by Amy Star
It was a brief tour, if it could even really be called a tour. Even so, it was nice to be shown around the little house, with leaves scattered across the floor boards and tumbling away with each step. They made no efforts to draw things out, though, considering wandering around outside while completely naked was not the most comfortable way to spend time. Soon enough, they began heading back down the stairs.
“Would you ever do anything like it again?” Elizabeth wondered, glancing over her shoulder as Ambrose followed her down the steps.
“Never again,” he replied emphatically. “I’m glad I did it. It was a good experience and a good skill set to have, don’t get me wrong. But it drove me nuts while I was working on it.”
Elizabeth laughed and hopped down the last few steps, landing with a quiet thump and moving out of the way.
Ambrose turned back into a bear just a moment after he made it to the bottom of the stairs. He gave himself a brisk shake before he prodded at Elizabeth’s side with the end of his nose. She ruffled his fur and tugged at one of his ears, and with a noise that sounded almost as if he was offended, he turned and began to lumber away with Elizabeth jogging after him.
They made their meandering way back to the house after that. After all, anything else he could show her would probably pale in comparison to the tree house.
*
If anyone had decided to ask her why, Elizabeth wouldn’t actually be able to give any sort of real answer, but she had expected everything to just…proceed as normal. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right term, but everything at Ambrose’s house seemed so idyllic. It was easy to believe that everything there would just carry on as it had been and that nothing would disturb the peace that they had settled into.
She wouldn’t have guessed that something as simple as an unexpected guest could throw everything out of sorts, like playing a game of Fifty-Two Pick Up with a deck of playing cards. Maybe that was a naive way of looking at it, but it had seemed to make sense at the time.
She would have liked to have kept that viewpoint. It would have been better than the alternative.
*
It seemed like an ordinary night when things changed, at least as ordinary as they got in Elizabeth’s circumstances, considering she was barred from entering her own house because of supernatural shapeshifters. Anyway, it had been a dull day, and it had been shaping up to be a dull evening; she had expected the status quo to hold out.
It seemed like a typical evening, with Elizabeth sitting on the couch watching a cheap movie on the television that had already been half over by the time she turned it on. And then, she was interrupted.
Elizabeth sat up slowly when she heard someone knock at the door. Ambrose wasn’t in the room, so she thought about answering it, but inviting someone into his house still seemed like a step too far, at least for the moment. Not that it mattered much, as he entered the kitchen at a brisk walk a moment later.
Elizabeth got to her feet and slunk after him, peering around his shoulder as he tugged the door open.
There was a man standing on the other side of the door, regarding them warily. He looked around Ambrose’s age—thirty, perhaps—and he was only a little shorter. He had skin the color of brown sugar, and his hair was a tawny shade of brown which was slicked back for the most part, save for a few errant strands that kept falling into his face, partially covering pale grey eyes.
He was dressed simply, and though in a sense, he was attractive, Elizabeth felt no draw towards him and, in fact, retreated another step behind Ambrose. There was something…odd about the newcomer, as if he didn’t quite fit right in his own skin. His eyes kept darting, as if he was expecting something to happen. More specifically, he seemed like he was expecting something to happen to him, as if a monster was going to burst out of the woodwork and try to gobble him up.
After a moment, he cleared his throat and said in a rasping voice, “Are you the one I go to if I need help?” He tipped his head to one side inquisitively as he asked, in a manner that seemed more canine than curious. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “I’m Maxwell, by the way.” The name didn’t quite seem to suit him. “Maxwell Beyer.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” Ambrose assured him before ushering him towards the basement stairs. Drawn by curiosity, Elizabeth trailed after them, pulling the basement door closed in her wake. If either of them noticed her following along behind them, neither of them said anything.
She was pretty sure they noticed, though. Even from her limited experience with shifters, it seemed like they always noticed. It was slightly impressive while at the same time being a little unnerving, though Elizabeth supposed it was no real loss that she would only rarely be able to sneak up on any of them.
As it turned out, Ambrose’s work wasn’t nearly as secretive as Elizabeth had assumed it to be. (Well, yes, it was still not exactly legal, and he didn’t want any people related to law enforcement finding out about it, but amongst his friends, it was not as much of a secret as Elizabeth had assumed.) He didn’t comment or protest when she followed the two of them down to the basement or when she hunkered down to sit on the bottom step and listen in on their conversation.
It was…enlightening.
Maxwell was a wolf and a very candid one at that. When questioned about the incident at Elizabeth’s house, he admitted readily that he had been involved in the dispute with the bears, though he seemed baffled when they asked if he had returned the other night. And when pressed for details about who he was, he admitted that he had spent more than seven years as a wolf, hardly shifting back to his human form at all, and those instances could be timed in seconds rather than minutes. So many of the details of his life had been lost or forgotten. Ambrose was going to have to invent most of it, making up entire swathes of who Maxwell was whole cloth.
Ambrose didn’t seem to appreciate it, but he didn’t complain, and the only sign he offered that he was dissatisfied was after Maxwell left, when he dragged a hand through his hair as he sighed, leaned back against the front door, and let his head thump back against it.
“He’s going to be trouble,” Ambrose decided eventually, slowly straightening up and dragging a hand over his hair once again. “Just…be cautious about him,” he warned her. “I’ve got a bad feeling about him. Turning over a new leaf or not, once a shifter gives up on balancing their humanity once, I wouldn’t put it past him to give up on it again, so he’s liable to be a bit…unpredictable.”
Elizabeth offered a jerky nod in reply. “Right,” she agreed slowly. “Unpredictable.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There was something unsettling about watching Maxwell when he was in the house. It was probably to be expected, considering how long it had been since he had bothered to be a human, but expected or not, the end result was the same; Maxwell was rather uncanny.
He didn’t seem to walk so much as he prowled, loose and languid but ready to tense and bolt like a startled hare at the drop of a hat. There was something too calculated hidden behind his eyes, in a way that made it seem like he was always trying to tell if something was an enemy, food, or neutral, as if a friendly middle ground had no chance of existing in his world.
Elizabeth didn’t like spending time around him, considering he made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. He set off her fight or flight instincts, and every time she was in the same room with him, a tiny voice in her hind brain told her she should flee. She was convinced he was going to cause irreparable damage to her blood pressure before he was gone, which made it rather inconvenient that he seemed drawn to her.
If he had seemed drawn to all of them, she could have passed it off as just an unfortunate quirk. But he wasn’t. He ignored Mara and Yusuke unless they specifically spoke to him, and despite the fact that he had ostensibly shown up to seek help from Ambrose, he never really sought out Ambrose’s attention so much as he simply went along with it when Ambrose told him to.
That was the strangest part. If he was truly there for h
elp from Ambrose, then why did he seem so unconcerned with actually getting said help?
She wasn’t sure what he wanted with her. She had never met him before, and she had never had anything to do with shifters before they decided to turn her house into a war zone. It was like he had simply thrown a dart and decided whoever it struck would be his fixation, and she had been the unlucky target. She swore if she looked hard enough, she would find a dart wound hidden somewhere on her back.
She supposed she would just need to get used to his presence, though. After all, he needed Ambrose’s help, and she wasn’t going to try to chase him off simply because he didn’t seem desperate enough. For all she knew, acting like a regular human after so long as a wolf was hard. For all she knew, maybe he would never really seem like a regular human again. Elizabeth wasn’t a horrible person, and she wasn’t going to go out of her way to get rid of him when he was looking for help.
Besides, if she was lucky, it wouldn’t really take all that long. After all, how long could it take to craft one fake identity?
Yes, she was sure that Maxwell would be a distant memory in the rearview mirror in no time, and soon enough she wouldn’t have to worry about a thing other than when she would be able to go home.
Admittedly, that wasn’t helping her discomfort. He had admitted to the fact that he had been part of the fighting group at the house, so how was she supposed to feel about him? True, the entire ordeal had apparently convinced him that he didn’t want anything to do with that way of life anymore, but Elizabeth also had proof that he could be violent and aggressive if he felt suitably pressed to be so.
She was worrying too much, she decided. She would bring up her concerns to Ambrose later, but other than that, she wasn’t getting anything out of lingering over it. She was just going to give herself a stress ulcer.
She found a book that looked interesting and decided that it would make a decent distraction until Ambrose had time to listen to her that night.
*
The plan to tell Ambrose about her discomfort didn’t go quite as eloquently as Elizabeth had initially planned. True, she had never been a playwright, and she had never been amazing at public speaking, but she had at least planned for the discussion to be a serious discussion, where she would outline her issue in a serious way. She mentally ran through ways to start the conversation as she headed up the stairs, so she could sound concerned and sensitive and understanding while still making her point clear. It would be great.
That wasn’t quite what happened.
“He weirds me out.” The words were out of Elizabeth’s mouth before she was even in Ambrose’s room, and she flopped down on his bed, face first with her arms spread out to her sides. Despite the fact that Ambrose could afford as many gaudy accoutrements as he wanted, his room didn’t seem particularly out of the ordinary, though the headboard and footboard were made of wrought iron and looked like they could break a foot if someone stubbed a toe on them, and they always made Elizabeth feel a bit out of place when she decided to roll around on the bed. Either way, it never seemed as if she was intruding, and Ambrose never bothered to tell her to leave.
Instead, he rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, what? That was just a bit too subtle for me to pick up on it.”
Elizabeth lifted her head up just long enough to blow a raspberry at him before she let her head drop once again, burying her face in the duvet once more.
Ambrose sighed and set his e-reader down on the bedside table. “He’s a bit odd,” he conceded, and at Elizabeth’s incredibly unimpressed silence, he corrected himself with, “Alright, he’s really odd.” He stretched out to prod at her shoulder with the heel of his foot. “So, you should be glad I’m doing this,” he pointed out. “The faster my job gets done, the faster he winds up somewhere else, very far away.”
“But I thought your job usually happened pretty quickly, anyway,” she grumbled, voice muffled by the bedding.
“No,” he returned blandly, “you’ve just only seen the last leg of it. It usually takes a while to get the documentation together, especially in this type of case, where he…doesn’t really seem to have an identity.”
“Which is weird,” Elizabeth pointed out, finally propping herself up on her elbows.
“He did admit that he’s been living as a wolf for a while,” Ambrose pointed out. “So, it’s probably to be expected.”
“Didn’t you say it was bad if they gave up on their humanity?” Elizabeth asked, her tone turning slightly wheedling as she did. “I’m pretty sure you said that was bad.”
“While they’re in the process of doing that, yes,” he agreed. “And I think we should be wary of him, but he hasn’t done anything yet, and evidently he’s thought better of that life choice. So, what? Do you want me to scold him for deciding he would rather be human after all?”
Elizabeth was silent for a moment as she sulked, before she admitted glumly, “No, that would be stupid.” There was a beat of quiet before she decided, “I still don’t like him, though. He kept me out of my house.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Ambrose assured her. “No one is going to insist that you like him. No one here likes him either.”
With that reassurance, Elizabeth heaved a sigh and levered herself up and off of the bed, getting to her feet. She dusted herself off in a manner that was more than a little unnecessary, getting a gentle snort of laughter from Ambrose, and she turned and headed back out into the hallway.
She supposed she would just have to deal with it for the time being. And she was an adult, so that, at least, was something she was very used to doing, whether she wanted to or not.
*
Elizabeth slept in Ambrose’s room a fair amount of the time, but she didn’t actually clear out any of her meager number of things from the guest room. She liked having a place to go that was hers, at least to some degree. She liked having a place to herself that she could use as a hidey-hole from time to time. She liked people and being social just fine, but she had her limits, and she was used to living on her own, relying on herself, and primarily working with non-sapient animals. She czxsDould only socialize for so long before she felt like she needed to go hide in a very dark hole.
The fact that Maxwell was around for a short while nearly every day wasn’t helping matters, but she was determined not to complain about that any more than was absolutely necessary.
She was sitting on the rug in the guest room, her back against the bed and her head tipped back against the mattress so she was watching the ceiling. It was perfectly smooth, so she couldn’t find shapes and patterns in it like she could in the popcorn ceilings at her house—which she had sort of hated at first, but as she hadn’t found the motivation to change them, they had grown on her over time—but the blank whiteness was good for zoning out and letting time pass.
It wasn’t until she nearly dozed off right there that she decided she should perhaps pick herself up off of the floor. Reluctantly, she dragged herself to her feet, changed into her pajamas, and crawled into bed. Of course, once she was lying down and once again staring at the ceiling, sleep seemed like a very far off and distant thing. Groaning, she flailed a hand out from under the blanket to snatch her phone up from the bedside table. She squinted in the blinding light as the screen came to life, until her eyes adjusted enough for her to check the phone’s battery life.
Seeing that it was nearly full, she decided she may as well find a way to entertain herself if sleep was going to elude her like a nervous kitten.
When a message arrived, it was nearly two hours later, even if it hardly felt like it had been thirty minutes. It showed up in a banner across the top of the screen, vanishing a few seconds later when she didn’t immediately acknowledge it.
heading to your house to take a look around the property
The text message arrived at nearly midnight from Yusuke’s phone. It was simple and to the point, and other than briefly glancing at it, it took Elizabeth a few minutes to pry her attention away from th
e movie on her phone and actually answer it.
Let me know if you need to know where anything is.
I sort of figured Mara would do the trespassing, though.
What with the whole dog sense of smell and all that.
There was no immediate reply, and after a few minutes of staring at her phone expectantly, it finally occurred to Elizabeth that he was probably already cat-shaped and running around her yard, so he wouldn’t be able to respond. She waited a few more minutes just in case before she resumed watching her movie.
*
so your yard stinks like wolf
also cats don’t have a horrible sense of smell
just not as good as a dog’s
so i can say definitively that your yard stinks like wolf
in case you were wondering
The stream of text messages woke Elizabeth up at two in the morning when her phone tried to vibrate its way off the bedside table, and she squinted at her phone in the darkness. She was pretty sure she was going to go blind from the light, and she had to retype her reply three times before she managed to get it coherent.
