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I can tell she’s hiding something. I don’t know what it is, but it almost feels like she’s angry with herself for sleeping with me. I can’t wrap my head around that at all. I guess I might expect that kind of a response after the first time but why now?
It occurs to me she might be angry because we’re sleeping together now in a way that doesn’t just happen. Maybe her problem is just that now we’re consciously deciding to do it. Neither of us can just pretend it’s one of those things we can’t control. Not now. Maybe when the sex is just a spur of the moment we can get away with that kind of bullshit. Maybe our minds are willing to allow us just a little bit of leeway in that case. Not now. Not a chance in hell.
I get that.
I hope I do a better job of hiding it than she does but I’m pretty damned worried about things. I can’t think of anyone who brings out the feelings in me that Tabitha brings out. That’s nobody in my life now as well as nobody in my past. These feelings are new and powerful and they bring along with them a fairly substantial dose of fear that I might lose them.
That I might lose her.
For God’s sake, I barely know her! I mean, we’ve had a lot of sex over a very short period of time but that’s it. What the hell am I doing thinking of her as my girlfriend?
When we part ways in the morning, it’s civil. She even kisses me goodbye and flashes me a smile. I mean, there’s nothing I can point to specifically that she’s doing that ought to alarm me. It’s more a feeling, and the problem is feelings like these are usually correct when a shifter gets them. Our wild side is attuned to things that our conscious minds might not be able to process. It’s the nature of predators and prey.
I know.
I know.
Polar bears are at the top of the food chain. We don’t have predators. Yeah, I get that. Still, predators need this kind of subconscious awareness just as much as prey. What the hell else would convince a bear to climb, swim, and jump from one hunk of ice to another just because of a subconscious certainty that six ice blocks away there are three seals swimming?
The point is, I know she’s hiding something. She’s restrained. Something is troubling her and now that I think about it, she’s been troubled since I got home yesterday. That really troubles me because it might mean there really is something to the witch hunt of hers. If she has information from her visit to the fire authority, that’s terrible. The firefighters at Company 417 are my brothers. I hate the thought that one or more of them might be involved in something immoral or illegal. God, it makes me sick just thinking about it.
I shouldn’t.
I absolutely shouldn’t.
But I want to tell her.
Instead, I go out into the wild, driving up to the ranch to blow off as much steam as I can. What I wouldn’t give for a trip to Alaska at the moment or to be able to take off a month just to head north and keep heading north until the only thing I see is ice. The world keeps spinning when I’m wild. Everything keeps happening and it’s not like it will solve anything at all. Still, there is nothing as centering for a shifter as a shift, and if I can spend some time on ice, the shift will be so much more satisfying.
“Well, you can’t,” I say aloud.
Nobody answers me although a squirrel twenty yards away eyes me suspiciously. I think he probably knows what happens when a man at this particular ranch starts stripping off his clothes. I’ll be completely naked in a moment. I wonder if the squirrel knows what I’ll become. I can always smell a shifter, but I only know what animal resides behind the human if I’ve witnessed them shift. That’s the case with all shifters, as far as I know, with the notable exception that shifters can always smell their own kind. If a polar bear showed up here, I’d know right away the nature of the shifter in front of me.
When I’m naked, I say, “Last chance to place your bets,” and I shift.
The physical changes of the shift are what you might expect. I hunch over, then finally drop to all fours as my bone structure and muscular system reorganize into a quadrupedal arrangement. My fingers thicken, my nails grow longer and sharper, and fur sprouts from every surface. My neck and head elongate and my teeth change shape and sharpen and the canines lengthen and thicken considerably in proportion to the rest of my teeth.
And of course, I grow larger. A bull polar bear can weigh up to fifteen hundred pounds when well-fed. As I’ve mentioned before, shifters are significantly larger in animal form than their animal counterparts. When I'm shifted, I’m nearly ten feet at the shoulder and weigh nearly two tons.
The squirrel watches the shift frozen in horror. As soon as the shift completes, he bolts away in horror, a perfectly natural response after watching an average-sized man shift into a polar bear the size of a rhinoceros.
I run for a while like I usually do. I feel a rumbling in my belly but decide I won’t hunt today. Tabitha will be waiting at home and it will take too much time for me to hunt a meal, eat it and clean up before heading home.
When I arrive home, Tabitha is sitting on the couch waiting for me. I smile and say, “Hi, Tabitha.”
She does not smile back.
“Where were you?” she demands.
“I was visiting a friend,” I say.
“The one with the ranch,” she finishes.
“Yes,” I say. “He’s a good friend of mine. I’ll take you to meet him some—”
“You weren’t visiting a ranch.”
The accusation is so unexpected I don’t answer right away and the dumbfounded look I wear does little to help prove my innocence.
