I hit bottom.
Beast screamed deep inside, a devil-cat scream of territory claiming, of rage, of might. The gray place of the change pushed into the clear water, making it roil with bubbles and heat and cold. I felt Beast’s pelt pressing against my flesh, abrading underneath. My bones snapped and split and cracked as they reshaped, so fast, so much faster than not so long ago.
My skin heated, a searing, burning, scorching pain, the pain of dipping my entire body into a boiling pot, steam rising, blistering. Blood burst from the flesh of my right hand, up my right arm, into the clear water, a thin cloud of reddish mist, fading, dissipating into the pool, turning it murky. Pelt erupted from my skin. Deep inside me, Beast screamed again, the vicious sound of victory.
I crouched in the pinkish, brackish, dim water, at the bottom of the shallow pool, completely submerged. I was pelted all over, fingers, hands, legs, ankles, and lower paws stretching the stupid flip-flops. I pulled out my purple shirt and saw the pelt extended over my boobs, all the way down into my jeans. Crap. Buried beneath the water, I felt my face, finding the usual half-human, half-puma face with large, outthrust jaw and cat nose, human forehead and eye sockets, with pelt all over, forehead, whiskered cheeks, and chin. Instinctively, I kept my head down and nose flaps closed, so water didn’t get into my puma nose. Human hair still covered my scalp, a black cloud of it floating in the water. I opened my mouth, felt of my teeth, the taste of chlorine bitter, almost soapy, and oddly salty. Though I had mostly human teeth, my canines—top and bottom—were long, like tusks. And . . . I had puma ears, rounded, movable ears that were set cat-high on my head.
This was a different shape from my previous half-cat form. I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. But at least the burning, aching, of my injured hand felt better. I made a fist. Opened my tawny-haired hand with the too-big, knobby knuckles. My Beast had a beautiful golden color. Slowly I stood up in the pool, water rushing, subsiding from me in a wave, the chlorine already bleaching out the blood. I stood on the tiled bottom and met Eli’s eyes.
“Well. The hair’s new,” he said.
I grinned, and it must have been pretty scary, because he said, carefully, “Jane?”
“Yeah. Gimme a minute.” My voice was mostly mine, but lower, hoarser.
I ducked beneath the water again, feeling like a guy from the Old Testament, who had dunked himself beneath water seven times to be healed of a disease. Beneath the water, I thought about my Jane form. What I looked like when I was human shaped. For reasons I’d never understood, I couldn’t move from my pure Beast form to my pure human form in the daylight, but the half form had seemed more amenable to shifting in daylight. Gray mist blended into the water a second time, boiling energies, flashes of light and shadow.
I changed again. The pain was worse, far worse than moments before. Too soon, I thought. And not soon enough. I crouched beneath the water and screamed, a gargling, cawing sound of misery, with no way to draw breath. My bones slid and crunched. Blood spiraled from my fingertips and into my mouth from my gums. I spat, the water churned by the gray energies.
The pain faded slowly, a burning, icy torture along my skin. The need for breath forced my feet underneath me, and I raised upright, sucking in air that was mostly hair and water, draining along my scalp. I coughed and took another, looking at my hands, touching my face. Human again. And only a fading tracery of red lines. “Yes!” I met Eli’s relieved eyes. He nodded and pulled his cell, saying, “Lock the doors, bring the gobag inside. Return to the SUV.”
From somewhere off to the side, the preacher said, “Sir, you have to leave. If you don’t—”
“Father, the lady needs some prayer time. You’re gonna give it to her.”
“Sir. I don’t want to have to call the authorities.”
“Bro!” Alex shouted, the word echoing in the long room.
Eli lifted his hands, and through the opening in the half wall flew a familiar tan gobag—Beast’s bag, which I carried with me when I changed shape. Eli caught it and gave me a chin jut that ordered me to get out of the water and go left. I stepped out of the pool and took the gobag, entered a room with a cutout female silhouette on the door, one from the fifties, wearing a long, wide skirt, maybe with a crinoline. It was painted Pepto pink. So was the austere little bathroom, where I rinsed my hair in the sink and dried off using coarse towels stacked on metal shelving. The clothing in the gobag was thin cotton everything, but at least was dry.
I met Eli at the door to the restroom / changing room, and he looked me over, clearly making sure I was human and covered. He pointed to a small door I hadn’t seen earlier, and I ducked out into the sunlight. But on the way, I saw the baptismal water. It was no longer blue and clean. It now had an odd tinge, with a froth of brownish bubbles along the sides.
I had desecrated the baptismal pool. Something unknown, something like horror and shock and revulsion, quivered along my body. Something evil had been left in that water. Something evil that had been inside me. What if I hadn’t gotten it all out? What if something was left behind, a taint, a smear of dark magic?
I made my way to the SUV, trudging through the heat in my new flip-flops, trying to make sense of what I had seen of the water. It had looked shadowy. Not muddy or dirty or dyed with blood, as I might have expected. It had looked shadowy. As if something loomed over the water, cutting out the light, the corners and bottom brownish and smoked over. I got in the front passenger seat of the SUV, which was running, the AC on high, and examined my arms, ankles, shins, feet, hands, and, in the sun-visor mirror, my face. No red lines. Not anywhere.
But somehow, I didn’t think I was totally cured.
Eli got in and eased into the sparse traffic, assuring me he had pulled the drain on the pool and set it to empty, making certain that the contaminated water was removed from the baptismal basin. He had also made a generous donation to the church. Then he pulled into a Popeyes fried-chicken joint and handed a bucket of extra-crispy to me.
I was generous—I gave each of the brothers a leg. I devoured the rest, ten pieces, four biscuits, and a tub of mashed potatoes that my skinwalker metabolism demanded for energy replenishment. Shifting almost always required food. Shifting and moving through time required something like penance—a sickness that nearly killed me the last time I used it, the recovery taking too long. Too dang long. Today, I wasn’t sick, but the caloric needs were greater than usual. I still felt empty when I finished the bucket of chicken, but exhaustion took me under and I closed my eyes on the way home, my head against the headrest, my thoughts gloomy and uncertain. And wary. As if something watched me through the darkness of my own thoughts, its sights on the center of my back, between my shoulder blades.