Shifter (11 page)

“I mean why would you want to be seen with me? Why do that to yourself?”

“Being seen in public with a beautiful woman is every man’s dream.”

“I know. So, again, I ask, why would you want to be seen with me?”

I can see the irritation in his eyes, and I know I’ve pushed him away with my self-deprecation, but when he speaks, his words are calm and honest. This I’m thankful for because I know I’m being ridiculously annoying, but this type of thing doesn’t happen to me, and I don’t trust that he is being honest with me.

“Because I think you’re beautiful,” he says, lightly touching my arm. “And I’ll have words with any man who says otherwise.” He says this with so much anger in his voice that it almost frightens me.

Giving him a quizzical look that says I don’t buy what he is saying, I say, “Okay.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes, I will go out with you. There’s a nice Italian place on Main St. The place has a casual atmosphere and great food. We can go there,” I say and pull my keys from my pocket.

“Wonderful. I love Italian.”

He steps closer to me. For a second I think he is going to kiss me. I wonder if I’ll let him. I wonder if I’ll stop it there. But he doesn’t, and I sigh with relief and regret. Instead, he brushes his fingers across my cheek and sweeps back another strand of hair. “I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow night.”

I can’t breathe. He is serious about this. “Tomorrow night,” I say and open the door.

I watch as he heads back down the street to where he has parked his car.

Chapter 10

~~~Dimitri~~~

“Yeah, I heard it all,” I say as I look up into her glowing face with bit of jealousy. She is a good woman, and my brother deserves a good woman, but why does he get to have this woman.

From the moment they walked out the door to the moment I heard them walking back up the steps, I have paced the living room floor waiting, wondering what could be taking them so long. My heart had warmed at the thought of her caring enough about me to help my brother search for me. In truth, I know that I’m not why she is helping him. She doesn’t know me from Adam. Devan is the one she is worried about. Devan is the one she is helping, and Devan is the one taking her out to dinner tomorrow night. If he thinks he is bringing her here for sex afterwards, he is sadly mistaken.

Pouting, I follow her throughout the house as she finishes picking up and gets ready to shower. The smile she wears angers me. I will kill him if he does anything to hurt her.

“Dimitri,” she yells. I jump at the sound of her voice. The annoyance in it sounds as if she has heard every word that has been running through my head. Without thinking, I follow the sound of her voice into the bathroom where I freeze. My eyes lock on the sight of her.

She is peeking through the shower curtain. Her head, neck, part of a breast, and her left arm is showing. The rest of her is shadowed behind the white curtain. Water has soaked her hair and caused it to stick to her face. The water is also running down her exposed arm and partially bared breast. I can’t move. This is as close as I have ever come to seeing her naked. What part of her body I can’t see clearly through the curtain is still outlined in shadow and my imagination is recreating the image and letting me see her fully naked.

“Why is one of your toys in my drain?” she asks, breaking me from the mental images swirling in my head. God, I need to get out of this body and into hers. If only my powers were working properly. I mentally curse, but my cat body doesn’t move.

I can’t shift yet, I tried right after they left. If I could though, I’d shift into a man and take her while she is all confused by the sight of her cat changing into a human. I do attempt to slip into her head, but all I get from her are feelings of frustration, no actual words or thoughts. This new breakthrough with my powers gives me some hope. I’m finding that as the days pass it is easier getting into people’s heads and hearing their thoughts. Every once in a while, I can hear the things people are thinking at me without having to go in their heads for the information, but not often. Moreover, it isn’t as if that many people are thinking that much at me.

Her sister has mentally warned me not to jump up on her. She isn’t a cat fan, but she doesn’t want to upset her children or Abby by saying anything aloud. I’m also able to catch bits and pieces of Abby’s emotions and the occasional hint of a word when she wants me to be more affectionate or wants me to play with Sebastian. I have no problems licking her face or nuzzling her hand, but I’m not about to
play
with another animal. I don’t
play
with my brothers when I’m in wolf form or any of the other forms I take, and I’m not about to
play
with a damned house cat.

While lost in my thoughts I feel the wind of the toy as it flies by my head. “I don’t mind you playing in the tub, but please don’t leave your toys in here,” she says and pulls the curtain closed.

“But I didn’t.” Why am I even bothering to argue? I glare at her as she goes back to washing herself. I try to turn away, but I can’t. The sight of her slowly running that soapy washcloth over her body has me mesmerized. I watch as she washes her breast, her stomach, her… Then she moans very, very softly, and I see and hear the cloth hit the porcelain tub. One hand stays between her legs while the other goes to her breast. I didn’t see this coming. How quickly did she forget I was here?

Without meaning to, I take a few steps toward the tub. The white curtain is nearly see-through, and the further I walk into the room the more light shines through it, and I can almost see exactly what she is doing. My mind refuses to think about whom it is she is daydreaming about while she does this. I only register that she is doing it out in the open. I knew she did it. I can hear the muffled sounds of her pleasure through her bedroom door at night. However, she always did it in her bed. Never outside of her room. And never in my presence.

She moans again. Louder this time, and I can see her body shuttering. She is about to… Then pain rips through me. My legs go out from underneath me, and my body begins to shutter. Through the pain I think,
I’m about to shift
. Shifting hasn’t hurt this bad since I first started doing it. Even when my body has forced itself to shift out of anger or fear, it didn’t hurt this bad.

“Oh, my God,” I hear her scream, but I can’t look up at her. She rushes to me. My mind barely registering her nakedness. The pain coursing through me is beyond anything I have ever felt, but I’m not shifting. I feel like I’m shifting, but I’m not. My body stays in this beginning stage. My bones feel as if they are splintering, healing, then splintering again. My muscles are tearing, stretching, ripping, cramping. My insides keep shifting and re-shifting from animal to human. I’m in so much pain that I feel myself trying to lose consciousness. Just as everything is about to go dark, something else breaks, something else reforms, something else sends flames through one part of my body while ice runs through a different part. I can’t keep doing this. I will myself to pass out, to die even, but I can’t. The agony keeps forcing me awake.

“Smith County Animal Hospital and Shelter, this is Jody, how may I help you?” the voice on the end of her cell phone says. I’ve been slipping in and out of consciousness for a minute or more, but it appears that once she realized there was nothing she could do for me, she threw a towel around herself and rushed to her bedroom to change clothes and find her cell.

“Jody, this is Abby Sinclair.” Abby’s voice is loud and panicky.

“Hi, Abby, what can I do for you?”

“Is Dr. Smith still there?”

“She is. What’s wrong?” the other woman asks, suddenly aware of the terror in Abby’s words.

“It’s Dimitri. He’s having a seizure or something. Can I bring him in?”

“Yes. We’ll wait on you.”

In less than five minutes, she has finished dressing and is loading me into the car. In another five, we are at the hospital. Dr. Smith and Jody are waiting at the door for me.

“When did it start?” Dr. Smith asks as they rush us into the hospital area of the shelter.

“Fifteen minutes ago maybe. I was in the shower, so maybe longer. When I pulled the curtains back to get out, he was lying in the middle of the floor looking like that,” she says, pointing down at my convulsing body.

“Okay, have a seat in the waiting area, and we will have a look at him.”

She sits, and Jody goes over to ask Abby more questions. They are trying to get a clear picture of what happened, but since she wasn’t watching me when this started, she doesn’t have much to give them. Jody asks what kinds of foods I eat, what kind of water I drink, what kinds of cleaning supplies she uses. She asks if Abby has changed anything in my diet, in my routine, in the chemicals she uses around the house. The room they wheel me into is right next to the waiting area. With my superhuman hearing, I try to focus on their conversation and not on what is going on with me.

“Did I do this to him?” Abby asks. I can tell that she is trying her best to hold back tears.

“No, I’m pretty sure you didn’t, especially not on purpose, but at this stage we can’t rule anything out. He could be having an allergic reaction to something or it could be something else altogether. This could be something that has lain dormant in him since birth and is just now showing itself. These questions are simply procedure.”

“Dimitri. Dimitri. Can you hear me?” Dr. Smith asks, pulling me away from Abby and Jody’s conversation.

I can hear her, but I have no way of communicating with her. I try to meow in acknowledgement, but only a slight whimper escapes my lips. I hurt everywhere.

“You’re trying to shift, aren’t you?” she asks. I don’t know how she knows what is happening to me. It must be an angel thing. “I can’t give you anything for it except some pain meds and some muscle relaxers, but I guess you know that.”

I don’t meow in acknowledgment.

Hours pass. Or what feels like hours. I keep expecting my body to shift but it never does. I managed to break into Dr. Smith’s mind a time or two to try to tell her what is going on but my body hurts so bad that I lose focus and slip right out again.

The medicine helps to dull the pain but not alleviate it. All I can do is lie on the hard metal bed and convulse.

-----

“Dr. Smith, is he all right,” Abby asks, jumping up from her seat when she sees the doctor wheeling me back into the hall sometime later.

“He’s fine. The seizures have stopped, but we can’t find a reason for them. I’ve run a number of different tests and explored a few theories, but none of them seem to be his problem. I’ve drawn some blood and other samples to run more tests, but I have a feeling nothing is going to come from those either. Whatever it is that caused the seizure seems to be gone now.”

“What do I do?”

“There is nothing you can do besides watch him. If he does it again, bring him back.

“Does that mean I can take him home now?”

“You can. Jody is going to him a sedative to help him rest. We gave him some pain meds, so he might be a little out of it for a while. If he sleeps through the night and most of tomorrow don’t worry about it. Also, I noticed he isn’t wearing a collar.”

“No, he and Sebastian are house cats. Neither one has been out of the house except to come here. I didn’t think they needed one.”

“Just in case, I’m going to give you two to put on them. I’ll have Jody go ahead and put one on Dimitri while he is out. I advise you to leave them on them permanently or at the very least put them on them whenever you leave the house with them or are going to have a lot of company coming in out of the house, as a precaution.”

“Thank you,” Abby replies. The confused look on her face says she gives this reply because she doesn’t know what else to say. The collar is a precaution, the doctor says. A precaution for what? In case we get out, I guess. With Mave roaming the neighborhood, I guess it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have collars on us, especially if Dr. Smith has put some kind of Angel magic on them that will let her trace the collar.

When we get home, Abby puts my half-conscious body in her bed. I have never slept in her bed for any real length of time. It isn’t that I don’t want to sleep in her bed, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. Her bed is the most comfortable place in the house for me to sleep this off. Apparently she is too scared to leave me while I am like this, so she pops in the first season of
Pretty Little Liars
(I have never seen that show), and crawls into bed with me.

------

My head is killing me. Despite this, I am ecstatic. Granted, I hadn’t actually shifted the day before, but my body had tried. I am anticipating Devan’s next arrival as much as Abby is. If my powers are coming back with such force, then I might be able to tell Devan who I am. I have tried to communicate with Abby, but it hasn’t worked. That isn’t saying anything. She is human. We aren’t able to penetrate human minds as easily as we are the minds of other supernatural beings.

Abby’s house has never been as full of people as it has been today. Her sister and at least three of her friends have been here all day. They have taken Abby out to get nearly her entire body waxed and to get her hair cut and styled. They have even taken her out to get a new outfit. At this moment, all of the women are in her bedroom putting makeup on her and accessorizing her outfit. Her sister is even taking pictures.