Kaci

Desperate, I glanced around as I stumbled through the underbrush. The woods looked thicker to the west, so I headed that way, and when I found as dense a patch of underbrush as I was likely to, I squatted in it to rest while I examined my wounds.

My head was tender, but there was a lump in my brow, rather than a dent, so I decided to call myself lucky on that front. I had to use the filthy tail of my shirt to wipe the blood from my arms. Most of my scratches were minor and shallow, but the laceration in my left forearm was long and deep, and it welled with more blood every time I tried to clean it.

The cut needed stitches, at the very least. But my only options were to try to tie the wound closed with a strip of cloth from my shirt or try to heal it by shifting into cat form. As my body reassembled itself, it would naturally begin to heal my wounds. At the very least, that would slow the bleeding in my arms and accelerate the scabbing process.

Unfortunately walking around as a big black cat would be dangerously conspicuous in the middle of the desert, especially in broad daylight, because in nature, most large cats are crepuscular; they’re mostly active at dusk and dawn. I did have this handy—if shallow—patch of woods, which should shield me from human notice. However, I wouldn’t be hard for Jared to find while I was leaking fragrant blood all over the place, even if he couldn’t actually track me by scent.

But maybe he wouldn’t bother looking for me. His car was trashed, and he’d have to explain that to both the police and to Paul Blackwell. And he was hurt. If the cops got to him before he got to me, they might make him go to the hospital, which would open a whole new can of worms for him, considering the risk of medical care exposing our species to the public.

Maybe if I hurried, I could shift to accelerate the healing of my arm, then climb one of the trees and hunker down out of sight for a while. Maybe Jared would walk right past me, if he came looking at all.

That felt like my best bet, so I knelt in the underbrush and took off my clothes, shaking from exhaustion and stress. I spread my shirt and jeans out on the ground and lay down on top of them. Then I closed my eyes and focused on breathing deeply. On blocking out the pain in my head and my arm, as well as the feline sense of urgency demanding that I run until I dropped dead, rather than get caught, though my human mind knew there was a better, if riskier, solution.

When my breathing was even and my hands had stopped shaking, I began to visualize what I wanted to happen. Speed was critical, but if I freaked myself out, the process would actually take longer.

My first shift had been five years ago. It was traumatic, violent, and completely unexpected. I’d long-since learned to control the process and had never once, since the day Faythe found me in the woods, lost control of myself in cat form. But that old fear was still there. Still very real. It was still my worst nightmare.

In cat form, I still felt like a monster.

Tears filled my eyes as my jaw began to pop. That sound cascaded down my spine, then echoed through the rest of my joints, and more tears fell, not from the pain, though there was plenty of that, but from the memories.

I had never loved shifting like the others did, and I probably never would. I would never love to race through the woods and hunt and eat raw game, because where they saw sport and exercise—tapping into a primal nature that was as much a part of us as were our human selves—I saw violence and death. And this time was no different.

As my legs began to thin out and reform, shooting pain through both muscle and bone, I remembered my mother and my sister. I remembered screaming in agony in my backyard as my body tore itself apart, out of nowhere. As my fingernails grew into claws, I remembered those very claws swiping and slashing at the mother who’d given me life and raised me, because I hadn’t known how to handle my own terror and confusion. Because in her terror, she had become a threat. Because my newly-feline self had lashed out through untempered instinct.

While my jaw elongated and my teeth moved around in my mouth, sharpening into curved points, I thought of that woman in the woods in Montana. The hiker. I remembered dragging her body into a tree through some compulsion I’d had no way of understanding.

All I’d known for sure that day, trapped in the body of a creature I still hardly understood, was that I was hungry. And that she’d smelled like food.

Finally, fur sprouted all over my reshaped body in that tiny green patch in the middle of the desert, but my mind was still far away, trapped in past traumas. In old sins I could never forgive myself for. In violent acts I blamed on the very beast ripping its way into the world through my human flesh, because no matter how guilty I felt, I could not let myself bleed to death or get recaptured—not even to pay penance for what I’d done. The instinct to survive was stronger than anything else I’d ever experienced both now, as I lay vulnerable and exposed in the last seconds of my shift, and five years ago, when I’d killed my own mother and eaten human flesh to keep from starving.

Ultimately, my body would win out over my mind. Even if I hated myself for it for the rest of my life.

“Kaci!”

Startled, I shot upright on four legs, backing instinctively away from the voice. Heart racing, I licked my front left leg, testing out my new wound. The taste of my own blood was familiar, and in cat form, it didn’t bother me. The pain was much less than before, and the gash had already started to close.

If I climbed a tree before it was fully healed, it might re-open. But if I didn’t…

I looked up and judged the distance in less than a second, my feline instincts doing mental physics my human brain could never have managed. Then I leapt, without conscious thought of how far I was going or where I would land.

My claws grasped the bark of a tree about a foot in diameter, digging in with all four sets. Pain shot through my front left leg again as the laceration reopened, but I pushed that pain to the back of my mind. Then l leapt again. Straight up. Pushing off against the bark with all four legs. I caught the tree farther up, spared a moment for balance, then leapt again.

And again.

And again.

Any higher, and the stunted desert tree would start to bow. So I took one more little leap up to a small fork in the branches thick enough to support the weight of my torso, to take some pressure off my legs. This would have to be high enough.

I hunkered down to wait. To watch.

Every bird that chirped sent alarm racing through me. Every creature that burrowed through the underbrush below made me flinch.

“Kaci! I know you’re out here!” Footsteps crunched through twigs and leaves to my east. Movement in that direction caught my eye, but then it was gone.

A low, soft growl rumbled up from my throat.

“We have to go!”

What? That didn’t sound like something Jared would say. In fact, that didn’t sound like Jared at all. But surely that was just my unreliable ears, currently overwhelmed by the thunderous rush of my own pulse.

“Kaci! It’s me! Please come out! Are you— Shit!”

The footsteps were right below me. I looked down and found someone holding the clothes I’d abandoned on the ground, almost directly beneath my tree. It was hard to tell from the angle, but he didn’t look big enough to be—

The man looked around, then he walked several feet away, peering through the underbrush. Then he turned. And looked up, squinting at the trees to the east.

Justus. Where the hell had he come from? How had he found me?

A whine leaked from my throat. He looked up, still holding my bloody, filthy clothes. “Kaci?”

The relief on his face was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.