A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) (2 page)

And when everything was sorted, relief coursed through her. She knew she wanted to do this, but she didn’t think she’d have the guts to actually see it through. Now she had her one-way ticket booked. Now she had her train tickets booked. Now she had paid for it all. The simple truth was that now she just had to get on with it. The sense of direction calmed her turbulent doubts, and she smiled at the young man.

“Thank you for your help, Tom.”

“It’s no problem at-” The sound of the door to the back office opening cut him short, and out walked an older woman, hair graying, and a severe face dotted with freckles. She was obviously the manager.

“Tom, you were supposed to buzz back here if someone came in.”

“It’s alright, Mrs. Peterson, everything is sorted.”

“Everything is sorted?” the woman repeated. She was quite annoyed, and Terry figured that it was probably time to step in.

“Everything is fine,” she said, looking between them. “Everything is actually sorted.” She nodded at the woman.

The manager stopped her warpath-like advance on Tom, and forced a strained smile at Terry. “Are you sure you don’t want to go over everything with me?”

“Quite sure,” Terry replied. She wasn’t going to give herself the chance to cancel it all. “Thank you again, Tom. You did wonderfully.” She looked at him as she turned, put on her coat, picked up her umbrella, and opened the glass door.

Beneath the howl of the wind, and the drum of the rain, she could hear the manager scolding the young boy. The last thing she heard before the door swung shut behind her was: “You’re just an intern!”

*

Liam felt a stab of revulsion for the umpteenth time as he looked at the grotesque form of Leon before him. The thing, Leon, existed in mid-shift, and only barely resembled something human. And no matter how often he saw him, Liam could never get used to the sight. At nearly seven feet tall, Leon looked like a monster straight out of fiction. His muscular, vast, and naked body was long, almost stretched, like he was the walking reflection of a carnival funny mirror. His stringy, vein-riddled arms ended in large and padded palms with dagger-length claw-tipped fingers. Out of his narrow waist jutted a wide hipbone, and extended two muscular thighs, oval in shape, and beneath perpetually-bent knees were rhomboid lower legs with an odd curve just before the ankles, which was broken-bone body horror enough to make anyone gag. Long, matted and shaggy gray hair growing down the back of his entire body gave off the impression that he was wearing some kind of camouflage suit, or that he was a vagrant who had chanced upon a designer fur coat. The half-snout jutting out in front of diminutive yellow eyes, high pointed ears which each had chunks of missing cartilage, was the visage of a wolf.

Unmistakable, but grotesque.

“Don’t look so disgusted,” the creature said with a slight lisp. His voice was deep and hissy, more of a snarl than proper enunciation, and Liam had to struggle to make sense of the words. He continued to be surprised that the half-wolf, half-man was able to form the sound of words at all, especially the common, everyday clusters of consonants. It seemed highly unlikely that that Leon’s tongue could work properly like a human’s, especially not with the inch-long shards of yellow killing enamel that protruded from his gums.

The hot and sticky jungle humidity seemed to hang thicker than usual, as though the air itself was congealing. “You look disgusting,” Liam responded. “So I look disgusted.”

“You think so?” the beast asked him. “I think I look quite fantastic, myself.” He strutted toward Liam before executing a playful pirouette. For such a large and hulking thing, the creature had surprising agility. Even grace, Liam had to admit.

“Did you really forget how to change?” he asked. His narrow eyes grew narrower. “Or are you just doing this for my benefit?”

“Your benefit?” Leon said, shaking his wolf-head. “
You
spoke to Keegan yourself, did you not?”

“I did.” Liam had met the angel-faced boy in Brunei, had seen him party it up in one of the city’s most happening bars. Keegan had told him that night, through a fog of blacklight-stained cigarette smoke, above the din of thumping dubstep, and amongst the throng of drunk and high half-naked men, that in the jungle, wandering aimlessly up and down the border, there lived a monstrous thing, half a man and half an animal. The drunken rambling had, of course, been of great interest to Liam. He had set off the very next morning, ignoring the warnings of a stubborn typhoon approaching.

“And didn’t he warn you of my appearance?”

“He did.” Liam had no problem remembering, all those years ago, that he hadn’t believed Keegan.

“He was my lover.”

“I already suspected that, from the way he spoke of you.”

“Oh?” Leon’s was quite interested. “And what did he have to say about me?”

“That you were worse on the inside.”

“Ha!”

“I saw him in a bar. He was drunk.”

“Yes? And what were
you
doing in there?”

“Research.”

“Research?” Leon repeated, before a look of understanding broke across his face. “You were asking about someone, though I suspect it was not me. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Liam admitted. He was surprised that even though Leon had a half-snout, and a wolf’s eyes and ears, he was still somehow capable of emoting, and not just the basics, either. There was a remarkable degree of facial expression.

The beast spoke after a pause. “It is the truth. I have been like this for longer than you know. Trust me, dear Liam. I am not putting on
anything
for you.” Leon’s eyes twinkled.

“Right.”

“But I am a little saddened to say that it is not the same, being like this. In some ways, it’s better. But in many ways, it is also not. Such is the way of life, am I right, boy?” He didn’t wait for Liam to respond. “But I suppose you could say there are some regrets, yes.”

“So if you could, you would remember the shift?”

“I have been this way for longer than you can fathom,” Leon said. “The people here tell legends about me. They carve my grandness into the bark of trees, as warning signs that I’d been sighted, maybe a glimpse through leaves and vines, maybe a blur in the blackness of night.”

“Yeah?” Liam murmured, nodding at the boastful beast. He remained unimpressed, however, and even felt a pang of pity. The man had forgotten how to
shift
. Liam believed that something like that must have been due to a terrible trauma. It simply didn’t seem possible unless a part of Leon’s brain or psyche had been damaged, and from the way he spoke of time frames, it might be something quite permanent.

“I’m a celebrity around here,” Leon continued, his voice like two knife sharpeners grinding against each other. “I’m the thing that goes bump in the night.”

Liam kept his eyes level with the beast. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

“So, no, I wouldn’t want to be able to shift again. Being a man or a wolf? It doesn’t appeal to me. Nobody would talk about me!” He laughed, but it sounded like more of a series of rapid exhales and wheezes. “I do miss it, though. I miss the freedom sometimes. I definitely miss the smells, and all the information they held. I miss being unable to process it all. And yes, I miss the prowl, the hunt, the kill. But that is all lost to me now.” The wolf-man sighed. “Forgotten to time.”

“It’s not something you simply forget,” Liam pressed. He had interrogated the half-wolf before, and many times at that, but the creature’s story always remained the same. “That’s like forgetting how to ball your fists, or how to jump.”

“How would
you
know?” Leon asked, extending a yellow-brown claw toward him. The finger trembled. “Have
you
forgotten?”

“No,” Liam said. “That’s how I know.”

“That’s how you
don’t
know, boy,” Leon growled. He blew out air, turned and walked away. Though his back was muscular, it curved, and Liam was surer than ever of his trauma theory. The wolf-man was obviously carrying an invisible weight. The foliage crunched beneath Leon’s feet, and Liam was once again amazed at the silence in the rainforest. There was not the chirp of an insect, the call of a bird, the croak of a toad, or the cackle of a monkey.

“How are you even still alive?” Liam asked. He struggled to imagine what Leon looked like on the inside. “How is everything still connected properly?”

“You think anything ever disconnects?” Leon asked. The wolf-head shook, and from his snout he choked out a raspy laugh.

“How old are you, anyway?”

“I’ve also forgotten that. I attribute my longevity, however, to this.” Leon lifted up his arms, gesturing at the lifeless rainforest around them. “She gives us life, Liam. She restores; rejuvenates. I am stronger than I look, and I could kill you in a heartbeat.”

Liam didn’t know what to make of the threat, and so he said nothing.

“Want to test me?”

“No,” Liam said, a hard look in his eyes. He sensed a wildness in Leon, something unhinged. “Why would I want to do that?”

“For fun?” Leon mused with a chuckle.

“You are a strange man, Leon.”

“It’s been a long time since I was last a man, Liam, as you can plainly see. And I mean that in more ways than one.”

Liam wasn’t sure what he meant, and so he studied the beast for a while. He couldn’t place why Leon made him uneasy, outside of his physical appearance, trapped mid-shift. It wasn’t just that. There was something more to it. Liam’s instincts told him that Leon was up to something, though whether or not it was simply the pointless plans of a lunatic, or something else, he wasn’t sure.

“I’m leaving,” Liam said. “I’m leaving Borneo.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been hearing talk of someone looking for me.”

“Marcus. That’s why you were in the bar.”

“Yes. I asked Keegan, too, but he said he hadn’t heard anything.”

“That was years ago,” Leon said, sounding bored. “Marcus could have come between then and now.”

“He probably did. I only just heard from one of the fishermen yesterday.”

“Ah,” Leon murmured with a slow nod. He turned back to face Liam, framed by two trees. He looked up toward the forest canopy, and Liam followed his gaze, seeing nothing but small patches of blue sky through the dark green thicket. “That news is old. It takes a long time for rumors to reach this deep into the jungle.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I’ve got to leave. He might be close already.”

“But you are safe in here,” Leon said. He touched a tree next to him, ran his clawed fingers up and down its trunk, peeling off light brown shavings of bark with ease. “He’ll never find you in here. He lost your scent at the edge of the rainforest, most likely. Many trails end in this jungle”

“I expect so.”

“So you have nothing to worry about, then.”

“He’ll stick around, try to find me. So I’m leaving. I don’t want to see him, and I don’t want to fight him.” Liam wasn’t sure why the beast was trying to convince him to stay. But almost immediately Leon proved that little theory wrong.

“Do what you must,” Leon said, waving a dismissive hand at him. “I don’t care.”

“Really?” Liam asked. “Sounds about right.”

“Go,” the wolf-man growled. “I am fine here with Her.”

Liam shook his head.
Her
was Mother Nature for Leon. He often blabbered about having ‘returned to the womb’. Senility had gotten the better of him.

“Watch yourself,” Liam said. “Marcus is dangerous.” He turned, beginning to leave. He’d go to the river, get a ride with one of the fisherman to the nearest town where he’d pay for passage on a barge going to Kuching, the coastal capital of Sarawak.

“Where are you going?” Leon asked him.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why?”

“If Marcus finds you-” Leon erupted into laughter, cutting Liam off. “You don’t know him like I do,” Liam said, his voice steady but with the hard edge of anger. “You don’t know what he did to me.”

“Don’t know?” Leon bellowed. “I know
everything
! Do you think that I never knew? Did you think you were hiding it from me these past years?” The wolf-man spat, and then growled. “And I
know
Marcus. Don’t worry about me. If Marcus comes to me, and he won’t, he’ll have a safe place to stay.”

“He’ll kill you,” Liam said. “You’re a blathering idiot if you don’t see that. If you know what he did to me like you say, then you’ll know he won’t stop until you, I, and the rest of our kind are dead.”

“He won’t kill me. He can’t.”

Liam shook his head in disbelief. “How can you possibly know that?”

“I should rephrase,” the beast growled. He chuckled then, but descended once again into a fit of gravelly coughs. “He won’t kill me yet.”

“Goodbye, Leon.” Liam left. He didn’t want to hear any more of the contradicting crap that came out of Leon’s mouth. As he walked away, brushing to the side bushes that stroked him, he quieted the turbulence of his emotions. Talking about Marcus had awoken old and unwanted memories he thought he had purged a lifetime ago. He wondered if what Leon the half-man, half-wolf had said was true. Why wouldn’t Marcus kill him if he found him? That didn’t make any sense.

But it didn’t matter anymore. The breadcrumbs would end in the jungle, and with Marcus off his trail, he’d leave. He already had a place in mind. It would be tricky to get there, and he’d have to stow away on a trawler to get across the sea border, but once he got to Hong Kong, he’d have no trouble moving across the land into southern China. From there, it would only be a couple of train trips, and then he’d be in Vietnam.

Liam smiled as he left the crazy old thing behind him. He figured he would stay in Vietnam for a while. Possibly for longer than he’d stayed in Borneo. He’d been before, and had loved it back then. He wondered, idly, if Sammy was still around. It had been a long time, but there was a chance that he might be.

And that was enough.