Midnight Magic, page 116
I had a sudden nightmare vision of what might pass for snacks in a colony of apex predator shifters. I imagined a flayed elk being dragged into the center of the room, and people dressed as if they were going to a PTA meeting diving into the raw meat. My imagination had gotten away with me. Or perhaps it hadn’t. I was in uncharted territory.
The matriarch of the group made a gesture, and several people followed her out of the room. They returned with cold soft drinks, veggies and dips, and a mountain of submarine sandwiches.
It was when she offered me a Coke that I understood that, unlike Nate and Al, she would be hard-pressed to pass among humans. Though her features were those of a woman in her fifties, her dark and gleaming skin bore faint but unmistakable rosettes.
I thanked her for the drink and tried not to be too obvious about examining her amazing skin. Up close, I could see that the rosettes did not have dots inside of them. She wasn’t a jaguar shifter, then, but a leopard.
I remember how shocked I was in vet school when I learned that there are no such thing as black panthers. “Wait, you mean the Jungle Book lied to me?” I said out loud in that class. Both jaguars and leopards can manifest a melanistic trait that makes them appear black from a distance, but up close, you can make out the pattern of their coat. Once we got my dad home, I had so many questions for him.
The woman held out her hand. “I am Chaya. The Chiruthai are my sons.”
I took her hand. “I’m very grateful,” I said.
She waved that away.” We are grateful for what your father has done for us. He delivered my boys.”
“He was your obstetrician?” I was really going to have to bring my dad down a notch about practicing medicine without a license.
“We come from a sliver of rain forest in Sri Lanka, a very small village,” she said by way of explanation. I nodded, having no idea how that related to what we were talking about. She turned to pass the snacks to other people, and Nate leaned in to explain.
“In isolated areas like that, the families intermarry for generations. You noticed her skin?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Her coat pattern stays with her even when she transforms. She’s more shifter than the rest of us. She had the six boys at once.”
“You mean she had a,” I forced my voice to the lowest possible whisper, “a litter?”
“Near the end of her pregnancy, she was too weak to switch back, so she delivered them in her leopard form.”
“Six is a huge litter. Don’t leopards usually have two?”
He nodded. “Usually, shifters are a minority in a family. Some isolated families, though, tend to be all shifters. Like Chaya’s.”
I realized that the word he was trying to avoid was inbred.
“There are children born of shifters who aren’t shifters, but just human?”
“Yes.”
“Are there ever purely animal offspring?”
“One of hers was, your dad thinks. The cub died after an hour or so but did not shift into human form after death.”
I realized that a grouchy Al was standing beside me, accompanied by my able assistant from the earlier surgery. Al was clearly under duress. “Dr. Jasper...”
“Call me Clementine.”
He sighed as if this was one more indignity in a life full of them. “Clementine, this is my sister, Lupe.”
“I didn’t realize you were Al’s sister,” I said. She was far too nice for me to ever guess that. “You did a wonderful job yesterday.”
“Al prefers to keep his worlds separate.”
“Wait, so everyone in a family that shifts morphs into the same species?”
“Yeah,” Al muttered in a tone implying that he seriously questioned my intellect.
“But Lupe means wolf, doesn’t it?”
“And Clementine means a midget orange. What’s your point?” Al said defensively.
I turned my attention back to his sister. “Have you thought of becoming a vet?”
She nodded.
“You would be a very good one,” I said. “Oh, has Mama Kitty changed back to her human form?”
Lupe laughed; a silvery, pretty sound. “She’s just a mountain lion. All the time.”
“Lucky damn cat,” Al muttered.
“My dad takes care of...” I didn’t want to say real animals, so I sort of stalled out and left my thought unfinished.
“Monospecies, yes, sometimes.”
“Monospecies, that’s a good way to put it.”
I reached out for Al’s wrist. “Speaking of monospecies, I need to make some excuse to Jim about where I have been.”
Al shook his head. “Nah, you don’t. You are officially in hiding under police protection until your attacker is found.”
“My attacker has been found, and Nate...”
Al stopped me. “Nope. Unidentified, unusually strong male attacked you for unknown reasons and escaped into the night. The end.” He leaned close to me. “And this time, for fuck’s sake, listen to me. The. End. The file will remain open for a few years, and then some desk jockey will put it away in a basement somewhere, and that is how it must be. It is not just you I am protecting.”
His eyes were boring into me. I glanced around the room at Lupe and Rome and thought of little Victor. “The end,” I said.
Nate moved back to the head table, and everyone quieted down. Social hour was clearly over.
Nate began speaking again. “I started with the vote so that Jedda could be present. You may go now, sweetheart.”
The tall girl said, “Thank you all so much”, blew a kiss, and left the room.
“And now, to the most important business. Earlier today, the Armiya Zhivotnyh, the so-called animal army of Russia, showed exactly what they are capable of. They poisoned Victor Palangyo, thinking that we would trade the child’s life for that of his father. Thankfully, we had a secret weapon, and they failed. If anyone had any doubts about what we are up against, they shouldn’t now. This is not just about our friend Zebadiah Jasper being taken, although that should have been enough. We are at war for our very existence.”
Rome glowered. “I told you all that months ago.” Only a gentle glance from Chaya kept him in his chair.
“Most of you know who our guest is. This is Dr. Clementine Jasper.”
There were lots of welcoming smiles and a few people yelling things like, “Don’t you worry!” and “We’ll get him back!”
It appeared that I had the floor. A little notice that I was expected to make a speech would have been nice.
“I am sure you have a lot of questions for me, but I have a few for you too.”
As they politely nodded, I went on: “The man who took my dad wants his research materials. I haven’t seen his files yet, but what sort of research does he do exactly?”
Everyone began speaking at once. Dad had provided medical care for the shifters, kept family genealogies, written down the oral histories, and drawn labs from them in both of their forms. He was working on a theory that would explain why some people became shifters when most simply died when attacked by a wild animal. For at least twenty minutes, there was a steady barrage of the things my dad had done for this community over the last two decades.
There was a deep pang up under my ribs. I knew that part of why Dad had thrown himself into this world was not purely for science, but because all the things he valued in his previous life had been taken from him.
CHATPER SIXTEEN - FRACTURED FACTIONS
I assured everyone that I would do my best to care for them in a veterinary role. “I am not an MD. It would be unethical for me to try to treat anyone as if I were one. Until my dad is returned to us, I will continue his research, and if you allow me, I will help with taking care of any of you who get sick, but only when you are in your animal form.”
This seemed to upset a number of people. From the corner of my eye, I saw Nate hold up a hand, as if trying to calm everyone down. I flashed a glare at him. I didn’t appreciate him serving as my mediator when I knew I was entirely right. Unlike my dad, I knew my limitations, and I didn’t fancy going to jail for practicing medicine on humans without a license. “Is there a printer here?” I asked.
“Yes, dear. What do you need it for?” asked Chaya.
“Before I look at anyone’s files, I need them to sign a release of information.” There was a general flurry of people saying that they trusted me and that it was not necessary. I held my ground.
“Every patient has a right to know exactly who is looking at their information. I’m not cracking a file open without a signed release.”
One of the women stood up. “She’s right. I’ll write one up.”
“Monica is a lawyer,” Chaya assured me. While that was being taken care of, I was able to ask a few questions.
“Do most of you live near here?”
I learned that there were several nearby houses where families with young children resided. Upon adulthood, most shifters could easily live among the world at large.
“Now, try not to laugh at me,” I began. “Do you have to shift every so often?”
Nate laughed. “She thinks we are Jekyll and Hyde.”
I was quick to say, “No, that's not it at all.”
“You all, hush,” Chaya said. “Dr. Clementine is trying her best.”
I realized then that to the colony, I would always be “Dr. Clementine.” They already had a Dr. Jasper.
I could fix broken legs, I could suck poison out of a small child, but I would never bring them the kind of hope and healing that my eccentric, brilliant, guileless father had.
I didn’t want to dwell on things that upset me, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by memories of my stepfather criticizing my dad. My mother had wanted to get as far away from crazy as she could, and so she had gone from a cryptozoologist named Zebadiah to an actuary named Bob.
“You know, he is probably actually homeless,” Bob had said more than once. And “How a woman as smart as your mother could have fallen for that lunatic, I will never know.”
I suddenly felt the weight of my father’s life. To know of such magnificence and be unable to use it to defend himself against such harsh denunciations must have been hellish. I would have lasted about a minute under such withering criticism. I would like to think that I would not have exposed the people who trusted me, but I would have been hard pressed not to defend my academic integrity.
Dad had been faced with that choice, and he had chosen to defend the vulnerable, no matter the cost. I had always loved him, sort of like you love an ugly dog, because no one else does. But I had been wrong. He was loved by an entire community of people who recognized him for the hero he was. I was heartily ashamed of myself.
With a lump in my throat, I excused myself. I wandered out of the French doors onto the balcony. I was standing there watching the last rays of sunlight filter pinkly through the tree line when Chaya emerged with a plate in her hands.
“I know you don’t need to eat like we do, but I suspect you haven’t had a meal in quite some time.” She wasn’t wrong.
I did some quick calculations in my head, “Wait, I think an apex predator needs something like 8,000 calories a day. Shifting must take phenomenal energy.”
She nodded. “It does. Not all of us find it as easy to shift back and forth as Ignatius does.”
I hadn’t heard anyone else call Nate by his full name. I took a bite of my sandwich. “Your food bills must be enormous.”
“When I was feeding eight teenaged shifter boys, I could barely keep up.”
“Wow. I thought you had six sons, which impressed the hell out of me, but eight!”
She laughed and handed me a napkin. “I have six, but once the Sands’ moved to the colony, I looked after Ignatius and Jerome.”
“So, they moved here when they were small?”
“After their mother was murdered, yes.”
“Did the police ever catch the people who killed her?”
“The police, no. They were caught, though.”
“Shifter life seems incredibly violent.”
“It can be,” she mused. “The colonies keep us safer.”
“Was Nate’s father the chieftain of this colony?”
Chaya laughed good-naturedly. “You really have to stop thinking The Lion King is a documentary. No, he wasn’t. He had made a life in the human world and only returned here because of the boys.”
“Can shifters always identify each other? In their human form, I mean?”
“Yes, we can. Sometimes that draws us together for mutual protection, and sometimes it makes us fight.”
“Al, Nate, and Rome all seem to want very different things,” I mentioned.
“No, they want the same things. They just disagree on the best way to get them. Al feels that we don’t fit into the animal world, Rome doesn’t want to assimilate into the human world, and Nate is trying to take care of everybody.”
I pondered that for a moment.
“Eat, dear. Get some rest.” Chaya patted my shoulder and left me alone on the porch.
I had grown cold out in the breeze. I was startled to discover Nate standing beside me.
“My God, you are stealthy.”
“That’s me.” He laughed. “Everyone has gone home. Chaya figured you needed a little time to yourself.”
“That was nice of her,” I gave a weak smile.
“And I need my warriors to get some rest. We may have a hell of a fight on our hands in a few hours.”
“So will Rome fight for you?”
“Of course, he will. I am the colony chieftain. I make that call and my warriors follow.”
“Tell me about the girl he’s looking for.”
“Marissa? She’s a scavenger.”
“A scavenger?”
“Not aligned with a colony.”
“Your family wasn’t always part of the colony,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, and it got my mother killed. Anyway, he met her, and then he couldn’t find her again. Really, the unaffiliated come and go. She got into trouble and ran. Her own family said she was using.”
That was less than reassuring. I leaned back into him and was grateful for his strong arms encircling me. “I had no idea,” I whispered.
“That shifters exist?” he asked, resting his jaw on my temple.
“Well, there’s that. But mostly I wish I had known how amazing my dad is.”
He turned me around and gazed seriously into my eyes. “You will have time to tell him that. And lots of other stuff, like how a certain Barbary lion might be the man of your dreams…”
“Ha! You should be so lucky,” I teased. “You don’t actually know that much about me. I’ve at least read an entire file about you.”
”I have been hearing tales of the exalted Clementine Regina Jasper for decades,” he explained.
“Jesus, he told you about Regina. I feel such… shame.”
“I won’t hold it against you. My family isn’t what most people would consider… typical.”
“So, your dad has to be a shifter.”
“He was, and you’ve met my brother.”
“Your mom?”
“She was killed by a rival pack. We didn’t live in a colony then.”
I somehow knew that the loss of his mother must be connected in some way to the dreadful scar he bore down his back.
“My dad came home to find Rome and me hiding under our mom’s body.”
“They hurt you,” I said, thinking of that dreadful scar.
“A human body can’t hold up to an attack by a lion. Rome and I were toddlers; we panicked and shifted. They left me for dead.”
“I am so sorry.” Suddenly, all the things I had considered losses seemed so trivial. My parents’ divorce, my dad losing prestige, life with Bob the Blob were nothing like the grief that he had endured.
“It was awful,” he said simply. Aiming for a lighter tone, he continued, “But almost as tragic was a certain pair of Doc Martens worn in a class picture by a very tow-headed eighth-grader.”
“Have you seen my eighth-grade picture? That thing needs to be incinerated and the ashes stored in an underground nuclear bunker.”
“Nah, maybe just the bunker. Along with the little plaid school uniform and the black strip in your bangs, it totally worked.”
“You are an evil man! Clearly one with perverted tendencies. I suspect you may be a clunky footwear fetishist.”
He leaned over me and I gave an inward swoon. The man was so... tall, and strong, and could become a fucking lion. Really, what chance of resisting that did I have?
He pressed in and kissed me. I sank into him. The kiss was delicious and smooth like a caramel river that surrounded me with warmth. My pulse quickened, and I pressed my fingers into his muscular back. Once again, he had left me panting with need.
“Do you live near here?” I asked, as any thought of pretending that I didn’t want what I really wanted was thrown off the balcony like a pile of leaves.
“Let me show you,” he took my hand and led me inside. He flipped a switch, and metal doors slid down on the outside of the French doors.
“Wow. Worried about security?”
“You would be too if you knew what was out in those woods.”
“Lions, and tigers, and bears,” I agreed.
He was teasing me by taking his time, slowly leading me up the stairs. I stood up on my toes so that I could whisper in his ear, “If you don’t hurry up, I might jump you on these stairs.”
“Promises, promises,” he said, swinging me up in his arms and taking the stairs three at a time. His crazy strength was going to take some getting used to.
He climbed onto the bed with me still cradled in his arms.
“Do you have a shower?” I asked suddenly.
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“I am gross.”
“You are not gross.”
“Coming from someone who eats his honorable rivals, I’m not sure that is a ringing endorsement.”
I froze, afraid that I had gone too far. Luckily, he threw his head back and laughed.
“If I show you where my shower is, can I get in too?”
“Hmmmmmm…” I tapped my lower lip with a finger. “I suppooooooose so.”
