The Shapeshifter Chronicles

by Peralta, Samuel

  What was even more worrying was the brief, sharp sound of a wolf barking, just once, as though signaling one of its pack members that prey had been spotted. She thought the sound came from just behind the copse of trees to the wrong side of where she wanted to run for her escape route. If that wasn’t an echo, then she might just be in some trouble. The silence in the woods was far more terrifying than noises, however. Every little creature—birds, gray squirrels, small rustling animals—had decided now would be a good time to go into its den. The feeling was of predators nearby. Predators, she thought, who could be after her.

  Nothing else to do but pull up your britches and move forward.

  She hefted the walking stick/broom in her hand, knowing it would do little good against a pack of wolves. If she was lucky (and that didn’t appear to be the case) it would only be one or two. She could handle a pair of wolves with her stick and a few well-placed scatter spells, but more than two and they would pull her down. Why hadn’t the runes this morning seen this danger?

  With the idea that she may as well head in the direction of home as anyplace else, she began moving that way with as sure of a step as possible. Honestly, she could be home quickly now that she wasn’t scouring the ground for herbs and mushrooms.

  Maybe I misheard that sound anyway, just something that sounded like a wolf, nothing to be afraid of—

  As she was thinking this, she stepped around a tree and there it was.

  Whatever “it” was, anyway. There was a swirling darkness, about as high up as her knees now but growing larger, especially in the center. The size of three or four wolves, but there wasn’t any actual animal, just that empty black shape hovering off the ground and looking for all the world like a dark cloud of night-black energy. She stopped and stared. Now she felt a chill all over as she realized what she was looking at.

  This was the Darkness that her books spoke of. Her mother and grandmother and mothers all the way back as far as they could go had written of a force that could follow anyone, that wanted to consume the energies and lives it could find.

  As she watched, the swirling grew into three distinct shapes, then sparks of dark blue light, like ball lightning or will o’ the wisps, began forming along the outer edges. The woman backed up, careful to not trip over any tree roots because the dark shape had extended towards her. Questing. Like an animal sniffing in her direction, a long finger of that dark energy pulled loose from the main mass of churning anger and frigid smoky something.

  Just as she was debating crashing around it and continuing home anyway, there was a noise behind her, and as she was turning her head to look, the middle of the form in front of her jerked into shape, drawing her attention back. She wasn’t sure if the sound behind her had been real, and if maybe the one in front was trying to draw her attention back, keep her unaware.

  Now the shape before her did look like a wolf, but like one with almost-human eyes. It was growing larger by the second. Dark and shaggy, bigger than the wolves she had seen in this area from a distance. Two other blurry swirls of energy and darkness were thickening beside the center, and she was sure they would also turn into wolf-like somethings. The center one crouched low, as if to spring at her. She wasn’t sure if a wolf made out of a dark, cold energy of some sort would be able to bite her, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out.

  Just as she was gathering herself to try and run around the edges, a dark finger of energy reached out from the center figure. Swirling, seething, it reached her as she shrunk away, and it brushed up and down her deflecting arm. Where it touched her, it felt like a swarm of bee stings, or maybe like burning flames. Almost like when you put a bare arm too close to a fire. She pulled away and swatted at the tendrils with the brushy part of her broom walking stick/staff, dispersing them in a smoky blur. They gathered back into the lurking shapes in front of her, and she felt as though they were laughing at her.

  She didn’t want to feel that burning, stinging sensation anymore, and now she dared peek over her shoulder and saw that the noise behind her had indeed been more of the shapes lurking, trying to surround her. These were small, but the one in front of her had been small when she first got here. She had a sinking feeling that this was going to be a bad situation, and was thinking of what she could do to get out of it. She had her walking stick, and she had a spell she could use to scare off regular animals, but wasn’t exactly sure it would work for these shapeshifting demon-looking things. Whatever they were.

  Aware that it probably wasn’t going to do any good at all, she said a tiny prayer to the Goddess, gathered her intentions around her (primarily those of saving her own life), and hefted her broom walking stick into her strong right hand, mentally preparing the spell. She snapped it into place, hoping its minor magic would chase this problem away before she had to pull out the more hefty spells.

  The keepaway sizzled and fell into the Darkness, absorbed there. The front wolf shape lunged at her again, and she smacked it back once more with her stick, resolved now to fight with more substantial powers she usually kept in reserve. She sighed. This wasn’t the day she had planned for herself.

  “You are starting to try my patience, evil one,” she muttered as she stepped back to summon reinforcements.

  There was a reason why Yaga lived so far from the rest of the village. The things she could do were better left seen only by the eyes of the forest. She raised her left hand and called to her cauldron. Her cauldron was one of the things other village eyes would not understand. She knew of wise women who had been called witch and punished for no more than commenting that the weather looked like rain; there was no way she could let busybodies see what she was about to do.

  Back at her house, a sleeping black and white cat woke, sniffing the air. It lowered its ears when it felt the magic that was suddenly nearby, and looked over at the cauldron, which had abruptly awoken from where it had been bubbling by the fireplace. Its four feet, which resembled nothing so much as baby arms and legs tipped with sharp cat claws, were stretching, getting ready to move. The cat, with that mysterious power that cats have, went from sound asleep to leaping across the room with speed and grace in an instant. It leapt onto the edge of the cauldron, which shrugged in acknowledgement of its rider. Then the door slammed open and the two familiars zipped out into the surrounding dense woods. The cauldron knew where it was headed, and it raced with a speed born of that magic and intense need.

  In the clearing facing the growing Darkness, the Yaga felt her familiars coming her way and smiled. The gathering mass of threatening shapeshifters had no idea what was coming, and they surged forward again, trying to find an entry point where the woman’s staff wouldn’t lash out at them. Tiny tufts of smoky Darkness clung to the brushes of her broom walking stick where she had swatted and killed bits of the entity. She was a tiny woman, but somehow the staff seemed longer than it had before. Like it could reach every corner of the woods and then return to the opposite side with a punishing thud.

  The surging, shapeshifting Darkness, ancient and angry, remembered encounters with power like this before, and the part of it that was sentient was beginning to think it should simply leave this encounter, zip away and find easier prey. The other bits were hungry and stubborn, and wanted to stay. And then a new energy came up behind the mass of swirling hate, and the choice to flee was taken away from it.

  The cauldron, black and white tuxedo cat perched with a surprising amount of grace on one jutting handle, appeared at the scene with a blast of displaced air. The magic that Yaga used could bend space a little, in addition to drawing assistance from what most people thought of as inanimate or unintelligent beings. However, Yaga knew that energy and intelligence were more diverse than those most people could ever know. And her cauldron was far from unintelligent, infused with the spirit of a willing imp who chose to blend its energies with hers.

  The energy field the cauldron had brought with it hemmed in the dark shapeshifters almost as though there was a wave or invisibl
e wall pushing at them. The dark swirls of hate and hunger were pushed tighter into the center, snapping out at nothing and also inwardly at each other, yipping and snarling. The cat, who had been sitting on the edge as though unaware of the vast speed with which they traversed the distance between home and the battle, hopped down and stalked towards the wolf creatures, fur ruffled and standing up along his back.

  Yaga shouted, “Earl! Behave yourself! Those critchers will eat your furry self good if you get too close!”

  The cat looked insulted, stopped, and glared. Licked one paw, offended.

  The cauldron, in the meantime, was crouching as if about to leap, and Yaga smiled. “Now you’re in for it.”

  The Darkness shifted wildly, not knowing which threat to focus on—the old witch had seemed vulnerable, needy. And this strange thing to one side of it seemed like it ought to not be a threat, but it also pulsed with an electric vibration not unlike its own. Pulling all its entities of notwolf and hate and feeding hunger as close as possible, the Darkness surged towards the witch again.

  And the cauldron moved. Lightning fast, its body shifting from a sweet pot-bellied source of soup and magic potions into a vast, gaping maw of blackness and hunger. It was larger than it had been before too. It resembled nothing so much as a mastiff dog snapping bits of food its owner had tossed. There was even the slightest hint of very sharp teeth pointing downward from what had been a simple cauldron lip before.

  It snatched up bits of the edges of Darkness, and they disappeared into the nothingness in its center. Each sharp motion snapped up more of the swirling shapeshifter, and each gulp of dark energy made the cauldron grow just a bit larger, until it was the size of a small draft horse, bearing down on the remaining shapeshifting Darkness.

  Now, in front, Yaga smiled again. Her smiles had gone from anticipatory to downright feral, and she raised her walking stick, which, like the cauldron, could be as large as it needed to be. She didn’t appear to need the stick as support anymore either. Her gait had changed from shuffling-old-woman-in-the-woods to avenging-warrior pose, and she spread her arms, sweeping the staff wildly to one side, her other arm held high, fingers curled in a banishing forked spell.

  The center Darkness, which was rapidly losing bits of itself to the gulping hungry cauldron, spun, looking for an exit. It spied the small black and white cat and thought perhaps that was the trick—if it could just grab that small being, which seemed to hold less power than the other two threats, its energy could keep the diminishing force of Dark hate alive just long enough to find a way out of this. It surged in that direction, and the cat, bored now, blinked.

  Earl the cat swatted one clawed paw at the Darkness. It ripped into the hatred, the power, the growling hunger, and the ripples pushed ever more into the center, growing and feeding off itself. The force the cat wielded with one paw was far stronger than a simple cat’s. For Earl was something far different from a simple cat. The Darkness shrank to half its former size.

  At the same time, the cauldron continued to chomp bits of the now much less substantial Darkness into itself, growing larger with each bite, and the witch swung her staff, striding closer to the center and dispelling shadow into disappearing tufts of smoke.

  And then, the Darkness saw it. One small spark, a Call, from ages and miles and places far away into a future world. A yearning, a hunger like its own. It pulled at the Darkness through something it didn’t understand, a bending of energy and time. “Here,” it said. “I need you. We need you. Te necesitamos.”

  As the Yaga yelled her last few victorious cries as she saw the power that had sought to make an easy meal of her disappearing into the mouth of her familiar, swatted into ribbons of pain by the other familiar, the Darkness took the path it had found, out and away. A tiny prick of wormhole opened up and then shut closed behind it.

  The Yaga stopped, mouth agape. She had heard of these time and space-bending spells but never seen one before. Earl the cat, who had been hissing and raising his paw to strike the last bit of Darkness it was fighting on the other side of the clearing—a Darkness which disappeared abruptly just as the paw was about to strike—pulled back and sat down. The cauldron spun in a circle, looking for more energy to eat. Ever hungry, it was not ready for its meal of power and darkness to be over. It slumped and pouted.

  The Yaga was not exactly sure what had just happened, but she knew that her enemy had escaped. She had also seen, as that tiny wormhole in time closed, a vision of another place, and unfamiliar faces in a city she would never visit. A redheaded woman, a dark-haired younger one. Ghosts and pain and a Goddess appearing to help. Whether that was a dream, another plane of existence, Faerie or Hell, the Yaga was not prepared to guess. These kinds of magic happened sometimes when real power was dispersed. It wasn’t her business, her story, so she sighed and put it out of her mind.

  She slumped onto her walking stick, tired now, and whistled for the cauldron. The walking stick looked like a broom again, and the Baba Yaga leaned on it. The cauldron, in turn, had grown to be about the size of a small horse, and it clomped towards her, stomping on a lingering bit of swirling smoke that might have been some leftover of the entity they had fought, but might have just been night and mist falling. It stopped in front of its Mistress and visibly sniffed her. She put a hand out, stroking its side, and said to it, “Give me a seat, Cauldron. I’m tired.”

  The cauldron pulsed and bulged, and then its center firmed out into a smooth bench. The handles to each side morphed into arm rests, and it pulled itself into smaller, denser metallic solidity. Then it crouched, its legs and arms and clawed tips close to the ground, while the Baba Yaga settled down, tired.

  She looked every bit the small old woman again. She surveyed the clearing, and then, remembering the mushrooms that had been her mission, patted her pocket to see if they were still there.

  Yes.

  She smiled. She would need these if she was going to figure out what just happened. She’d also have to consult the books her Mothers had left to her, and write down the story of the event herself, for future Daughters to study. As far as she knew, no one had ever encountered this Darkness quite in the same fashion, and it certainly hadn’t disappeared into some hole in the world like a spider into its knothole, before. This was new. And new magic must be noted.

  “C’mon, Earl. Let’s get home,” the Baba Yaga said as she patted the bench beside her. The cat, which had been trying to figure out where his prey had gone, sniffed the clearing’s floor and squinting eyes, took one last look around, and shook his head as if in agreement. Then he leapt in one graceful movement onto the bench next to his partner. The cauldron walked, much slower this time, back towards home. The battle, as weird and confusing as it had been, was over. The shapeshifting Darkness and its hunger was gone.

  Running

  In the meantime, a tiny tendril of Darkness that had broken off from the main mass flickered and seethed unnoticed out of a hollow of ground. For a while it followed the old woman as she rode her cauldron and muttered to herself about her woods being invaded by annoyances. The woman spoke to the cat as if he were a person, having a conversation about what they would have for dinner. Then, having heard enough, the small bit of leftover Darkness floated into the air, pulsed, and popped out of existence where it was, only to rejoin the larger mass of Darkness where it had retreated.

  It had landed in a place with very few people, but which would grow to be one of the largest cities, one day. Near a river, where a small mission was only now being built to teach the native people of the area religion and reading. It swirled, gathered, hidden by a copse of cottonwood trees, and then regained its wolfish shape. Nearby, coyotes yipped, a band of hunters followed herds of deer, living off the meat as it roamed along the rivers north and southwesterly. The notwolf shapeshifter enjoyed its time as a wolf and adjusted its coloring and size to blend with the local groups.

  Then one day, it came upon the spirit of an angry young man who had just died. The man had
drowned in the periodic flooding of the river in this dry area, and his rage and pain drew the Darkness to him. The Darkness surrounded him, and he shifted into a wolfish shape, joined together, and the taste for this region grew strong, pleasurable.

  They would run here. They would wait. Here.

  Running. We run. Corremos.

  Wolves run on each side, males, females. Generations going back into time and time. Tias and tios, abuelos, primos, back and back to the earliest of us on this land. The oldest wolf remembers a time of swarming buffalo, the youngest is only here a few days. Some of us are the spirits of people, people of the wolf. Some of us are, were, never human.

  The smell of deer, of flesh, of an even sweeter meat not all of us have tried but have thought about. The smells surround us. This land is mine, my feet have been here before. We are a pack, many others with me, and we swirl together and apart like the wind, with the wind. El Viento.

  We have always been here, we always will be here. We range between the Colorado River in Austin to the San Antonio River that is my grounds, but the running takes a few hops in this wolf-ghost form. The city that surrounds us grew up over time. It is all ours. Este es nuestros. Mios.

  We are waiting. Esperamos.

  A Word from Kim Wells

  This story is a piece of the Children of Mariposa universe, inspired by my first novel, Mariposa, about a ghost who finds herself on a grand mission to help others who are trapped in this universe. Eventually, that universe is going to grow even larger. I am still working on the novel that’s Mariposa’s sequel, and should have it released sometime in 2016. In the meantime, I also have multiple projects in the works, including an anthology inspired by the Future Chronicles model.