CHAPTER ONE
When it came to backpacking, Amelia Lark could probably be considered a pro. The Australian outback. Parts of southern Africa. Mexico. Canada and Alaska. It was not a new hobby for her. She knew some people would consider it dangerous, especially since she had first picked up the hobby as a junior in high school, but she saw no reason to let that stop her.
Twenty years old and on winter break from school, she started her journey in Greece, with a handful of basic phrases floating through her head and a translation app always open on her phone. She knew a few languages—English, Shona, French, and some Italian—but Greek was not one of them. She was patient, adaptable, and good at charades, though, so she wasn’t particularly concerned.
With her backpack, her wallet, and her phone, she set out. She breezed through Athens like lightning, determined to see it but unwilling to pay the cost of staying for more than one day. In some places, reasonably priced hotels were plentiful. Athens, Greece, was not one of those places. She found her money would be better spent ferrying herself between the Cyclades and hopping between the islands. True, the islands weren’t as idyllic as they always looked in movies and on television, but she thought it was worth it.
On the first night, she slept in a bed and breakfast owned by a small family after a day of riding buses and taking pictures. The next morning, she met up with Riley. A classmate from college, he had similar hobbies, interests, and financial means, and when they had discovered that they planned on being in Greece around the same time, they had made a point of figuring out how to meet up with each other.
On the second night, the two of them pooled some money and slept in a hotel. True, it wasn’t a grand, expensive suite, but neither of them wanted to spend more than absolutely necessary. They got breakfast and lunch and took so many pictures in between them that Amelia was convinced they could have wallpapered most of the ruins, and then they parted ways.
Amelia slept in a hostel that night, and the next morning, before the sun was even rising, she was off to Albania. She met up with Bailey, an old friend from high school until her family had moved to Eastern Europe, and together they discovered that Turkish coffee was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to either of them.
The chill was minimal, and it seemed only natural to explore the beaches. Bailey laughed, “Did you think you’d wind up using your Italian this much?”
(The answer was no; Amelia hadn’t expected Italian to be such a big deal outside of Italy or a classroom.)
Bailey pointed out everything and anything that seemed even the least bit remarkable as she dragged Amelia around by the wrist, save for a pause at lunch to scarf down a burek, (stuffed with cheese, in Amelia’s case, though Bailey had always been an odd duck and preferred her pastry stuffed with spinach) and a longer pause at dinner to finally sit down in a restaurant. The mutton was fantastic, though they hardly stopped talking long enough to actually taste their food.
By the time they spilled into Bailey’s living room that evening, Amelia was exhausted and her camera had been through the best workout of its short but well-loved existence up to that point. Amelia passed out on the couch almost as soon as she lay down, and she slept straight through until morning so heavily that it almost seemed like she had been beaned over the head with a baseball bat.
The next morning, after a rushed breakfast and a drawn-out goodbye, Amelia was on a bus across Albania, stopping halfway to explore whatever she had time for in the city of Elbasan before hopping right back onto another bus that night. She slept for most of the ride, and when she woke up again to disembark, she stepped off the bus in Macedonia.
She had no friends to join her in Macedonia—her friends, much like her, were all college students, and most of them could barely understand what the words ‘disposable income’ and ‘family money’ meant, let alone conceive of actually having such things—but she didn’t actually have any trouble making friends on her own.
She spent much of the day with a middle-aged man who had been on the same bus as her, both of them stumbling their way around good-heartedly as they could only speak to each other in fractured Italian. Neither of them spoke Macedonian, and whether or not they ran into anyone who spoke English was rather hit or miss. He was good company, though, and the instant a stranger’s hand had touched Amelia’s backside, her newfound friend had chased the bastard off like a guard dog.
They parted ways after dinner that evening, and Amelia spent the night in a monastery. It was beautiful and surprisingly comfortable, at least when compared to a few hostels she had stayed at in the past.
She was up and on her way bright and early the next morning, buying a snack in town because no one in Macedonia seemed to believe in a proper breakfast, before she hopped onto another bus and road it clear through to Serbia.
As soon as she left the bus station, her passport still in hand, Ayomide all but crashed into her, sweeping Amelia off her feet in a hug that probably would have cracked the ribs of a normal person.
Wheezing in the aftermath, Amelia squeezed one of Ayomide’s arms and cautioned, “You need to stop working out.”
“Nope,” Ayomide returned cheerfully. “Now come on, let’s go. Time’s wasting, and you’re only here on a stopover.”
With that decided, her old summer camp friend seized her by the hand and began dragging her along like she was trying to lead a show dog through its paces.
It was an eventful day, being shepherded through the streets until nightfall, when they finally parted ways at the door of the hostel. Amelia was cordial with the guests and the workers, but once she was in the dorm room, she face planted into her bed and didn’t move once until the next morning when she got up to shower, eat a lightning fast breakfast, and hop on yet another bus.
Next up was Bulgaria. She didn’t have any friends to meet there, but she wasn’t worried. She was sure she could get acquainted with someone while she was there.
*
Amelia was in Bulgaria when she met him. She was settling down for dinner at a hostel, chatting with the other guests as the owner and his wife cheerfully doled out food. They were a pleasant, slightly manic couple, and the guests ran the gamut from a free-range sixteen-year-old to a man in his fifties trying to make a dent in his bucket list.
One guest, perhaps five years older than her, was…not human. He looked human—shifters always did—but Amelia could smell that he wasn’t.
He was tall and dark-skinned—the same shade of dark chocolate as her mother, rather than Amelia’s own cocoa powder color—with amber eyes just a few shades darker than Amelia’s golden eyes. At 5’5”, Amelia was not exactly towering, but she was willowy, her build consisting of about eighty percent long legs, while the man looked as if he could have taken on a rhinoceros and walked away victorious. While Amelia’s own loose, bouncing curls looked black at a glance, they were shot through with auburn and mahogany in the right light, but his close-cropped curls were as black as coal.
And from the way he watched her across the table, she knew he could tell that she wasn’t human either.
She spent the meal watching him, barely tasting the food she put in her mouth. Afterward, as some of the guests moseyed off to bed and most of them gathered around the owners to listen to the missus tell a particularly embarrassing story about the mister, Amelia stepped outside and began to follow the sidewalk. Just as she suspected, within a few moments, the other shifter sidled up next to her, falling into step with her.
“Sooo,” Amelia began slowly, sliding him a sly, sidelong glance, “what are you?” She grinned when he looked startled, as if he had been expecting her to beat around the bush a bit more. “Don’t worry,” she soothed. “You tell me yours; I’ll tell you mine.”
That got a laugh out of him, at least. “Names first,” he decided, in a voice deeper than the ocean and smoother than oiled glass. “I’m Darius.”
“Amelia,” she offered in reply. She loped a few paces ahead and turned around so that she was walking backward in front of him, and then she offered him her hand. When he shook it, his grip was just a bit too tight. “So, what are you?” she repeated, her eyebrows rising expectantly. She folded her arms over her chest once he relinquished her hand.
There was a low chuckle, and he held his hands up in a pacifying motion. “I’m a lion,” he answered with a grin, his elongated canine teeth on display, much like Amelia’s own. “You?”
“A cheetah,” she answered easily, finally turning to walk forward again, dropping back to walk beside him. “What are you doing here in Bulgaria?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he fired back.
With a roll of her eyes, she returned, “I’m on vacation.”
“Same here. My younger sisters are both around somewhere or other.” He slid her a speculative look. “Want to do some sightseeing tonight?”
Amelia’s steps stuttered for a heartbeat before she fell back into step. “Well, that was abrupt!” she laughed. “You definitely don’t beat around the bush. Ever heard of foreplay?” she asked with an impish smile.
“Can you blame me?” he asked, just a touch defensive. “It’s been years since I ran into any shifters outside of my family.”
“Fair point,” she agreed mildly. “Did you have anything in mind?”
Darius shrugged, evidently unconcerned with a minor thing like ‘planning.’ “Wander and see what looks interesting?” he suggested, and he offered her his arm as if her agreement was a done deal.
Amelia rolled her eyes, but she did loop her arm through his. “Alright, King of the Jungle,” she sighed with good-natured exasperation. “Show me a good time.”
“You sound so enthusiastic,” he drawled dryly as he started leading.
“I like to keep my expectations low,” she returned wryly, one side of her lips quirking up. “It comes in handy in case I get disappointed.”
Darius’ expression twitched into something like a scowl before evening out again. “Presumptuous, don’t you think?” He folded his arms over his chest. “What if someone surprises you?”
Amelia shrugged lackadaisically. “Keeping my expectations low also means it’s really easy to pleasantly surprise me.” Darius didn’t seem to have an argument for that.
As they walked, there was remarkably little sightseeing going on. They passed by some lovely architecture, some beautiful landmarks, some fascinating shows, and some very excited crowds, but they stopped at none of them. Darius simply continued walking with a purpose. Despite his claims about wandering and seeing what looked interesting, it was painfully apparent that he had a goal in mind. On the handful of occasions where Amelia slowed to actually enjoy some of the scenery or to try to talk to someone, Darius just kept right on walking, forcing her to jog after him if she didn’t want to lose him entirely. It was a tempting thought to just stop and let him go be impatient somewhere else, but curiosity at how far he was going to walk carried her onward.
He wanted to see Amelia transform. She could guess that much, though she wasn’t sure why he seemed so focused on it. He had siblings, so unless he was the only shifter in the family, she found it hard to believe that he had never met another shifter before. Maybe he had simply never met another type of shifter. Amelia supposed she could understand some anticipation or excitement, but him blatantly misrepresenting his intentions was still not something she appreciated.
Considering all that, it was not a surprise when a stretch of forest rose ahead of them. It was winter, true, but that had little effect on the evergreens, and they hung thick with needles, making for an easy curtain of green to hide in.
Just as Amelia expected, Darius made an expectant motion and led her into the woods. She paused long enough to take a look around and decide that she would still be able to get away if he decided he wanted trouble before she followed him.
It felt inevitable when they left their clothing stashed in a bush and transformed deep in the trees and far from prying eyes. They circled each other for a few moments, sniffing curiously and taking in what they each looked like. Darius was more curious than Amelia was, but she supposed that made sense.
She had never seen a lion in person, true, but everyone knew what a lion looked like, and Darius looked like a lion: large, golden, and with a dark, shaggy mane. While the argument could be made that most people knew what a cheetah looked like, Amelia was not an average cheetah; she was a king cheetah. Her coat was a bit thicker than a standard cheetah’s, and most of her spots were mottled together until they looked more like stripes, including three long stripes along the entire length of her back.
While he was distracted staring at her, she lifted one paw and set it on his head, and then she turned and bolted into the woods, declaring ‘Tag, you’re it!’ in the only way she could when she didn’t have a voice.
She heard a brief noise, almost like a startled bark, and she could hear Darius crashing through the underbrush behind her with all the grace and finesse of a monster truck. She pranced ahead of him, always just a few paces ahead. She wished there were fewer trees and flatter ground, so she could really stretch her legs out and show off. It wasn’t often she had a chance to really show what she could do.
Granted, as she peered over her shoulder and watched Darius narrowly avoid a messy impact with a tree, she supposed it was probably for the best that she could only go so fast for the moment.
She slowed to a halt after a moment, watching him coyly over her shoulder, her tail swaying gently. She gave him just long enough to get close enough that she could have touched him with her tail before she burst into motion again.
She heard him growl in discontent as she breezed out of his reach again, and she rolled her eyes to herself before she slowed to a halt again, turning to face him once more. When he came to a halt, he was nearly nose-to-nose with her.
He really was enormous. He squashed the grass beneath his paws flat, and there was a visible trail behind him, documenting his every step. Conversely, Amelia knew that if she lifted her paws, the grass would eventually spring back up. She was sleek, lean, and lithe, and she knew the art of moving in silence.
Darius circled around her curiously once more, pausing to sniff at her tail, and she knew he was getting a few ideas that it was perhaps a bit too early to be getting. Pointedly, she sat down, her tail lashing through the grass. Darius jerked his muzzle away from her, his head lowering as he made a low, contrite grumbling noise.
Still, the sun had long since gone down, and Darius seemed to be taking the fact that they were both shifters as some sort of sign that they were closer than they were. Amelia was already getting tired of it.
After waiting for Darius to back up to a more polite distance, Amelia stood back up and began delicately padding her way back through the underbrush, making her way back toward the bush they had left their clothing under. With some reluctant rumbling, Darius fell into step behind her.
When they made it to the bush, they transformed in silence and put their clothes back on, thankfully without any other inappropriate behavior. After that, they began to make their way back to the hostel. It was easier to appreciate some of the sights this time, when Darius wasn’t trying to sprint his way along. Even with the awkward silence, it was more relaxing than the trip to the woods had been.
Halfway back, Darius wondered casually, “How long will you be in the area?”
Well, if he wanted to just pretend everything was normal, Amelia supposed she could let him get away with it. “Until tomorrow morning,” she replied, shrugging one shoulder.
“Leaving so soon?” he asked, frowning slightly.
“If I want to see as much as I can, then I can’t really loiter,” she explained easily.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. “That’s unfortunate.”
They lapsed into silence after that, until they made it back to the hostel. Once they stepped inside, a pair of young women greeted them.
“There you are!” one of them exclaimed, latching onto Darius’ arm.
“We thought you had run off without us,” the other scolded, punching his opposite shoulder.
The family resemblance made it rather obvious that they were his sisters. Amelia slipped away to bed while the women dragged him away.
*
Amelia began the next day with packing. She probably should have done it the night before, but she was not immune to procrastination.
When Darius handed her a cup of coffee the next morning, Amelia didn’t think anything of it. She sipped it lazily as she haphazardly shoved things into her backpack. Even when the mug was empty, though, she wasn’t feeling any less drowsy.
“You are not doing your job,” she groused, glaring at the dregs in the bottom of the mug.
When she only got drowsier, she started to get concerned. She sat down beside her bag and rested her forehead on her bunk. A moment later, the mattress dipped as Darius sat down, watching her expectantly.
“What’d you do to the coffee?” Amelia asked, her words slurring lethargically. Darius patted her on the head and didn’t deign to actually answer. Instead, he picked her up and carried her out of the room and out of the hostel entirely. The world tipped and twisted around her as he carried her, until her eyes drifted closed against her will.
When she woke up sometime later, locked in the pitch darkness of the trunk of a moving car, she screamed until her throat was hoarse. She battered her hands against the floor, the lid, and the seats. And she realized she was stuck.
*
Aibek paced through the kitchen, the window open and a frigid breeze drifting in. As if he hadn’t even noticed the cold temperature, every so often he paused in front of the window and leaned closer to it. A cup of coffee sat on the counter, going completely ignored.
“You seem tense,” Anara remarked, the straw of her drink caught between her teeth. She twisted back and forth on the stool at the kitchen island, the toes of one foot dragging back and forth across the tile.
Aibek waved her off and slammed the window shut. He shook his head, breathing out heavily through his nose to clear the smell from it. It didn’t really work, but it felt good to try.
“That was shockingly non-descriptive,” she added, her eyes narrowing, as if she could scoop whatever was bothering him straight out of his skull if she stared at him hard enough. Aibek did not actually doubt that she could manage it, if given enough time. “Seriously, what’s up?” Anara ceased her twisting on the stool, planting both feet on the floor with enough force that her stool rattled.
“There are other shifters in the mountains,” Aibek explained, still glaring out the window. “They are getting too close.”
With a sigh, Anara set her soda down and heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll go get Sezim.”
“What—?” He jerked around to face her, his head cocked to one side in confusion.
Her eyebrows rose, and she looked distinctly unimpressed. “You’re going to focus on this until you get to see who’s out there for yourself,” she stated flatly. “So you, me, and Sezim are going out to take a look around and either scare off whoever’s out there, or ease your mind that we aren’t in any danger. Yeah?”
Aibek sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “Yeah, alright,” he agreed. “I will meet you outside.”
*
Amelia allowed herself about half a minute for panicking before she asked herself sternly, ‘What would your mother tell you?’ She fell still, forcing herself to ignore the adrenaline pounding through her veins. She groped for an emergency trunk release in the dark, and her heart soared when she wrapped her fingers around it. She pulled it one way, then the other, and then wrestled with it for a few moments before she finally let it go and conceded that whoever had snagged her had been aware of the trunk release and had disabled it accordingly.
Instead, she rolled onto her stomach and dragged her fingers along the edges of the carpet until she could yank it up. She felt her way around the bared space carefully until her fingers curled around a cable. Presumably the trunk release cable. She wasn’t going to pull it and launch herself out onto the street while the car was cruising down the road, though. Getting out of the trunk wouldn’t do her much good if she wasn’t in any condition to flee.
She knew whenever the car stopped, but typically it wasn’t for long. Just long enough for the driver to switch places with one of the passengers. On the few instances it stopped long enough to refuel the car, she could hear muffled conversation surrounding the car. Tossing herself out of the car wouldn’t do much good if she were immediately grabbed again.
Amelia wasn’t sure how long she had been in the trunk when she realized the car had slowed, drastically. If she really paid attention, she could feel it swerving slightly, as if it was on unstable terrain. And just like that, she knew she had the perfect chance to flee.
She wrapped a hand around the release cable and pulled it toward the front of the car. There was a hiss and a pop as the trunk released and the bottom opened a crack. A blast of frigid air crept in, but she steeled herself. She kicked her shoes off, squirmed out of all of her clothes to make sure she wasn’t hampered by anything, and transformed.
She stood up on all four legs, forcing the trunk hatch to rise, and she leapt from the car, landing on white, snow-encrusted pavement. She stumbled a few steps, tumbling down to splay out on her belly, but she hopped back to her feet and bolted, surging off the road and straight into the snow.
The chill bit through her fur, but she kept moving, bounding through the snow like the deer that she used to chase with her mom when she was little. She wouldn’t be able to keep the pace up for long, but she could already hear voices shouting behind her, turning into snarling as her captors abandoned the car to chase after her. But if she could keep up her pace just long enough to lose them, perhaps she could find somewhere to hide just long enough to rest for another sprint.
She let her mind go blank until she couldn’t run anymore. When she had to slow to a walk, her muscles ached with cold, and she was pretty sure her whiskers were frozen, but she pushed the thought aside, instead focusing on where she might be. In the mountains, obviously, but that was not exactly specific. The Balkans, maybe. She didn’t think she had been stuck in the car for long enough to be out of Bulgaria, at any rate.
She couldn’t hear anyone behind her, but snow tended to act as a sound dampener and she knew that, so she knew she couldn’t let herself stop yet. She couldn’t smell anyone, but she could also hardly feel her face, so she wasn’t sure how much stock she was willing to put behind that sense.
So she kept walking, her head low and her shoulders hunched against the cold, her paws dragging through the snow and ice. Just a little farther, she told herself. She wasn’t actually sure where she was going, but eventually, she figured, that had to be true.
Time passed—maybe minutes, maybe hours, maybe a full day, she wasn’t sure and she couldn’t bring herself to care—when her limbs decided they couldn’t do it any longer. She tumbled down in the snow in a heap. Slowly, she dragged herself back upright, but she only managed to trudge a few more steps before she crashed down again.
Slowly, painstakingly, she tried to push herself back to her paws again, but her legs weren’t cooperating. She barely got her front legs beneath her before she collapsed again.
Was this where she was going to wind up, then? Only twenty, hungry, thirsty, and dying in a snowdrift in maybe-the-Balkans. She could imagine the newspapers, puzzling over a mysterious cheetah corpse found so far outside of its range as to be laughable.
She could hear snow crunching, getting closer to her. It sounded too light to be a lion, but what else could it be?
When a nose sniffed at her, it was too pale to be a lion, and it was spotted much like she was (or rather, spotted much like her mother was, considering Amelia’s more stripy nature). She caught a glimpse of mismatched eyes, one an icy blue and one such a pale silver-grey it was nearly white.
Whoever—whatever—it was, they moved away to instead shove their head beneath her shoulder and begin levering her to her feet. When her legs wobbled and she nearly collapsed again, they caught her against their shoulder. There was a low, encouraging grumbling noise in her ear, and slowly, she began to plod forward, one step at a time.
After a few minutes of walking that felt like hours, someone else sidled up against her other side. Bracketed between the two of them, she had no choice but to keep moving. Their heat gradually began to leech into her, numbness replaced by prickling pain like she was moving through glass and needles. She wanted the numbness back, but at the same time, she knew that the numbness was worse than the pain.
A third cat joined them soon enough, darting in close to check in on them before bounding away again, patrolling in circles around them, thick-furred paws carrying them over the snow like snowshoes. Every so often, the third cat would bound close again, as if to see if they needed any help, but bounced away again.
They were bulky, all three of them, with white fur so thick that Amelia was half-convinced she could disappear in it, and decorated with black spots. Their paws were enormous. Snow leopards, the part of her mind that was still capable of some semblance of logic supplied eventually.
They came to a steep incline, and the snow leopards started up it as easily as Amelia might climb the stairs in her parents’ house. She groaned and sat down until the third snow leopard bounded up to her and bonked their heads together gently, urging her onward. With an effort, she hauled herself back to her feet and started climbing, her claws digging in because each step felt like she was dragging herself up the side of a cliff.
It felt like it took hours to get up the incline, and they emerged into a copse of pine trees, the needles laden with snow and drooping. The wind and the snow had picked up by then, and Amelia could hardly see more than a few feet in front of her. She didn’t know how the leopards knew where they were going, but she didn’t have much of a choice except to follow them.
When she came to a staircase, she tripped over the lowest step, face planting into the frigid metal. One of the snow leopards nudged her back to her feet and began steadily prodding her up the steps until she was standing on a platform. She wasn’t sure who opened the door in front of her. She supposed one of them must have transformed, but she didn’t get a chance to look before she was being herded through the door.
It was like walking into an oven, a wall of warmth crashing over her. One of the snow leopards continued urging her toward the fireplace until she was curled up so close to the hearth that it almost looked like she was going to crawl right into the flames. It was certainly a tempting idea, though she wasn’t quite addled enough to actually try it.
Everything after that became a bit hazy. She had a vague recollection of someone throwing a blanket over her, though she wasn’t sure who. She stopped caring at that point, letting her eyes slip closed as she basked in the heat. She rested her chin on her front paws, her back twisted so she could stretch her back paws toward the fire. She curled her tail close, over her hips. Once she was comfortable, she did her best to pretend the rest of the world wasn’t there. She wanted to be asleep before the feeling began to come back to her toes. If any of the snow leopards returned to check on her, then she was completely unaware of them.
*
Amelia woke slowly, her eyes blinking open reluctantly only to close again a heartbeat later. For a few long moments, she simply basked in the heat of the fire and the blanket and the rug beneath her.
Wherever she was, it was warm, and for the moment, the fire was her favorite thing in the entire world. It was followed closely by the blanket on top of her, which was fuzzy, and she sort of wanted to roll up in it like a caterpillar. Behind that was the rug, which was far more comfortable than a rug had any right to be. Admittedly, she was pretty sure the rug would lose some of its appeal once she actually bothered to open her eyes and wake up. Considering that, she was reluctant to do so.
When she finally opened her eyes for real and rolled so that her front legs were gathered beneath her, she was in a small den. There was a long couch and a pair of slightly overstuffed armchairs, along with a small bookshelf that was overcrowded with both books and assorted knick-knacks. She was alone in the room, but there was a pile of neatly folded clothing a few feet away, sitting on the arm of the couch. Ordinarily, Amelia hated wearing other peoples’ clothes—they always smelled so strange—but in that instant, she was glad to see them. Her backpack and everything in it was most likely still sitting in that hostel, just waiting for someone with sticky fingers to go digging through it.
Slowly—so, so slowly, because everything hurt like she had been hit by a car (or like she had jumped out of a car, maybe)—she stood up, the blanket sliding off of her fur to puddle around her paws. With one back paw, she kicked it far enough away from the fireplace that she wouldn’t be worrying about errant sparks. She looked around furtively, making sure there was no one around, and then she transformed. Once she was standing on two human feet again, she stretched her arms over her head, arching her back until it cracked. She let her arms drop and picked up the clothes.
There was a green hoodie with black trim, a camisole with a built-in bra, a pair of black jeans, a belt, a pair of socks, and a pair of underwear that still had the store stickers on them. After pulling the stickers off, she pulled the underwear, the camisole, and the socks on before she stepped into the jeans. They were a bit short at the ankles and a bit large around the waist, but they stayed on just fine once she cinched the belt in place. The hoodie was another story entirely, since it fell down past her hips and the cuffs of the sleeves stopped several inches past her fingertips. If she started flapping her arms, she probably could have used the excess fabric as wings to fly home.
She felt better—a bit more human—with clothes on. Everything still hurt, and she had a dull headache pounding behind her eyes, but those were things she could ignore easily enough. She sort of expected to be hungry, but she wasn’t sure she was. Then again, she could have just gone past hunger to the point that she no longer noticed it.
Her head popped out of the neck of the hoodie, and she found that she wasn’t alone in the room anymore. “Oh!” One hand flew up to her chest in her surprise, and the hood fell down off of her head as she jumped. “Ah—hi!” she offered, her voice too loud.
There was a man standing in the doorway that led to the hallway. He was a hand taller than Amelia, and he had skin the color of coffee with cream. He had dark brown hair, short on top and shaved entirely along the sides. He looked like he was probably around five years older than her. He was also broad enough that Amelia suspected he probably could have walked through a brick wall without much of a problem.
“Hi,” he returned at a more reasonable volume, his amusement clear.
Amelia shoved the cuffs of the sleeves up past her wrists and linked her hands together in front of herself, picking at the cuticle of one thumbnail. “Were you, um…were you the one who brought me here?” Even as she asked, she knew the answer. She recognized his eyes, the left one an icy blue and the right one nearly white.
He nodded once in confirmation. “My sisters helped as well.” Amelia couldn’t place his accent.
“Thank you,” she offered, pouring as much sincerity as she could manage into those two, simple words. Thinking about it, Amelia could vaguely recall two other snow leopards helping. She supposed she would have to track them down to thank them, too. “I’m Amelia Lark,” she added, since actually introducing herself to the man who had saved her life did seem prudent.
“Aibek Niyazov,” he returned easily. “I do not know what you were doing out there to begin with, but just leaving you out there was not an option I was comfortable with,” he replied wryly. “Leaving a—you are a cheetah, yes? Just you do not really look like one.”
Amelia folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin proudly. “I’m a king cheetah,” she corrected, with sharp emphasis. “Super rare.”
His eyebrows rose slightly. “Well. Perhaps this is an appropriate setting, for a snowflake such as yourself.” He smiled the slightest bit when Amelia scowled at him. “Regardless, leaving a cheetah out in such weather, there would have been a casualty before sunrise.”
“You had very convenient timing,” Amelia pointed out with some bemusement.
“I was already patrolling when I found you,” he replied, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. “I could smell that there was someone here who should not be.” He tipped his head to one side, observing her placidly. “That does still leave the question of what you were doing out there,” he pointed out. “I doubt you simply decided to go on a mountain jog.”
“No, I didn’t,” Amelia groaned, lifting a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose before dragging her hand back through her hair. “It’s…a really long story. A really long, difficult story.”
“Then after something to eat and drink would probably be best,” Aibek suggested, and he turned sideways to make enough space for her to fit through the doorway. “The kitchen is through here,” he explained, “though you will probably be accosted once you are in there.”
“By your sisters?” Amelia guessed as she stepped through the doorway and followed him down the hall.
“Among others,” he agreed as they walked into the kitchen.
Much like the den they had just walked out of, the kitchen was tiny. Rather than a proper table, there was an island, and between that and the appliances, the space was very effectively filled up. When Amelia turned around, she saw a door that presumably led into a bathroom, but she didn’t see any other doors or hallways. She wasn’t actually sure where anyone was supposed to sleep, unless passing out on the rug in front of the fireplace was an everyday thing.
And then she noticed the woman sitting at the counter. She was a dainty, middle-aged woman with a braid of brown hair trailing down her back. She had pale skin and a waist that had been tiny once upon a time, but had rounded slightly with time. Her eyes were bright blue, and her lips were curved in gentle amusement as she watched Amelia try to get her bearings. Presumably, she was Aibek’s mother, but there wasn’t much of a resemblance between them.
“Finally rejoining the land of the living?” she asked, her tone light and playful. Amelia was pretty sure her accent was Russian.
“How long have I been sleeping?” Amelia asked, baffled, as she looked at Aibek over her shoulder.
“Eighteen hours, perhaps?” he suggested before he shrugged, unconcerned. “We tried to wake you up to eat and drink something a few times, but you were very against the idea, and we decided that trying to funnel feed you was a bit beyond your dignity and my patience.”
With a roll of her eyes, Amelia brought a hand to her chest and mustered up as much sarcastic sincerity as she could manage and she said, “I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Aibek nodded with an earnestness that almost managed to seem genuine, before he pulled open the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. He tossed it to Amelia, and once she fumbled it against her chest, he turned to leave the room, offering over his shoulder, “I should go tell the others that our guest is awake, or I will probably wake up to a dead bird on my pillow.”
To Amelia’s mild surprise, she heard the front door open a moment later, and she had to wonder if all the others, however many there were, were all out in the snow. She didn’t really dwell on that, though, more concerned with the fact that it was just her, alone, with Aibek’s mother.
“You must be starving!” his mother declared, as if it had only just occurred to her. She hopped to her feet and began to bustle around the kitchen, pulling out a pan and a pot and gathering ingredients from the cupboard and fridge. “I hope you don’t mind Italian,” she carried on as she filled the pot with water. “Everyone here’s fine with it, and I figure it’s pretty innocuous.”
“That’s fine,” Amelia replied faintly, still bewildered. She lifted the water bottle to twist the cap off and take a drink, mostly just for something to keep her hands occupied.
As soon as the water hit her throat, it occurred to her that the headache was probably from dehydration, and it took a concerted force of will to keep sipping at a reasonable pace, rather than downing the entire bottle in a few gulps.
“You may call me Faina,” Aibek’s mother added pleasantly, as she set the pot on the stove to begin boiling. “And you are?”
“Amelia,” she answered, finally at something like an appropriate volume. “Nice to meet you. Are you a snow leopard, too?”
With a gentle laugh, Faina answered, “I’m not, no. My grandfather was, though, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when I met my husband.”
“In Russia…?” Amelia guessed slowly, as she finally convinced her legs to work so she could sit down at the counter.
“In Kazakhstan,” Faina corrected, as she poured cream into a pan and set it on a burner. “I’m Russian; my husband was Kazakh.”
‘Was.’ Amelia was just going to avoid the topic of the probably deceased husband, then. That seemed like the safest bet. Or at least that was her plan until Faina carried on talking about him.
“We’ve been all over the place, though,” she carried on merrily as she started grating some sort of firm, white cheese. “He was something of a…an eco-warrior, I guess you could say,” she explained, with a fond laugh. “That’s how we wound up here. Temporarily, at first, but then he ran afoul of things, so we made the set up more permanent. Honestly, it would be perfectly pleasant here if I could just convince the others to remember to go shopping on time.” As an afterthought, she added salt to the pot of water before she picked up a box of pasta and dumped it in.
“Here in the Balkans?” Amelia wondered, because she still wasn’t actually sure where she was.
“Of course, honey,” Faina replied, glancing at her over her shoulder with a quizzical quirk to one eyebrow. “We’re in Bulgaria. Where did you think you were?”
Amelia shrugged helplessly. “I was pretty sure I was still in Bulgaria, but honestly, I had no real idea. I spent an obnoxious portion of yesterday locked in a car trunk, and I couldn’t tell how long exactly or how fast the car was going until it seriously slowed down in the snow.”
Faina blinked at her, opened her mouth to ask a question, and then thought better of it. “Best not get into it now,” she sighed as she began scooping up the grated cheese to dump it into the cream. “The others are all going to want to know what happened, and I’m sure you’d rather not explain the whole mess more than once.”
“That would be nice, yeah,” Amelia agreed, before she busied herself with the bottle of water again. Faina turned her attention back to the stove, stirring and seasoning the food in front of her.
The silence didn’t last for long, though. The front door banged open with enough force that the walls rattled, only to slam closed again a moment later. It was followed by the sound of boots hitting the wall. “You’re not a stampede!” Faina shouted toward the hallway. Despite that, thunderous footsteps raced down the hall, and a girl who couldn’t have been older than sixteen skidded into the room in a pair of socks.
She was paler than Aibek, but still darker than Faina, with the same dark hair cropped close to her head and smoothed back, and the same vivid blue eyes. A grin that could only be described as ‘shit-eating’ split her face as she laid eyes on Amelia, and she declared in a voice that held endless amounts of cheer, “Hi! I’m Sezim!”
She was a short, broad girl, with wide hips and broad shoulders, and she looked like she was constructed entirely of muscle. And despite her height—she only came up to Amelia’s mouth—Amelia had trouble trying to describe her as small, as she and her grin seemed to fill the entire little kitchen beyond capacity.
Evidently deciding that any real conversation with Amelia could wait for the moment, Sezim whipped around to face Faina, her feet nearly sliding right out from under her in her tie-dyed socks. “Pasta?” she asked, her tone brightening further, as if someone had just promised her a million dollars. Despite her feline lineage, Amelia couldn’t help but imagine her with a wagging tail like a golden retriever.
“Yes, dear,” Faina replied as she set a colander in the sink.
Sezim darted forward, declaring, “Got it!” as she wrapped her hands around the handle of the pot and picked it up to pour it into the colander, so quickly Faina very nearly had to leap out of the way.
Amelia was getting tired again just looking at her.
Faina ushered the girl away from the sink after taking the now empty pot back. “Go make yourself useful and get the bowls out,” she sighed, as she poured the drained pasta back into the pot and poured the sauce over it. She gave it a few tosses with a wooden spoon.
Heaving a sigh like she was being told to kiss a frog, Sezim tossed herself over to the cabinet and pulled out a stack of bowls that seemed nearly as tall as she was. Amelia had to wonder how many people would be crowding into the small kitchen.
As she set the bowls down on a corner of the counter with a loud clatter, Sezim burst out, as if she couldn’t keep it in any longer, “I helped get you back to the house. I mean, kinda. Mostly I was patrolling to make sure no one snuck up on us during the walk.”
If Amelia thought very hard, she could sort of remember a third leopard bounding in circles around them for a portion of the walk. “The really bouncy one?”
With a beaming smile, Sezim nodded, clasping her hands together in front of herself. “That’s the one!”
“You’re not done yet,” Faina pointed out, and Sezim skittered over to a drawer to pull out a handful of forks. She left them unceremoniously in a pile next to the bowls. Amelia was getting the impression that meals were of the ‘serve yourself’ style in this family.
“How long have you been awake?” Sezim asked brightly, leaning into Amelia’s space, only to lean back apologetically when Amelia recoiled slightly. “Have you seen everything yet?”
“Hush, dear,” Faina sighed good-naturedly. “She’s only been awake for about a half an hour. There’s been no time for her to see anything. It’s not like anything on the mountain is going anywhere.”
“Noooo,” Sezim agreed slowly, “but it might be nice if she got to see it before it disappears under eight feet of snow.”
“I think there’s time,” Faina remarked dryly, and she reached over to ruffle Sezim’s hair. “Do you know where the rest of your siblings have disappeared to?”
“Serik’s around,” Sezim returned with a shrug. “Dunno about the others.”
As if on cue, a new voice wondered, “Is Sezim being strange again?” and Amelia turned to see a boy peering into the kitchen from the hall before he cautiously emerged into the room.
“No more so than usual,” Faina answered. “Now be polite.”
As if he only just noticed Amelia, he shrank back toward the hallway. He was dead silent for a few moments before he mumbled, “Hi. I’m Serik.”
He looked to be around Sezim’s age, and his hair color, skin tone, and eye color were virtually identical to his sister’s. His hair was longer, though, and fell into his face like a wavy, unruly mop. He was a few inches taller than Amelia, and he was lean and lanky and looked like he was still growing into his limbs. On the whole, he gave the impression that he had accidentally tumbled into an industrial taffy puller and gotten stuck for a minute before meekly pulling himself out and scuttling away.
He offered no handshake and, in fact, looked like a sudden move might send him fleeing for the hills (or into the mountains, as the case may be). So Amelia followed his example and kept her hands to herself.
Sezim flung herself across the kitchen, flinging her arms around Serik’s neck and dragging him down to her height with a startled yelp. “We’re twins,” she supplied brightly, clearing up any confusion over how close they were in age, though Amelia was pretty sure she could have guessed as much in time. Serik struggled in her hold for a moment before going limp in resignation, like an exasperated kitten.
If she was frank with herself, Amelia couldn’t quite imagine growing up in such a remote area when she was their age. She had always been a city girl, shifting only in the house or if her parents took her out to somewhere private to do so. ‘Peace and quiet’ and ‘ample space’ were not things she was accustomed to, but she had always figured the tradeoff was worth it. Serik and Sezim seemed pretty well adjusted, though, so maybe Amelia had just been too quick to accept that only being able to stretch her legs a few times a month was a necessity.
“How do you go to school from here?” Amelia asked before she could stop herself, looking between them in bemusement.
Sezim blinked at her and released her brother from the unwanted hug to instead pantomime typing in the air in front of herself. “Cyber school,” she answered, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Amelia supposed that maybe it was, but she had a hard time imagining Sezim actually sitting still long enough for that. She kept that observation to herself, though. Things were going better than she had expected, and she didn’t need to start being rude for no reason.
“Are you a shifter, too?” she asked instead, looking at Serik.
He nodded in reply, just a quick, jerky bob of his head. “Wasn’t there last night, though,” he added, before Amelia could ask if she had missed the presence of a fourth snow leopard in her cold-induced delirium.
“And you can all just…shift whenever you want out here,” Amelia stated, as if the very concept of it was utterly alien.
“Basically,” Sezim chirped in reply, hip-checking Serik as she did. “All the time. I mean, we try not to let, like…hikers or whatever see us, since snow leopards aren’t exactly native to the area and no one wants a hunting party tromping through the area, but hiding from regular humans is easy.”
“Not very observant,” Serik supplied in a quiet mumble, quite like he had forgotten that snow leopards tended to look like piles of snow-covered rock when they weren’t in motion and were actually in a snowy environment. Not that Amelia could disagree with the assessment. She’d had to hide from the mailman when he had come to the door once, and he had entirely missed her tail sticking out from behind the couch.
“Wait, so—” Sezim blinked up at her. “Do you mean you couldn’t, then?” she asked, scratching her temple with one hand.
Amelia snorted. “Not even close,” she replied. “I lived in Chicago. There were people everywhere, and I would’ve been spotted in a heartbeat. If I wanted to get a chance to actually run, then I had to get my mom or my dad to drive me out of the city.”
Sezim wrinkled her nose in clear distaste. Before she had a chance to voice any of it, though, Serik unexpectedly burst out, “Can you really go over a hundred kilometers an hour?”
Amelia was not even going to attempt to do that math in her head, and instead, she just assumed it added up to the right number of miles. She grinned as she confirmed, “If I have enough space, yeah.” She sighed wistfully. “I’ve only really had a chance to do it a couple times this semester.”
“Why live in the city, then?” Sezim asked, her brows scrunching together in bewilderment. “It sounds awful.”
Amelia couldn’t quite keep back a laugh in time, and she lifted a hand to cover it. “It has its downsides,” she acknowledged, “but it’s basically all I’ve ever known. I mean, I was born in London before we moved. I’m not sure I would even know what to do with myself otherwise.”
Sezim groaned, and to say the noise was melodramatic was not doing it nearly enough justice. “You’d run, obviously!” she burst out. “And everything would be so much better.”
“Is that a professional opinion?” Amelia asked dryly, her weight shifting to one side in her seat as she leaned an elbow on the counter and propped her chin up in her hand.
“It is,” Sezim returned emphatically.
“Honestly, dear, don’t be rude,” Faina sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers.
Sezim closed her mouth with an audible click after that. A moment later, the front door opened once again, presumably for the final time as Amelia could hear two sets of footsteps coming inside.
When Aibek finally returned, it was on the heels of a woman who looked to be around Amelia’s age, even if she was a few inches taller than Aibek. She was darker than her younger siblings, though still not as dark as Aibek. Her eyes were crystal blue and her hair was the same dark brown as the rest, though it was only shaved on one side, with the rest of it messily braided over her shoulder. She was a curvy woman, making Amelia feel less like an hourglass and more like a mailbox in comparison.
“And here we have the self-proclaimed boss of the family,” Aibek declared, gesturing to her with one hand. “She just lets me pretend whenever there is trouble or something she does not want to be bothered with.”
She slid Aibek an exasperated glance before offering sweetly, “Is it my fault if no one else has any common sense? No, I don’t think it is.” With that said, she very determinedly started to ignore him.
“I’m Anara,” she offered in a low, cool voice, as she held out a hand. Amelia shook it briefly. “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met yesterday,” she added.
“Ah, vaguely,” Amelia returned. “Sort of. Not really.” She shrugged loosely.
Sezim snickered behind one hand and offered in a singsong tone, “She remembered me.” Amelia wasn’t entirely sure why that was apparently so special, other than the novelty of meeting another shifter when it was rare to meet any outside of the family.
(And yet, Amelia had met two families of them. Though she supposed the second family was perhaps the universe trying to apologize for the first family. If so, it was an apology she was willing to accept.)
“Well,” Anara sniffed, though she didn’t seem truly annoyed, “it’s not like we had a proper introduction.”
“Amelia, by the way,” she offered as an afterthought. She had never introduced herself so many times in one day outside of starting a new semester. She kept expecting someone to suddenly decide that they should go around the room telling facts about themselves. Luckily, that did not happen.
Faina clapped her hands together briskly, drawing all eyes in the room to her. “Now that everyone is here, would anyone like to actually eat?” she asked, gesturing theatrically to the tower of bowls, the pile of forks, and the pot of pasta. “If so, you’re all free to dig in.”
Just as Amelia suspected, everyone simply picked up a bowl and began jostling for a position at the stove. Gratefully, Amelia accepted the filled bowl that Aibek pressed into her hands before she even had a chance to stand up from her seat at the counter. Another bottle of water followed it a moment later.
It was a very relaxed affair. Amelia and Sezim sat on one side of the counter, with Sezim all but glued to Amelia’s side like she was some sort of superhero. Faina stood on the other side of the counter, her bowl in her hand as she leaned her side against the granite.
Aibek leaned one shoulder against the refrigerator, one ankle crossed over the other and his bowl held close to his chest. Anara simply stood in the middle of the room, as if to be part of any conversation that broke out, regardless of who was speaking. Serik, as if he had given up on caring in the least bit, simply sat on the floor, his back against the counter and his knees drawn up to cradle his bowl. If any of them were even aware that the kitchen was too small for the amount of people using it, none of them seemed to care.
Amelia ate in silence for a moment, listening to Sezim and Anara bicker over who had to make the next trip down the mountain and to the store, which was apparently enough of a hassle to warrant a drawn out argument. Eventually, though, they fell silent long enough for Sezim to poke at Amelia’s shoulder with two fingers and wonder, “Can you tell us what happened before we found you in the snow?”
No one else said anything, as if they weren’t sure whether or not pushing the matter would upset her, but they were all side-eyeing her curiously. Even Serik had quietly gotten to his feet and clustered close to Faina on the other side of the island. And yet the attention wasn’t uncomfortable; Amelia wasn’t getting the impression that they would be angry with her if she decided to say ‘No thanks, I’m not comfortable talking about it.’ “I guess so,” she agreed easily enough.
The words came more easily than she had expected them to, as she told them about the curiosity and the excitement of finding another shifter, until it turned to annoyance at his behavior. Her surprise and fear the next morning when she realized she had been drugged, and the draining, anxious anticipation of being locked in the trunk for hours. In fact, she felt oddly detached as she explained it, though, as she wrapped the story up with a light, “…and then Aibek found me in a snow bank, and you all know what happened from there.” She snapped back to herself when she realized that the others—all five of them—looked quietly outraged on her behalf. Faina looked as if she were contemplating adopting Amelia right then and there.
Eventually, Faina mused thoughtfully, “They’ll probably be a bit long, but otherwise, some of Serik’s old clothes would probably be a decent fit for the time being,” as she tapped the round end of her fork against her lip.
“I guess I can dig them out of the back of my closet,” he mumbled into his bowl before stabbing a bite into his mouth. Evidently done with the conversation, he melted back down the side of the counter to sit on the floor again.
“Oh! I—thank you,” Amelia stammered, blinking at Faina and the spot where Serik had been a moment before.
Faina beamed at her. “It’s not a problem, honey,” she replied, before she looked down toward the floor. “Right?” Serik’s hand emerged from behind the counter, offering a thumb’s up. “Right!” Faina carried on, as Serik’s hand disappeared again. “Now, you just finish eating, and then we’ll find somewhere for you to get comfortable for the night. Tomorrow, Aibek can show you around.”
Amelia wasn’t sure how much else there was to see of ‘around,’ considering she was pretty sure the house consisted of three rooms and a hallway, but she agreed either way, with a pleasant, “Sounds like a good plan.”
It was dawning on her, just then, just how much she had lucked out.