Book 2: Shifter’s Love
Chapter One
Every morning when I put on my blue smock with the name of my school on the breast pocket, my Nene would stop me before I walked out the door.
“God has made you brave,” she would tell me, stroking my face. “He marked your face to remind you that will soar over mountains and burn brighter than anyone else.”
I would straighten my back and look into my Nene’s bright eyes. Then, she always patted my cheek, right next to that deep black, oddly-shaped birthmark that stretched across my face in something that was almost a star, almost a smear, and then she would give me a loving kiss goodbye. I believed her when she said these things, and I would face the taunting children that filled the schoolyard with a straight spine and a sense of pride.
“Larissa! Larissa! Tiny bush girl, Larissa!” That was the best they could come up with – that I, their intellectual better, was one of the pygmy people who were the first to occupy Madagascar, the country of my childhood. I remember thinking how silly they were, as though I was an older sister looking at my tiny siblings, but really, we were all the same age. I never stooped to schoolyard taunts, I got my revenge in the classroom.
‘To add 146 to 270, I must focus on the tens. Forty and sixty are one hundred, the extra ten makes it one hundred ten. Now the hundreds; one plus two is three. But, I have this extra hundred, I must carry it over, so now I have four hundred. The ones I left down here on the floor are still six. I have four hundred sixteen total.’
In math class, my skinny, brown arm would shoot up before any of the older children. I would proudly call out “Four hundred sixteen!” and the teacher would smile his soft smile at me, while the others shot me dirty looks. What did I care? I was the star soaring over the sea and shining brighter than all of these limited mortals.
One evening, my math teacher, Rakoto, invited my family over to his house for a dinner. We had pork and white beans, my favorite, over soft, machine-sorted rice. I remember I marveled at the uniformity of the white, perfectly steamed grains. At my house, we each had to chew softly so that we wouldn’t crack a tooth on the small stones that came with hand-sorted rice.
“I am so pleased with Larissa,” Rakoto told them as they ate silently. “I am sorry we do not have an advanced class to place her in. However, she can take her finals early and graduate ahead of her group, if she likes. That would give her time to study with a tutor at home and increase her chances of attending a university in France.”
France. That was a magical word to me. The promise of the country so far away and, yet, ever-present in my daily island life. The French had a strong hold on my island for most of my childhood, and many of our family friends had moved there. I lived for the day I would sip espresso and nibble on buttery bread on the balcony of my tiny apartment in Paris. My parents both smiled and winked at me as I swung my short legs under the table and beamed with pride at my teacher’s praise. I was twelve, very small for my age, and couldn’t see that life would have anything like sadness or troubles in store for me.
Which was why it surprised me, when my parents informed me that I would not be testing out of school. I would go through my schooling at a normal pace, and I could forget about France.
“You monsters!” I railed at them and threw my expensive notebooks out the window so that they landed near the geese we kept. The whole family of big, white birds joined in the fight with angry honks as I stomped my foot and loudly reminded my parents that, “My teacher said I should! He says I’m the smartest!”
My father got down low to the ground and looked into my eyes. “My Larissa,” he told me, “your teacher is not your father. And we cannot allow you to stand out like that. If you do this, everyone in the town will do their best to pull you back down. You know that.”
I waited for more reasons as to why I was correct and they were wrong, to come to me, but all I got were tears pricking the backs of my eyes. I hated him for not allowing me to be special, but I loved him for protecting me. Any other father would have slapped me and told me, “Aza melengy-lengy,” but my father didn’t say that. The expression, which in English means “Don’t dream,” was never spoken in my house. Instead, my parents would admonish me to be careful, to watch myself. I was so young and so foolish. How could I have known how wise they were when I was convinced that I had all the intelligence I would ever need?
I returned to school resigned to wallow in the mud with the simple-minded children that I compared to the single-celled organisms we drew in our notebooks in biology. In Madagascar, textbooks were far too expensive and hard to come by. My school did not provide them, so we drew illustrations, we wrote out paragraphs explaining the nuances of the universe, and were expected to have handwriting neater than any child could manage. Many of my classmates refused to write without a ruler inching down the page line by line, helping them measure their letters perfectly as they squeezed their words out and down through their blue and black pens.
I loved school. It was easy and straightforward. We came in, stood to greet the teacher, then took our seats and copied down everything that our all-knowing professor wrote on the board. To finish, we recited the lesson entirely. Easy. So, it confused me when my classmate, Solo, couldn’t seem to handle such a basic process.
“Teacher, look!”
The class spun around to see Solo crouched over a small fire he had started with his notebook pages. He didn’t even try to run away. He just smiled at the professor and fell to his knees, ready for his beating.
‘What an idiot,’ I thought to myself, completely missing Solo’s reasons for causing chaos in such an orderly place. Now, as an adult looking back, it’s so clear to me. I wish now that I had spent every free moment running beside him as he tore over the hills and went full speed into the ocean. We could have screamed at the waves together. However, once I was out of the classroom and in the complex and complicated world, I rarely knew what to do.
Today, as an adult, I watch my new colleagues from my place outside the shifter compound. When I see the half-animal-half-humans laboring under the direction of the construction teams, I think of Solo and his small fires, his willingness to take a beating. If we had all been smart, we would have used his distraction to run outside and play while the teacher was busy smacking his hands with a stick, but we did not skip out or climb the nearby trees. We were good little children and stayed in our seats.
Good little shifters are what the construction workers have on their hands now. None of them have the courage or the creativity to start a fire or create a distraction. Last year, a builder killed a young shifter, a male boar I believe, and there was a short-lived rebellion. It was sparked by Tina Traxon, the wolf I like so much, who killed the awful human that strolled into our compound and took a life, the way only a human can. Like so many rebellions, Tina’s was quickly squashed due to lack of organization and vision. The young fighters only felt anger, and anger fades. It is careful planning and an eye to the future that moves a population forward.
The compound is so different now. The president swept in after the attempted coup and pretended to broker peace, but all he really did was get everyone to shut up. He curried favor by building some actual houses, but they are human houses, and many shifters found they preferred their wilder, more animal-inspired homes. They put on a show for the president and moved into their new dwellings, but it was forced and fake. It made my stomach turn.
Then the new clothes came out. They were clearly stitched together swatches from our clothing tax that we paid for with the literal shirts on our backs and everyone ran for the pile of oddly colorful outfits, grabbing as much as they could without even looking to see what they had. Everyone was so tired of being exposed to the heat, to constantly being on display that they didn’t care anymore. Clothing was clothing. When the president proudly announced that the clothing tax was now null and void, people didn’t even clap, for fear of dropping a shirt or dress that a neighbor could grab.
Finally, a big surprise announcement. I have to admit; President Bachmann is a showman above all else. He never misses the opportunity to impress, and he used everyone’s full arms and calm demeanor to set the stage for some horrible news.
“Friends,” he began, “I’m afraid a horrible crime has been committed. Now, I have provided so much for all of you, so I cannot let such an awful thing go unpunished. A price must be paid.” Everyone looked around for Tina Traxon, the wolf shifter and now murderer, and she stepped forward bravely. Tina looked strong and beautiful in her remaining strips of clothing, with her sculpted muscles and wild, wavy hair. She squared her shoulders and faced the president as she awaited her sentencing. The president took one look at her and suddenly seemed to have a moment of inspiration. He turned to Black Feather and said, “Take him away.”
Before anyone knew what was happening, Black Feather was surrounded by law enforcers who shocked him with big, metal wands and made him fall to his knees. They quickly had him shackled and locked inside the president’s private car. His white, surprised face looked out with that distinct expression of true, deep shock. His eyes met mine for just a moment, and my heart sped up so fast that the Earth seemed to fall away from under my feet.
Black Feather’s parents ran up to Bachmann, screaming for their son’s release, but they were quickly dragged to the side and had the first collars put around their necks. Big, gleaming necklaces that laid flat on their collarbones were locked around their necks and activated with a piercing, electric squeal. The two of them froze as if bombs had been attached to them.
“Now, now,” Bachmann continued in his bedtime story voice, “we don’t want any of that. All I want for my shifter brothers and sisters is peace and order. I’m sure you all agree that murder is illegal. While Miss Tina Traxon here,” he motioned to the shocked and awkward Tina, “may be the one who killed my worker, she is not who I choose to punish. I want you all to know,” he continued, lowering his chin down to his chest, “that when one of you breaks the law, you are all culpable. So, if I were you…” Here he paused and put a hand on the shoulder of an enforcer. “…I would be spending my time making sure that those around me are being neighborly. And if they’re not, well,” he gestured to the parents of Black Feather, “these lovely necklaces do many things. One of them is an emergency communication system that will allow us to run and help anyone who feels threatened by their fellow shifter. And you all get one.”
The law enforcers pulled more collars from their cars and moved around the crowd, clipping the horrible jewelry on each neck. I shrank to the back of the crowd and watched as my poor father – the man who had been doomed to roll in a wheelchair the rest of his life – and my powerless mother, by his side, were collared as well. There was a third collar in the enforcer’s hand, and I knew it was for me.
That was all I needed to see. I took a note from Solo and used the distraction to get away as fast as I could. I never looked back. I didn’t say goodbye. I just ran through the last opening in the fence and didn’t look back. No one is making me a link in their chain.
I ran far enough away that I could shift without anyone seeing and then, in my fossa form, I sped over the ground on my long talons, my leg muscles pumping harder and harder until I was far away from everything.
Beyond the compound there is nothing. No rivers or lakes, almost no small animals making their homes, no one living in old, crumbling buildings. I used to imagine a society of free shifters out beyond our borders, but the only thing I found out there was wind and hard, crusted ground. The surface was a wide, angry face wrinkled with disappointment. Those before us had a chance to care for the land, but they rejected it and this was what they left behind – a big nothing.
I collapsed down in the Nothing and caught my breath. My fossa stomach lay on the ground and the heat rising from it relaxed all the tense muscles inside my gut. I tried to close my eyes and breathe, but the images of the handcuffs on Black Feather’s wrists, the shiny metal on his parents’ necks were all I could see. Just the memory was enough to temporarily asphyxiate me, and I had to stop and remind myself that I was not the one who was captured, I was not collared or cuffed. I was free, and yet I was captured. After all, there was no going back now.
Back in Madagascar, in that small town by the sea, I once saw a worker boat get loose from the dock and glide out into the waves. At first, its owners tried to chase it. They swam after it, they even jumped in other boats to try and catch it, but those unpredictable currents in the Indian Ocean pulled it in every direction, like a mosquito flying away from swatting hands. They needed that boat; it was valuable, and no boat meant no seaweed to sell, but they couldn’t catch it. Eventually, they had to let it go, and we all watched as it shrank into the horizon. I often thought that I would have liked to see that vessel after its journey all alone. What would it look like after sailing on its own volition?
I asked my father if the sailors would accept the boat and take it home after its return, and if they would be happy to see it. He said it all depended on the state of it; if its hull was cracked or there was rot in the wood, they would break it apart and use it for firewood. If it was whole and useful, they would sail with it again.
Whole and useful. The phrase rang in my head as soon as he said it. It came back to me, as I rolled onto my fossa back and glared at the sun as it glared angrily back down at me. I was not whole and had not been for a long time. And I certainly was not useful – not to the compound. I didn’t even feel like a member of this strange, cobbled together community anymore.
So, I turned my attention to the towering mountain that protected our political leaders and would soon hide Black Feather in the ground beneath. That mountain seemed to call my name. Maybe I wasn’t whole or useful anymore, but if that was the case, perhaps a useless being, such as myself, could worm her way through the cracks and between the stones that separated an innocent boy from freedom. Why had the president wanted Black Feather? Did it matter? Did it have something to do with his daughter, Harper? I was sure that it did. Perhaps the fact that Black Feather was a handsome young man. Maybe that he was cunning and knew how to get others to do his bidding, made Bachmann grab him. Maybe the president had other plans that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
My fossa senses kicked in, and I spotted a small, brown mouse one hundred yards away. I slowly rose and prowled across the hard ground, nose twitching at the scent of its little heart beating and the tiny veins flowing with warm blood. I stopped a few feet away and lay in the dust to wait patiently as it rose on its hind legs to smell the air, then venture forward. I held my position and waited, but the mouse seemed to sense me. So, I pretended to have no interest in the little thing. I rolled onto my back as if I were full, too full to worry about such a tiny morsel of food.
The mouse grew braver and moved closer to the patch of land, where I appeared to be soaking in the sun and scratching my back. I even let my eyes close to slits and my face relax into the fossa equivalent of a smile. To my surprise, the little mouse put its tiny paws on my side and lifted itself up to inspect me for a moment, then dropped back to the ground.
Again, I waited, smelling the tiny thing and marveling at how it underestimated me. When it was just a few inches away, I allowed my full body weight to send me around, and down, and I brought all my anger onto the little creature. It didn’t even have time to let out a shriek; it died with its mouth open just seconds before I scooped it up and plopped it into my jaws.
The dusty mouse nourished me enough to let me go exploring a bit further. I walked all around and headed toward some large boulders. There, I found a small cave where I could sleep safely in either form. A little bit of grass had sprung up in the shade, but there was no water. Perhaps some hid under the ground, but I was too tired to dig.
I slipped into the darkness and let the cool, deep air slide over my skin. I was suddenly so exhausted I could hardly think, and my brain just switched off and left me alone, so that I could exist solely as a creature of blood, skin, bone, and a never-ending heartbeat.