulk on my roof and spy on me and my family. What, exactly, have I done to you?”

  “You did punch me in the face and threaten me with a firearm,” I reminded her.

  “Again, can I remind you of the spying on my family bit?”

  She had a point. In the future, I should really only peep through the windows of families with no shifter blood and the kind of liberal politics that generally reject gun ownership. It would make my life much easier.

  Diane watched me carefully, her eyes showing more agitation than she’d admit to feeling. She wasn’t, I realized, just a version of Carmen without the shifter gene. She lacked Carmen’s calm certainty and utter confidence. She’d been raised by cats, but she wasn’t one, and I wondered how much that difference pained her. Everything she did was just a little too big, a little too showy. It felt like overcompensation, and I wondered how I’d missed that before.

  “Start over?” I asked. I didn’t hold out my hand, but neither did I attempt to threaten her with a ball of water. I considered that progress.

  She nodded. We seemed to know where the other stood for the moment.

  She turned, expected me to follow, and led me into a room that looked like the design love child of Ernest Hemingway and a deranged taxidermist. The color scheme was brown and blood red, the furniture was leather, and the overall theme was “Animal Zombie Apocalypse.” On every wall, glassy eyes stared from the faces of surprised and quite dead deer. All herbivores, I noted. No cats or bears decorated the walls, so at least I wasn’t looking at the dismembered heads of Mac’s family.

  “Are deers not shifters, then?”

  “Of course they are,” Diane said. She offered no further explanation. She sat in a dark red leather chair perched behind an immense mahogany desk.

  Directly above her head, a rifle perched in its wall mount. I doubted the placement was accidental. The message was clear: if we were starting over, we were doing it on her terms. I resisted the urge to gather a ball of water, but only just.

  Instead, I deliberately turned my back to her and perused the room’s morbid decor, silently letting her know she wasn’t that scary. I was feeling pretty cool until she spoke. “You realize I have absolutely no idea why you’re here, right?”

  It’s a lot harder to be cool when the other person only finds you perplexing and odd.

  I sat in one of the chairs facing the desk. Unable to find a convincing cover story to explain my presence, I opted to go with the truth.

  “You know shifter kids are going missing and then being returned, right?”

  She nodded slowly, her stare piercing. She may not be able to actually turn into a cat, but looking at her, I wondered if it was really so simple as Simon had explained to me once. He’d told me they either had the ability, or they didn’t. Human, or shifter. Diane might not be able to turn into a furry, four-legged predator, but with her amber gaze so like Carmen’s leveled directly at me, I had a hard time believing she entirely lacked feline DNA.

  “I’m trying to figure out who’s taking them, and I have few leads. You’re one of the few shifter families I know.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged, unwilling to say outright that I thought she might be involved. It must have been an articulate shrug, because she immediately understood.

  “You’re suggesting that, despite all evidence that you’re an ignorant fool who only knows what my family is because Carmen chose to tell you, I’m a suspect simply because I come from a family of cats?”

  When she put it like that, even I had to wonder what I was doing there. “Also, someone tried to kill me. Maybe.”

  “Just one person?” Her voice conveyed mild surprise that I didn’t have several simultaneous hits out on my person, all of which carried sizable rewards.

  “And here I was thinking you didn’t like me that much and would be totally okay seeing me get crushed in a near-fatal car crash. How silly of me.”

  Diane leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her lean stomach.

  “Did your mommy tell you how special you were? Did she say you were beautiful and everyone loved you and you could do anything you wanted to do? She must have, because I can’t imagine why else you’d be so convinced it was all about you.”

  My mother had, in fact, told me that I should never really try to do much of anything, and should spend most of my life relaxing on the family island with her and my aunts. However, I doubted admitting to a life as a pampered trust fund baby would earn me any points with Diane.

  I gritted my teeth and attempted to count to five. I made it to three. “I’m not accusing you. I’m trying to explain why I’m looking for answers any way I can get them. As for you, I still don’t know what you would have done with that gun if Carmen hadn’t pulled you off. So perhaps I have good reason to think you aren’t one of the good guys.”

  She rolled her eyes so dramatically I’m pretty sure she got a good look at her own pituitary gland. “That was days ago. I’d have completely forgotten about it by now if you hadn’t turned up at my door. And while I appreciate you ringing the bell this time, so far all you’ve done is question my moral fiber in my own house. You’re making me wonder why I gave in to Carmen so easily.”

  She smiled widely, showing all her teeth. Even so, I didn’t feel threatened. I was fairly certain she was posturing. Unfortunately, if she really was all bark and no bite, my reasons for being there were even flimsier than I’d originally thought.

  I wasn’t used to having the combative relationship I’d instantly developed with Carmen and her sister. These women riled me up, and I seemed to have the same effect on them. Whenever I was in their presence, I nearly felt like a cat myself, slowly circling them with hackles raised and claws extended. It was oddly satisfying, and yet it accomplished nothing.

  “You’re right. I have nothing to go on and no reason to think you’re anything other than you appear to be.” I said, speaking in a surprisingly calm tone. I was in the wrong, and I didn’t see how denying that would help. “I’m trying to find answers, and I thought you might know something because of your connection to Pamela.”

  She studied me for a long moment, then released one long, deep sigh. I thought it was a bit overdramatic, but it did seem to indicate she’d stopped fighting me.

  “What, exactly, do you think I know?”

  “How close are you and Pamela? Did she confide in you?” Or perhaps ask for your help escaping with James? That last question might have been silent.

  She held her hands before her, palms up. “She’s my niece, but I can’t say she ever had much need of a confidant. She’s a popular girl with lots of friends, and her mother adores her. She had little need of someone else to talk to. Dana’s the one who seeks me out. Let’s just say she lacks the support network her sister enjoys.”

  This didn’t surprise me. Everything about Dana suggested she neither sought nor received excess attention, though I doubted she was entirely okay with its lack. Everyone wanted to be noticed in some way, and I was glad she had at least one family member paying attention to her.

  “Pamela never spoke to you about James? About how the families disapproved? I thought she might have trusted you, since you don’t...” I awkwardly ended the sentence. I still understood so little about shifter etiquette, and I had no idea if I was poking a sore spot.

  “Have whiskers? Hardly. If anything, it meant she’d trust me less. Look, Aidan, we’re
family, and that means we’ll always defend each other, but we’re like any other family. We love each other, but we don’t all get along or even like each other. And those who turn furry tend to believe those who don’t can never really understand them. Maybe they’re right.” She didn’t hide the bitterness in her voice, though I’d no idea if it came from her own lack of magical ability or the way the rest of the family treated her because of it.

  “James and Pamela planned to run away, the night James was taken. Someone helped them with those plans.”

  Diane simply looked at me, her face open and questioning. She had no idea what I was talking about.

  “I made a mistake coming here,” I said, standing slowly. “I’m sorry. I really did think you might know something.”

  “You were hoping I was the bad guy and would confess,” she corrected.

  I shrugged. “It would have made my life a lot easier. Sure you won’t do it anyway, just to simplify things?”

  She laughed, though there was little humor in the sound. “I find myself torn. You’re annoying and borderline incompetent, so I kind of hope you fail. At the same time, Pamela is my niece. I really do want to find out who took her.”

  She turned slightly, her gaze falling on the rifle on the wall. If there was anyone I wanted to get rid of in the next month or so, I suspected I only needed to tell Diane they were involved in Pamela’s kidnapping, and they’d quickly disappear.

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” I told her. “I’ll see myself out.” Before she could argue, I walked quickly from the room and through the house. It was, I realized, surprisingly homey. Away from the pristine living room we’d spied the other day and the animal rights’ nightmare that was the study, the rest of the house was warm and even a bit cluttered.

  In the hallway, I narrowly avoided stepping on a plastic yellow truck. Diane had children, I realized. Probably a husband. They must have been at school and work the times I’d visited. Diane was just another suburban woman who happened to be a card-carrying member of the NRA and spent the holidays with her shifter family. She didn’t like me and had happily smacked me in the face, but if I was honest, I’d have wanted to do the same thing to someone caught crawling around on my roof. There really was no reason to distrust her.