by Beth Dranoff
Friends with benefits. Not the same as I had with Sam, but I also wasn’t ready for Sam. Not committed. Jon was my exit strategy, and a tasty one at that. As long as sometimes he was here and sometimes Sam was here I didn’t have to confront my certainty that one day Sam would leave. Me. Us. Even if what I feared most was something I would bring into being by being here, doing this. With my other lover.
Jon’s mouth drifted lower and I gripped harder.
* * *
“We can’t keep doing this,” I said, nuzzling into Jon’s neck where we’d ended up, against the wall and with my leg slung over his.
“Sure we can,” Jon replied. “If it’s what you want, I’m happy to oblige.”
Yep. That was Jon—a giver.
“Listen,” I said. Because I’d forgotten earlier. About Frank, and my new debt, and the or else portion of my imposed arrangement.
“Huh.” Jon kissed the top of my head, his arms wrapped around me as I leaned back against him. “Wasn’t it me who actually cut it off? Why isn’t that crew after me?”
“Low-hanging fruit?” I shrugged, my shoulder coming closer to Jon’s mouth, and he nipped at it. Mmmmm. “What could they threaten you with? Plus you have no real connection to Gus—unlike me, what with Sandor and the thing where Gus tried to kill me.”
“True.” Jon had found a softer spot, closer to my neck, and was kissing his way along it again. “I’ll help.” He found my earlobe, used his teeth a bit. I groaned and squirmed, but I couldn’t escape with his arms hugging me in place. Did I have somewhere to be? His palms glided up until they found my breasts, his fingers ghosting over the nubs until they hardened up to meet him. Oh yeah, he was a giver all right. Then, going lower again until I needed more. We spun around, and then I was straddling him; sliding over and into and under until there was no more thought.
Chapter Eleven
I spaced out during Anshell’s ceremonial introduction to the event. Nothing new there; the man sure did like to make a production of things. I entertained myself by practicing my micro-shifts. A form of meditation Anshell had taught me. Nails sharpening, then blunting, fur sprouting from the tops of my feet and then back again. Beauty and Beast in one Dana-sized package. I shook off the sand that had gotten in my hairs as they fell to my skin, ticklish scattering grains; a splatter of tiny dry crystals that twinkled in the moonlight.
Sam’s lips twitched as he stood slightly behind Anshell and off to one side. Those eyes, watching me.
I wondered if he smelled Jon on my skin, even after I’d showered. What Sam would think of Owain. I thought maybe I wasn’t ready to share that gaping, sucking chest wound just yet. Or, you know, at all really. Which was why I was here. The meet was optional; my need for a run was not.
Would Anshell ever stop talking? What was he even saying at this point? I tried to focus. Something about the upcoming Summer Solstice. Our responsibility as Pack members to contribute through our deeds to the community around us in a positive way. I wondered if that included the norms. I wondered when Anshell would be done.
Sam was shaking his head. At me? Pfft.
Finally the raising of the arms and the answering howls and growls around me. Yes.
“Run well, and may all your moons face at least seven ways.”
An answering wave of animal noises as those who’d come out drifted towards the shadows to get their shift on. Where was Sam? His scent, cinnamon and cream and fur warmed by sunlight, was suddenly behind me. I turned to look over my shoulder, and my reward was the lazy answering smile that stretched wide across Sam’s face, deepening the creases of skin at the outer edges of his eyes.
“Let’s run,” he said.
* * *
The breeze made windy as it rushed past my ears. Seagulls by the shore. I slunk past, tail twitching, my head down and my butt swaying high as I prepared to pounce. Another feline shot over and past me, scaring my prey into a flurry of feathers and sand displaced. Sam. Teasing me with a flick of his tail before circling back to touch noses when I didn’t respond.
I looked up at the unnaturally bare trees, stripped by the cormorants flocking north, lured by the warmer temperatures and seasonal shifts. Without natural predators, the birds were breeding faster than the native environment could support and branches that should have been part of a lush super growth of June-in-Toronto green were instead these bleak grey spikes of delayed death.
But climate change wasn’t real. Right.
There was white, and feathers, and the unguarded moment. Fish and brackish water and rust and sweet smoke hanging in the air that clung tacky against my skin, a contrast with the grains of sand rubbing at the softer bits between the pads of my paws. The rhythmic pounding from a drum circle across the water echoed its driving beat in my chest.
I spotted my prey and tracked it with whiskers that twitched in the breeze. My ears flicked forward and back, angling, a live satellite dish on a search and capture mission. A splash down the beach; stones displaced with an after-tow of water bunching and smoothing. Hungry. Yes, I hungered. Satisfaction was there. I wanted it.
The string, invisible, drawing me towards the potential. Craving. Satiety. I could have both. Closer. Almost...
I pounced, and the bird was in my mouth, its neck snapped, blood and feathers dribbling down my chin. My human self wanted to puke. But the me that was me in this moment sucked and chewed and swallowed. Whole again inside where nobody could see.
The water was cool on my tongue as it washed away the taste of bird and grit and feathers. My reflection startled; even after so many months it was only my expression, familiar in its dispassionate wariness, that I recognized. Too bad water alone wasn’t enough to cleanse the palate of my human experiences.
I turned around again, quenched but not sated. Ready to share my spoils.
I was alone.
Here kitty kitty kitty.
Buzzing, followed by a popping as though the atmospheric pressure had dropped and I needed to be chewing gum. A whispering that stroked down my back and between my ears. My answering growl, raising the fur into a Mohawk peak along my spine, ending in a purr I could not control. The unguarded moment seized.
Exactly how many times was I going to be threatened in a single twenty-four-hour period?
And where was the Pack?
I couldn’t hear anything over the buzzing in my head, the chirping roll from my throat. But there were other senses to access—sight, scent—and neither of those were telling me anything other than you’re on your own again, girl.
Suddenly wishing I truly was.
The smell is what hit me first: flesh stripped and left to ripen in the sun, decaying fish carcasses, milk curdled and souring beyond fermentation and well into the inedible mold stage. And yet I felt that hand running fingers through my softness, blocking out the stench and honing in my attention on where he or she touched. The yowl of a cat in heat.
I burned.
Some infinitesimal part of my awareness beat its metaphorical fists against the inside of my head. Demanding my attention. This feeling, this need, was familiar in a way that did not automatically breed contempt. Remember. Something I had to remember. But what?
It had happened before.
This happened then.
Oh. Oh shit.
Alina.
Danyankeleh.
My father’s voice in my ear, in my head, hanging on the wind.
Remember who you are. Where you are.
RUN.
I ran.
Not fast enough; I could feel the ooze against my skin of She-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Uttered-Aloud, even as the single word echoed in my mind: Alina.
I knew enough now to be scared. Flight winning over fight. Had to get her touch away from me.
But how?
There
was water, but no amount of residual humanity was convincing my cat self that liquid immersion was an appealing option. I could shift back, but I couldn’t tell whether anyone was close enough to see. Not ready—safe—for me to come out of the not-quite-as-normal-as-you-think closet yet.
I realized the bird had been a way to Pied Piper me away from the safety of the group. Stalking my hunger, turning me from predator to prey. Would anyone in the Pack even notice me gone? I’d already proven beast brain was more driven by craving than by deductive, dispassionate logic.
This was my own stupidity, so it was up to me to get myself out of this too.
Mental breath. I made a conscious decision to empty my mind. Nothing and no one to interrupt the expansive fluffy goose-down comforter of white I wrapped around and up and along the walls of me. My core. Remembering I existed in this form but also as something else. Two legs, not four; words and not sounds.
Two as one under the slivering moon.
I could do this.
I dipped my paw in the water. Hissed at my own reflection, the chill that dripped beneath and between my pads; I snatched it back and started licking. Alina’s laughter in my ear. Cats have hackles apparently, and mine were sticking straight up. Hey Dana, why don’t you show the crazy lady who wants to skin human you just how much her presence is freaking you out? Yeah, that’d be super helpful.
Kitty kitty kitty. You have a secret to share.
I glanced over my shoulder. Alina had materialized a few feet back to stand between me and freedom. Theoretically at least—the beach was pretty big and there was only one of her. At least I hoped she was on her own. And what the hell kind of secret did she think I wanted to share with her? What, we were going to be hair-braiding buddies now? After she’d tortured me for information and left me lying pooled-river-of-blood-adjacent to die? Seriously?
She must have taken my silence as agreement, or at least an opportunity for her to keep going.
“Do you know who I am?” What, she didn’t recognize me? I angled my head to one quizzical side, playing at a game whose rules I was still waiting to make sense of. Pretending she was the stranger she was not.
Alina invaded my personal space again, holding out the back of her hand. Touching my nose to her skin, I sniffed; an involuntary response. I fought against the urge to rub my head against her, marking my territory. No. Couldn’t let that happen or she might realize my scent was familiar.
I waited. Tried not to flinch as she reached out and scratched behind my ears, even though I couldn’t control the growl vibrating in my throat. Alina was a demon, and powerful, but it was only the two of us here and I was a big cat with claws.
She backed away. But didn’t go far.
Instead she reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of something that smelled like salmon sashimi rolled in fresh milk and garnished in some kind of nip that made my head spin. Dancing and twirling, arms outstretched; a Dionysian band with Pan and flutes and pointy shoes with poufy dresses. I held my breath while music that couldn’t be there even so pounded in my ears. Or maybe that was my heart. I was panting while standing still, weighted with that Sisyphean boulder at the bottom of a hill without end. Alina held out her hand with her offering hanging on the damp air, pulling against the remaining shards of my self-control to a place I still had to resist.
It was getting hard to remember why.
Human Dana was yelling, trying to get the cat brain to see, go back to the place where trust was bad. Alina was a demon. Alina the demon equaled pain. Equaled fear. Equaled bad.
The screams, the blood; the head of Ezra rolling to the ground at the replica of a facility I used to know. Human Dana remembered and wished she didn’t. No. Human and feline, we were one. Feeding the other. Left brain and right brain integrated into a single whole.
Neither of them trusted the green-horned, dark-haired Alina.
“I would ask a favor,” she said. Wait, what? Alina raised her hand and waved it through the air, slowly; as it passed, my skin hummed and a yowl—pure alley cat in heat—burst from my throat. No way to contain it. Losing the thread that suggested I shut up and play dumb. “I could take what I want from you.” Musing. “But I want you to want it. To give it freely.” She chuckled, rotating her hand; the pleasure I’d been feeling turned suddenly into the stabbing of a thousand needles everywhere and all at once. Yowling now, only this time with pain.
Alina dropped her hand and I crumpled along with it. Prostrate in the sand, no longer caring that I was belly-deep in water as long as its coolness meant relief.
“There is someone new in your midst,” she said, watching me pant; a scientist observing the outcome of a specific set of applied criteria. Knowing what would happen yet conducting the test again and again because why not. “Dana Markovitz. She has a relationship with your Alpha. I want you to watch her, profile her, and report back. Understand that you will represent my interests in your world now, and you will tell me what I want to know. Or,” her eyes holding mine in their infinite black abyss, “your pack will be slaughtered and I will kill you last after making you watch. Do we have a deal?”
Oh yeah. The Pack was totally going to stand behind me after this.
My paws were crossed under my chin, negating my promise, but I nodded. Sure, let’s pretend to make a deal. We both knew this was a proposition I couldn’t decline and walk away from.
She was there and then in a single blink she was not.
Wind rushed past my ears and echoed with the pounding of the drum circle again. I licked at my paws—a compulsion—and then at my hindquarters. Grooming the scent of Alina from my skin.
But I had a new piece of information: once I’d shifted, Alina couldn’t tell it was me.
Chapter Twelve
The tree was still thick with green and yellow foliage. If you were to ask me what I was doing, rational me, I’d probably have said surveillance. I was watching the entire beach, taking in the partiers and the slackers, but that wasn’t all I was looking for. Or how I found myself thirty feet from the ground. Or why I couldn’t stop shaking.
The beating drums tapered off and campfires were tamped down. Distant sounds of metal on grease as cars started up, their headlights piercing the gloom as the evidence of their paths receded.
Relative silence was no better. Every twig that snapped and each splash of a fish or a bird hunting that fish had me tasting blood. My blood. I bit the side of my check, licked the pads of my paws and washed behind my ears. Again. Compulsion. Repetition. The cat in me at odds with the human.
So I stayed where I was.
More cars, more headlights. The pack was thinning, heading home to shower and get some sleep before work.
My tail twitched and cracked a branch as it thwacked. I jumped, not recognizing the sound as my own.
More darkness, even fewer cars. Had they forgotten about me?
Maybe it was for the best.
Forget I existed. Then maybe I would never fall under Alina’s control again.
I heard the clip clip cloppitty clip of hooves as the hard edges met with soft sand, spraying water and displacing serenity in its wake. I smelled familiarity, and home, and I forced myself to look towards its source. Down. Beneath where I still hid.
Only shadow. But a shadow that got closer, claws cracking bark as it climbed. I backed away, deeper into the gloom, hoping it wouldn’t find me. But it knew my scent—he knew my scent, in any form—and then he was there, on the branch beside me. Edging forward so I could see him, remember that I knew how he smelled. Tasted. He watched me, then blinked and looked away. I yawned. No threat here, nothing to see.
He came closer, making himself more vulnerable so I could feel less threatened. I could have swiped at his face with my claws.
My hackles released a bit as he edged in, nearer, just enough to reach over an
d touch noses.
He purred; I answered with one of my own. Bumping his head with mine. He licked my cheek and I rubbed it along the scruff of his neck.
Pinks and blues smudged at the far edge of the water, the light reflecting against the streaks of grey and black and brown in his coat. Different than I remembered. Still familiar.
He looked at me, at the tree trunk and then down. Repeated the sequence again, waiting for me to understand. I retreated a few steps and the branch I was on groaned. A warning growl, deep in his throat; an answering whinny from below. Also familiar and yet I could not lay name to it.
Trust. I remembered trust.
“Dana.” Yes, I knew that voice. “Come down, girl.”
I couldn’t claim that name. Not safe. I growled warning; the other cat echoed my concerns.
“You’re safe,” the man down below was saying. Human? Was he human before? I edged further away, the tree limb I was on bending even more precariously under my weight. “No,” he said. “Stop. That branch you’re on will break if you go any further. Come down.”
I whined. I did not want to see the scary not-cat again, have her figure out who I was when I wasn’t this. The me who was me on two legs and not four paws.
And in that moment I remembered who I was. That the human on the ground could not climb up to me in his other form, and that he was Anshell. And of course the one with me in this tree was also known because he was Sam.
Sam angled his chin again, indicating the way I needed to go. Rubbed his head up against me; bumping at me, gentle, when I didn’t immediately respond.
I wanted to feel the safety of their proximity. Getting closer, close enough to taste their scent. Both men waited until I was more them than me, wrapping their shared presence around my shoulders, willing myself to believe in that. No room for doubt, the flicker of it held a moment in my head and then like a candle released and snuffed.
I jumped. A moment later, Sam landed beside me. We touched noses, and he gave my forehead a couple of quick licks before padding off into the underbrush to shift back. I realized that I, too, could hide. There was a reason to run away, a reason to stay in this form and not the other. Safer somehow.
