Chapter Two
Back in my room, I put my book in a little place of honor under my pillow. I marked the page that had the character who looked like Boris, but I didn’t really need to. The pages opened right to him, so I could stroke his soft, paper face and whisper to him every night. Some nights, I saw him blink or start to smile at me, but others, he was still and frozen in the picture.
“I miss you, Boris. So much. This place is so lonely without you.” The picture would never respond, but it never interrupted me, either.
The whole experience made me desperate to read the thing, but no one I knew had ever learned. The only creatures left who could actually read a book were the wealthiest of humans, and they were all in hiding. Even the people living in the city had no idea where they had gone (at least according to some of the braver shifters who wandered off the mountain from time to time). I was inclined to believe the stories, for if I had been filthy rich during the takeover, I would have grabbed my diamonds and run.
I went on a few more expeditions into the big, expensive houses, and I was always shocked by how uncomfortable they made us as a group. We were used to caves, ramshackle buildings with dirt floors, or sitting around a campfire outside. Being surrounded by long drapes that piled on the floor or stared at by old portraits unnerved us all. We would get in and then get out and go back to our friendly, noisy palace that was looking more and more like an animal dwelling every day.
My little prison office stayed the same. The lights were a little too bright; the cot was small, but comfortable; my clothes stayed folded on the shelves. One day, there was nothing to do and no one who felt like talking, so I organized them all according to category then threw them off to do it again but by color. Now, they were all mixed up again, which was fine by me.
I saw Tina more than most other shifters. Tina was infamous for being able to talk with anyone, spend time with any animal, hang out at any party. She invited me into the city once, but I got nervous.
“What do you say to them? The humans, I mean?”
“Well, I don’t say too much.” She stretched her long, flexible arms and arched her straight back until it popped a little. “Humans really like to talk about themselves. More than anything, they like you if you do a lot of listening.”
She went off by herself or with a few other females in tow. The new thing was to have a human boyfriend down in the city instead of dating one of the shifters on the mountain. I don’t know if that bothered the guys or not, but I imagine it must have. Here they had one amazing ability after another, and yet the girls wanted regular, single-form humans. Oh, well.
One night, I reached under my pillow and let out a loud scream.
“Oh, no!”
I ran to the door and threw it open, and stormed straight to the corner where I knew Nate and Tom liked to hang out.
“All right, you two,” I pointed straight up as my voice rang up into the ceiling, “I know you have it. Throw it down.”
Silence. The two pretended they couldn’t hear me over their comics. “I mean it! This is not funny. That book is very special to me, and I need it.”
“What book?” Nate waved a comic book about a man in a bat costume at me. “This book?”
“You know the one I mean! The one with the boy in it.”
“Ew. A girl reading books about boys,” Tom jumped in. I pressed my teeth together and stared up at him. Traitor.
“Tom, come on. We’re friends. Friends don’t take each other’s things. Just give it back.”
“What’s going on?”
I looked over to see Meredith wiping her hands and waited for her to join us. When she made it to the spot next to me, I pointed up to her sons. “Meredith, I’m sorry, but they’ve taken my book. I only have one, and they’ve got it up there somewhere. I need it back.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked straight up. “Boys, down. Now. And bring your book collection with you. We’ll settle this right now.”
The boys sighed and lowered the rope that held their tiny library down through its pulley. Then, they shifted and flapped down to the floor. They didn’t shift back when they arrived, knowing they were cuter as bats.
“All right now,” Meredith untied the knot at the top of the collection, “let’s have a look.”
One by one, Meredith and I went through each of the books. It was one comic after another. Some starred scantily-clad women, others had bad men with evil faces laughing like maniacs, but none of them were hiding my story.
“It’s not here.” I shook my head and piled the comics back up on top of one another. “I don’t know what happened. I’ve always kept it in the same place.”
Meredith was not convinced. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at her offspring. “Anything you boys want to tell us? Hmm? Maybe a little confession? Something you want to get off your chest?”
The boys, in human form by that point, shook their heads as innocently as they could manage. “Gosh, no. We don’t know what happened.”
Their mother patted me on the shoulder. “I’m going to keep looking around the basement. You go check your room one more time. Something tells me that someone is hiding it from us.” She raised her eyebrows in warning at her boys, who kept their faces sweet and blank. However, when I turned away from them, I could have sworn I saw them share a smile as if they’d just won a huge victory.
Of course, the more we looked, the more frustrated we became until we finally just gave up. I trudged up to walk through the palace and find something to distract me. Luckily, I bumped into Tina who had just come back from another house.
“Hey, come check out this great stuff!” She led me to her quarters, which were way in the back by Grey and Larissa and Black Feather. None of them lived with their family members anymore, and I didn’t ask why. They each holed up in their own little spaces but kept a close eye on one another all the same.
She dumped her treasures out on her bed, and we went through them.
“Look at these jewels,” she breathed, sliding a bracelet of white, round, and smooth stones onto her wrist. “Why do humans wear these? Does it make them feel beautiful?”
“No, just special. It’s like, I have this, but you don’t. Little kids do the same thing.” I reached over for a little, black rectangle, and to my surprise, it came to life in my hand.
“What would you like me to do?”
The robotic voice made Tina and I stare at it for a long time. “What do we say?” I whispered to her. She shook her head slowly.
The phone interrupted. “Sorry, I didn’t hear that. What would you like me to do?”
“Can you play some music?” I grabbed Tina’s arm as soon as she said it. What if this was a trap? She shrugged me off.
“Yes. I have over a million playlists. What would you like to hear?”
“Uh…” She looked at me, and I knew right away what we needed.
“We want to hear some funk music by the Big Man. His first album.”
To our shock, a clear, booming sound came from the thing. The horns, the soaring voice of Big Man, the strong, deep sounds that backed him up all took over the room. Tina and I jumped up and started dancing.
“Wow!”
“This is amazing! We have to see what else it can do.”
We asked the rectangle all kinds of questions. Where were the rich people? How long would they be gone? Where was President Bachmann? What happened to his daughter? It couldn’t tell us. It started to tell us the history of the Bachmanns, and we quickly told it to stop. We’d had enough of that most of our lives.
“Can you read something for me?” I asked it.
“Yes,” it answered. “Just place me in front of the text you would like me to read.”
I grabbed it and jumped up. When I made it to the little plaque in the hallway, I held up the phone. “Here. Read this.”
“In case of an emergency,” it began, “do not use the elevator. Take the stairs. Using the elevator during a fire or earthquake…” I stared as it turned each indecipherable squiggle into an actual word. I waved Tina over.
“This thing is amazing! We can finally find out what all those books say in the library.”
“If the bears don’t burn them all first,” she added. “What should we read first?”
“I know!” I grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the hallway. “My little snot-nosed brothers took my stuff. We can use this to get it back.”
She gave me an odd expression, but then she just shrugged and followed me out. I couldn’t wait to see their little faces when I told them they were finally going to read exactly what their books said.
When we found them, they were right where I’d suspected, hanging from the bars on their patch of ceiling, reading comics upside down.
“Hey guys,” I called up. “Remember my friend Tina?”
We heard them whispering frantically. She waved and arched back to see them. I just crossed my arms and waited.
“Hey,” Tina said to me, “didn’t you say you had a new book?”
“Well, I did.” I let out an exaggerated sigh. “It’s lost. And it’s such a shame, seeing as I have this new thing that knows how to read. I could have heard the whole story, but now I can’t do anything.”
“Wait, you have a way to read?” Tom immediately flew down and shifted back to boy form as soon as he touched the floor. “Can you tell us this story?” He held out his favorite book of pictures. It had the man in the bat costume spreading his cloak over most of the cover as all the bad men ran from him at top speed, straight toward the edge of the picture.
“Well, maybe.” Tina cocked her head. “I’m not very excited to help any mean boys who took my friend’s story.”
Nate joined us with a book of his own. “Well…” He paused, thinking hard. “I mean, I’m not saying we took it, but maybe…maybe we saw it somewhere.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. We were playing over there,” he gestured toward an empty cell, “and we saw something. We thought Emily just put it there. For fun.”
Tina nodded as if she agreed. “Sure. Sounds fun.”
“I suppose we could go and take a look,” I offered. The boys nodded and tore off, their feet pounding in a crazy rhythm as they careened down the hall. Tina and I followed, and soon we could hear the boys yelling that they had found it and we could have it.
The cell had a loose stone in the wall that Thomas jiggled loose for me. “Look, Emily!” He reached in and pulled my book out, making a loud, ripping sound.
“It’s right…oh. Oh, no.” Thomas’ big, sweet eyes filled with tears as he looked up at me. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to. Nate said if we hid your book–”
“Shut up, booger face!” Nate’s own face was red with embarrassment as he stared at my book’s torn cover. He quickly grabbed it from his brother and put it back in its hiding place. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” He shifted and returned to the ceiling, leaving his little brother behind as he sat and cried on the floor.
Seeing how distraught the whole thing had made Thomas, I walked over and gently put a hand on his back as I sat down next to him. “Can you tell me what this is about? Why did you take that?”
Thomas dragged an arm across his face to wipe away the snot and the tears. “It’s because you don’t play with us as much as you did before, and every day, you want to look at the pictures in this book, but you won’t show them to us, and you got us in trouble that one time, and we just want you to be nice, but sometimes you’re not nice, and we don’t like it, so we took it because it’s not fair!”
Tina had to suppress a smile at just how cute all of this was, and I pulled Thomas in for a hug. “I’m sorry, big guy.”
The hug just made him cry harder, and I rocked him back and forth. Tina got the book out for me and inspected the damage. “It’s just the cover,” she said, her little frown on her face telling me she could probably fix it. “The rest of it is fine.” She picked up Thomas’ book and let out a long whistle.
“Hey,” she sat down with us, “this looks pretty cool. Can I see if this little thing can read it?”
Thomas turned to her and regarded her in a bit of surprise. “Um, yeah. Okay.” He sniffled one last time, and I cleaned his face with the hankie Meredith had given me when I moved in. She was right, they were handy.
We asked the thing to read for us and got a surprise. “I have an audio file of this story. Would you like to hear the official recording?”
Shocked, we answered ‘yes,’ and then listened as dark, suspenseful music filled the cell. The characters came to life with unique voices, speaking the dialogues, and the fight scenes were full of the sounds of fists hitting flesh and valuables falling and breaking. It was phenomenal.
At the end of the story, we all breathed out a big sigh of relief together. What an amazing thing we had! Nate had snuck up behind us to listen in and, even though he hadn’t seen the pictures as he’d listened, we could see he was just as excited as we were.
“Wow,” he whispered. “Can we do another one?”
Tina paused for a second. “Well, I think we should do one with some other people invited to join us. What do you think?”
She laid out her plans for a story night in the palace, and the boys jumped up and down clapping with excitement. “We’ll invite every species. How would that be?”
“Yes! Oh, yes please! More stories!” The boys got so worked up they started running up and down the hallways and chanting “Store-ees! Store-ees!”
I watched them and then looked down at my torn property. Tina gave me a sad little smile. “I’m so sorry about that, hon. I’m sure we can fix it.”
A sigh snuck out of me, and I shook my head. “It’s not easy living with little ones, you know? They’re so, so emotional and resilient and different and difficult. I never quite know what to do.”
“It’s normal.” Tina sat next to me, and we flipped through the pages together. “Shall we hear this one?”
“Not yet.” I closed the book and held it to me. “Right now, I have my own version of this book. I’m not quite ready to hear the reality of it.” She nodded as if she understood and then stood to go.
“I better go figure out how this thing works. I want to keep it functioning.”
“Cool. I’ll see you later.”
She left, and I went back to my room where I sat for a long time. The boys knocked on my door to come in, but I told them my stomach was hurting. They didn’t mope for too long; they were still riding high from their experience earlier that evening. I laid down and tried to sleep, but I was wide awake.
After a while, I wandered out and bumped into Ted.
“Hey! Good to see you, kiddo.” He put his hands on my arms and beamed down at me as if my presence truly had made his day. I smiled back.
“Hi, Ted.”
“Do you have a moment?” He glanced over at his family who were all preoccupied. “Just have something I want to show you.”
We walked up and out of the palace and into the dark forest. Of course, Ted had no problem seeing in the dark, but I had to go by scent. We crashed through the now taller shrubs all around the palace and worked our way to the west side of the building, then continued on down a mountain trail until we reached an odd little triangle-shaped structure just barely shorter than Ted.
“I made you this.”
He gestured to it, and I gasped, seeing it a bit more clearly. It was my own little house, a secret space just big enough for one. It looked cozy and warm inside and would have a beautiful view of the sunrise once morning rolled around. I was stunned.
“Ted! I love it!” I ran inside and quickly ducked down, realizing just how small it was. Once I sat, I felt protected and safe. He walked over and showed me how to close it up.
“Now this door,” he demonstrated, swinging it shut, “locks from the inside so you don’t have to have anyone in here that you don’t want. And,” he winked, “you can put anything valuable or special out here so that no little hands get ahold of it.”
I crawled out and threw my arms around him in a big hug. “Oh, this is just, I mean, I can’t believe...Oh, wow. Wow. Thank you.” I stepped back from him and looked at the little shack again. “I’ve never had anything that was all mine before. You’re the best!”
“Come up here any time you need some space. You’re becoming a young woman. You need somewhere for yourself.”
We hugged again, and I wiped my tears away. I quickly put my book inside on one of the little shelves at the top and then sat on the floor. “I’m going to hang out here for a little bit if that’s okay.”
“Of course. Enjoy.” He gave me his little Ted smile and then walked back, leaving me in the dark.
A lot of animals would get jumpy in the forest at night, but not me. Boris had taught me everything I needed to know to get through a long night in the wilderness, and being there just reminded me of him. It was too dark to see my book anymore, and I reminded myself to get a flashlight to bring out there for next time. I curled up on the floor and stared out into the little plants that were growing densely together.
My eyes closed, and I had just edged into a dream when a new presence made me sit up and take notice.
“Who’s there?”
“You tell me.” It was Black Feather, and he was headed straight for me. “What is this?”
I groaned out loud. “None of your business. Just leave.”
He ignored me, of course. Tromping up, he approached my little structure and let out a grunt of approval. “Hm. Good construction, sound design. Did the bat family make this for you?”
“For me. Yes. Goodbye.” I started to close the door, but he stopped me with his toe.
“I don’t think that’s very nice.” He squatted down and gave me his infamous, sexy smile that usually made all the girls giggle. It did nothing for me. “I think you should share this place with me.”
“No way.” I tried to close the door again, but he was too strong for me and held it open.
“I need a little hiding place, too. You can take it some days, and I’ll take it on others. It will be fine.”
“No.” I stood up and out of my little shanty and faced him, arms crossed and anger at full tilt. “This place was a gift to me. It’s mine. You can’t just demand it like that, jerk!”
He smirked, undeterred. “All right then,” he said, still smiling. “How about a deal?”
My eyes narrowed. “What kind of deal?”
“I will leave you alone and not mention this little castle of yours to anyone. If,” he paused again for another round of smirking, “you kiss me. Right now.”
“Knock it off. You’re with Larissa.”
“Larissa’s not here.” He reached out to touch me, but I ducked away. He scowled. “What’s your problem? You’ve already got this cool place. You can’t give me one kiss?”
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. Why did boys have to be like this? Before I could change my mind, I reached out and grabbed the back of his head and pulled him in for a big, wet kiss.
It was awful–stiff, slobbery, and weird tasting. I shoved him away after a few seconds and quickly wiped my mouth.
“Ugh! You’re not much of a kisser, are you?” He was wiping his mouth as well, which bothered me more than I would have liked.
“Then why are you kissing her?”
We both jumped at the sound of Larissa’s voice. We spun around to see her standing, head cocked as if she were listening to something very insightful and a long, sharp spear in her hand. She walked up to Black Feather, who was breathing fast and looked genuinely scared.
“Larissa, I–”
She interrupted him with a slap across the face. He went red and then shifted and flew away. She and I held a stare for a few seconds, but she just shook her head at me and then headed home, walking as a human. A big, relieved sigh came out of me once they were both gone, and I collapsed back on the ground, unsure what had happened and very hopeful that, whatever it had been, it was the last time it would ever occur.