A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) (15 page)

“No,” he said, and he approached her, but was interrupted.

“Liam,” Marcus groaned.

Terry stepped back, her eyes on the hunter. His brow was knitted, his face bunched up in pain, and he had both hands over the wound on his side.

“You asked for this,” Liam said, not leaving Terry’s side.

“I know.” He was having trouble speaking without groaning in pain. “Why did you tell me to see Leon?”

“I met him when he was in Borneo. He is calm. You could use some of that.”

“He’s my father, Liam.”

Silence was wedged in between them. “What?” Liam asked.

“He’s my father.”

Again Liam said nothing, and Terry looked between them. “Why don’t you go see him, then?” she asked, and the hunter looked at her, and tried to laugh, but wheezed, and spat blood from his mouth instead.

“Because I hate him.”

“Why?”

“Because he made me like this.”

Liam stepped forward. “What? Made you like what?”

“Like
you
.”

“Impossible,” he said. “We’re born this way.”

“Not me.”

“You just found out late.”

“No,” Marcus said, and he shook his head. “No, I’m telling you the truth. He found a way.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“He says he’s forgotten how to change.”

“He didn’t forget,” Marcus whispered. “He lost it when he turned me.”

“You weren’t turned,” Liam said, his voice a hard edge. “We’re born like this.”

“You don’t understand,” Marcus said. “
Everyone
is born like this. Some of
you
just figured it out on your own. My father
made
me find it in myself. I never wanted to be like this!” He spat out the last word in disgust, and looked down at his body.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want, Liam, but I am telling you the truth. And you,” he said, looking at Terry. “You asked me why. It’s simple. I hate him. I hate you that you’re with him. I hate my father. I hate our kind.”

Liam stepped in front of Terry. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Marcus said, laughing. “That was it when I killed your wife.”

Terry saw Liam’s body harden, and she held his arm. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “Just forget it.”

“Were going.” Liam turned. “We’ll send an ambulance.” The hunter didn’t respond.

Terry, falling into step behind Liam, looked at the wound on the back of his neck. The wolf had bitten into him badly. “You’re going to need a doctor as well,” she told him.

“Yeah,” Liam agreed. He stopped and turned, held out his hand. Terry took it, and the two walked in silence back to the guest house. Nobody else was on the streets – it was late. Nobody would have seen the sculpted man, six feet and three inches tall, walking barefoot and completely naked, with a fully clothed woman beside him. And for that, Terry was glad.

“Y
ou have to see a doctor today, Liam.” Terry was cleaning the wound on the back of her neck, but it was clear that it was more than she could, or should handle. “You don’t want to risk infection.”

“Fine,” Liam said. “We’ll do that first thing.”

It was already starting to get bright, but Terry did not feel the weight of sleepiness. Everything had that happened had her nerves in a frenzy, and she knew that even if she tried, she couldn’t possibly go to sleep.

On the television, the morning news was showing footage of a great hulking man being carried by four paramedics on a stretcher, and being placed into the back of a small ambulance. He was unconscious, body limp, and bleeding profusely through a wound in his side.

“What do you think they’re saying?” Terry asked, referring to the news reporter who was speaking rapidly in Vietnamese. A square box with a blurred out human head appeared in the corner, and a bright red question mark faded into the center of it. “It’s obvious they have no idea who he is.”

“I don’t care,” Liam said. “He doesn’t have a passport or anything. He’ll be detained.”

“In prison?”

“Probably. He’s in the country illegally.”

“That won’t stop him.”

“No,” Liam agreed. His tone was somber, and Terry knew the source of it.

“He’ll hurt people to get out, won’t he?”

Liam sighed. “Yes.” His eyes were hard and fixed on the television, and she could see that he was holding emotion back, though exactly what that emotion was, she wasn’t sure. Some anger had to be there. Regret at not having killed him, on a base level? That might be it. But speculating was pointless, and she knew that even if she asked, he would not reply.

“What do you think he’ll do?”

“I don’t know,” Liam said. He shrugged.

“Do you believe him?”

“Believe what?”

“That the Leon guy is his father?”

Liam looked at her then. His eyes were narrow, but his head was nodding slowly up and down. “I don’t know why he would lie about that.”

“Do you believe that Leon turned him into, you know?”

“A shapeshifter?”

“Yeah.”

Liam shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked up at Terry, and she saw cloudy confusion in his eyes. “I just don’t see how it is possible, to do what Marcus described. Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe Leon just figured out how to force the first change. Because it happens at different ages for shapeshifters. But every shifter I ever met, once they figured out the shift, they knew they were born with it. They knew that others were different, or that they were different from others. I never once thought, even vaguely, that anybody could do it, and it was just a process of unlocking the capacity.”

“But how do you know that not all humans can do it?” Terry asked. She didn’t expect to hear a reason informed by science and genetics, but she also would be disappointed if Liam was merely satisfied with groupthink superstition.

“I guess I don’t,” he admitted. “If Leon can do what Marcus said he could, then that would change… everything. But why hasn’t anyone else figured it out before?”

“Has anyone bothered?”

“I don’t know,” Liam said. “Already by the time I was born, our kind was nearly extinct. In my town, I was the only one.”

“Not your parents?”

“Nope.”

“Then how did you-”

“Don’t know.”

“Is it hereditary?”

“I don’t know, Terry.” Liam turned his gaze on her again, and she could see in his eyes that she sought the answers to these questions far more than her idle curiosity did.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“If Leon’s found out how to force it, you know, or unlock it, then everything would change, wouldn’t it?”

“It would. But why would he be stuck in mid-shift as a result?”

“He could have given Marcus something, and lost something himself,” Terry murmured after a pause. She knew it was a meaningless utterance, but it was the best she could do armed with so little knowledge. It seemed absurd to her that what she would call today, though technically it was tomorrow, was when she found out that shapeshifters existed, that there were people on this planet who lived for centuries, and who could turn into animals at will.

She had been forcing herself not to satisfy her curiosity by asking Liam what it had been like in 1800s, or the 1700s. She wanted to ask what it was like that he’d seen the world change, so very much, before his very eyes. He’d watched the industrial revolution globalize the world, had seen countless wars erupt, some spluttering out, others nearly ending the world. He’d seen the terrors and atrocities committed by humans endlessly over and over again.

It was another of those waves of understanding that came crashing over her. His whole character was more relatable now, less strange. He wasn’t some socially misadjusted man, awkward and sometimes cold and cruel. He was a man jaded, one who had closed himself off to save himself, because she could not think of anything else she might do to immunize herself from insanity. The only way would be to ignore the world, to escape into the wild, or at least escape from humans.

And she realized then that it was what Leon had done. Liam had told her that the beast had returned to the womb, or at least so he thought. That could be the only way. Liam had done something similar, hiding amongst simple people in the middle of a jungle. Perhaps he and Leon were more similar than he seemed prepared to admit.

And she understood Marcus a little better, too. Bitterness, anger, and hatred had pumped through his veins. He’d even said so himself. He didn’t want to be a shapeshifter. She saw how one could look at it as a curse, doomed to outlive your loved ones, different, and never feeling free in any human society. How could anybody feel at ease if they were in danger every time they flexed a certain muscle? How could they be denied the shift, like a person being denied their religion?

“Are you angry?” Terry asked. Her voice was soft. She intentionally soothed it. She didn’t want to come off that she was prying into his emotions. Terry knew that, if she was in his position, she would be angry. She would be furious. To be reminded so forcefully of what it meant to be the way you were, the implications that stretched forward through time, and the memories, both haunting and joyous, stretching backward through time like roots and tendrils – the human mind had never had to reconcile that before in all its history. She couldn’t help but wonder if all shapeshifters were ill-equipped to deal with the psychology of that, and as a result, were damaged goods. Traumatized, even if they didn’t know it.

Either way, she knew that she was going to stick by Liam’s side if she could. “It’s fine to be angry, Liam.”

“I am. A little.”

“Are you sad?”

“A little.”

Terry clasped his hand tightly. “You can be sad.”

He squeezed it back, running his thumb along her knuckles. “Thanks,” he said, smiling as he looked at her. “But I don’t need to be. At least, not for long. I’m fine.”

Like so many times in the few days they had known each other, a silence fell in between them. Not so much a wedge anymore, it was comfortable now, something normal. She knew that in time he would talk more, but he still had to get used to it. She leaned on his shoulder, sitting at the foot of the bed in her guest room, and together they watched the news on the television repeat itself over and over.

The same footage of Marcus being put into an ambulance, the four paramedics clearly straining with the weight of the great oaken trunk of a man, might have been amusing if they hadn’t known him, hadn’t met him. In the growing daylight, she hadn’t realized how meaty and muscular Marcus had been, and she became more impressed with Liam, having fought off something so large and so ferocious. Even in his bear form, Liam had only been a touch larger than the lithe wolf.

“So, what do we do now?” Terry looked toward the balcony, saw that the sun was beginning to rev into gear as it popped up over the horizon. She wanted to leave Hanoi. It just felt right to. And she didn’t doubt that the same thoughts were going through Liam’s head.

“Travel with me.” Liam looked at her, and she looked at him, and it was entirely new. His eyes were no longer doors rusted shut, only displaying the surface of his emotions. It was like those doors had been opened wide, and she was looking into him. It was a request, yes, but it was also a plea. Double-edged, like Liam’s entire character, she was coming to realize that everything he said, everything he did, would always have more than a single meaning, and would always link back to who he was, what he was.

This was not just a man chasing after what he wanted. This was a man who was letting her know that she was what he needed.

“Okay.” She said it without hesitation. She laughed after, a burst of relief, and also joy. Her eyes grew wet for a second, and she wiped them quickly. But she couldn’t keep the stickiness out of her voice. “Where to?”

“Let’s go south. We’ll stop where we want to until we hit Saigon. From there? Who knows?”

“It’s called Ho Chi Minh now, you know.”

“When I was last there, it was called Saigon.”

“That was-”

“During the war.”

“How did you get past military checkpoints and things like that?”

“Same way I got across the Pingxiang border crossing.” Liam looked at her, amusement in his eyes. “It was you!” she cried, pointing at him. “Oh my God, I didn’t realize that until now.”

“I don’t have a passport,” he said, shrugging. “I mean, how could I get one? I have no proof of birth or any form of identity.”

“I never thought about that.”

“Lots of little inconveniences come with being born over two hundred years ago.”

“I bet. I guess I’m glad to be my normal, mortal self.”

“Yeah,” Liam said, his voice fading.

“So, next stop?” Terry said quickly.

“There’s a city called Hue.”

“I’ve read about it.”

“I think that would be a nice place to stop. They have lots of great tailors there. You could get a dress made. I could get a new suit made.”

“Hue sounds good, and you look good in a suit.”

“You look good in a dress.”

“Thanks.” She felt a bit of warmth color her cheeks. “After that?”

“We’ll decide later.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “We’ll leave this afternoon.”