Smilodon, page 15
It was over… for now. All that remained was to collect our prisoners and whatever intelligence the other teams found. Then, clear out. We weren’t even going to mask our presence. I maintained my vigilance as we backtracked our path through the facility, just on the off-chance we missed someone, but there was no need. We returned to our vehicles without encountering any active ‘hostiles.’
As the groups filtered in with prisoners, we laid them out in the tall grass. Those of us wearing fur collected our packs and padded away long enough to shift back to human and pull on our clothes. Then, we rejoined the Magi.
After a discussion between Vicki, Gabrielle, my grandparents, and Alistair, the decision was to deliver all of our prisoners to the Magi for interrogation. Vicki and Gabrielle would take the documents, maps, and everything else from their ops center to Precious where Alistair would lead the analysis with shifters from the Council specifically trained for intelligence work.
I lost track of the number of trips I made with a sleeping prisoner over each shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The portal Grandpa opened didn’t look like anywhere on the manor grounds that I’d ever seen, but I figured I should keep my questions to a minimum, since I was now a shifter and all. I didn’t want to put him in any awkward positions because he was ‘Grandpa.’
It wasn’t long until only shifters and two Magi stood around our vehicles. The Magi opened a portal to Precious large enough for our vehicles and several shifters standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and we vacated the area.
15
The infirmary in Precious occupied a space three lots down from the city’s administration building. Given the nature of shifter healing and the relative lack of any wars at the moment, it wasn’t very busy. In fact, the only patient when I walked in with Gabrielle was Thomas Carlyle, still in wolf form and dozing on a gurney.
The infirmary’s sole doctor looked up as the door opened and broke into a huge grin. He almost jumped up from his seat and strode across the room. The moment he crossed within arms’ reach, he erupted in a huge smile and thrust his hand out to Gabrielle.
“Excellent job you did, getting those children back,” he said, pumping Gabrielle’s arm like the handle of a hand-pump. “And to bring them back unharmed! Capital, my dear; simply capital!”
Gabrielle endured the enthusiastic hand-shake until he released her and indicated me with her left hand, “You wanted to examine Wyatt, Doc. Well, we’re here.”
“Excellent! We’ll start with the basics, and then I’ll ask you to shift.” He added a self-deprecating shrug. “I’m afraid the nature of our existence is such that I have as much experience as a veterinarian as I do an MD. If I thought it wouldn’t scandalize the state medical board into revoking my license to practice, I’d get a degree in Veterinary Medicine, too.”
That kind of hit me. “You mean shifters don’t have their own medical board? I would’ve thought we would.”
“Oh, no, dear boy… not at all. Most shifters’ concept of medicine is… well… not too current with the times, I’m afraid. In that respect, we’re on par with the Magi. They don’t have to bother with medical studies, though; a Magi who’s strong in his or her healing talent can remove diseases and afflictions modern human medicine considers terminal. Oddly enough, though, almost every Magi whose strongest talent is healing has also pursued some level of medical degree. From what one told me, a more thorough understanding of the body can help them when they set out to heal someone. But! I digress. You’re here for your medical work-up, and I’m just chattering away. Let’s get you over here and start your complete physical.”
* * *
When Doc said ‘complete physical,’ he wasn’t joking. He poked, prodded, tickled, or measured me in more places than I realized I had places. He weighed me. Then, he took tissue, urine, and blood samples. After that, a full body x-ray. And after that, a full-body PET scan.
And after all that, he told me to shift, and we did it all again.
Gabrielle led Wyatt into the administration building’s conference room. Doc already waited, sitting in a chair near the projector screen that hung down from the ceiling along one wall, and Alistair, Alpha Jace, and Vicki trailed in behind them. Karleen slunk in behind Vicki, looking for all the world like she hoped no one would notice her.
Doc’s eyes narrowed at seeing Karleen trailing along in the group’s wake. “And just who are you, Miss?”
Everyone turned to look, but the other shifters had to have known she was there. As the dire wolf primogenitor, her scent wasn’t anything like any other wolf shifter.
“Karleen Vesper,” she answered.
Doc lifted the file on the table in front of him and flicked it open. “Let’s see… Gabrielle Hassan, Alistair Cooper, Jason McCourtney, and Victoria Magnusson. Nope. There is no ‘Karleen Vesper’ on this medical release authorization. So, which are you? Wyatt groupie or shifter journalist?”
An almost-predatory smile curled Karleen’s lips as she answered, “Oh, I am most definitely a ‘Wyatt groupie,’ as you put it, but I’m also the North American dire wolf.”
Doc gaped. “You are?”
“Yep,” Karleen replied, adding a nod for flavor.
Gabrielle watched Doc scan the others present with his eyes as he gnawed on his lower lip, then flicked his eyes back to Karleen as he asked, “I don’t suppose you’d agree to a medical baseline and comparison to the historical dire wolf?”
Karleen shrugged and leaned against the wall near the door. “I dunno. Why don’t you let me sit in on this discussion to see how it works?”
“Oh! Well… I don’t know. I mean, there’s patient privacy to consider, and…”
Wyatt trooped around the table and took his folder out of Doc’s hands. Before Doc could even ask what was happening, Wyatt added Karleen to the medical release order and initialed his addition. Then, he returned to the seat he’d claimed, saying, “Find a seat, Karleen.”
The dire wolf shifter exploded into motion and claimed the seat to Wyatt’s left before the people in front of her had a chance to take more than a step. The part of Gabrielle that was always a predatory cat of the genus Panthera tried to growl, but Gabrielle didn’t let it out. She wasn’t sure what kind of game Karleen was playing, but she wasn’t about to let the dire wolf claim Wyatt without making a fight of it… possibly literally.
“Uhm… yes…” Doc muttered as he looked over the edited release form. “Well, everything appears to be in order here. So, let’s take our seats and begin.”
Everyone who wasn’t already seated found one, with Alpha Jace sitting at the head of the table with Alistair on his right.
Doc cleared his throat and began, “Three days ago, I collected all of the data I will now present. At that time, Mister Wyatt was on Day Eight of his life as a shifter.”
A silence settled over the group that felt both awed and expectant.
“And he has already won a dominance fight with a councilor,” Alpha Jace remarked.
“Yes,” Doc replied, bobbing his head in a nod.
“How is Carlyle anyway?” Alistair asked.
Doc flicked his eyes to Alpha Jace, who nodded. “He’s recovering well. Almost completely healed, in fact. None of the injuries were anything that our accelerated healing would normally have a problem with, but it was the sheer scope of injury that proved the most challenging. I insisted he remain in the infirmary while we get him back to a healthy weight, because his body almost devoured itself to feed the healing process. Right now, I doubt he could win a fight with an enthusiastic puppy.”
Alistair nodded his understanding.
Alpha Jace said, “Very good, Doctor. Thank you. Please proceed.”
“Uhm, yes. So the bulk of the delay in having this meeting has been the struggle to obtain Mister Wyatt’s human medical records. Even after he gave me a signed release authorization, the doctor’s office was still difficult about it all. But I digress.”
Doc clicked to the first slide in his presentation.
“Mister Wyatt has benefitted from almost a doubling of his muscle mass as well as a major reduction in his body fat, which is the norm for a turned shifter. Furthermore, his body is still refining the improvements granted to Human Wyatt. This is in line with what we’ve seen with other turned shifters, but the sheer scope is unlike anything in the medical database. At the time of the examination, Mister Wyatt could already deadlift six hundred kilograms. The deadlift record for turned shifters is eight hundred kilograms and change, and it was set by a shifter eighty-six years into his shifter life. For those present who are uninitiated to turned shifters, it is not uncommon for their physical prowess to keep improving as far as ninety days post-turn. In just eight days, Mister Wyatt’s deadlift capacity increased by an order of magnitude.
“As interesting as the improvements to Human Wyatt are, the disparity between his feline form and its historical counterparts is far more startling. First of all, Wyatt’s feline skeleton is eighteen-point-seven percent more massive than the largest Smilodon populator fossil we have found to date, which was the largest of the three Smilodon sub-species identified thus far. Just to put this in perspective, Smilodon populator was itself about twenty percent larger than modern Bengal tigers, the second-largest example of Genus Panthera after their Siberian cousin. Paleontologists have singled out the Smilodon breed of saber-tooth cats for having weak jaws and fragile incisors when compared to the other species of sabertooth cats, and my examination of Wyatt’s feline form led me to conclude that he does not have these weaknesses. Many people who study shifters have said that we all start off as the best versions of ourselves we could possibly be, and I believe this applies to Wyatt as well, for both his human and feline forms.”
“Does your data or examination give you any indication of where he’ll plateau?” Alpha Jace asked.
Doc emphatically shook his head side to side. “Not at all. Right this moment, his front paws are large enough and his entire form powerful enough that he could remove a man’s head with a lateral swipe if he put his whole body behind it. Despite having more of the fast twitch muscle present in modern cheetahs than cheetahs themselves do, Wyatt’s feline form is built for endurance almost from the paws up; I ruined three treadmills trying to run him to exhaustion. The only reason he doesn’t have a higher percentage than cheetahs is the simple fact of having so much more muscle overall than they do.”
Everyone in the room—besides Wyatt—gaped at the doctor. Alpha Jace voiced the prevalent thought, “Three treadmills?”
Doc shrugged. “Well, to be fair, I didn’t pay close enough attention the first time and told him to get on the light duty one we use for sprinters. The poor thing just collapsed when Wyatt put his full weight on it. But even after moving him to the heavy-duty treadmills we use for lion and tiger shifters, he still burned out the bearings and gear boxes. Not to mention that the frames of those two treadmills now look vaguely U-shaped.”
Vicki leaned forward and shot a mischievous grin toward her brother. “I guess it’s time for you to go on a diet, brother mine.”
“Oh, no… not at all, Miss Magnusson. If anything, we need to increase his caloric intake, favoring protein and carbs. We discussed what—and how much—he has been eating since waking up in the infirmary, and my calculations suggest he’s consuming less than three-fourths of what he should be. I’m surprised there’s any fat left in his body at all. Shifters aren’t quite as bad as humans when it comes to consuming muscle mass if he or she isn’t getting enough food, but his eating habits are absolutely holding him back.”
“Doc,” Wyatt protested, “I already eat like a squad of trainees in basic.”
“Then, eat like a platoon at least,” Doc shot back. “You are not quite starving yourself just yet, Wyatt, but if you don’t step up your caloric consumption, you will be and soon. Gabrielle, at the risk of creating a conservation crisis, take him out and teach him how to hunt.”
The rest of the presentation faded to the background for me as my mind swirled around Doc’s unequivocal statement that I wasn’t eating enough. I wasn’t hungry… was I? Sure, I kinda felt like I could eat, but I wasn’t anywhere close to what I’d call ravenous. And if I followed his advice, what would I look like in eight more days? I mean, my physique already pushed the limits of what a plain old human could achieve with nutritional min-maxing and obsessive exercise and weight training. What more did he want from me?
But I’m not human anymore, the growly voice opined. Why should I compare myself to… them?
That was the first time the growly voice tiptoed around the edges of frightening me. For a split second, I had the impression it was going to say ‘food’ instead of ‘them.’
I’ve never been a very competitive soul. Well, not really. Most of my competition has been with myself. Could I correctly solve an IT problem faster than an estimated time? Could I hike a section of trail faster than my personal record? Stuff like that. As for external competition? Being better at something than Joe Schmo? Nah. That’s just not healthy. I mean, sure. If a person approaches with the proper attitude and viewpoint, external competitiveness can be a good thing, but oftentimes, it serves only to catalyze a lack of self-esteem or self-worth. That Guy is so successful at underwater basket-weaving; I’ll never be able to compete with him. And other senseless crap like that.
So, I was more than a little surprised to realize parts of me wanted to find out just how ripped I could get with enough quality food and a proper exercise regime.
“Hey, Wyatt… you in there?” Gabrielle’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Oh, uhm, sorry, Gabrielle. What were you saying?”
“I said that Doc gave me two copies of his recommended dietary guidelines for you, since you’re kind of my ward in the shifter world for now.”
I blinked. “Oh, he did? What does he recommend?”
Gabrielle chuckled. “Well, he goes into a lot of detail, but you can basically boil it all down to one statement: Meat and a lot of it. If you’re a numbers guy, he wants you to aim for six thousand to eight thousand calories per day, divided between protein at seventy-eight percent, carbohydrates at fifteen percent, and fat at seven percent.”
“Oh,” I replied, wincing. “That’s a lot of food, Gabrielle.”
“The best way to do it, probably, is to eat six to eight one-thousand-calorie meals spread throughout the day. I split my caloric intake into meals like that as best I can, and on the weeks where I actually manage it, I don’t feel hungry.”
“Oh.” I still felt a little overwhelmed by the sheer mass of food Doc wanted me to eat each day. “Do you think he’s right? About my metabolism and body still growing and changing?”
I caught Gabrielle’s nod out of the corner of my eye. “I absolutely think he’s right, Wyatt. It’s a proven fact among turned shifters that the turning process isn’t a one-and-done kind of thing. Sure, most of it happens within the first seventy-two to hundred-and-twenty hours, but the process doesn’t complete for something like sixty to ninety days. You’re the first turned primogenitor we know of, but so far, you’re following the trend. Your baseline just started out so much higher than most shifters.”
A surprising thought came to me. “He didn’t say anything about why I’m a primogenitor and not a cougar, either.”
Gabrielle chuckled. “That’s because we don’t know why you’re a primogenitor and not a cougar. We don’t know why Karleen is a dire wolf, instead of either breed of wolf that her parents are. For all that we as shifters have looked into primogenitors, there haven’t been enough of them to assemble any kind of body of knowledge about them beyond the basics. Stuff like ‘do not piss them off.’”
“Seriously?”
“You heard Doc, Wyatt,” Gabrielle insisted. “Right now, your cat is big enough and strong enough to send an adult human’s head flying toward the fences. If you came at me intent on my death, the only way I come out of that—the only way—is to run like a terrified kitten. Sure, I know stuff that you don’t. I have a lot of experience fighting in my feline form, but all it would take is one good hit from you to put me at your mercy. If you don’t believe me, look what you did to Thomas Carlyle just by falling on him.”
That was a terrifying thought. But at the same time, repugnant. The part of me where the growly voice lived outright recoiled and snarled at the thought of trying to kill Gabrielle. What struck me about the growly voice’s reaction was the sheer, overwhelming disgust and contempt it radiated at the mere thought of attacking Gabrielle out of an intent to harm. It was over and above what I would have said was my normal rejection of harming others without due cause.
It’s because she’s mine. I will not harm my own unless they betray me, the growly voice explained.
Wait, what? Just when did I lay claim to Gabrielle? I don’t remember that happening.
The growly voice almost snarled. How can I be so stupid? Or am I perhaps blind? Do I not remember both Karleen and Gabrielle rubbing against me in their true forms?
Images exploded in my mind. It was from my human perspective, and it took me a heartbeat or two to realize it was from the backyard where the children were abducted. Karleen leaning against me in her dire wolf form—pressing herself against me, if I’m going to be honest. And then, Gabrielle rubbing herself along my other side from jaw to tail.
Oh. Oh my.
Did that mean they claimed me?
Of course not, the growly voice replied. I do the claiming. They just made me aware that they were agreeable to me claiming them.
“Is there something wrong, Wyatt?” Gabrielle asked, pulling me from my thoughts once again. “You look a little unsettled.”
Well, crap. How was I going to ask her? I mean, guys just don’t walk up to women and say, ‘Hey, cutie, interested in being claimed?’
