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THE SHIFTERS
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“D ADDY! DADDY, PICK me up!”
“Ooof! You’re getting heavy, Maddie girl!”
“Don’t care, Daddy! Pick me up! You’re strong. You can do it!”
Jared Lowe grabbed his daughter and hefted her into the air, tossing her like she was as light as a feather just as he had done since she was still a tiny child instead of a girl of six years already. In truth, she really was starting to get too heavy for these kinds of games, but he knew he would continue to play them until his physical strength no longer allowed it. He would have done anything for his little dark-haired beauty, a girl who looked so much like his own deceased mother that it sometimes made him feel as if his heart was stopping a little. His beautiful little blue-eyed girl, still young enough to believe that everything he did and said was close to perfection. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that this was something that would last forever, or even believe it would last for much longer, but it was something he wanted to soak up as much of as possible while he still could.
“Careful, Jared! You’ll drop her!”
“No way, Moira,” he called over his shoulder to his laughing wife. “As she just so sweetly reminded me, I’m strong.”
“So strong!” Maddie chimed in, giggling like a little maniac all the while. “He’s so strong. He won’t drop me!”
“See? I have the little one’s approval. All’s right in the world, my beautiful wife, and you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing, huh? That’s an awfully bold statement. What about the next car payment?”
“I said nothing, and I meant it. Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you? Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you both? Y’all are my two best girls.”
“Yeah!” Maddie crowed, setting Moira to laughing again and clearing the worry lines from her forehead. “Best girls in the world!”
“That’s right, best in the world. And how would my best girls in the world like to go for a little walk?”
Both Jared’s wife and daughter agreed that a walk would be the best thing there was, and with continued chatter amongst the little family of three, they all put on their winter coats. Texas was a large state with a geographical and climatic diversity that astonished most non-residents. The part of Texas the Lowe family lived in, the Hill Country, experienced a good deal more winter than some of the other parts of Texas, and out on the Lowe ranch, it got very cold in November. The wind whipping around and through the hills sometimes felt like it could cut through a person, and although it would not put a stop to the ritual family walks Jared and his family took, they were smart enough to bundle up. Jared led the way out of their front door, taking a moment to point out the lovely pink-and-orange sky produced by the setting sun. Sunsets were one of the things Maddie loved most, and this one was near perfect. Jared stopped, picking Maddie up in his arms so that they could admire it more closely, and from beside him, Moira slipped an arm around his waist. It was the most perfect moment Jared could remember having in his life. He was just about to open his mouth and say so when a great, booming noise shook the earth and knocked them all off of their feet.
“No! Christ, no! Maddie! Moira!”
It had been almost a year since the Great Reckoning, or at least as near as Jared could figure. At first, he had done his best to keep records of the passing time, to maintain some sort of normalcy for himself, but that was a charade a man could only keep up for so long. It was the kind of thing only a man dedicated to the idea of keeping the life he used to have alive in his heart kept up with. That was a dedication Jared had long since abandoned. Maybe it was the nightmares that did it. The goddamned nightmares he had every night he didn’t hit the bottle hard enough to pass out cold. On the few occasions that Jared did venture into town, he was always hearing people talk about where they were when “it” happened. It was all anyone ever wanted to talk about, where they were and what they had been doing before the world had switched over dark. All Jared wanted was to forget, and yet his sick brain wouldn’t go anywhere else every time he tried to get some honest-to-God rest. Each time, the dream was the same. He was with his daughter and his wife on the last normal evening of anyone’s life, looking at a sunset so brilliant it was almost too difficult to look at. That sunset was the thing he tried to cling to, especially since he had to live through it almost every night of his “after” life. At least a beautiful sky was the last thing his little girl saw before everything went dark for her. It was the last thing she’d seen in her short life, the last thing his wife had seen, too. It was the last really beautiful thing to happen for anyone before the whole world went dark. It was the thing he thought about when he was too hungover to think, or on afternoons like this one when he went about mundane tasks like cutting wood for himself. It felt pointless to do it, but it was November again, cold and with no electricity anymore to keep them warm. They didn’t have those kinds of creature comforts now that the world had basically ended.
“Jared?”
He whirled around to face the voice that had interrupted his morose thoughts, an axe still clasped tightly in hand. Jared had always been the kind of man to keep mostly to himself, and that was before the Great Reckoning. After, when he was living in the middle of an actual apocalypse? It was safe to say that company sneaking up on him was very far from appreciated.
“Woah there, buddy! I come in peace!” Alex Morrow said quickly, hands up in a surrendering gesture as he took several steps backward. “Hey now. Why don’t you go ahead and put down the axe, what do you say? I’m not aiming to get myself hacked into pieces today. Seems to me we’ve had enough death and destruction around here, you know?”
“Jesus, Alex, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. Not after everything that’s happened. For all I knew you could’ve been one of them, right?”
“But I’m not. You can see that, right?”
“I can see that now. But before? You oughta be more careful, man. Hill Country turned out to be the perfect place for that freak doc’s monsters to run around. With all of these trees, all of these hills, you could’ve been one of them. You could’ve been one of them easily.”
“Monsters, huh? That’s interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“That you call ’em that. I always think it’s interesting to see what kinds of names people have for them—the ones who didn’t live like us. The ones who didn’t die like, you know, everyone else.”
“What would you suggest I call them, Alex? They aren’t exactly people anymore.”
"I call ’em shifters, myself. Seems fitting, don’t you think? That’s what they do, after all. It’s not like they aren’t ever people anymore; they just shift into other things, too. They shift into their animal forms and shit. You know. One minute they’re people, and the next minute you’ve got a bunch of lions standing in front of you.”
“No, Alex.” Jared interrupted his unwanted visitor’s musings with a voice so firm the man jumped in his boots. “They aren’t.”
“Aren’t what, man? I mean they do shift into other things, don’t they?”
“That doesn’t mean they’re still human. That freak saw to that. They aren’t human, and they aren’t safe. They’re what we have left to deal with now that the whole world is on its knees.”
“Right,” Alex said slowly, shifting from one foot to the other in a movement that served as a painful reminder of something Maddie had always done when she thought she was in trouble for something. “That’s probably why they sent me.”
“Why they sent you? What are you talking about? Who sent you?”
“Some of the other survivors, man. Not everyone’s been holing up the way you have. A lot of us, even the ones who had ranches just like this one, we moved on into town. Figured we gotta band together, since everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”
“Right. And what’s that got to do with me?”
“We’ve formed a council of sorts, I guess you could call it. We’re holding a town meeting tonight about what to do with the shifters. Or I guess the monsters, if we’re going to use your word. I don’t hold with them all being bad the way that some folks do—”
“Then you aren’t using your head.”
“Like I said, not like some folks do, but I’ll agree that there’s enough of ’em causing trouble to warrant talking about. They sent me. They guys who formed the council. They thought it would be best to invite you in. Thought you would make a pretty damned good asset.”
“Asset for what?” Jared was suddenly very, very tired, his lack of sleep from the night before catching up with him in a big way. “What are you trying to get at?”
“For fighting back, man. We want to finally start fighting back. We want to take our world back.”
––––––––
“W ELL, WELL, WELL. LOOK at what we’ve got here, folks? Somebody got a little cockier than she should have, and now she’s going to pay.”
“What should we do with her, Morris? What do you think about that? What should we do with a pretty, little young thing like this?”
Jade Rivers stopped dead in her tracks, thankful beyond measure that she’d started being stealthy just by force of habit. It’s not like it would have made any sense for her not to be stealthy, what with the whole world turning inside out on itself and everything. And rummaging through the woods wasn’t a safe thing. If she needed any reminders of that, any proof, she was looking at it right now. God only knew what had possessed this poor woman to come out into the woods on her own. Desperation, perhaps? She was sure that there was a steadily declining availability of resources ever since the Reckoning, and that could only make things terrifying for the people still living in normal society. The normal society that was no longer available to her. The society that had kept her relegated to the outskirts of everything just for suffering the same losses that they all had. Sure, she wasn’t dead, that was true. But becoming what she was? Becoming this thing that was still partially human, but not entirely, meant she was unwanted by the few people who still populated the town she had grown up in her entire life. Not that she really thought they would be able to tell what she was, not just by looking at her, but still. She had skulked around the town’s outskirts enough to know that shifters like her weren’t exactly welcome additions to society. From the way people acted, one might have thought it was the shifters themselves that had been responsible for the Reckoning. One might have thought they were the culpable ones instead of another set of victims. And it was jackasses like this lot that kept that fear-driven belief alive and well. She knew this and yet felt petrified to act in any capacity.
“Please!” the girl Jade half recognized but couldn’t quite place begged, her basket of foraged food dropped and utterly forgotten. She looked up at her two assailants with wide, petrified eyes, backing away from them so slowly that a normal human with an attitude problem could have caught her, never mind the shifters. Either this girl had never known what it meant to stand up to a shifter or actually seeing one had driven all of her knowledge about them right out of her head. Either way, she looked like she was in some serious trouble. Because guys like Morris and his buddy Trevor weren’t safe. They were exactly what everyone who was still human thought all of the shifters were like. They were as close to monsters as a human could get, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The people still living in towns were afraid, that and devastated by what they had lost. The shifters like her, the ones who didn’t have any desire to make people suffer more, were afraid, too. They were afraid of the same things Jade was afraid of, she supposed. They were afraid of what they had become, the powers they now possessed that they had never asked for. They were afraid of the way they had been ostracized from the people and town that had once belonged to them. Then there were the ones who really had turned into something very closely resembling the monsters of their childhood. They became one of the most frightening things of all, especially when they were being dealt with in a world that no longer resembled the one they had all taken for granted a year ago.
“Please!” the young woman cried, clinging to the basket she’d brought along to scavenge, and scurrying backward. “Please, you don’t have to do anything! You can just let me go!”
“Aw,” Morris growled, his human form already beginning to blur with that of the tiger that lay beneath, “ain’t that cute? She thinks she can reason with us. What do you have to say about that, Trevor?”
“I think she went and forgot that the world went and moved past what it used to be. I think she forgot that it’s our time now.”
“I didn’t!” the young woman cried, cringing when she realized she’d backed all of the way into a massive tree blocking her from going farther. “I didn’t forget! You guys are in charge! I know that, I promise! I know that—just please, let me go!”
“What do you think, Trevor? Should we let her go?”
Morris shrugged and turned away from the woman as if he were going to go. Trevor looked down at the girl and shrugged as well, his face registering disappointment but fully willing to go along with what his leader said. The girl clung to her basket as she rose, her entire body trembling as she turned to run. It was turning her back that was the real mistake, not that they were likely to have let her go regardless. When she turned, that was when Morris and Trevor both shifted. Even having seen it before, even being able to do it herself, Jade felt her stomach drop when she saw it. It was what some of the people in town were calling an abomination. Morris’s body began to lengthen as he fell to a crouch on the cold, rocky ground. His back arched so severely that it looked like it might break as his muscles rippled beneath the skin that was rapidly being replaced by thick, bristly fur. He threw his head back and roared, as did Trevor who had begun his own transformation the moment his leader had. Jade opened her mouth to say something, to do anything that might help this poor girl survive, but before she could even get a word out, Morris and Trevor pounced upon her. There was a scream and a sickening crack as they landed on her back, breaking it instantly. As she watched, the two beasts began to rip the girl apart like shreds of cloth. That was when Jade turned and ran. She ran without seeing, without looking where she was going. She ran until she was stopped by another body colliding squarely with her own.
“No! No, let me go!”
“Hey! Cool it, Jade, it’s me! It’s Tommy!”
“What? No!”
“Jade? Jade, look at me! It’s Tommy! You’re home now, okay? You’re home. Why don’t you calm down and tell me what the hell is going on that has you so worked up?”
Jade’s wildly turning eyes finally landed on the man who had caught her and stopped her running. For a second she still saw Morris, and she could feel her shift beginning to take her over. Then her eyes focused and she saw that it was Tommy after all. He was one of the shifters like her, one of those who hadn’t gone crazy and decided none of the rules applied anymore. There weren’t tons of them, but there were enough to have formed their own little society of sorts, a camp none of the humans knew about yet that they were using as a home base. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something, and she was grateful for it. She was especially grateful for it now when she was so freaked-out by what she had just seen Morris and Travis do. The bad ones didn’t like to live in such large groups, and it was unlikely they would ever venture into the camp. She was safe there, or as safe as she was ever likely to be in this awful new world.
“Jade,” Tommy insisted again, slinging one arm around her shoulders and leading her farther into the depths of their safe space, “seriously, tell me what’s going on. You look like you’ve just been through a war or something.”
“In the woods,” she panted, still trying to catch her breath from how fast she had run. "I saw two of them. Morris and Trevor. They ripped a girl in half, Tommy. They ripped her into ribbons, and I didn’t do anything to stop it. I didn’t do anything to help.”
“Jesus. It’s okay, Jade. What could you have done on your own?”
“I don’t know. Something! More than she could do! I just stood there! I didn’t shift, didn’t use the powers I have to help her. I just stood there.”
“It’s funny you should mention doing something. I was talking to Sharon, and she wants to put you on a mission.”
“Me?” Jade asked dubiously, afraid of the woman who had taken up the leadership role for their encampment despite her respect for her. “But why me?”
“Because you have the best control over your shifts. You can keep from doing it when you don’t want to, and that’s something most of us still haven’t learned.”
“But why would I need to do that? Control it, I mean?”
“Because. She wants you to go into the survivors’ town. She wants you to go in and pretend to be one of them. You’re on an intel mission, my dear.”
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“C OME ON, PEOPLE, PLEASE ! If you guys really want to have a meeting, we’ve got to have some order!”
Jared looked out over the crowd of people sitting in folding chairs in front of the podium he’d been put behind. When he’d agreed to attend this town meeting, an agreement that had been tentative at best, he hadn’t realized that the plan was for him to lead the damned meeting. If he’d known that, he would never have agreed to come, which was probably why Alex hadn’t told him the plan in the first place. Now here he was, standing up in front of a crowd of people who were all afraid, mostly angry, and all looking to him for some kind of guidance. That was the last thing he wanted. He wanted nothing to do with a position of leadership for these men, women, and children. Maddie and Moira had looked to him as the leader of the family, and look where that had gotten them. Dead, that’s where. And yet here he was, all of these faces looking up at him as if he had some answers.
“Come on, guys!” he shouted again, rapidly losing patience for the chattering, which was doing nothing but keeping any decisions from getting made. “If we can’t stop talking for long enough to get things done, we might as well just forget this whole thing.”
He looked around the room and saw that this comment, at least, had been taken seriously. The room shut up quickly, which was good. It was true that he was operating blind, but his audience didn’t know that.
“Good,” he said gruffly, clearing his throat and gazing around the room. “That’s good. Now I’m not going to pretend that I understand what this meeting is about. As far as I know, everything’s been going as well as we could hope for in a situation like the one we’ve got now. The best thing I know to do is open the floor. Maybe one of you can give me a better idea of what’s going on here. It’s no secret that I haven’t been much a part of the goings-on of the town since it happened.” A woman in the front raised her hand, and Jared acknowledged her gratefully. If he could keep these people talking, they might just be able to get through the meeting quickly so that he could go back home where he belonged.
“I’m Cindy,” the woman said loudly—a woman Jared vaguely remembered from managing one of the town’s banks. “And I’m sorry you weren’t brought more up to speed. What we’re doing here tonight is trying to establish a solution for the shifter problem.”
“What solution?” a man from somewhere in the back shouted angrily. “We just take ’em out! We’ve got plenty of guns, right? We take ’em out, that’s what I say!”
“No,” Cindy said quickly, with a voice of finality, “that’s not what we’re going to do.”
“All right,” Jared said slowly, trying very hard to keep his own feelings on the monsters to himself. “What would you suggest? It seems like you’ve already got a plan of sorts.”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Me and a couple of others have been talking. We’ve been talking about Dr. Barry Strong’s machine.”
This comment was met with another rush of whispers from the crowd. Jared knew he should do something to silence them again, but he was a little too shocked for that. He hadn’t heard anyone utter that name in a long, long time. The fact that anyone still called the man a doctor made Jared want to put his fist through a wall. Doctors were supposed to help people. What that man had done was destroy normal life for not only a few, but the world at large. He had been an honest-to-God mad scientist, building his terrible machine. All it’d taken was one flip of a switch and the world had changed, the wave of destructive chemical and energy sweeping the nation and then infecting the rest of the world. Jared had no idea what the man’s intention had been, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that it had destroyed his life, and that was enough.
“All right,” he said, dimly aware that it was still he who was responsible for keeping this meeting under control. “Would you care to elaborate for those of us who weren’t privy to the conversations you’ve already had?”
“Of course. We want to locate him. We want to locate him, and then we want to send a party to go and see him.”
“I’m sorry, but why?”
“Because. If he was able to create the terror and destruction he did, it stands to reason that he has already come up with a cure or would be able to do so. He’s the one who destroyed everything. He’s the one who should have to put it back.”
“I’m sorry, but there is no putting it back. The world has been broken down. It can’t be built up back to what it was before.”
“We’re not asking for it to be the way it was before. But there are steps that can be taken. All of those people who got turned into shifters? They didn’t ask for that. They didn’t ask for it any more than the rest of us asked for what happened to us. If we can get a cure, we can start to do some good. That’s something, at least. It’s a start.”
“And how exactly do you suggest we find him? It’s not like computers are still up and running. You know anybody who can take care of that?”
This question was met by another bout of murmuring, this one louder than the last. He was losing control of the crowd. He knew he should do something to get things back in order, but he couldn’t seem to make himself do anything at all. The idea this woman was suggesting, that there could be some kind of redemption for those who had been altered by the good doctor’s machine, had never crossed his mind. He wasn’t sure he wanted it there at all. One of the things that had kept him going was his hatred for those monsters. He saw them as the living embodiment of the cataclysmic event that had taken his family. He’d never considered doing anything but taking them out one by one. He’d certainly never considered trying to save them. And even if that were possible, Jared saw no way of finding the man responsible for the Reckoning. The ease of information that had come from the internet was long gone. The idea that they could just find him was about as practical as saying they could all just pick up and move to the moon.
“I can do it.”
The voice was soft, so soft Jared almost believed he’d been hearing things. It had come from a smallish woman who now looked highly uncomfortable to be the center of attention. Nevertheless, she did not break eye contact with the room as a whole. Instead, she repeated herself, this time speaking loudly enough for all to hear.
“What you’re asking for—to be able to find the doctor—I can do it. All I need is a generator and a laptop that worked before everything started.”
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“S O, YOU’RE THE ONE who’s going to save us all, huh?”
Jade, who had been on edge from the moment she’d entered the settlement, gave a little yelp of fright before realizing who it was talking to her. It was Jared, the one who had led the town meeting in the first place. Jade had gotten up and left the meeting as soon as Jared had announced it adjourned, bursting out of the dimly lit room that had once been a high school gymnasium, and taking in deep gulps of the cold night air. Sitting inside of that room, full of people who either pitied or hated her for what she was, had been one of the hardest things she had ever done. For one thing, it made the shame she felt over what she had become about fifty times worse. For another, the fear that they would somehow discover what she really was became a stark reality. What Tommy had said about her being good at controlling her shifts was true. She knew for a fact that many of her friends and fellow shifters wouldn’t have been able to sit through the tension of that town meeting without an involuntary shift. Self-control was a talent of hers—either that or cowardice over what she had become. Perhaps it was cowardice that had driven her to escape the group of surviving humans as quickly as possible and had her planning on melting back into the woods and keeping as separate from them as she could possibly manage. That was the plan, anyway. What wasn’t a part of the plan was the voice that called out from behind her, stopping her in her tracks completely.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just sort of surprised.”
“Surprised?” Jade asked wearily, turning toward Jared. “Why surprised?”
“Well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, this whole find-the-doctor plan was as new to me as I’m guessing it was to you. Secondly, I didn’t know there was any way to get a computer doing anything useful anymore. And thirdly, I didn’t know you were still around.”
“Around?”
It was an awfully strange way to say a thing like that, and Jade couldn’t help but notice it. It sounded detached somehow, almost cold as if all of the people who had died and those who had been turned into something human had just gone on an extended vacation. She wasn’t sure what to make of it, just like she wasn’t sure what to make of him. She didn’t know him, but she knew of him. In a small town like theirs, people had a pretty good idea of who else was around. She had always had a massive crush on him despite the fact that he was a handful of years older than her, and when she’d found out he had gotten married, she had cried.
Remembering that now made her feel like the shittiest kind of person, though. His family was dead. His wife and little girl both, and here she was, a living, breathing abomination. She couldn’t tell if he knew what she was or not, and the instinct to bolt was strong. It wasn’t as strong as the desire to be around him, however. That desire, the desire to just be a girl talking to a boy she liked, was stronger than she would have ever believed possible.
“Sorry,” he said with a humorless laugh. “I have a way of saying things sometimes that strike people as a little odd. I don’t spend a lot of time in the company of others these days.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Neither do I.”
“That’s probably why I haven’t seen you. But you know what?”
“What?”
“I could use a drink. Wanna join? My mamma always told me to drink with company when at all possible. I haven’t been paying much attention to that lately, but I think tonight I’d like to. You game?”
Jade smiled, then laughed, and followed Jared to the settlement’s makeshift bar. Sitting there with him, it was almost like getting into a time machine. She’d had no idea how much she needed to just feel like a person again, and sitting there with Jared gave her that. She felt like more than just a person. She felt like the best version of herself, and the more the two of them drank, the more pronounced that feeling became. They talked about everything but the catastrophic event that had led them to the predicament they were now in. They talked about times gone by without either of them ever bringing up the people they had lost. By the time Jared suggested they leave the bar and return to his ranch for a nightcap, Jade was as giddy as a high school girl finally getting to go on a date with her crush. It was only once she was in his lamp-lit kitchen that she started to wonder if this had been a good idea. It must have shown on her face, too, because when Jared handed her a glass of some dark-looking liquor, his head cocked to the side and he began to frown slightly.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Something changed. What’s wrong? What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing. It’s stupid, really. I was just thinking about how I always had a crush on you. You probably knew that. Everyone else in town seemed to.”
“No,” he answered with what appeared to be genuine surprise, “I didn’t.”
“Well, I did. I used to fantasize about being alone with you just like this.”
“Really? You could’ve fooled me. You don’t exactly look happy to be here.”
“It’s just that in those fantasies, I wasn’t alone with you because you had nobody else to hang out with. It wasn’t because I was the one who was supposed to find the information you needed, you know? It was because you really wanted to be around me. Because you wanted me.”
“And who said I don’t?”
It was the last response in the world that Jade had expected, and what happened next seemed to occur very quickly. It was like her life became a series of Polaroid pictures instead of a fluid sequence of events. One minute Jared was standing in his homey, worn-in kitchen across from her, and the next he was directly in front of her, taking her newly poured drink out of her hands. She couldn’t look at him, could hardly even breathe, except that he wouldn’t let her pretend he wasn’t there. He took her chin in his hands and pulled her face up, forcing her to make eye contact.
“Jade, I have to tell you something.”
“Um. Okay?”
“I used to have a crush on you, too. After the Reckoning, I figured you were one of the people lost. I’m glad to see that’s not true.”
He leaned forward and kissed her deeply, the kind of kiss most girls could only dream of. For a split second, she thought about stopping it, pulling back and telling him what she really was, but she had already seen what he thought about the shifters. He had called them monsters. If he found out what she really was, he wouldn’t want her, and she couldn’t stand that thought. She’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted him right now, something good in the middle of a world that had turned into so much bad.
“Is this okay?” he asked her, pulling back from her just long enough to get a good read on her face.
“It’s more than okay,” she panted, making her decision on the matter right then and there. “It’s the only thing I want in the world right now. Now kiss me again.”
He grinned at her and did what she said, kissing her more fiercely this time, his tongue slipping forcefully between her lips so that her entire mouth was filled with his flavor. His hands found their way to her shoulders, then slipped down her waist, gripping her tightly and lifting her up so he could set her on the kitchen counter. She opened her legs wide so that he could move easily between them, her skirt riding all of the way up to her hips as she did so. He let out a low growl in the back of his throat, and if she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was a shifter just like herself. Just that sound was enough to make her wet, and she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him closer to her.
“I want you,” she gasped. “God, I’ve never wanted a man more!”
“This?” he asked softly as he quickly unbuttoned her blouse and cupped her breasts firmly. “You want this?”
“More!”
He bent, putting his mouth where his fingers had been and running his tongue roughly over her painfully hard nipples. She let out a cry of pleasure, her hips rocking helplessly against him, wanting more of him, wanting to feel him inside of her. Her hands moved to his belt buckle, undoing it so quickly that it actually made him laugh.
“You aren’t playing around, are you?”
“No, sir. Definitely not. Now stop talking, Lowe, and take me.”
He tipped his head in a mock salute and pulled himself free of his boxers, the length and girth of him enough to make her gasp all over again. There was very little time to marvel over it, though, because Jared was pulling her panties aside and plunging himself into her, so fast that it made her head spin.
“Is this okay?”
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to!” she said in a shaky voice, her legs wrapping around his hips as her hands clutched at his shirt, pulling him in closer to her. Her back arched, the length of her body fully pressed against him now, as he began to thrust into her slowly at first, then rapidly picking up speed. She was so wet now that she knew she was close. Her entire body buzzed and tingled with the pleasure building deep within her until it exploded into the most intense, blinding orgasm of her life. She cried out, screamed, then bit his shoulder to try and regain control of herself. Her nails raked up the length of his back, and dimly she reminded herself to be careful not to dig in too hard, or else he might realize she wasn’t exactly human anymore. She was worried that she would hurt him, but instead, the pain only seemed to turn him on more. She felt him quiver inside of her, and then he let out his own yell before collapsing his weight on top of her. They stayed there that way until they could catch their breath. When Jared finally pulled out of her and put his jeans on again, they looked at each other and laughed.
“I swear to God, Jade, that’s not why I invited you here.”
“Do you wish it hadn’t happened?”
“Honestly?”
“Ugh. Yeah, I guess. Honestly.”
“No, I don’t. This is the best I’ve felt since... since it all happened.”
“Good,” she said as nonchalantly as she could manage, trying to hide the fact that internally she was doing her version of a happy dance. “Me, too. Now, how about we give that whole nightcap thing another try?”
––––––––
W HEN JARED WOKE UP the next morning, the first thing he noticed was that he hadn’t had his usual bad dream.. There was no pounding head and sour-tasting mouth, no acrid stomach that threatened to overcome him at any unsuspecting moment. He hadn’t drunk enough to black the nightmare out; he simply hadn’t had it. For the first time since the Great Reckoning, he had gotten a truly restful night’s sleep.
The second thing Jared noticed upon waking was that he was alone. Waking up by himself and to an empty house was something he had only just begun to get used to, which was perhaps why he was so keenly aware of the fact that he was on his own now. That and Jade hadn’t struck him as the kind of girl to just grab her things and leave in the middle of the night. And it must have been in the middle of the night that she had left, too, because when he touched the pillow and sheets on her side of the bed, they were cool. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but her not being there made him feel uneasy. It brought him right back to the kind of disorientation he had felt at the beginning when all of the devastation and change brought on by the Reckoning had been brand-new. That was something he had sworn to himself he would never feel again, and yet here he was, feeling precisely that. He pulled himself out of bed, showered, and dressed, all the while with his mind stuck on what might have happened to Jade to make her leave that way. He had several theories, ranging from ideas that maybe he’d just seriously misjudged her character (something he very rarely did) to conspiracy theories about people who weren’t happy with the results of last night’s town meeting coming and kidnapping her while he lay there useless in his peaceful sleep. He was so caught up in trying to decide which of these theories was most likely that he didn’t even notice he wasn’t alone on the vast piece of land he called his front yard.
“Hey!”
“Jesus Christ!” Jared exclaimed, sloshing hot coffee all down the front of himself as he jumped halfway up to the heavens in surprise. “You scared the shit out of me, you know that?”
“Sorry,” Jade answered uncertainly, her brow creased with worry. “I didn’t mean to. I thought you knew I was here.”
“But you weren’t here,” Jared answered sharply, at a total loss as to why he was as annoyed with her as he was. “At least not until a couple of seconds ago. I woke up, and your side of the bed was cold.”
“Did you miss me?” she said playfully, a tentative half grin on her face that almost softened his anger toward her. “It’s okay if you did. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m just saying, I thought you took off once I went to sleep. Which means what you just did is still technically sneaking up on a man. You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that, not after everything that’s happened. You’re liable to get yourself shot or something.”
“I’m sorry. But I didn’t sneak off!”
“You didn’t? Then I’m imagining you just popping up this way?”
“No, you aren’t. What I mean is that I wasn’t just sneaking off someplace for no good reason. After you fell asleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about the town assembly thingy.”
“Okay,” Jared answered slowly, staring at her face intently as he did so. He could tell that she was telling him part of the truth, but he could also tell that there was something not quite right here. It was in the way she fidgeted, the way she couldn’t quite keep eye contact with him. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and he knew it. What he didn’t know was why she felt the need to keep secrets. “So you couldn’t stop thinking about it. That meant you had to get up and what, go for a long walk in the middle of the night? Not a smart choice.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. Or at least it wasn’t exactly like that. It’s just that last night was the first time I’ve had any clue of what I was supposed to do. It was the first time I’ve felt like I had a purpose since this whole awful thing happened, and I couldn’t wait for another second to get started, not even to sleep.”
“So let me get this straight. You got up and wandered off in the dark, by yourself, with a bunch of fucking monsters running around, to try and get started on finding out where Dr. Crazy’s been hiding out this past year?”
“You shouldn’t call them that,” Jade frowned, her face growing bright red as she did so. “Shouldn’t call them monsters, I mean. It could have happened to any of us, you know.”
“Sure, fine. Whatever. You’re not telling me anything I haven’t heard before, Jade. But semantics aside, is that what you’re telling me? You got up and left to try and get a head start on that whole thing?”
“Not to try.” She grinned again, looking a whole lot like the cat that got the canary. “I did it.”
“What do you mean, you did it? You did what, exactly?”
“I found him. I know exactly where he is. Not only that, I know which path to take to get to him.”
What followed was an argument that would have fit perfectly into any one of those stupid television dramas that had become extinct along with everything else after the Great Reckoning. Jared, who had never been one to request any more information than he expressly needed, didn’t bother asking Jade how exactly she had gotten this done so quickly. He didn’t care what methods she had used or what kinds of resources she’d had to draw from. All he wanted was the location, which Jade gave him gladly. That was where the two of them stopped agreeing on things. It turned out that the doctor’s house was a close hike from them, which Jared now figured was why their little part of Texas had racked up the highest death toll of any place he’d yet heard of. When he began gathering up some things to put in a pack, Jade had started adding some things of her own. That was when she made it clear that she had no intention of letting him go confront the guy responsible for all of this devastation on his own, and no amount of argument on his part seemed to make a difference.
“Look!” she finally yelled into his face, or as close to his face as she could get considering she was almost a foot shorter than him. “I’m the one who found the information you needed. I’m going!”
“I don’t need you to go! I don’t need anyone to go, in fact. This is something I’m going to take care of on my own.”
“Bullshit! This didn’t only happen to you, Jared. It happened to all of us! And you were more than willing to let me do the work of figuring out where he was. As far as I’m concerned, that means I’ve earned the trip.”
“But—”
“And on top of that, I’ve already told you. I know exactly how to get there. So the way I see it, you can go on your own, and I’ll go, too, but separately, or we can just go together. Your choice, I guess. Either way, I’m going.”
“Fine,” Jared answered through a clenched jaw, hardly able to believe that he was conceding defeat so quickly. “But you better not get in my way.”
“That’s funny,” she retorted, a flinty look in his eye that made him want to take a step backward. “I was just about to say the same thing to you.”
––––––––
“T HIS IS IT. HOLY FUCK , Jade, that’s it.”
“I know it is. Why do you sound so surprised?”
“I don’t know,” he answered thickly, running his hand through his hair in a move that could either have been from anxiety, anger, or both. “I guess I didn’t really expect it to be here, you know? After everything that’s happened, everything that’s gone down, it just felt too easy.”
“I’m pretty sure this part was the easy part,” Jade whispered, crouched down in the thick woods surrounding the massive three-story house made almost entirely out of glass and metal. “Finding it, I mean.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Um, yeah. I told you I knew where it was. I don’t know if you know this, but I was kind of a computer genius before the whole world went to shit. Even post-apocalypse, I can still do some pretty neat things when it comes to technology.”
“I wasn’t trying to say I doubted you, Jade, I was—”
“It’s cool. I get it. It doesn’t matter what you thought about my abilities to get this done anyway. Like I said, I have a feeling this was the easy part. This was the only thing we knew was a sure thing. Everything that comes next? Those are all completely unknown variables.”
Jared didn’t say anything in response, but Jade could feel him giving her a sideways look. The closer she and Jared had come to this house, the more on edge she had become. At the start, it had all felt like an adventure. It had felt like freedom not to be in her little shifter encampment, not to be avoiding the townspeople, either. With Jared, she could be a normal person. She could be something of who she was before the Reckoning had ever occurred. The two of them had spent the night around a small campfire, trading stories that were really memories. For that one night, the state of the world hadn’t mattered. It had just been a man and a woman with the most insane chemistry ever, getting to like each other more and more with every passing moment. But now? Now they were about to break into the doctor’s house, and once that happened, Jade was pretty sure her grace period would be done with. She had no idea why she was so sure of it, but something told her that going into that house was going to show Jared what she really was. The two of them were only just getting to really like each other, but as soon as he knew what she really was, Jade knew that Jared wouldn’t want her anymore. She would be lucky if he didn’t try and kill her.
“Look,” Jared said quietly, looking at the house instead of her, “if you don’t want to go in there, don’t. You’re right. I don’t know what we’ll find. He’s probably not even there, and if he is, you may not want to be there to see what I’ll do to him.”
“Maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t go in there, then.”
“And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means we aren’t trying to get revenge on Dr. Strong. We aren’t supposed to be going in there to kill him, Jared. We’re supposed to be looking for a way to make things better. We’re supposed to be looking for a cure.”
“And if he doesn’t have one? If it turns out he’s just some fuck sitting here in his glass castle while the rest of us deal with what he did?”
“Do you even care about that? You think shifters are all monsters, right? Because if that’s so, then you don’t care about trying to help them.”
“I don’t know what they are, okay? I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that he should have to answer for his crimes.”
“And that doesn’t mean that you can just walk in there and shoot him. It’s not the right thing to do, and it won’t help the people who need it. And that’s what this is supposed to be about. Helping people, even those ‘monsters’ running around in the woods. Because whether you like it or not, they didn’t choose to be that way. They should at least get to choose, Jared. It shouldn’t be something that was just done to them.”
She was sure he was going to yell at her. He even opened his mouth to do it, but after a moment he shut it again and nodded once, tersely. He started toward the house without any further conversation, and that was good. Jade was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to talk to him anymore because what she had just said had made her own impending struggle all too clear. Suppose Dr. Strong really was in there, and suppose he had actually come up with a cure. It seemed unlikely to her, but what if? She would have to make a decision. She had spent the last year trying to get used to this new creature she had become. If there were a cure in that home, she would have to decide whether or not to give it up and go back to the way she had been before or to continue on her new path.
“Come on,” Jared whispered, snapping her back to reality as he slowly opened the large glass front door. “Stay sharp, Jade. And stay behind me. We don’t know what we’re going to find in here, but we do know that if the doc’s inside, he’s a quack. And we know he’s dangerous.”
She nodded and for once in her life did as she was told. The house seemed even bigger on the inside than it had appeared looking at its exterior, and she remained behind Jared as they searched one room after another. By the time they had ruled out everything but the attic, Jade was sure the trip had been a bust. It was when she saw the strange blue light seeping out from beneath the closed attic door that she knew she was wrong.
“Come in, won’t you?”
The voice was high, unstable, sounding to Jade as if its owner had been sucking on a tank of helium. She didn’t know what a mad scientist’s voice was supposed to sound like, but she didn’t think it was this. It was almost enough to make her laugh, except that all she had to do was look at the rage on Jared’s face for that laughter to dry right up.
“Jared—”
“Don’t. You already said what you needed to say. Don’t, okay?”
Without giving her the chance to chime in with an opinion, Jared swung the door open, leading Jade into a place unlike anything she had ever seen. Everything was pristine, made out of chrome and glass just like the rest of the house. She couldn’t tell where the blue light was coming from, only that it cast its light everywhere, and the attic was as cold as a meat locker. The walls were lined with rows and rows of shelves, each one of which was full of beakers and vials. In the dead center of the room sat a young man looking directly at them with the most unsettling sort of smile. Jade clutched at Jared’s back, wanting to tell him to stop, but he only moved forward and took her along with him. Whatever reaction they had set into motion, there was no stopping it now. She could no more stop what would happen next than she could turn back the hands of time.
“You know, I’ve been wondering when somebody would come to see me,” Dr. Strong tittered. “Waiting and wondering. Truth be told, I’ve been hoping. I was starting to think I’d done too good a job, that things were too chaotic for anyone to realize where I was or consider coming to see me at all. I’m so pleased to see that I was wrong.”
“We’re not here to please you, Strong,” Jared snarled, his rage barely contained beneath his seething surface. “Let’s get that straight right now.”
“No, of course you’re not. But what, pray tell, have you come for?”
“A cure. We’ve come for a cure. We can’t bring back all of the people you’ve killed, but we can give the others, the ones you’ve changed, a way back to their humanity.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe they don’t want to go back?”
“That’s not up to you,” Jade cut in, so full of adrenaline she thought she might burst. “You don’t get to make that choice. Not for anyone.”
“And what about you, sweetheart? Will you change back? Because there is a cure, I’ll tell you that right now. It’s even in this room. And what will you do when you hold it in your hand? Will you change? Or will you remain the beautiful, evolved creature you have become?”
“What?” Jared said in a shocked voice, turning to look at Jade as he spoke. “What’s he talking about? He’s not saying... are you? Are you one of them?”
Jade didn’t want to answer, and as it turned out, she didn’t have to. Although most of her attention was now trained on Jared, her senses had been heightened when she became a shifter. Despite her focus on Jared’s obvious confusion, she could clearly see Dr. Strong behind him. She watched as he lovingly caressed a small refrigerator set closely beside his chair and then as he pulled a shotgun from behind his chair. The grin on his face when he pulled that gun up was one she would remember for a long, long time to come, but at the moment she hardly had time to register it. Before she knew what she was doing, she was moving, shifting as she leaped clean over Jared to get to the crazy doctor. She felt her body grow, felt her strength quadruple, and as she landed in Dr. Strong’s lap, she let out a snarl of rage. The shot he fired into her flank did nothing to stop her. The pain didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was stopping him before he hurt Jared. She pounded on him, ripping the arm that held the gun so that he shrieked in agony and dropped his weapon. She wanted to kill him. She had thought this whole time that it would be Jared who’d do it, but it was her. It was Jared who stopped her, pulling her lion's body off Dr. Strong before she could inflict permanent damage.
“Jade! No! You don’t want to do this! I know you don’t—it’s not you! You’re not a monster, Jade, you’re not! You’re you! You’re still you, and you’re wonderful. You... I think I could fall in love with you, Jade!”
The words were like magic for her, and almost as quickly as she had shifted into her lion form, she shifted back into a human. She collapsed as she did so, Jared’s arms the only thing keeping her from hitting the floor. She was losing blood quickly and could feel herself growing faint, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had done what she had set out to do. What mattered was that she wasn’t a monster—not to Jared and not to herself.
“You mean it?” she said hoarsely, completely ignoring the now badly hurt Dr. Strong. “Do you mean those things, or were you only trying to control my shift?”
“No, Jade,” he said with a thick voice that sounded very much as if it were beginning to fade. “Not trying to control you. I get it now. I get it, Jade, and I don’t care. Please. Please hold on. Hold on for me.”
Those were the last words she heard before everything went black.
Epilogue
Jade
––––––––
“M M. TURN IT OFF, BABE .”
“Turn what off?”
“The light. I don’t want to get up yet!”
“Ha! I can’t turn it off, Jade, it’s the sun. You want me to turn off the sun?”
“I wouldn’t turn it down if that’s what you're asking.”
Jared laughed and pulled her close to him, so close that she could smell the scent of the wood he must have already been out chopping. His scent was one of her most favorite things about him, and on more than one occasion she had asked herself if she would have noticed how amazing it was if she weren’t the way she was—if she weren’t a shifter. There was no way to be sure, but she had a feeling she would never have run out of things to love about him even if she’d merely been human. It had been almost a year since their confrontation with Dr. Strong, and every morning she woke up to him lying beside her, she grew to love him more.
Jade’s memories of that confrontation were dim at best. Most of what she knew of its conclusion came from the things Jared had told her. After she had passed out from the gunshot wound she had sustained at Dr. Strong’s hands, Jared had used some of his more persuasive methods to entice the good doctor to fix her up again. The fact that she was a shifter had helped because it helped her heal at an accelerated rate, but without Dr. Strong removing the buckshot, she might not have survived. Once that was done, Jared had tied up Strong and carried both her and the cure all of the way back to town. He’d sent a team of people to retrieve the doctor, who was now a rather unwilling member of their society, one who helped both cure and care for shifters who needed his care. It was slow progress, and it was clear now that things would never go back to the way they had once been, but it was a start. It was the beginning of change, not the least of which was Jared’s view of the shifters. Jade had been sure he would give her an ultimatum—either take the cure or lose him—but he’d never done any such thing. What he had done was bring her to his home, and once he’d done that, she hadn’t ever left.
“Babe.” He broke into her thoughts, pulling her in closer to his body so that she could feel the length of him stiffening against her. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“That thing where you disappear into your own head.”
“Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“About you. About how happy I am. How grateful for all of this. This is more than I ever thought I could have, Jared. When I realized what I was, I thought any chance at happiness was gone.”
“Nope, sorry. Not allowed. I mean to be happy, which means you’re going to have to come along for the ride. You’re carrying my kid, after all.”
Jade’s hands moved down to her belly, feeling the place where their child now grew. They had been through several conversations about whether or not the baby would be a shifter like her, but in the end, it didn’t matter to either of them. They had dedicated their lives to building a new world, and they had started in their very own home. Whatever their baby turned out to be, they would love him or her. Their baby would be part of the new world.
“Is that all I am to you?” Jade laughed, turning onto her back and pulling one of Jared’s hands onto her belly. “An incubator? Only good for growing babies?”
“Nope, not only for that. You’re pretty damned good for some other things, too.”
He moved in and kissed her, biting on her bottom lip the way he knew she liked best. It was amazing how quickly her body responded to him every time he touched her, and this was no exception. She arched her back, her nipples immediately hardening and begging for his attention. He was more than happy to oblige, moving from her lips to her nipples and then continuing down until his face was between her trembling legs.
“Oh God,” she sighed, shivering as his mouth found her aching clit. “I’ll never get over how good you are at that.”
“Good.” He raised his head just long enough to answer. “That’s kind of part of my plan.”
She closed her eyes as his tongue lapped at her, moving expertly as his fingers moved inside of her in perfect unison. Her hips began to rock helplessly, her body’s instincts taking over and bringing her quickly to orgasm. She moved her hands down to his hair, tugging lightly until he slid up her body, guiding his throbbing member inside of her as he did so in one fluid motion. He groaned as he thrust, his eyes never leaving her face as she brought her legs up, draping them effortlessly over his shoulders. She let out a cry of pleasure when he thrust again, this time so deep it was almost too delicious to stand. It was relentless, his thrusts, his hips rocking in perfect unison with her own, their bodies acting as one entity. Her hands flew above her head as she grabbed on to the headboard as Jared’s movements quickened. She shut her eyes and screamed as her head was filled with white light peppered by stars, the force of her pleasure overtaking her completely.
“Oh my God! Oh God, Jared, I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m coming!”
Her head shook back and forth helplessly, still stunned by the things this man could do to her body. Above her Jared stiffened, yelling out her name as he gave in to the same pleasure she was feeling. They came together, riding out the ecstasy until both of their bodies were exhausted. Jared collapsed beside her and pulled her in toward him so that her head rested over his rapidly beating heart.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” she said, laughing and snuggling up even closer to show how unhurt she was. “Not even close. You just made my day.”
“Good.” He smiled sleepily. “I’m glad to hear it. That’s all I want to do, you know. I want to spend the rest of my life making every one of your days. I can’t think of any better thing to dedicate myself to than the most amazing woman in the world.”
