by Molly Harper
“Actually, that wasn’t as expensive as you would think. Ernie really hated his job.” She jerked her shoulders. “We bought out the rest of the seats so no one else would get hurt. You were collateral damage.”
I blew out an irritated breath. “That creates very little hope for me regarding the airline industry. Also, screw you and your whole family. Collateral damage.”
The woman put her hands to the ground, as if to push up to a standing position.
I held the potted meat can in what I hoped was a threatening manner. “Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast. Stay on the ground.”
The woman sank back down, glaring at me with eyes the color of a bottomless Scottish lake. “You wouldn’t understand. We’re not like werewolves. We’re not like witches. No one has ever bothered to study us in any sort of serious way. Hell, most people don’t even know we exist. There’s still so much we don’t know about ourselves. We’re obsessive about our shifting, to the point where we can’t function. We don’t know why we’re this way or how it started. We don’t know why some families turn out generation upon generation of talented shifters, while the trait is fading out of other families so fast they don’t even consider themselves shifters. Some of us can’t control the shifts, so we have to live in hiding for fear we’ll suddenly turn into a giant rabbit in front of our human neighbors. Others are driven mad trying to find the right form, that perfect form that will make us feel whole. We’re so spread out and we’re not exactly known for being organized. We each keep to our own little group, and we don’t talk to each other. You know, some of us actually think we’re cursed to be this way, can you believe that? Of all the backward-ass things? We’ve been hearing for years that Friar Thomas wrote a book that would give us the answers we need. We’ve been searching for a copy for years, and nothing. Until some pain-in-the-ass librarian friend of my cousin Ensel spotted you with it at the library. What are the odds?”
“I’ve wondered the same myself,” I muttered.
“Having that book will help us understand ourselves in a way we never have before. It’s like a how-to guide on handling your gift without driving yourself insane. Isn’t that a better use for it than giving it to some rich old vampire and letting it mold in her library?”
I noted that she didn’t mention the final chapter’s “shifter A-bomb.” Was it because she didn’t know about it? Or because she didn’t think I knew about it and didn’t want to tip me off? Well, I certainly wasn’t about to bring it into the conversation.
“But it’s not up to me to make that decision. I’ve been hired to do a job. I’m taking it rather personally that you keep trying to kill me in the process, so I’m going to stick with it,” I told her.
The fluffy chick sighed, brushing her hands off on her pants and rolling to her knees. “Well, I’m telling you now, I’m not letting you out of these woods with it.”
I believed her. And that didn’t exactly endear me to her. I felt for the knife, wondering if I could pull it out of the bag before she pushed up from the ground and tackled me. After the eye poke, she knew to watch me for sudden movements, so probably not.
I tried to think of something else from Friar Thomas’s work that I could use, like an acute sensitivity to poison ivy or a particularly thin spot in the skull that I could exploit with a rock, but mostly it was genealogical information and details about the act of shifting itself.
I had to stop thinking like myself. I had to stop being so analytical. What would Finn do in a situation like this, once attempts to charm this woman had failed and he was forced to use his wits instead of his wiles? I didn’t have strength on my side. I didn’t have a weapon. But I did have something that the shifter woman didn’t.
Potted meat.
I whipped my hand toward her, splashing the foul, vinegary sauce into her face. She screamed, though I couldn’t tell if that was rage or disgust, as she wiped her eyes with the tail of her shirt. “Why my eyes again, you hateful bitch?!”
“Because you keep leaving them unprotected!” I yelled. I jogged back toward the wasps, careful that she was able to see me, even with the potted-meat sauce stinging her eyes. The shifter roared as she stumbled after me. I scanned the branches overhead, listening for the sound of buzzing. After a few minutes of steady, careful running, I spotted my wasp assailants, circling lazily around the top of the hive. I cut a wide circle around the opposite side of the tree, avoiding the insects’ attention, and waited behind the trunk. When I heard the shifter’s heavy footsteps approaching, I slowly pulled the overworked, springy branch back as far as it would go.
The movement roused a few wasps, which meandered out of the hive but didn’t come closer to me. The shifter woman barreled through the trees, and I let go of the branch. It snapped forward, and the already tenuous connection between the nest and the wood snapped from the momentum. The hive launched toward the shifter, sailing in a beautiful arc and landing at her feet. It exploded on impact, and a red cloud of wasps burst around her.
The terrified animal noise that came out of the shifter’s mouth made me want to clap my hands over my ears. Instead, self-preservation had me running, doubling around so I was back on course. The shifter screamed and screamed as the wasps attacked her.
I pumped my legs, eager to get as far away from the noise as possible. I eventually slowed, but I kept moving at a steady pace, the shifter’s howls echoing in my ears. I’d hurt her, seriously. And while her screams were deeply unpleasant, I couldn’t find it in me to be sorry. While I appreciated that she had voted against crashing my plane, her family clearly had plans to kill me. She got off easy.
Eventually, the woman’s screams faded into nothing, and the light around me turned purple. I didn’t want to stop. It was irrational, but I just kept holding on to the hope that the next hill I climbed would make way for a city block. At this point, I would settle for a cabin and a helpful forest ranger.
I was much more careful, scanning my immediate surroundings for additional insect Death Stars as I moved. Without that deliberate, constant scan, I might not have spotted the conical orange flowers in the underbrush. I knew I should recognize them from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember why.
They reminded me a little of snapdragons, with their rumpled petals, but I knew that was the wrong name. It was a pretty name. Gah, why couldn’t I remember it? It was jimsonwe—no, that was something else. Gemweed? No, jewelweed. Jewelweed grew in profusion in Kentucky and was an excellent natural treatment for poison ivy and insect stings. I stooped to pick as many of the blooms as I could. I rubbed them gently between my palms, trying to express the plant oils into the sting on my hand. Eventually, the throbbing eased, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I pressed more flowers between my hands and rubbed the oil into my neck.
“Thank you, obsessive-compulsive reading tendencies. You have served me well, once again.” I hummed happily, though I still wanted to burn that hive like Darth Vader wanted to crush the Rebel Forces.
It was beyond dark, and I wasn’t able to see the trees in front of me. It was probably time for me to stop for the day. But I didn’t want to make a fire, for fear of catching some other shifter’s attention. Also, I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to try to find a place to sleep for the night, because I now knew that covert wasp death traps were a possibility. Basically, I was trying to deny the fact that nighttime existed.
Sound plan, really.
I stopped to open a soda, hoping that a little glucose would lift my mood, but before I could bring the bottle to my lips, a hand slipped around my mouth and pulled me back into a stand of pine trees. Struggling against the hard body tucked against my back, I sank my teeth into the hand, breaking the skin. I heard a pained hiss in my ear, and the hand yanked away. I whipped my head around to find Finn standing behind me, a finger (uninjured) pressed to his lips. And when I saw that it was Finn, I fought even harder. He shook his head back and forth violently but didn’t make a sound.
Behind us, I heard the murmur of voices, feet
shuffling through the grass. I could see flashlights bobbing as a group of at least six men walked past us.
People! I struggled against Finn’s grasp. This could be a search party or a rescue squad. Why was he trying to keep us from being found by people who might want to help us? People who might have supplies or cell phones or even a spare Tic Tac?
I inhaled sharply, but Finn cupped his fingers, recently healed, against my lips and whispered, “Shhh.” I sneered and stomped the heel of my boot on his toes, grinding it into the dirt. His eyes narrowed, and he clenched his teeth against the pain, but he still didn’t make a sound.
We stayed locked like that, staring each other down, even while I heard the voices outside our shelter. And then I heard the voices say, “Earl found her half-dead about three miles from here. Said the librarian bitch threw a hornet’s nest at her!”
I froze.
Another deeper voice added, “I’m telling ya, this book better be worth the trouble, John. Crashing a plane, Susannah half-dead from wasp stings. Wandering in the damn woods, up to our asses in deer ticks.”
“It will be,” the first shifter promised. “It will all be worth it, once we find the book.”
My breath caught. The shifters! And they did not sound happy with me. They sounded gruff, with some odd, discordant Midwestern accent that drew out their vowel sounds and roughened their voices. I squinted at the shadows cast through their flashlight beams. Very large, very wide shadows. These were not petite shapeshifters. I shrank back, unintentionally curling my body against Finn’s. His hand skimmed down my side in what I was sure was supposed to be a comforting gesture.
A little bit of the weight dragging on my conscience let loose, now that I knew I hadn’t killed the shifter woman (all the way, at least) with an insect bomb. I might have said that proved my pacifist leanings, but I was still crushing a man’s foot under my heel, knowing full well he couldn’t make a sound without risking exposure.
I was coming to understand that I was a complicated person.
As the voices faded, I bit down on Finn’s fingers again. He yanked them out of my mouth and gave me a light shove so he could pull his foot from under my heel.
“Get away from me,” I growled quietly. “I told you to leave me alone.”
“I just saved your life,” he rumbled. He swept his hand toward the retreating voices. “Those were my employers. They’re looking for you. I can’t fight them off, because I’ve been living on possum. If I really wanted to hurt you, if I was still trying to get them the book, I would have turned you over to them. Also, as a side note, you smell really nice.”
“And isn’t it convenient that you just happened by when they did?” I whispered, pushing my way out of the trees and into the open air, away from Finn and his welcome, familiar, spicy amber smell and his stupid, handsome face. I watched the flashlight beams move farther away and marched swiftly in the opposite direction. “And I smell like flowers because I was stung by half a wasp’s nest. It was not an effort to smell pretty for you.”
“Are you kidding?” Finn threw up his arms as he kept pace with me. “You still don’t trust me?”
“Let me pronounce this very slowly so you understand me, Mr. Puppet Master Manipulator. I’ll even make hand gestures.” I held up both of my middle fingers while shaking my head slowly. “Noooo.”
“Hey, if you’re referring to my talent, I could have used it against you after you figured me out!” he shot back. “I could have forced you to stay with me, to toddle along quietly while I handed the book over to my bosses and got the debt taken off my name, but I didn’t.”
“Most people don’t want credit for not being a supervillain, Finn. Most people leave ‘control an innocent bystander like a puppet’ off their day planner in general. And before you get too excited about your newfound virtue, let’s just remember that you have used your superpower against me.”
“Just that once,” he confessed.
“It’s amazing how ‘just that once’ doesn’t make me feel better,” I grumbled. I shoved my way out of the pines, sure to make the branches whip back and smack him in the face.
He yelped as softly as he could and followed me out, rubbing his hand over his injured cheeks. “That first night we were together, I was afraid you were going to leave me while I was sleeping for the day. Which you did anyway, which proves my influence over you wasn’t that strong in the first place.”
“So I’m supposed to be happy that I have too much ‘noise in my head’ for you to be able to hypnotize me properly?”
“No, you should be happy that I’ve been trying so hard to treat you differently from every other mark I’ve targeted over the years. My heart just wasn’t in it. I didn’t want inside your head, so I couldn’t get inside your head. That’s why the pilot was so annoyed with me.”
“Again, I am not seeing any reason for me to swoon in gratitude.”
Tugging at my arm gently, he asked, “Would you just sit down for a second?”
And when I didn’t comply, Finn forced me to sit and put my open, intact soda in my hand. “Drink.”
When I tried to stand, he pulled me down to the ground, into his lap, wrapping his arm around my waist. He forced me to stay put, putting the bottle to my lips.
“You have some serious issues with personal boundaries,” I sniped at him, my voice making the aluminum vibrate. I wanted to fight. I wanted him to know I could give him pain beyond a crushed toe and branches to the cheekbones. But it was so comfortable being cradled in his lap, leaning back against him, with my head tilted against the curve of his neck, with his familiar scent filling my head. I relaxed against him and appreciated that I wasn’t alone and terrified for a few minutes.
Wait.
“Are you doing it right now?” I asked him. “Controlling my brain?”
“No!” he insisted. “You can tell when I’m in someone else’s head. I don’t talk. I don’t move. My eyes go sort of cloudy, according to what I’ve heard. It’s like I go into a sort of trance-y dream state.”
“Well, that’s something.” I sighed.
“If I was not in control of my talent, kitten, I wouldn’t sleep next to you,” he said.
“And that’s something random.”
“I lost control of my talent a while back. It was like a power surge, which was great. Better range, more complete influence over the target. When I slept through the days, my mind would literally wander, and I would end up inside the head of some soccer mom two blocks away. I would sink so deep into her brain that I would end up walking around my apartment and mirroring her actions.”
“So you’re a sleepwalker,” I said, not quite understanding his urgency. Or why he kept trying to force-feed me soda.
Finn nodded. “A sleepwalker with the ability to rip off doorknobs if they kept me from leaving a room and walking out into the daylight, if that’s what the soccer mom did. I had some pretty serious burns. And I developed a phobia of going to sleep. Every time I did, I thought, is this it? If I drift off, is this going to be the day I don’t wake up? It was terrifying and draining. And it made me make some not so great decisions.”
“This is where I repeat my thesis that most of your decisions are bad decisions.”
“I have a handle on it now,” he promised me. “I worked with a friend on some meditation techniques. He had the same problem to an extent, except his control was taken from him by a curse.”
Finn tipped the bottle, and I let the soda pass my lips while he spoke. It was warm and a little too sweet, but my mouth was so dry I didn’t care. “I’ve been living my life like this for a very long time, before I was a vampire. I don’t know any other way to be. The charm, the little conversational tricks, picking up on people’s tells, I learned it from my father. And he learned it from his. We started out as carnival folk, fortune-tellers gouging Dust Bowl farmers, but Jimmy Palmeroy stepped it up. He always knew how to put on the right airs, to rub the right elbows. He thought big. He took my friend Max in when
we were kids and told me that from that day on, we were going to earn our keep. We pulled all the classics. Salting the mine. Pig in the poke. Max was particularly good at the badger game.”
I didn’t want to know what any of those things were, particularly if a real badger was involved.
“Like I said, there was plenty of cash up for grabs back then, for people who knew how to grab it. Max and I just figured out how to do that without start-up capital.”
“So . . . you were con men?”
“I like to think of it as more like Robin Hood–style bandits who took riches and distributed them to the needy. But in this case, we were the needy. We just cut out the middlemen.”
“OK, then, con men.”
“Fine. It wasn’t like we didn’t have style or skill. It takes brains to figure out what people want to hear to make the decision you make for them.”
I pushed away, bracing my hands against his chest. It was still so strange not to feel a heartbeat beneath my hands. But I supposed that Michael, with his beating human heart, had lied to me just as seriously as Finn. Then again, I still carried quite the grudge against Michael. “Am I supposed to find this charming?”
He shifted me over his thighs, but I think it had to do with embarrassment over a growing problem in his lap rather than anything I said.
“Well, that’s how we lived, even after my dad died. You get to the point where you don’t think of people as, well, people. You don’t think of the guy you’re selling ‘mineral rights’ to as a father whose life savings would be better spent sending his kids to college. You don’t think of the woman investing in your swampland as a widow who’s only buying in because she’s lonely and she likes the conversations. You’re focused on chasing that big retirement score. And beyond the cost to your soul, there are real consequences. It’s not like the movies. You don’t get to walk away in slow motion with a big bag of cash. People get pissed off when they realize they’ve been tricked. And we fooled the wrong people . . . a lot of the wrong people. But it only caught up to us when we tangled with vampires, who did not appreciate buying a semitruck full of skin cream we promised would protect them from sun exposure so they could go out during the day.”
