A strange sensation niggled at the edge of my senses and my ears flicked back, listening, waiting.
“No!” Bridger screamed, his hysterical voice overwhelming the noise of animals.
I whirled around. He was running, pointing his gun at two black shadows careening through the yard, coming straight at me. A gunshot exploded, and the closer shadow, a giant panther corded with muscle, fell dead at my feet. Not a heartbeat later, a mountain lion slammed into me with a force that sent us tumbling through the dirt. Its teeth sank into my flesh. I whipped around, dislodging its teeth, and pinned it to the ground. But it was wily. It slid from beneath my claws and was on me in a flash. We were a giant ball of hissing, growling fur, completely wrapped around each other as we rolled about the dusty ground, seeking to tear the other apart.
I felt the bullet collide with the mountain lion before I heard the shot. The animal’s body lurched once and then fell atop me. How Bridger missed me I can’t say. But I was still alive. Calmly, I stood. The mountain lion twitched once and then the skin seemed to deflate, as if all the air were being let out of a balloon, and then fell away, revealing a shivering, gasping man. He reached a trembling, tarantula-tattooed hand toward me and anger distorted his familiar face. It was Tito, the dishwasher. Hate filled his dark eyes, and with his last breath, he spit on me.
“Keep going, Maggie,” Bridger called, “so they can all see you.”
In five short paces I stood before the gate, just out of the Skinwalkers’ reach.
The animals were crazed now, throwing themselves against the gate in savage hysterics, rattling the hinges. The woman in their midst smiled eagerly. Like she was hungry and I was her long-awaited dinner. Calm as a cat, I turned my back on them, though I could feel and smell their breath. I faced Bridger, sat, and wrapped my tail around my paws.
He didn’t make me wait. I heard the shot a split second after I felt the bullet pass through my golden fur and enter my flesh. The force threw me through the air and slammed me against the gate. I couldn’t breathe—air refused to enter my burning lungs. And then I slid from the gate and fell to my side as blood began to drain from my body.
Silence enclosed the night.
Bridger stood at my side. He nudged me with his bare foot, then slipped a heavy bag over my body.
“She’s dead,” he triumphantly announced.
And the night exploded in noise.
36
Consciousness slowly settled over me. I was in a burlap sack. And I was an animal. The sack came away from my face and Bridger peered at me. He reached out a tentative hand, caressed the fur on top of my head, then completely removed the sack from around me.
“Maggie,” he whispered with relief. “You’re alive. Change. If you are what you say you are, you must change. Now, or you will die!” There was urgency in his whispered words. His hands came down on me, pushing painfully against my chest.
I smelled blood—human blood—and realized it was my own. But I was a giant cat. And for some reason, I lay in a damp, barely lit cement room that smelled like water and rock.
“Maggie! Change! Shift!” He pushed even harder against my chest in an effort to stop my blood from spilling onto the floor. Pain shot through my shoulder and into my lungs. I tried to growl, though it was more like a kitten purring.
“Shh!” he hissed, his eyes frantic. “They are out there listening to make sure you didn’t survive,” he mouthed.
My ears flattened, straining. The very faint echo of animal cries reached my ears. I growled again, a low, hollow rumble.
“Please, Maggie. If you’re not one of them, change back to yourself,” Bridger begged.
I looked at his hands, pressed against my chest and covered in blood, and licked them clean. I was so tired, though, I could not change back into my human form. I put my head down on the hard cement and closed my eyes. It hurt to breathe, hurt to move. All I wanted was to die so that I didn’t hurt anymore.
“Maggie,” Bridger started again, always whispering. “I don’t want to live the rest of my life with a broken heart. Please, please change back. Find the strength, or my heart will die with you.” Without taking his hands from my chest, he lay down with his head on my ribs. “For me. Please, Maggie.”
He was silent a long moment. His next whispered words seemed to wake me from the beginning of a foggy sleep. “Maggie, remember the first day we played Ultimate and Alex kept looking at you? And I put my hand on your shoulder? That was the first time I admitted to myself that I was truly, helplessly in love with you. I wanted to tell you so badly when I walked you to work that day, to kiss you. And every day after that, it took all of my willpower not to touch you, or kiss you good night, or tell you how hard it was to be away from you.” He sighed, his breath fanning my whiskers. “And now that I am able to tell you these things, you are choosing to die. I always knew you were strong willed … but I never thought you were selfish. Do you realize that if you die, you are taking away the only thing that matters to me?
“Maggie Mae Mortensen, if you won’t change for yourself, do it for me.”
Somehow Bridger’s words sank into my fuzzy brain. Without lifting my head or opening my eyes, I remembered what it felt like to be me. Remembered how my clumsy human legs felt, the taste of fish tacos, the rush of mountain biking down a steep hill, the feeling of being held safe in Bridger’s arms, and of loving him and knowing that he loved me back. Slowly, with so much strain I felt like the last little bit of toothpaste being squeezed from the tube, I began to change.
Bridger got to his knees, whispering encouragement. “That’s it! Keep going! Come on, Maggie, come on!” His hands were in my fur, touching me, warming me. “Don’t stop, just make the shift.”
I felt my legs lengthen and my claws disappear; then my fur became bare skin. And with a groan of pain, I was myself again, curled up in a ball on the cold, hard floor. My chest and ribs burned. I looked down and saw a hole in my skin below my right shoulder—watched it start to close up and push out a bullet as big as the top knuckle of my pinky finger. As the bullet clinked onto the floor, all pain disappeared. I was whole.
Bridger grabbed my limp body in his arms and hugged me to him, laughing a whispered laugh. “I truly thought you were one of them at first, but when you said you didn’t need a skin to shift, I dared to hope—I knew …” His voice trailed away to nothing. “That’s why I didn’t shoot you in the heart—why I didn’t shoot to kill. Because I knew you’d heal when you shifted back. Here.” He held my T-shirt out to me.
I was too tired to care that I was naked, too tired to pull the T-shirt over my head, so he did it for me, tugging the long shirt down around my thighs. Then he picked me up and moved me from the bloody spot on the cement floor to a cleaner spot. His face, mere inches from mine, absolutely beamed.
“I can’t believe it! You’re one of us!” he whispered. He laid me down on the floor again, taking care that my head didn’t hit the cement. Then his hands were all over me, touching my hair, face, neck, my bare calves and feet, back to my face again, like a mother examining a brand-new baby. “You are one of us!”
“What do you mean?” I whispered.
“You are like me. A Shifter. That has to be why I am so drawn to you!” He put his hands on either side of my face, leaned down, and gently kissed my forehead. “I should have known the first time I saw you run. But I thought I knew every single Shifter in the entire world by name. We are so few, so rare, we never lose contact with each other. But somehow you slipped through our fingers.” Bridger was whispering almost faster than I could follow. “Oh, Maggie. If only you’d told me from the beginning. If only things had been different for you.”
“If only I knew what I was from the beginning, life would have been so much easier,” I whispered, thinking about the past two years. My heavy eyelids slipped shut.
“Your juvenile record is for indecent exposure, isn’t it?” I could hear the smile in his voice. My eyes flickered open. “A definite downside of shifting, coming out of it naked. I’ve had a few close calls myself.”
My eyes fell shut again.
“Oh, Maggie. If only you’d told me.” His hand stroked my hair and I started to drift off to sleep. His voice jarred me awake. “Don’t move,” he whispered, as if I had any choice. Even the energy it took to open my eyes and watch him leave the dimly lit room almost hurt.
My eyes flicked around, taking in quick flashes of my surroundings before crashing shut again. I was in some sort of windowless, stone-walled basement. A bomb shelter, maybe? It was an empty room, without so much as a rug on the damp, grimy floor. The only thing in the room besides me was a lightbulb dangling on a lone cord from the ceiling.
Bridger returned with his arms full of stuff. Gently, quietly he set the stuff beside me. I forced my eyes open one last time to see what it was: food, two sleeping bags, water, and a foam pad. He rolled out the foam pad and put a sleeping bag onto it.
“Climb in. You’re going to fall asleep any minute. I almost killed you.” His eyes were dark and troubled for an instant. Then his face broke into a beautiful, breathtaking smile again.
I looked at the sleeping bag but couldn’t move my body. Bridger lifted me onto it and zipped me into its soft warmth. He covered me with the other.
“Eat this,” he instructed, holding a granola bar to my mouth. I ate the whole thing in record time. “At least your appetite’s not sleepy,” he said with a whispered laugh. I sipped some stale water out of the canteen he held to my lips, then lay with my back to him, using my arm for a pillow. Maybe it was the cold, damp floor or maybe I was in shock, but in spite of the sleeping bags I began to shiver.
“You’re freezing,” Bridger said, his breath on my ear. He climbed into the sleeping bag with me and lifted my head onto his warm, bare chest. Wrapped in his arms, I fell asleep before I heard his heart beat three times.
37
A woman’s face, framed by the hood of a tiger’s head and teeth, stared at me. She reached through the wrought-iron gate separating us and wrapped her hand in my blacker than black hair, pulling me toward her until our noses almost touched. But when she opened her mouth to speak, she changed, grew taller, with crow-black hair and charcoal eyes.