Chapter Six
THE thud of a fist pounding on my door dragged me out of my hundredth read-through of a beat-up paperback of Watership Down. Anthropomorphized rabbits had a whole new meaning now I knew human-animal shape-shifters existed. Now I knew I was one.
I squinted at the alarm clock on my bedside table. Three a.m.
“C’mon, Yusuf. I know you’re awake. Open up.” Owen’s voice was quiet, but even through the sturdy door I could hear him clearly. In the two weeks since my foray into the wild side, improved hearing was only one of many changes I’d noticed. Hearing, sight, scent. Heck, things even tasted different. More acute, somehow.
I swung my legs over the side of my bed but hesitated before I could stand. I’d been avoiding Owen. I wasn’t altogether sure I was ready to face him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Stop being an ostrich.”
Despite myself, I grinned. “Ostrich?”
“Yeah. Burying your head in the sand. Avoidance isn’t the answer. Besides,” he added, “it’s a waste of time. We’re going to talk tonight, one way or the other. And I have the master key.”
“That’s a total misuse of your authority,” I told him, even as I got to my feet and crossed my small dorm room to the door.
“I wouldn’t have to use it if you weren’t avoiding me.”
I rested my hand on the knob, pausing. He didn’t sound upset. In fact, patience more than irritation colored his voice. I had been avoiding him, yes. Though I supposed it was more accurate to say I’d been avoiding anything and everything having to do with my new reality. Including Owen. I needed time to wrap my head around everything that had happened and the consequences.
Maybe Owen was right. Avoidance was a waste of time. I swung the door open.
Compassion blazed in his golden amber gaze, and I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling more exposed than if I were naked. “Hey.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder. Squeezed. “How’re you doing?”
I nearly broke down. I’d been asked the same question a thousand times. Probably many thousands of times. Every day by my parents. By nurses. By doctors. By anyone and everyone I interacted with at any level. How are you? How are you doing today? Or, worse, How are we doing today? As if my illness was a communal experience. But tonight, with that one question and full of his damned compassion, I cracked. I didn’t want to say “fine” or “okay” or whatever socially acceptable answer was expected. I wanted to be honest, to lay it all out for him, to dump every bit of panic and betrayal and doubt on him.
The most fucked-up part? I was fine. For the first time in my entire freaking life, I was physically fine. There were no aches, no pains. No blinding headaches or gut-twisting nausea. No mystery rashes, inflamed joints, or swollen lymph nodes. After nearly two decades of pain ranging from mild discomfort to excruciating, I was healthy as a horse.
But instead of dumping all that on Owen’s doubtlessly capable shoulders, I shrugged. “I’m all right.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not. It’s okay to be freaked-out, you know.”
“Thanks for the permission.” I flopped back onto my bed. Then cringed. “Sorry. I shouldn’t snap at you.”
Owen waved it away. “No worries. Seriously, I get it. It’s a lot to take in. But you’re not going to do yourself any favors by dealing with it alone.” He pulled the chair away from my desk and straddled it, his front against the back. “You should talk to someone, someone to help you figure everything out.”
“And that someone is you?” I pulled one of the pillows away from the wall and clutched it to my chest. A fluffy barrier, but it was better than nothing. Not that I really thought I needed armor—not even emotional armor—between Owen and me. But the topic… it was a whole different kind of danger.
“If I gave you a name of someone else, would you talk to them? A professional? One who also is a shifter, because obviously talking to a human shrink might be problematic.”
I just stared at him.
“I didn’t think so. Which means you get me.”
“Are you a shrink now?” I cringed again after I said it. Damn it, it wasn’t like me to be mean. And I didn’t lash out at people. “Sorry,” I muttered, meaning it.
Again, Owen shrugged off my bad temper. “Almost. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say someday.”
I cocked my head.
“Psych major. Going for a PhD in clinical psychology. So, you know, someday.”
I realized this was the first bit of personal information I really had about him. Sure, we’d hung out some for a while, but all I knew about him was his chess strategy and that his dad was a doctor. I hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t offered. On the other hand, he hadn’t really asked me too many personal questions either. Had he read me so well he knew I wouldn’t appreciate it? Or had I been so standoffish he hadn’t felt comfortable?
“Oh.” I clasped the pillow tighter to my chest.
His expression, not hard to begin with, softened further. “Seriously, relax. I don’t plan on forcing you into some kind of therapy. But when you stopped coming down at night, I got worried. Also,” he said with a spark of enthusiasm, “I found something.” He leaned back in the chair to dig into the front pocket of his khaki shorts. The movement hiked up the hem of his blue-and-white-checked shirt, and through the slats of the chair back I caught sight of tight, tawny skin and a smattering of light brown hairs. I had a sudden urge to reach out and see what that skin-hair combo felt like under my fingers.
I tore my gaze away when he brandished his phone. “I figured out what your shift is.”
I blinked, trying to rein in my wandering thoughts. “My shift?”
“Yeah. It’s sort of a generic term for the animal we shift into.”
“Okay. I take it you don’t think I’m actually a lion?”
He grinned. “Close but no cigar.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
He rolled his eyes, his smile widening. “It might be a Wyoming saying. Who knows? But what I mean is you’re a lion, but not an African lion. Not like the ones we see all the time.”
I sorted through the random animal-related trivia I knew after two decades of Animal Planet and National Geographic. Something was there, on the outer edges of memory. I couldn’t quite grasp it.
Owen shoved his phone at me. “An Asiatic lion.”
I took the device automatically and focused on the picture there. It was definitely lionlike but different enough to seem like a distant cousin rather than a brother. Like the reflection in the windows of Matthison Hall that night, this lion—this Asiatic lion—had had a shorter mane, darker fur, with speckles. I think my reflection had been a bit scrawnier than the animal on the screen.
Without asking permission, I found a browser on Owen’s phone and typed “Asiatic lion” into the search bar. Clicking open the first link to display, I skimmed the info it revealed.
Owen left the chair and slid next to me on the bed. He pointed at one of the paragraphs. “See, a lion, linked, but one that evolved differently.”
“But they’re from India. I’m Iranian.”
“The natural lions live in India. Doesn’t mean the shifter versions had to have come from India.”
The reminder, not that I was apparently able to shift, but about where my family came from, was a punch to the gut. It made me think about my family and the fact that if Dr. Weyer was correct, I’d been lied to for years. It was that fact I’d been trying so hard to avoid. I didn’t want to face it, to think about it. I passed the phone back to Owen and clutched the pillow even tighter.
Owen scooted back a bit to give me room, but he didn’t leave my bed. He tucked his phone away and watched me for a moment before saying, “I take it you haven’t asked your parents yet?”
I laughed, a mix of bitterness and weariness filling the sound. “How do I call the people who have loved me more than anyone or anything else in the world, who have sacrificed so much for me, even when I resented them for the coddling, to ask if they’ve been lying to me the whole time? If I was adopted, why wouldn’t they have told me? If one of them is a shifter, why wouldn’t they have said something?”
“I don’t have a good answer for you. You’d know better than me what to expect from them. But I do know you won’t get any answers if you don’t ask the questions.”
I slumped. “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I love my parents, I do. I know it might seem weird after I moved halfway across the country to get away from them, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care.” I sounded a little desperate, like I was trying to convince myself.
“Of course not.” We sat there in silence for a while.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, slapping the top of his thighs in a matter-of-fact way. “The way I see it, there are a few avenues for our search.”
“Our search?”
Owen grinned. “Sure. You don’t think I’m going to let you have all the fun?”
I wasn’t sure I considered parental betrayal and a secret heritage fun, but since brooding in my room for the last two weeks hadn’t gotten me any closer to answers or acceptance, working with someone couldn’t hurt. Owen could provide a nice buffer between me and the reality I wasn’t sure I was ready to face.
Part of me also recognized that the last couple of weeks not hanging out with Owen nearly every day made the loneliness harder to bear. I’d never been social, and with most interpersonal interactions restricted to my parents and medical staff nearly my entire life, I thought I’d long gotten used to my own company. But after having interacted with people my own age, solitude hung heavily across my shoulders and worse, in my head. I still went to classes, so technically I wasn’t alone, but the emotional distance I’d built up the last several years—the shield that had started to thin after meeting Owen—had been strengthening, even harder and more impregnable than before.
“What did you have in mind?”
Owen angled his chin toward my desk, where my laptop sat next to an open textbook. “Can we use your computer?”
“Sure.” I levered myself up to unplug the machine. The battery was fully charged, so we could stay lounging on the bed. When I situated myself back where I’d started, the mattress shifted under my weight, and I half fell into Owen. For a moment, just a tiny speck of a moment, I let myself lean against him. The solid presence of him next to me was both comforting and thrilling. I had no way to reconcile those contradictory sensations, so I passed the MacBook to Owen, then scooted back until a few inches separated us. I immediately missed his warmth.
After a quickly raised eyebrow, Owen located the web browser and started typing. “The way I see it, there are a few directions we can take. We can search online adoption records, see if anything pops.”
I didn’t like that option. Mostly because I didn’t want to admit to the real possibility my parents weren’t my biological parents, which would lead down a path of lies and distrust I didn’t want to deal with.
“And since you’re not comfortable going to your family…?” His voice trailed off even as the pitch in the last syllable hooked up, making it a question.
I shook my head. “I think, if I approach them… I think I need something more… some kind of evidence that doesn’t involve me turning into an Asiatic lion.”
“That’s pretty irrefutable proof that they’ve kept something from you, one way or the other.”
“I’m still not a hundred percent convinced it’s not some kind of mutation or anomaly, maybe brought on by all the testing and drug therapies I was subject to growing up.”
I could tell he wanted to say more, but instead Owen hit Enter on the keyboard with a flourish. “Which brings us to this option. We’ll work our way back from the shifter part of you. Starting with the database.”
“There’s a shifter database? And it’s online?” That didn’t seem like a good way to keep under the radar.
“There is. And it is.” Owen tilted the computer so I could see the screen. “And it’s buried so deeply under layers of sites, and a sign-on and password is required to access it, that no one who isn’t authorized gets far enough to even be curious.”
The site he brought up wasn’t fancy. In fact, it was basically a list of links and descriptions. As best as I could tell, it was sorted by country, by general type—canine, feline, bovine, avian—and then by individual species. “Is this like a directory?”
Owen nodded. “It’s like a census and the Yellow Pages rolled into one. We’ve got demographic data, migration data, location data, and even contact information for some.” He typed “lion” into the search bar, then scanned the results. The first page had a few dozen rows of Panthera leo.
“Are those individual shifters?” There weren’t very many.
Owen scrolled through the lines. “Mostly family groupings. Prides, actually, since these are lions.”
Families. There were at least a few dozen lion-shifter families. I peered closer at the screen, catching the snow-at-midnight and pinesap scents coming off Owen. I inhaled deeply, pressing closer before I remember what I was doing. Clearing my throat, I pointed at a middle column. Botswana. Cameroon. Kenya, Tanzania. The list was made up almost entirely of African countries, though I did see one listing in the United Kingdom and one in the US. “So this is where the shifter families live?”
“Yeah. I mean, shifter families move around and immigrate just like human groups. It’s harder for some groups, though. A lion wandering through a nature preserve in Cameroon would draw a lot less attention than a lion wandering around the Tetons. So some groups tend to stay in the same general vicinity of their natural origins.”
I didn’t know what I was hoping to find. On the one hand, if we found there were lion-shifter families in or near Iran, it would be one step closer to indicating a parental betrayal rather than a medically induced mutation.
We scanned the second page of lion-shifter families. All were still located primarily in Africa, with only a couple of outliers. The tension pressing around my heart started to ease. None of the Panthera leo groups were settled anywhere near Iran. No lion shifters in Iran and only two families in the US.
Owen clicked to the next page. There, listed at the bottom, were three families of Panthera leo persica. Asiatic lions. Two families were located in India. One was located in Iran.
When Owen’s hand hesitated, I reached over and clicked the link.
An icy punch to the gut stole my breath and stopped my heart. Damn it.