Shifter

by Jennifer Reynolds

  “Here he is,” she says, stopping in front of one the cages halfway down an aisle.

  I’m in love the moment I see him.

  Chapter 2

  ~~~Dimitri~~~

  “What now,” I want to scream, but I know neither of the women standing in front of my cage can hear me. No one can hear me. I settle for giving them the most annoyed look my new body is able to conjure. They pay me no attention. God, do they have to stand there and stare at me like that? Their big heads bobbing at me from behind the barred door is creepy. They look like bug-eyed aliens from some B-movie examining their latest abduction. I’ve already had the anal probe, what more could they want?

  “You wouldn’t like it if I came to your home and stood in your doorway looking at you, examining you, would you? No, no you wouldn’t. Now go the hell away.” The words come out as an ineffectual growl that causes them to coo over me and causes me to turn away from them in disgust. This day keeps getting worse by the moment. The last thing I feel like doing is dealing with these women. “Just bring the musky smelling, greasy headed boy back to do whatever it is the two of you want to test me for or do to me.”

  “He’s cute,” the one not dressed in medical scrubs says and taps the bars with one fingernail as if that is going to get me to turn around and look at her. “Awe, he’s pouting.”

  Great. Just freaking great. I know that to them I’m merely a tiny, fuzzy creature, and people love to ogle tiny, fuzzy creatures, but damn it, if they only knew how humiliating it is for a man like me to be treated this way. I could kill that stupid bitch for doing this to me.

  “Mave,” I scream out in my head for the thousandth time today, turning back to face the women. My cage is hard and too cold. I can’t get comfortable enough to stay in one spot for any length of time. A small hiss escapes my feline lips at the thought of that witch, and the woman sticking her hand into my cage pulls back slightly. I try to look at her apologetically, feeling guilty for my behavior, but I know she can’t understand me.

  Mave continues to ignore me. The stupid witch. Maybe if I call her a bitch enough times she will answer. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.” Nah, she’s too used to people calling her that for it to faze her. “I know you can hear me, you crazy hag.”

  On the other hand, maybe she can’t. I only have limited control over my powers. Maybe I can’t project my thoughts to her. I sure wasn’t able to project them to the people who found me this morning.

  The fact that I risked exposure is a testament to how pissed and desperate I am to get out of this form. I didn’t have a choice. I’m a damned cat for crying aloud. Twenty-four hours ago, I was a man. Okay, technically, I’m not a human man. Being able to shift into any animal I want to means that I’m not completely human. Nevertheless, I’ve never been a cat before. At least not the cute, fluffy kind. Mountain lion, tiger, cougar; I’ve been all three, but I have never degraded myself and shifted into a common house-cat before.

  I hadn’t meant to insult her. The witch, not the woman now stroking my fur. I should have known better than to make promises to a witch. In my defense, I had been drunk. Really drunk. She should have known not to believe anything a drunk man says. All women know this. We say and promise many things we don’t mean when we are trying to get some. Very asshole of us, I know. Trust me, I will never do it again, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

  The pack had been celebrating the purchase of a large chunk of land in the mountains of Tennessee. Being mythical creatures and all, we did use a little magic with the help of a friendly witch to make the buyout happen, meaning it wasn’t a complete surprise. Because of this, it was not necessarily a cause for celebration, but the pack lives to party, and any excuse to do so is welcome.

  The land had originally been my families, therefore the packs, a hundred plus years ago, until a great uncle of mine lost most of it in a bet with a witch. From there, it was purposely lost to the banks by the spiteful old bitch, then auctioned off a small piece at a time. The spells the witch cast over it has kept our family and pack from being able to get it all back at once, until now. If it hadn’t been for Sam, one of the few witches actually friendly to the pack, we wouldn’t have managed it at all. Our magic isn’t anywhere near powerful enough to break the binding words of the bet.

  For over a hundred years, we have resigned ourselves to roaming the small bit of land that wasn’t lost because my father and his other brothers had owned it. The only consolation we have had is that we are shapeshifters, not weres. We aren’t confined to one form. This means we can wander around as wolves, coyotes, or any other animal that most humans will willingly stay away from due to basic survival instincts. This opens us up to being able to roam large parks or wooded areas without scaring the humans. Our favorite things to do are shift into deer and roam the Natchez Trace. The parkway is long, spanning three states, which gives us plenty of room to stretch our legs when we need to.

  Over the generations, we have bought back a few tiny pieces of our land, opening our roaming area up little by little, but until that night, the largest piece was still missing. To finally have it all was a great thing for the family and the pack. A night of drunken debauchery was our reward to ourselves for getting the land back. Starting the next day, the warding spells would have to go up and the battle with the werewolves that roamed the land would begin. That one night was all we allowed ourselves.

  Devan, the next to the oldest of my mother’s four boys since Daniel died, was supposed to be the responsible one that night. Every time any of us go out into the human world like that, we choose one person to be our DFWD, designated fertile woman detector, though the person isn’t limited to scouting women. This person is in charge of making sure none of us go home with a human or another shifter unless he or she is sure that said person is unclaimed and, in the case of women, not fertile.

  Unclaimed in the human vernacular means single, not just un-wed. We can tell if a woman or a man has a steady partner. Unclaimed in the supernatural world means un-mated. Most supernatural beings mate for life. In some cases, like shifters, this means they find their soul mate, the one person in the entire world that is their perfect match. In other cases, like weres, this means that the two make a verbal pledge before their pack to be together forever. The big difference is that any two people can make the pledge whether they are in love or not, and if they fall out of love with each other, then oh well, they are stuck with each other. Most weres don’t enter into the pledge lightly. All of this means that the chances of running across a claimed male or female in a bar looking to get laid is slim. On the off chance you run into one, you want to stay far, far away from her or him.

  The same goes for humans. I’m not saying that shifters can’t sleep with humans. We can. We do all the time. We just have to be very careful not to impregnate one. Most supernatural species have certain heightened senses that let them know whether the human they’ve encountered is fertile or not. Knowing whether a woman is fertile or not doesn’t matter to most species, such as Vampires, because they can’t breed with humans. Shifters, on the other hand, are human in all the ways that matter. The problem is that these senses are dulled when we are intoxicated or otherwise mentally handicapped. In those moments, we are human. We are unable to shift or use magic.

  Human women can carry shifter babies with no problem, even deliver them. Not until the kid hits puberty and begins shifting does the problem come into play. Most humans are unable to accept that the supernatural exists. You would think that with all the supernatural themed entertainment floating around out there that people would be more accepting of shifters, but they aren’t; therefore, we tend to stick with our own kind.

  A pack occasionally brings in new blood from the human world, but there are enough different packs throughout the world that the need for such measures is slim.

  Unfortunately, that night, Devan was slacking in his duties. He was apparently too caught up in the moment to bother caring about what anyone else was doing. So wh
en she came into the bar looking the way she did, I pounced without a single thought about the consequences. If I had been in control of myself, I would have been able to smell the magic on her, the way I had smelled it last night. No matter how powerful she is, she can never hide her smell, not from us.

  She is beautiful, there is no doubt, and even sober I might have pursued her for a little while. She is tall, Amazonian tall, with long, blood-red, curly hair. Her body is lean and curvy, exactly the thing that makes my loins ache. I really hate the women of this generation. They are either skeleton thin or morbidly obese. There seems to be no middle ground anymore. Whoever said that a woman was only beautiful if her bones poked through her skin was insane.

  With no one to stop me, I bedded her with promises that she would not be a one-night stand, that I would call her the next morning, that I would do a lot of things that even then I knew I would never do. The sex had been great—what I could remember of it, anyway.

  Yet, I barely paid any attention to her the next morning when my brother snuck into my room to wake me. Once I paid my bill at the front desk and was on my way back home, she became no more than a fleeting memory.

  Apparently, I had made an impression on her. Last night she had shown up at my doorstep—pissed. How she had known where I lived, is beyond me. I had only moved into the cabin that week. The cabin had been one of the many homes we had inherited when we had bought back the rest of our land. The family that had previously owned the land had built the small log cabin as a vacation home.

  My name isn’t even on the deed to the house, my older brother, Darius’, name is. I know I hadn’t given her his name. She had to have used magic to find me. If she did, her powers are greater than mine are. I can find my family and pack mates because of our blood and our bond, but some random woman I had slept with once was lost to me. I can’t even transport myself to a place I’m unfamiliar with, unless someone I am blood or bonded to is there or has been there, and even then, I have to be careful of how and where I land.

  “Answer the door you worthless piece of shit,” she had screamed as she pounded on my door.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, opening the door and not immediately recognizing her. After all, it had been nearly a month since the buyout.

  “What do you mean, can you help me, you son of a bitch,” she screamed at me, her face turning as red as her hair.

  “Look lady… I don’t… Oh shit.” The second she stepped to the doorframe, I recognized her.

  “You’re damn right, ‘oh shit.’ What the fuck is wrong with you?” She was nearly nose-to-nose with me.

  “Please, come in, Mave.” I said her name as a question while opening the door wider and stepping aside to get out of her line of sight and give her full access to my home, thinking that would at least help to calm her down. The look she gave me burned my soul. Literally. I felt my insides flame for a second, right before she walked passed me, and I inhaled her magical aroma. Strawberries and fire. I knew instantly I had really messed up. That smell was the sign of a very powerful witch.

  “So,” she said, walking to the middle of the room and turning to face me.

  “So what?” I knew I had messed up by sleeping with a witch. Most of them hated our kind. Surely, she had known what I was. I’m positive she hadn’t been drunk or even drinking. Was she going to accuse me of raping her or slipping her some sort of drug or magical concoction that compelled her to sleep with me?

  “Well, you’re obviously not dead, which had been my first thought when I didn’t hear from you by the third day.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You promised to call. I waited. Some of my friends said that it was customary to wait three days after getting a number to call. I figured since we had slept together you might forgo that rule, but then, when you didn’t call, I waited the three days. When I didn’t hear from you, I got worried. My friends told me to blow you off. They said you were just some asshole who had used me. I couldn’t believe it. You had promised. I went to the bar where we met and the hotel we stayed at that night. They both said you and your brothers were from out of town. That was when I began to fear your death. I searched and searched the internet for automobile accidents and plane crashes…”

  That was the moment that I knew she was crazy. I should have known that night because of the things she did and was willing to do in bed. My uncle used to say that the crazy ones were always freaky in bed. I listened to her rant for a few more minutes before I cut her off.

  “Look, I am real sorry about that night. My brothers and I were celebrating. Hard. I had a little too much to drink. If I said anything inappropriate, I am sorry. And I probably would have called had I had your number…” I started to lie.

  “But you did have my number. I programmed it into your phone.”

  “You…what…” I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and scrolled through the numbers. “It’s not in here.”

  “What.” She snatched the phone from me and scrolled through the names. “You erased it.”

  “No, I didn’t.” My brother must have when he realized what I had done, the bastard. I wasn’t about to tell the crazy woman in front of me this. What if I had gotten her pregnant? Thinking that caused me to blurt out, “Are you pregnant?” My heart raced at the thought of her carrying my child. On one hand, it was a great thing to bring a new member into the pack. On the other hand, for this woman to be its mother was going to cause some serious turmoil.

  “No,” she said with a hint of sadness in her voice.

  I fell into the seat next to me with obvious relief.

  “Asshole,” she spat at my action.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that…”

  “Shut up. I don’t care. You had no intentions toward me whatsoever, did you?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Why sleep with you?”

  She nods.

  I wanted to tell her because she was easy, but that wouldn’t be very modern of me. She was no easier than I was. We had both bedded people we didn’t know. Whereas I had intended mine to be a one-night stand, she obviously had not.

  “I was drunk and you were there.” Damn it, I hadn’t meant to say that either.

  “You know what, fuck you.”

  And that had been the moment I became a cat. One minute I was sitting sprawled out on a chair in obvious relief of not fathering a child with this loopy fucking cunt, the next I was an itty-bitty ball of fur in the middle of the chair cushion.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she snarled down at me. “You are still cute in that form. Every woman who lays eyes on you will want you, but not in the way you will want them to want you.”

  That was not what I was thinking. I was thinking that when I shifted back into a man I was killing the bitch. As I thought this, I tried shifting, but nothing happened. I screamed at her in anger. What came out of my mouth was a hiss, and she had the nerve to laugh at me.

  “Don’t hiss at me.” She cooed and tried to rub me between the ears with one of her fingers. I took a swipe at her with one of my paws and scratched her good with a long, sharp nail.

  “Why you little shit,” she spat, sucking on the wound. “You made me bleed.” Shrugging, she said, “I’ll have the last laugh anyway. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, your condition is permanent. I’m a very powerful witch if you haven’t noticed, and you have thoroughly pissed me off. I was going to keep you for myself, but for this,” she held up her bleeding finger, “I’m sending you to the pound. They kill animals there if no one comes in to adopt them. And the ones that are adopted are neutered.”

  With a flick of her hand, I was in a cage on the front steps of the Smith County Animal Clinic and Shelter in a small town across the Tennessee/Alabama state line called Austin.

  I spent the first five minutes I was there cursing Mave. When I gave up on her, I began to contemplate my situation. I couldn’t think of any way of getting out of it. />
  Once I resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to go into the shelter the moment the doors opened, I had to think of ways of getting out of the cage. I could still feel my magic, which was a good thing. The first thing I tried do was shift out of the cage. Not far, just on the other side of the mesh door. It didn’t work. The next thing I tried was popping the lock. Nothing happened.

  Escape wasn’t an option. I had to think of ways of ensuring that the shelter wouldn’t put me to sleep. After forcing myself to calm down and think through things, I decided that they wouldn’t kill a healthy cat. I tested my magic again by making sure I didn’t have any physical abnormalities or medical conditions. I felt my magic this time and let it heal any diseases she might have given me.

  She was just crazy enough to do something like give me feline leukemia or AIDs.

  Then I had to decide what to do to make sure someone adopted me. What did people want in a cat? Cuteness. Pedigree. I spent the next hour focusing on changing my color and my breed, before finally settling on a smoky gray Maine Coon, the biggest housecat I could imagine. Surely, someone would adopt such an expensive animal.

  My powers seemed to only work on me and, even then, they were limited, which meant there wasn’t much else I could do. I had circled the cage, flung myself at the bars and latches, hoping something would give, but I was too small and weak to do anything.

  After that, I slept. I woke a few hours later to someone jostling and lifting my carrier. A pimply-faced teenage boy looked through the bars of the cage at me. Mentally I cursed and lay back down, resigned to my fate.

  They poked, prodded, and bathed me, then they put me in this cage with pebbled food, room temperature water, and, thankfully, a clean litter box—that thing was going to be the bane of my new existence. Hissing at it, I crawled into the opposite corner and lay down. I hated being this lazy, but there was nothing left for me to do. I hadn’t been here long before these two women walked up.