Midnight Magic, page 113
The first page was very old. It said, in fancy Tudor script, “Ignatius Thomas Sands, yeoman guard of the Tower of London, 1530.” Next to the spidery handwriting, a painted, fancy red ‘RS’ filled much of the page. The second page read, “Ignatius Thomas Sands II, Eventide Farm, 1555,” and again, was emblazoned with the ‘RS’.
Flipping through the pages, I saw that all the Ignatius’s had stayed on the farm until 1680, when Ignatius Thomas Sands IV had moved to the New World. The last page was typed, not handwritten, and it bore the name of “Ignatius Thomas Sands the 19th, 1985 RS”.
Underneath the family tree, I found some papers in my dad’s neat, blocky handwriting.
The first was a sort of medical intake form dated 2000.
It began with statistics.
“Nate” Ignatius Thomas Sands, age 15
Height: 6’1”
Weight: 210 lbs.
Extraspecist: Genus Panthera Leo Leo
This family has been extraspecist since Tudor times. Family legend has it that Ignatius the first was a warden at the Tower of London when it functioned as a zoo. Each generation seems to have at least one male heir that carries the mutation. In the case of the Sands family, both Nate and his twin brother carry the gene. I am unsure if they are “twins” in the homo sapiens sense, or “litter mates”, although since their mother is a monospecies, I suspect they are simply twins.
I speculate that the family lore is correct, and they were infected by the Barbary lions that were gifted to Henry VIII by Egyptian royalty.
Barbary lions as a singular species have not been sighted in the wild since 1918. They are larger than other lions, and have a distinctive, very dark mane.
Nate has a black mane when he transfigures. I have observed that eye color does not seem to change. Scars remain with the individual. Injuries received in either form manifest in both. Even when in human shape, they retain some of the physical advantages of their animal form. They are therefore stronger and faster than other humans are.
Further, I suspect that the longer a family has carried the mutation, the easier it is for the extraspecist to move between forms. Nate can transform at will and seems to have some control when in his Panthera Leo Leo form, more than seems typical, particularly for one so young. His brother seems more powerful and yet less able to control his shifting.
Will observe and document.”
There were many other pages, all my dad’s observations through the last twenty years of knowing Nate. I noted a page headed “Mating and Imprinting Behaviors Amongst Duospecists”. It had a long list of couples’ names going back hundreds of years, a sort of family tree. There were two ages listed next to each individual, one labelled (i), the other (m). Typically, in vet speak (i) means inseminated, but these dates were so old that the technology for that didn't exist yet. Also, the (i) date preceded the (m), which I presumed to stand for ‘marriage’. None of this made any sense.
I was clearly experiencing a psychotic break, and yet part of me felt like dancing around and making up songs that went along the lines of, “My dad was right, so fuck all of youuuuuuu. Suck it! He wasn’t crazy after all. So, suck it!” I imagined many verses, directed at his colleagues, my stepfather, and the journalists who have used him as a joke for decades. The chorus seemed to entirely consist entirely of “Suck it!” and feature me doing a sort of Ozzy Osbourne head-banging move.
I skimmed through the rest of the box and realized that it only contained information about the Sands family. There was one observation that caught my eye. “An oddity that I assumed was shifter legend, but appears to be true, is the inability to shift between forms unless all four feet are touching the ground. I hypothesize that it has to do with muscular contractions or blood flow. My informants believe that they draw energy from the earth to shift. Will observe and research.”
So, this was the work that he had been kidnapped for. I was itching to get back to my dad’s house and go through those other files. They offered me a whole new world to learn about. Resolving to pursue this as soon as my dad was safe at home, I heard a sharp clang outside.
I paused at the door, then took a deep breath and went to find Nate. As soon as I turned the back corner of the cabin, I wished I hadn’t.
Nate was already knee-deep in the long hole he was digging. His shovel had hit a large rock, which he seemingly effortlessly tossed out of the hole. He had put on a pair of jeans but was shirtless, and his muscles glistened from exertion. Long deep gashes still covered his shoulders and belly. Lying on the ground beside him was the bloody corpse of a man.
Nate looked up at me. “Listen, I know this doesn’t seem like the time, but do you have a scalpel?”
My knees had grown weak.
Stupidly I muttered, “Um, yeah,” and mutely wandered back to the truck.
Of course, the Sands men couldn’t be the only ones. If shifters were real, there had to be other kinds, so why not tigers?
It finally dawned on me why I had been attacked in the shower. If shifters existed, they had kept it a secret for, well, most of history. Leaving a claw in a bison could expose all of them.
I remembered what my dad said about the extraspecists’ unusual abilities and understood how my assailant had been able to see in a dark room and walk around the table. He must have been watching me and saw me drop the claw into my backpack. He had been looking for his own claw, and in his animal form, he still bore the wound I had inflicted upon him.
Suddenly incapable of making a simple decision, like which scalpel to take back to Nate, I numbly carried my entire bag around to the back of the cabin. Avoiding looking at the corpse, I shuddered and held out the bag.
Nate bounded out of the hole and took the bag.
“What do you want a scalpel for?” I finally whispered after I had taken a few steps back and he promptly returned to digging the grave.
“Well, it’s not likely that he will be found out here, but we don’t want to leave a bullet in him.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Listen, stop digging until I take care of some of those wounds.” he looked down at his bloodied torso and shrugged. Vaulting out of the grave, he sat on the edge. Seeing my shaking hands, he said, “Try not to torment yourself over it. He was going to kill you. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Rather than think about that, I was determined to mend Nate as best I could. I gave up on brushing the dirt out of his wounds. “Where’s a bucket?” I asked. A shrug of those wiry shoulders said that he wasn’t sure. “Do not get back in the dirt,” I ordered and went to look around. There was a bucket by the pump beside the cabin. I filled it with water and poured some antiseptic in.
Walking back to my patient, I said, “He didn’t try to kill me in the vet’s shed. He said I had to go with him, but he didn’t try to kill me.”
Nate shook his head. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the water or because he was disagreeing with me about the danger posed by Tiger Man. Either way, I poured cold water over his torso. He gave a disgusted shiver and winced.
“Geez, how can you be such a baby over a bucket of water when you walk around with this sort of injuries?” I asked.
“Not a big fan of water.”
“Oh, my God. And you don’t like fireplaces. Even as a human, you still have Felidae tendencies.” I had never been more Zebadiah Jasper's daughter. I should have been running for the woods, and instead I was as fascinated as I had ever been by anything.
“More or less. I do take showers, though,” he was quick to add.
I patted him dry and assessed the damage. I had no business treating a human, but we were in the middle of nowhere, and I wasn’t precisely sure how we would explain these gashes in an ER. We would both end up on a psychiatric hold if we tried to tell anyone how he got what were clearly the marks of being mauled by a tiger. Furthermore, if Nate was the product of some elaborate delusion after all, I would be showing up at the hospital to get my imaginary friend treated. I decided to just assess his wounds. There was one area where I was going to have to stitch; the rest I could use Dermabond on.
I tried to make a joke about at least not having to shave my patient’s fur off for once, but it fell flat before I had even formed the words in my head.
Once I was standing so close to the corpse of my attacker, there was no pretending that he wasn’t there. I tried to avoid looking at the body but found my eyes lingering over it in horror.
“Well, I don’t know how much he,” I nodded towards the body on the grass, “stayed the same after shifting, but he could have killed me the other night, and he didn’t.”
“Dmytro was human then.” He nodded towards the sprawled body on the grass. “The people who have your dad would have been thrilled to get you too. No better way to make Zeb do what they want than threaten his daughter. In his wild form, he wouldn’t think like that. In a few seconds, he would have snapped your neck like a twig and torn you into strips of meat.”
Well. When you put it that way…
I couldn’t bear to stand by the graveside while Nate buried the Tiger Man who could have killed me. I went around to the side of the house where the water pump was. I pumped out some water, washed my face, and took a long drink. I put the humane killer back in my bag and did my best not to start crying all over again. Then I remembered something that made my spine go stiff. Those fuckers had my dad.
I slammed the bag shut with a vengeance. If any of them hurt Zebadiah Jasper, they would be begging to just be shot and buried in the woods.
Nate came around the side of the cabin. “Give me five minutes to get a shirt on and lock up.”
“OK. We need to get busy and find my dad.”
He reached over and tugged on a loose lock of my hair. “A lot of folks are looking for him. And the cops are, too,” he added as an afterthought, making it clear that he regarded them as the less effective group.
OF SIMBA AND SETTS
I was waiting in the truck when he came back out. My phone was nearly dead, probably from searching the universe for a signal out in the middle of a whole lot of nowhere. I learned early in my career to always keep a car charger in my bag. “Can I charge this?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Have you done that before?”
“Kill another shifter? Not like that. In combat, though, yes.”
Not the reassuring answer I was hoping for.
“And they don’t get buried,” he continued.
“What? You just leave the bodies lying around?” I would get back to this combat to the death thing in a minute.
“Of course not. We take on their energy. It’s the honorable thing to do.”
“You take on their energy?” I had the feeling he was treading lightly and trying to choose his words very carefully.
He jerked his head back towards the cabin that was now next to a graveyard. “He assaulted a woman. His life force ends by being worm shit.”
Oh, good Lord.
“When you say you take on their energy, you mean you eat them?” I squeaked.
“We are apex predators. Our values aren’t the same as yours. I was trying not to freak you out.”
“Oh,” I answered weakly. “Good call.”
He started the truck, and I stared out of the window, not entirely sure where to begin with the questions.
“If you are born... well, a...”
“Shifter.”
“OK, so if you are born a shifter, when do you know you are one?”
“Early. That’s why we tend to live isolated. Until puberty, you usually can’t control when you change. It would definitely attract attention at daycare.”
“So up here, there is a group of lion shifters?”
He shook his head. “No, there aren’t enough of us for that. For safety’s sake, we tend to form colonies of mixed groups. Sweetwater is all apex predators. We wouldn’t mix in the wild, but we don’t eat each other either.”
“Polar bears!” I exclaimed. “How old is that kid?”
“Scott is twenty. He’s studying to be a biologist at Laramie.”
“He nearly gave me a heart attack; I was sure I had somehow accidentally ingested LSD.”
“Sorry. I didn’t send him to get the pretty Dr. Jasper,” Nate winked at me.
“Wait, does my dad usually go across that river riding on the back of a polar bear?”
“Only ones who can stay in control after they shift.”
“Well, glad my crazy dad has standards,” I muttered.
Once again, the truck came to a sudden stop that nearly threw me into the windshield.
“Do not speak about Zebadiah like that.”
“Whoa there! He’s my dad, and while he was devoting his life to you guys and riding across rivers on polar bears, he was keeping secrets from me the whole time. Don’t you dare think you can tell me what I can and can’t say about him.”
“Nothing matters more to him than you do. He wanted to keep you safe… from exactly what you just encountered.”
That reminded me of something. “So, you take care of keeping each other’s life force in the,” I held up an invisible Simba in my hands, “circle of life?”
“Yeah, it’s a point of honor.”
“My dad has jars of teeth. Do I need to give them to you to do something with?”
Nate nodded. “I know. No. Those are his. They are tributes from grateful families.”
“Tributes? They pay him in teeth?”
“No, they aren’t paying him that way. It’s a gift. Our teeth are necessary to our survival, so when he saves someone’s child, a parent would show their appreciation by knocking out a tooth and presenting it to him. We pay him in gold ore. He doesn’t remember to spend much of it, but he has it.”
“Does gold ore look like glittery dusty rocks?”
“Yeah. We provide security for a setting of badgers. They get the ore for us.”
“Bloody hell! A polar bear provides security for a family of badgers? Security from what? And no one notices the huge frigging white bear?”
“Of course not. Only grizzlies do that job.”
I slapped my head dramatically. “Oh, why didn’t I think of that myself?” The sheer amount of crazy was making me cranky.
“You all know my dad isn’t actually a vet, right? He could have killed one of you.”
“He is more than we have ever had before. You people weren’t exactly lining up to help us.” Now we were both angry.
“Maybe that’s because you hide yourselves away!” Even as I said it, I knew that it wasn’t true.
His jaw tightened. “Yeah, because centuries of us being burned alive as demon spawn inspired such trust in you guys.”
“I’m sorry. But no one would burn you at the stake now, would they?”
“Nope. Now I carry the DNA of an extinct species, made extinct by humans, by the way, which means some very bad people could make a whole lotta money from my carcass,” he finished with a snarl.
I held up a hand. “Wait, I have some more questions.”
Almost begrudgingly he muttered, “OK, go ahead.”
“Is my dad researching why some people become shifters?”
“That’s one of the things he was trying to learn.”
“Do all shifters revert to human form when they die?” I could not believe I was having this conversation. Part of me was still looking for hidden video cameras that would catapult me to reality TV fame.
“Yes. Eventually.”
“So, if they killed one of you, they wouldn’t get what they want anyway.”
“That’s why they keep us alive to do their experiments.”
“Have they gotten any of you?”
He gave a tight nod. I had touched a nerve. “There have been rumors of disappearances, but not from Sweetwater. We are a fortified colony. Notice they didn’t try to take Zeb until he got closer to town.” A bitter surge of guilt caught in my throat.
Nate went on: “My brother keeps calling about a missing girl. I thought she had just ghosted him, but now I wonder if it might be connected…”
“Wait, was that why he called you in Jim’s office?”
“Yeah. I’d stopped answering his calls,” he admitted with a smidge of guilt in his voice.
A sudden realization hit me. “You stood upwind of Tatanka.”
Nate nodded. “I tried.”
“So, he could smell you. That’s why he got all stampy after we let him out.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you suspect something weird had happened with Tanky? Was that why you came to check on us?”
He grinned. “Nope. I was intending to get your number, and then once I got up there, I smelled a fucking tiger.”
“Oh.” I really had no response to that, primarily because I was turning “I was intending to get your number” over and over in my head.
“Was this tiger part of your… ummm… group?”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “No. They’re trespassing.”
“Kind of foolhardy, isn’t it? I mean, you guys have managed to keep yourselves secret for…”
He interrupted, “All of history.”
“Right,” I began uncertainly and went on, “Since the beginning of history. So, wouldn’t attacking a very famous animal, like Tanky, be risky?”
His jaw tightened. “It was a message to me.”
“To you? What message? And from whom?”
“From the same fuckers who have your dad, and the message was ‘you can’t protect shit’.” The insult clearly rankled.
The tension was broken when his phone rang. Thankfully, he spoke English this time.
“Good. I’ll hold tight. She’s with me. I’ll be waiting.”
“Who was that? I assume I am the ‘she’?”
“That was Captain Hourani. He leads a specialist team that is going to get your dad out.”
I snorted with inappropriate laughter. “Let me guess, they are your SEALs?”
He looked at me sideways. “Don’t be silly. They are Sri Lankan leopards.”
“All of them?”
“They are six brothers. Together, they all served in the Sri Lankan armed service. They are stealthy and brave. They are determining the best way to get your dad out safely. I promise.”
Flipping through the pages, I saw that all the Ignatius’s had stayed on the farm until 1680, when Ignatius Thomas Sands IV had moved to the New World. The last page was typed, not handwritten, and it bore the name of “Ignatius Thomas Sands the 19th, 1985 RS”.
Underneath the family tree, I found some papers in my dad’s neat, blocky handwriting.
The first was a sort of medical intake form dated 2000.
It began with statistics.
“Nate” Ignatius Thomas Sands, age 15
Height: 6’1”
Weight: 210 lbs.
Extraspecist: Genus Panthera Leo Leo
This family has been extraspecist since Tudor times. Family legend has it that Ignatius the first was a warden at the Tower of London when it functioned as a zoo. Each generation seems to have at least one male heir that carries the mutation. In the case of the Sands family, both Nate and his twin brother carry the gene. I am unsure if they are “twins” in the homo sapiens sense, or “litter mates”, although since their mother is a monospecies, I suspect they are simply twins.
I speculate that the family lore is correct, and they were infected by the Barbary lions that were gifted to Henry VIII by Egyptian royalty.
Barbary lions as a singular species have not been sighted in the wild since 1918. They are larger than other lions, and have a distinctive, very dark mane.
Nate has a black mane when he transfigures. I have observed that eye color does not seem to change. Scars remain with the individual. Injuries received in either form manifest in both. Even when in human shape, they retain some of the physical advantages of their animal form. They are therefore stronger and faster than other humans are.
Further, I suspect that the longer a family has carried the mutation, the easier it is for the extraspecist to move between forms. Nate can transform at will and seems to have some control when in his Panthera Leo Leo form, more than seems typical, particularly for one so young. His brother seems more powerful and yet less able to control his shifting.
Will observe and document.”
There were many other pages, all my dad’s observations through the last twenty years of knowing Nate. I noted a page headed “Mating and Imprinting Behaviors Amongst Duospecists”. It had a long list of couples’ names going back hundreds of years, a sort of family tree. There were two ages listed next to each individual, one labelled (i), the other (m). Typically, in vet speak (i) means inseminated, but these dates were so old that the technology for that didn't exist yet. Also, the (i) date preceded the (m), which I presumed to stand for ‘marriage’. None of this made any sense.
I was clearly experiencing a psychotic break, and yet part of me felt like dancing around and making up songs that went along the lines of, “My dad was right, so fuck all of youuuuuuu. Suck it! He wasn’t crazy after all. So, suck it!” I imagined many verses, directed at his colleagues, my stepfather, and the journalists who have used him as a joke for decades. The chorus seemed to entirely consist entirely of “Suck it!” and feature me doing a sort of Ozzy Osbourne head-banging move.
I skimmed through the rest of the box and realized that it only contained information about the Sands family. There was one observation that caught my eye. “An oddity that I assumed was shifter legend, but appears to be true, is the inability to shift between forms unless all four feet are touching the ground. I hypothesize that it has to do with muscular contractions or blood flow. My informants believe that they draw energy from the earth to shift. Will observe and research.”
So, this was the work that he had been kidnapped for. I was itching to get back to my dad’s house and go through those other files. They offered me a whole new world to learn about. Resolving to pursue this as soon as my dad was safe at home, I heard a sharp clang outside.
I paused at the door, then took a deep breath and went to find Nate. As soon as I turned the back corner of the cabin, I wished I hadn’t.
Nate was already knee-deep in the long hole he was digging. His shovel had hit a large rock, which he seemingly effortlessly tossed out of the hole. He had put on a pair of jeans but was shirtless, and his muscles glistened from exertion. Long deep gashes still covered his shoulders and belly. Lying on the ground beside him was the bloody corpse of a man.
Nate looked up at me. “Listen, I know this doesn’t seem like the time, but do you have a scalpel?”
My knees had grown weak.
Stupidly I muttered, “Um, yeah,” and mutely wandered back to the truck.
Of course, the Sands men couldn’t be the only ones. If shifters were real, there had to be other kinds, so why not tigers?
It finally dawned on me why I had been attacked in the shower. If shifters existed, they had kept it a secret for, well, most of history. Leaving a claw in a bison could expose all of them.
I remembered what my dad said about the extraspecists’ unusual abilities and understood how my assailant had been able to see in a dark room and walk around the table. He must have been watching me and saw me drop the claw into my backpack. He had been looking for his own claw, and in his animal form, he still bore the wound I had inflicted upon him.
Suddenly incapable of making a simple decision, like which scalpel to take back to Nate, I numbly carried my entire bag around to the back of the cabin. Avoiding looking at the corpse, I shuddered and held out the bag.
Nate bounded out of the hole and took the bag.
“What do you want a scalpel for?” I finally whispered after I had taken a few steps back and he promptly returned to digging the grave.
“Well, it’s not likely that he will be found out here, but we don’t want to leave a bullet in him.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Listen, stop digging until I take care of some of those wounds.” he looked down at his bloodied torso and shrugged. Vaulting out of the grave, he sat on the edge. Seeing my shaking hands, he said, “Try not to torment yourself over it. He was going to kill you. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Rather than think about that, I was determined to mend Nate as best I could. I gave up on brushing the dirt out of his wounds. “Where’s a bucket?” I asked. A shrug of those wiry shoulders said that he wasn’t sure. “Do not get back in the dirt,” I ordered and went to look around. There was a bucket by the pump beside the cabin. I filled it with water and poured some antiseptic in.
Walking back to my patient, I said, “He didn’t try to kill me in the vet’s shed. He said I had to go with him, but he didn’t try to kill me.”
Nate shook his head. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the water or because he was disagreeing with me about the danger posed by Tiger Man. Either way, I poured cold water over his torso. He gave a disgusted shiver and winced.
“Geez, how can you be such a baby over a bucket of water when you walk around with this sort of injuries?” I asked.
“Not a big fan of water.”
“Oh, my God. And you don’t like fireplaces. Even as a human, you still have Felidae tendencies.” I had never been more Zebadiah Jasper's daughter. I should have been running for the woods, and instead I was as fascinated as I had ever been by anything.
“More or less. I do take showers, though,” he was quick to add.
I patted him dry and assessed the damage. I had no business treating a human, but we were in the middle of nowhere, and I wasn’t precisely sure how we would explain these gashes in an ER. We would both end up on a psychiatric hold if we tried to tell anyone how he got what were clearly the marks of being mauled by a tiger. Furthermore, if Nate was the product of some elaborate delusion after all, I would be showing up at the hospital to get my imaginary friend treated. I decided to just assess his wounds. There was one area where I was going to have to stitch; the rest I could use Dermabond on.
I tried to make a joke about at least not having to shave my patient’s fur off for once, but it fell flat before I had even formed the words in my head.
Once I was standing so close to the corpse of my attacker, there was no pretending that he wasn’t there. I tried to avoid looking at the body but found my eyes lingering over it in horror.
“Well, I don’t know how much he,” I nodded towards the body on the grass, “stayed the same after shifting, but he could have killed me the other night, and he didn’t.”
“Dmytro was human then.” He nodded towards the sprawled body on the grass. “The people who have your dad would have been thrilled to get you too. No better way to make Zeb do what they want than threaten his daughter. In his wild form, he wouldn’t think like that. In a few seconds, he would have snapped your neck like a twig and torn you into strips of meat.”
Well. When you put it that way…
I couldn’t bear to stand by the graveside while Nate buried the Tiger Man who could have killed me. I went around to the side of the house where the water pump was. I pumped out some water, washed my face, and took a long drink. I put the humane killer back in my bag and did my best not to start crying all over again. Then I remembered something that made my spine go stiff. Those fuckers had my dad.
I slammed the bag shut with a vengeance. If any of them hurt Zebadiah Jasper, they would be begging to just be shot and buried in the woods.
Nate came around the side of the cabin. “Give me five minutes to get a shirt on and lock up.”
“OK. We need to get busy and find my dad.”
He reached over and tugged on a loose lock of my hair. “A lot of folks are looking for him. And the cops are, too,” he added as an afterthought, making it clear that he regarded them as the less effective group.
OF SIMBA AND SETTS
I was waiting in the truck when he came back out. My phone was nearly dead, probably from searching the universe for a signal out in the middle of a whole lot of nowhere. I learned early in my career to always keep a car charger in my bag. “Can I charge this?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Have you done that before?”
“Kill another shifter? Not like that. In combat, though, yes.”
Not the reassuring answer I was hoping for.
“And they don’t get buried,” he continued.
“What? You just leave the bodies lying around?” I would get back to this combat to the death thing in a minute.
“Of course not. We take on their energy. It’s the honorable thing to do.”
“You take on their energy?” I had the feeling he was treading lightly and trying to choose his words very carefully.
He jerked his head back towards the cabin that was now next to a graveyard. “He assaulted a woman. His life force ends by being worm shit.”
Oh, good Lord.
“When you say you take on their energy, you mean you eat them?” I squeaked.
“We are apex predators. Our values aren’t the same as yours. I was trying not to freak you out.”
“Oh,” I answered weakly. “Good call.”
He started the truck, and I stared out of the window, not entirely sure where to begin with the questions.
“If you are born... well, a...”
“Shifter.”
“OK, so if you are born a shifter, when do you know you are one?”
“Early. That’s why we tend to live isolated. Until puberty, you usually can’t control when you change. It would definitely attract attention at daycare.”
“So up here, there is a group of lion shifters?”
He shook his head. “No, there aren’t enough of us for that. For safety’s sake, we tend to form colonies of mixed groups. Sweetwater is all apex predators. We wouldn’t mix in the wild, but we don’t eat each other either.”
“Polar bears!” I exclaimed. “How old is that kid?”
“Scott is twenty. He’s studying to be a biologist at Laramie.”
“He nearly gave me a heart attack; I was sure I had somehow accidentally ingested LSD.”
“Sorry. I didn’t send him to get the pretty Dr. Jasper,” Nate winked at me.
“Wait, does my dad usually go across that river riding on the back of a polar bear?”
“Only ones who can stay in control after they shift.”
“Well, glad my crazy dad has standards,” I muttered.
Once again, the truck came to a sudden stop that nearly threw me into the windshield.
“Do not speak about Zebadiah like that.”
“Whoa there! He’s my dad, and while he was devoting his life to you guys and riding across rivers on polar bears, he was keeping secrets from me the whole time. Don’t you dare think you can tell me what I can and can’t say about him.”
“Nothing matters more to him than you do. He wanted to keep you safe… from exactly what you just encountered.”
That reminded me of something. “So, you take care of keeping each other’s life force in the,” I held up an invisible Simba in my hands, “circle of life?”
“Yeah, it’s a point of honor.”
“My dad has jars of teeth. Do I need to give them to you to do something with?”
Nate nodded. “I know. No. Those are his. They are tributes from grateful families.”
“Tributes? They pay him in teeth?”
“No, they aren’t paying him that way. It’s a gift. Our teeth are necessary to our survival, so when he saves someone’s child, a parent would show their appreciation by knocking out a tooth and presenting it to him. We pay him in gold ore. He doesn’t remember to spend much of it, but he has it.”
“Does gold ore look like glittery dusty rocks?”
“Yeah. We provide security for a setting of badgers. They get the ore for us.”
“Bloody hell! A polar bear provides security for a family of badgers? Security from what? And no one notices the huge frigging white bear?”
“Of course not. Only grizzlies do that job.”
I slapped my head dramatically. “Oh, why didn’t I think of that myself?” The sheer amount of crazy was making me cranky.
“You all know my dad isn’t actually a vet, right? He could have killed one of you.”
“He is more than we have ever had before. You people weren’t exactly lining up to help us.” Now we were both angry.
“Maybe that’s because you hide yourselves away!” Even as I said it, I knew that it wasn’t true.
His jaw tightened. “Yeah, because centuries of us being burned alive as demon spawn inspired such trust in you guys.”
“I’m sorry. But no one would burn you at the stake now, would they?”
“Nope. Now I carry the DNA of an extinct species, made extinct by humans, by the way, which means some very bad people could make a whole lotta money from my carcass,” he finished with a snarl.
I held up a hand. “Wait, I have some more questions.”
Almost begrudgingly he muttered, “OK, go ahead.”
“Is my dad researching why some people become shifters?”
“That’s one of the things he was trying to learn.”
“Do all shifters revert to human form when they die?” I could not believe I was having this conversation. Part of me was still looking for hidden video cameras that would catapult me to reality TV fame.
“Yes. Eventually.”
“So, if they killed one of you, they wouldn’t get what they want anyway.”
“That’s why they keep us alive to do their experiments.”
“Have they gotten any of you?”
He gave a tight nod. I had touched a nerve. “There have been rumors of disappearances, but not from Sweetwater. We are a fortified colony. Notice they didn’t try to take Zeb until he got closer to town.” A bitter surge of guilt caught in my throat.
Nate went on: “My brother keeps calling about a missing girl. I thought she had just ghosted him, but now I wonder if it might be connected…”
“Wait, was that why he called you in Jim’s office?”
“Yeah. I’d stopped answering his calls,” he admitted with a smidge of guilt in his voice.
A sudden realization hit me. “You stood upwind of Tatanka.”
Nate nodded. “I tried.”
“So, he could smell you. That’s why he got all stampy after we let him out.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you suspect something weird had happened with Tanky? Was that why you came to check on us?”
He grinned. “Nope. I was intending to get your number, and then once I got up there, I smelled a fucking tiger.”
“Oh.” I really had no response to that, primarily because I was turning “I was intending to get your number” over and over in my head.
“Was this tiger part of your… ummm… group?”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “No. They’re trespassing.”
“Kind of foolhardy, isn’t it? I mean, you guys have managed to keep yourselves secret for…”
He interrupted, “All of history.”
“Right,” I began uncertainly and went on, “Since the beginning of history. So, wouldn’t attacking a very famous animal, like Tanky, be risky?”
His jaw tightened. “It was a message to me.”
“To you? What message? And from whom?”
“From the same fuckers who have your dad, and the message was ‘you can’t protect shit’.” The insult clearly rankled.
The tension was broken when his phone rang. Thankfully, he spoke English this time.
“Good. I’ll hold tight. She’s with me. I’ll be waiting.”
“Who was that? I assume I am the ‘she’?”
“That was Captain Hourani. He leads a specialist team that is going to get your dad out.”
I snorted with inappropriate laughter. “Let me guess, they are your SEALs?”
He looked at me sideways. “Don’t be silly. They are Sri Lankan leopards.”
“All of them?”
“They are six brothers. Together, they all served in the Sri Lankan armed service. They are stealthy and brave. They are determining the best way to get your dad out safely. I promise.”
