by Lauren Esker
"You'll do nothing of the sort." Erin reached for her phone. "There is no reason why Tim can't stop by the store on the way home and pick up diapers, at least. Sadly, we didn't keep any of the kids' baby clothes, since we weren't planning on having more. There's a nice little mall outlet nearby that has cheap stuff, though—I can take you there after breakfast." She'd been texting while she talked, and now she sent it with a stab of her thumb. "There, dispatch sent."
"I hope Tim doesn't take this as a veiled hint," Nicole said, laughing.
"What, that I'm pregnant? For one thing, I'm on Depo, but really, if the man is going to jump to conclusions iwthout even asking, then he deserves the anxiety." Erin began spooning cereal into bowls. "Anyway, I suppose what you need depends on how long you expect it'll be until you can place them in a foster home."
Avery and Nicole shared a glance. "Uh, that's problematic," Nicole said. "We had a placement for them, but the foster mom couldn't handle it."
"Can't blame her," Erin said with a laugh. "Four babies is a lot to deal with at once."
"It isn't that," Nicole admitted. "We think someone might be after them. There was an attempted break-in at the foster parents' home last night."
"For the record, I argued against bringing them here," Avery said.
Erin turned away from the stove with a frown. "Wait. What do you mean, someone's after them?"
"You're not in any danger," Nicole said quickly.
"We don't know that," Avery shot back.
"... and we'll be gone by nightfall," Nicole finished, ignoring him. "We'll find another place for tonight. The last thing I'd want is to draw danger to your home, Erin."
Erin gave her sister a half-hug. "It's your home too, so stop being ridiculous. What, do you think I'm going to throw you out on your ear? You're welcome to keep them here as long as you need to. I'm sure Hannah and Forrest would be happy to pick up some babysitting money."
"You don't understand," Avery told her. "These kids might have some serious bad news trailing behind them. I got shot at last night. I don't want to put your family in jeopardy."
"We'll talk it over with Tim, then," Erin declared. "For right now, let's get some food into these babies, why don't we?"
The most convenient place to do this turned out to be the kitchen floor. All four children converged, crawling, on the bowls on the floor—and the front-runners, Ginger and Gael, immediately plunged their faces in and tried to eat that way.
"They only know how to eat like dogs," Nicole said, dismayed.
She picked up Gael, who tried to squirm out of her grasp. He hadn't managed to eat much at all; flat human faces were not well suited to eating face-first. Ginger seemed to have gotten some of it up her nose, and was now sputtering and making faces.
Erin gathered Ginger into her lap and began attempting to spoon-feed her. Ginger absolutely hated it and kept trying to dodge the spoon. Most of the cereal ended up on her face, rather than in her mouth. She started to cry.
"Don't you know what this is for?" Erin crooned. She looked up at Nicole and Avery. "They really haven't spent any time at all as human children, have they?"
"I guess not," Avery said. He and Nicole had ended up in the awkward position of trying to keep the other children away from the food. They'd already managed to upset one of the bowls onto the floor.
"They know how bottles work," Nicole said, over the growing chorus of wailing. "We've fed them that way before. Maybe we could bottle-feed them today?"
"But they should be eating solid food," Erin countered. "They're not too old to have bottles, but we can't stop feeding them solid food just because they don't know how to eat it. That's not how parenting works!"
"We're not parents!" Nicole and Avery protested in unison.
"I hate to break it to you," Erin said dryly, pitching her voice above the chorus of crying, "but you are the closest thing these kids have right now. There, there—hush, little one." She nuzzled her face against Ginger's bare belly and let the child play with her hair, until Ginger was sniffling rather than squalling. "We can teach them. All children have to figure out how spoon-feeding works; it's not as if they're born knowing it."
"I don't see why we can't just let them eat like that," Avery said. He picked up a bowl and held it for Sophie, the child he'd commandeered. She tried to plunge her face into it. "Sure, it's messy, but who cares if they use a spoon or not?"
"Because they'll choke," Erin said. "They're not built for it. I think this would be easier if we do them one at a time. They're setting each other off."
"I'd be all for that," Nicole said, "except there's four of them and only three of us." She had a baby tucked into each arm. The other children had grown calmer now that Ginger was no longer crying, but they were still hungry and unhappy. "Avery, can't you get them to shift back?"
He started to say he couldn't, then thought about it. "I think if Ginger does, and stays, the others will too. She's their alpha."
Erin looked up from offering the spoon to Ginger, trying to coax the girl to open her mouth. "I thought that was a myth. That wolves don't actually do that."
"I don't know about wolves. We do have dominance hierarchies, though. Humans do, too."
Something he knew from personal experience. As a foster child, he'd observed human hierarchies closely, a small quiet child trying to figure out how to insert himself into the other children's social groups. Coming from the background he did, he was willing to tolerate abuse as a necessary consequence of being accepted by the pack leader—he just thought it was normal. What he couldn't understand, with humans, was the way the rules kept changing at the capricious whims of the child in charge. Being part of the group one day didn't mean being part of it the next. At least with werewolves, your pack might be toxic, but you would always have a place in it. Children, he'd found, could be more cruel and savage than wolves.
"Anyway," he went on, pushing away the memories. "I've gotten Ginger to follow me through my shifts before. If she shifts, the others might catch on."
Erin sighed as Ginger eluded the spoon yet again, and started licking cereal off her fist instead. "All right, but you know, they'll need to learn to be baby humans as well as wolves. You can't keep avoiding it."
"Erin, we're not their parents," Nicole said, exasperated. "We're temporary caretakers until we can find their actual parents or get them placed in a foster home. The important thing is to keep them warm, clean, fed, and clothed—okay, maybe forget the last part, but right now, we're managing maybe one of the four. Avery, go ahead."
Avery passed Sophie to Erin and began stripping off his sweater. He paused long enough to ask her, "You okay with this?"
"I'm a shifter too," Erin pointed out. "Not to mention I'm a big girl. You've got nothing I haven't seen before."
Not exactly the sort of statement to make him feel less self-conscious about getting naked in front of a stranger. But Nicole smiled at him, so he went ahead and skimmed out of his pants.
Naturally, the point at which he'd just stripped everything off was when the rest of Erin's family came in, laden with grocery bags.
There was a brief, fraught silence before Erin's daughter cried delightedly, "Babies!"
"Mom," said the older, bespectacled boy, "there's a naked guy in the living room."
"I know, dear," Erin said, unperturbed. "He's a werewolf. Now take your sister and go unload the washing machine, please."
The kids slouched off with the beleaguered air of badly put-upon adolescents. Erin's husband cleared his throat and set the bags on the counter. He was slightly shorter than Avery, with glasses and close-cropped dark hair. "I feel as if I've missed something here."
"I was shifting to try to get the kids to follow suit," Avery said, hoping he wasn't flushed, but he had a bad feeling that he was. He'd always been a blusher, to his dismay.
"Which we don't need to do now, because we have an extra set of hands," Erin said cheerfully. "Tim dear, I'm sure you haven't lost the technique for feeding
a baby, have you?"
"That's one of those questions where 'no' isn't really an option, isn't it?" He held out a hand to Avery. "Tim Leung."
"Avery Hollen, SCB. Sorry about making a poor first impression, Mr. Leung."
"Call me Tim. And you're fine. Actually, I'm happy to make the acquaintance of another shifter. If you don't mind, a little later I'd like to ask a few questions about—"
"Tim, honey, work later. Feed babies now. I'd like to warn you," Erin said, "that you probably won't make it out of this house without being quizzed about your entire family's shifting history. We're working on a database of shifter family data in an attempt to work out the population genetics of the shifting trait."
"I understood some of that sentence, and I'd be happy to help, if I can." Avery reached for his pants. At least being a shifter had given him practice in getting back into his clothes quickly.
"Don't get them started," Nicole sighed. "They will literally talk about nothing else for hours. You've been warned."
The babies proved a suitable distraction. With four adults, they had one person to each child, and things went much more smoothly than earlier. Hunter and Sophie caught on quickly to the "rules" of being spoon-fed. The other two had a little more trouble, but with food as a reward, it wasn't terribly difficult to get them to grasp the idea that if they simply stopped fighting it, food would be delivered into their mouth. Ginger had the hardest time; Avery was fairly sure it was because she was naturally stubborn, and a natural leader, and she was used to being able to feed herself. She didn't like depending on someone else to do it for her. If she could hold the spoon herself, he thought she'd take to it with no problem, but she wasn't quite coordinated enough for that yet.
After breakfast, Avery and Nicole got their first lesson in diaper-changing, and Erin and Tim's children were easily bribed to babysit for a little while so the adults could finally get a chance to eat. Hannah was openly captivated by the babies and claimed to know "all about" taking care of children, as she'd been babysitting for neighbors over the past year. Forrest affected an above-it-all air of adolescent disinterest, but seemed capable enough.
"Just keep them away from the gum trees," Erin warned. "No gum tree leaves for anyone who isn't a koala."
"Mom," the kids chorused, exasperated.
"Are either of your kids koalas?" Avery asked. "Erin, I assume you are."
"Yes, I am, and Hannah is, but we can do much better than just telling you." Erin nudged her husband. "Tim, come on; let's show them the family tree."
"At least let us finish eating, for pity's sake," Nicole said, waving her fork admonishingly at her sister.
"You can eat in our office; we don't mind," Tim put in.
Nicole rolled her eyes, but—plates in hand—she and Avery trooped down to Tim and Erin's home office. It opened off the eucalyptus-filled sunroom, and the tangy scent of the leaves hung heavy in the air. Aside from that, it was a typical home office, clearly shared between the Leungs; there were two desks, two chairs, two computers, and piles of papers everywhere.
"What do you do?" Avery asked. "Besides studying shifter, uh, genetic drift, was it?"
"Population genetics," Tim said. "I'm a biological anthropologist on the U-Dub faculty, with a population genetics specialty. That's the study of how groups change genetically over time. And Erin is a molecular biologist. She's more focused on the chemical side of things, trying to pinpoint the specific genetic underpinnings of shifting. I look at the big picture."
He went to the tidier of the two desks and tapped a key on the computer, waking it up. With Avery looking over his shoulder, he opened a file labeled Family 3.0, filling the screen with colorful text and graphics.
It was recognizable at a glance as a family tree, and it was extensive. Many of the entries were labeled with both Chinese characters and English names. It wasn't until Tim zoomed in on one section that Avery managed to find Nicole. From her name, a line led up to her parents; her mother was labeled in Chinese and alternatively as "Penny" Ung, and her father was Robert Foster Yates. Erin was there, along with Tim and the kids. Nicole's other siblings were Lisa and David; Avery made a careful mental note of the names.
Most of the entries on the family tree, in addition to their birth and, where applicable, death dates, had a tiny item of clipart beneath them. Nicole's was ... a gray blob? Avery leaned closer. Oh. A koala. He laughed softly, tracing up with his eyes to the tiny bat under her mother's, and the matching koala for her father. Of her siblings, there were two more koalas and one (Lisa) was a bat.
"Your mom is a bat shifter?"
"Fox bat," Erin said from the doorway. "Lisa is a tube-nosed bat, which will never stop being hilarious."
Avery scanned the family tree, looking at the pieces of clipart. Tim Leung was, it seemed, a deer shifter. Of their children, Hannah was a koala and Forrest was a deer like his father. A number of people in the extended family had a red "X" beneath their name—non-shifters, he assumed. And some, especially as the family tree went farther back, had nothing at all.
"I'm not quite sure I see what you're trying to figure out here," Avery said at last. "If someone's parents are a deer and a koala shifter, the kids are going to come out one or the other of those things. It's pretty straightforward, isn't it?"
Tim cleared his throat and straightened his back. Avery could see him going into professor mode.
"So, here's the thing," he said. "Shifters in the same family tend to cluster into related kinds of animals, you're right, but they're not usually the exact same kind. My family are deer shifters, all small deer such as muntjacs and water deer, the kind that are native to southern China, where my family's from. But we aren't all the same kind of deer. Nicole's mother comes from a family of bat shifters, who are similarly diverse in species. With me so far?"
"Sure," Avery said. "But werewolf families are usually all wolves. At least, all the ones I know about."
"They're one of the known exceptions—families who all run to a particular species of animal. Lions and orcas are some of the others. In every case I know of, they're social animals with a tight group bond and a strong hierarchy. But it isn't the norm, and not all social animals are like that, either."
"Such as bats," Erin put in.
"On the other hand," Tim said, "shifter families don't usually throw out someone who falls that far from the baseline—like, an all-deer family doesn't tend to throw out a bat or a bird. Although occasionally you have that kind of thing; I've documented a few examples. And most shifter families have a handful of non-shifters among them, even if they have full shifter heritage."
"I have a friend whose mom is a bear shifter who doesn't shift," Avery said. Jack had told him that, also mentioning that it was relatively normal for bears.
"Exactly. Most shifter families have a few people like that, with some kinds being more prone to it. And among those who've cross-married with humans, which is the majority, even more so." Tim held up a finger. "So there are two huge questions here. The first is, what determines what you shift into? If one of your parents have blue eyes and the other has brown eyes, we have a pretty good understanding of the probability you and your siblings will come out with blue eyes or brown. But what if one parent is a koala shifter and the other is a muntjac? There's no obvious gene that codes for it, at least not one we've found so far. And, frankly, there's no plausible way a gene could code for it, not the way it can for blue eyes or red hair."
"And the other big question," Erin said, sliding seamlessly in when Tim paused for breath, "which follows from that one, is where do shifters come from in the first place? No one knows, any more than we know what gives us the ability to shift. Most families have been shifter families as long as anyone knows. But then there are families like mine, where koala shifting spontaneously developed in the last couple hundred years."
"Did it?" Avery asked, and then answered his own question. "I guess it would've had to. You couldn't have been in Australia until a few generation
s ago, right? And koalas aren't native to either Asia or Europe."
"Right," Erin said, stepping up to Tim's computer. She flicked down the touchscreen with a stroke of her finger, scrolling back in time on the family tree. "Based on old family lore, we think we've traced koala shifting in the European side of our family back to two different people in the mid to late1800s. A great-great-grandmother and one of our great-grandfathers. One came from a shifter family, or at least had shifter relatives in her extended family, all falcons and hawks. The other was apparently human, with no documented shifter relatives at all.
"Here's the even more interesting thing. There's also a koala shifter among our cousins on Mom's side. Absolutely unrelated to the Yates branch of the family; they all have Chinese diaspora ancestry. The koala shifting trait appears to have developed spontaneously rather than being passed down from a common ancestor. But it's a coincidence of epic proportions that, out of the entire population of Australia, one of the bare handful of koala shifters—we've documented only fourteen of them, living and dead, all closely related to us—would just happen to occur in a family that married into the Yateses."
"So there's ... what, a shifter gene?" Avery asked. "Not for any specific kind of shifter, but for shifting, generally?"
Erin looked up from the computer. "That's the assumption we're operating from. Or more like a mosaic of genes, I expect."
"But it isn't that clear-cut, obviously," Tim said. "Since shifting itself is—"
"Oh, don't start, dear—"
"—a trait with metaphysic implications as well. Come on, you know it's true!" Tim spread his hands. "It doesn't obey conservation of mass. It doesn't follow the principles of either physics or biology. We cannot transmute one kind of animal into another kind of animal, and we don't know of any animals other than humans who do it. And yet, a very small percentage of the population does do it."
"That doesn't mean it's magic," Erin said.
Nicole gave Avery a conspiratorial grin. Here they go again, her expression seemed to say.
"I didn't say anything about magic, but there is clearly something going on that we don't understand. Something beyond DNA."
