Shifting Selves (18 page)

Carmichael gestured expansively, encompassing the entire table in the movement. “But if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be the big happy family we are now, would we?” Sera managed a derisive snort and began sketching in the corner. I could just make out the strong lines and exaggerated features of a caricature, and I suspected Carmichael was about to see an unflattering representation of himself. I figured it was best to interrupt her before she finished.

“Let’s make a list of the involved parties.” I looked at Mac, questioning, and he nodded in wordless agreement that the time for secrets was over. The GPS devices and exploding tire had made sure of that.

Sera stopped drawing long enough to write down the names and offer her own suggestions. “It’s not that long, is it? Mainly Will and Carmen’s families.”

“I can’t say I got any sort of teenaged criminal mastermind vibe from Dana,” Mac said.

“Or Brandon,” I agreed. “Not unless he’s discovered some abduction-by-scowling method of which the FBI is unaware.”

Carmichael cleared his throat, perhaps foolishly hoping to keep my brain more on track. “We should write them down anyways. There might be a connection we’re missing.”

“What do we know about the two women?” Johnson asked, pointing to Celeste and Eleanor’s names.

“We know they’re my family,” Mac pointedly told him. He seemed to think that was answer enough.

“If we’re including Dana, we have to at least consider them.” I tried to keep my voice soothing, though the wry look he shot me made me think I’d crossed into condescending. I gave him an apologetic grin he seemed to accept, though he wasn’t happy when Sera wrote “check out” next to their names.

“What about Carmen’s ex-husbands?” asked Mac.

Sera paused in her work on the sketch to add their names. “They were rich and seemed to make marital decisions with their little head. We should probably look into it more.” She wrote “alibi/motive?” next to their names.

Johnson flipped through his small notebook and began to recite. “Mark Avila is an environmental lobbyist in Sacramento. He attended California State University, Sacramento, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business. He met and married Carmen Hernandez eighteen years ago, divorced nine months later. Husband #2, Clay Reeves, owns a ski resort on the Nevada side. He has an MBA from Berkeley and has since moved onto his second wife, who appears to be younger and stupider than Carmen. Both men have solid alibis for the times the shifters went missing.” Sera wrinkled her nose at him and silently crossed out “alibi.”

“Is that it?” Mac sounded uncertain. It was a short list, and his family made up at least half of it.

“What about the Reno book club?” It was a stretch, but at the moment, stretches were still a better option than the near empty page currently facing us. Mac cast a questioning look my way, and I shrugged. With everything else going on, I’d forgotten to mention exactly where Sera and I had gone after we threw him off that day.

“You mean the people whose roof you climbed?” Carmichael was dubious. “What exactly are you accusing them of, beyond a desire for personal enrichment and possession of an easily accessible skylight?”

“We didn’t like them,” said Sera firmly, as if that should be enough to declare the matter settled.

The three men continued to look skeptical. They clearly were not taking my and Sera’s gut instincts seriously enough. One little misdemeanor trespassing and you lose all credibility. “The homeowner had a big gun,” I pointed out. Still nothing, since I was talking about someone in Reno. Big guns were considered a form of home decor. “One of them is related to Carmen, so if we’re looking at her exes, it’s only fair to look at the rest of the family.”

They were starting to appear convinced, so I played my trump card. “And she hit me really damn hard,” I finished.

That did the trick. Mac stared at me, and I didn’t think it was worry I saw in his eyes. It was frustration that I hadn’t told him sooner, combined with annoyance that someone as large as he should never hit a woman, no matter how much he might want to return the favor. “To be fair, I’d probably just said something tactless.” The entire table snorted in unison.

“Add the Reno Book Club to the list. Innocent women don’t often smack people in the face, even annoying trespassers,” said Carmichael. Sera did so quickly, thrilled to include those women in our list of suspects.

“What are we really looking for here?” I asked. “A connection to the shifters? What about motive? Access?”

Carmichael shook his head. “Motive’s a waste of time. There’s no telling what goes on in someone’s head. Go with facts. Evidence.”

“Like the drugs.” I was onto something. I knew it, and the others’ interested faces told me they agreed. “We need to find out where they come from, which we’ve been trying to do, but we also need to figure out who’s been buying syringes. Something is being done to them while they’re missing. Maybe more drugs? Some sort of chemical lobotomy? We need to look into who might have access to that kind of equipment.”

“Exactly,” said Johnson. “We’ll make an agent out of you yet.” He smiled, but I noticed his eyes drifting over my shoulder toward Vivian’s potted plants. He wasn’t one hundred percent invested in his own agent work these days, I thought.

“Who else?” Sera asked, after writing “drugs” in capital letters, the straight line in the letter d forming a lit joint.

We sat in silence for a long minute, before Johnson finally spoke up. I think he’d been waiting to see if the rest of us shared his knowledge before spilling it. “There’s the missing bobcat child.”

Three heads snapped immediately toward him. Carmichael was in the loop, so he merely sat back and watched our reactions. “How do you know this?” Mac’s voice wasn’t exactly accusatory, but it was definitely a few notches past suspicious. The shifters were a tight-knit group, and if the abduction was common knowledge, he’d have heard about it by now.

Johnson met his gaze, his voice calm and level. He may only have the tiniest smidgen of earth blood, but he was as calm and grounded as any earth I’d ever met. “A mother took her eight-year-old son to the local playground. He disappeared, and her panicked reaction was quite public. For once, we were able to get to the scene before the shifters had a chance to hush it up. When we asked if the child was a shifter, the mother was distressed enough that she forgot to pretend she had no idea what we were talking about.”

“Eight? That’s so young.” I forced myself not to think of the terrified young boy, wherever he might be. If the pattern held true, he’d be returned in a few days, worse for wear but alive. There was only one problem with that scenario. “It doesn’t match the pattern. The others were in their teens.”

“But the others were first-born,” Sera noted. “Was he?”

Johnson nodded. “He’s her only child.”

“So, we’re missing first-born children from the bears, mountain lions, and bobcat families,” I summarized. “All predators. No, wait. Bears are omnivores, right? And mostly peaceful?” Let’s hear it for Wikipedia, making me slightly less ignorant one day at a time.

“Yeah, but they’re still the most dangerous animals in the area. Far more so than a bobcat. Any other common threads? Other than being shifters and first-born?” Sera looked around the table, looking for any possible explanation.

Mac shook his head, as clueless as the rest of us. “I’ll talk to some of the other families tomorrow, see if they’ve lost anyone. Most of the non-predators are quieter and hard to find, and they avoid the bears and cats. Even shifters can be slaves to the circle of life. I know a few of them, though. I’ll check with the marmots and otters, see what I can find.”

“Marmots and otters?” I didn’t mean to squeak that. I really didn’t. “Those otters by the river, they were shifters?”

Mac ignored me, perhaps wisely. I might forget him in a heartbeat if I could hang out with otters on a regular basis.

“Focus, H20,” said Sera, despite the fact that she was working on a drawing that now claimed several feet of the paper. I looked closer, and realized it was us. All of us.

I stood dripping wet in a puddle of water, while Sera’s hair crackled with flames. Mac was braced like a weightlifter, the Airstream held proudly above his head. The two agents stood next to each other, a matched set of perfectly smooth suits and ties so tight they appeared to be cutting off their air. Simon leaned against a wall in human form, cool as could be, while his feline tail wrapped around Vivian’s leg. And there was Vivian, tablet firmly in hand and four intact limbs. I could just make out “Missile Launch” written on the tablet screen and hoped the agents didn’t think to question that too closely.

It was us, the way we should be, and yet we were falling apart.

“All this, it’s barely a start.” I ran both hands through my hair, tugging as I went. “It doesn’t matter how many people go missing if we have no idea what’s happening to them. We don’t know why they’re returning with their brains all messed up, why they have amnesia or are unable to shift. We have no idea why someone would ever want to do that, particularly another shifter. And we have no idea why we’re involved enough that someone would want us dead, or even who in the car was the target. All of us? Just me or Sera or Mac?”

I stopped to catch my breath, but I wasn’t done ranting. “You know what? I would really, really like to learn that answer, because I’ve had enough attempts on my and my friends’ lives for one year. I’m pretty much over that. It’s time we figure out what the hell’s going on.”

I spoke with authority, though it would have been more impressive if there were any answers to be found. Even so, we stayed up well into the night, swapping ideas, refining theories, trying to make sense of something that resolutely avoided a logical answer. Eventually, the liquor in the bottles dropped several inches, and everyone’s eyelids were drooping and heavy. I glanced at Mac, and we both offered the other a weak, rueful smile, knowing we were both too worn out and exhausted to continue our earlier plans. Tonight would not be the night, after all.

Whoever he—or she—was, this kidnapper had a whole lot to answer for.

As the small hand of the clock crept toward the two, the agents finally decided they’d run out of ideas. They left, yawning the entire time, and Sera stumbled toward her bed, leaving the two of us alone. We stood a foot apart, preparing to go to our separate beds. Right now, I could think of no lonelier place than the warm queen-sized bed awaiting me upstairs, but I was simply too tired for tonight to be our first night together. “Tomorrow?” I asked.

He wrapped his hands around my waist and pulled me easily to him, placing a single soft kiss on my lips. “Tomorrow,” he agreed, reluctantly disengaging. He moved to leave through the back door, but stopped abruptly, turning back to face me. “You know, you were right about one thing.”

“Just the one?”

He smiled, slow and wicked. “You probably should know my first name before we sleep together.” He leaned forward and placed his lips by my ear, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath, and he spoke a single word.

A moment later, he closed the back door behind him, leaving me standing alone in the room, an unabashedly dopey grin on my face.

CHAPTER 17

I awoke to a silent house the next day. Normally, Vivian’s quiet rustlings pulled me from sleep, the everyday sounds of water rumbling through pipes or dresser drawers sliding open and closed. I’d hear her getting ready for her day at school and burrow into my cozy bed, appreciating the small joy of being warm, safe, and surrounded by people I loved.

That morning felt different. I slipped on my green robe and stepped lightly down the spiral staircase. Despite everything that had happened over the last few days, I half hoped to find Simon reclining in a sunbeam or Mac drinking his morning coffee, mystery novel firmly in hand. Instead, I found a profoundly quiet house. It was the kind of silence you only find in a truly empty space. The conscious mind can’t explain it, but the subconscious picks up on the absence, the lack of even the tiniest movement or breath.

I knew I was alone, but I still padded quietly around the cabin. I opened the door to the downstairs master bedroom just a crack, to see Sera’s bed rumpled and slept-in, but no Sera in sight. I crept back upstairs and opened Vivian’s door, not sure what I expected to see. It was neat and organized, with only a little clutter on the desk from her computer odds and ends. Various Doctor Who action figures perched atop the monitors. A large spiral notebook sat open, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of a project. It all looked like Vivian might return home any moment. I backed out slowly and closed the door.

Finally, I hauled myself up the ladder to the loft, though I knew Simon wouldn’t have left the hospital. His space was as neat as Vivian’s, though that was partly because he’d never unpacked from his earlier attempt to leave. His bag still sat on the twin bed. He might be planning to stay in Tahoe, but he didn’t plan to remain with us. I barely resisted the urge to rip the bag open and hide all his clothes, thereby keeping him with us forever.

Giving up, I wandered downstairs and made some tea and buttered toast. When no one showed up by the time I’d finished eating, I took a quick shower and dressed for the day in a clean pair of jeans and a couple of layered knit tops, preparing myself for whatever weather the mountain chose to throw my way.

The air held a noticeable bite, and I wrapped my arms around myself during the short walk to Mac’s trailer. Even outside, it remained quiet. The birds found little to sing about on such a cold morning, and the various forest critters had wisely chosen to hide until the weather consistently started to act like it was May. Snow was uncommon at this time of year but not unheard of. If the clouds overhead darkened any further, I suspected a spring snowstorm was on its way. I grumbled to myself and made a mental note to switch out my Converse for boots before I headed out for the day.

I banged on Mac’s door, louder than I meant to. The silence was unnerving, and I found myself craving the comfort of another voice.

There was no answer. I knocked again, even louder this time. No one opened the door.

I glanced around the yard, checking for witnesses before I brazenly entered Mac’s house. The door swung open easily, but that wasn’t unusual. I wasn’t sure Mac ever locked it.

It was easy to see why. Mac’s trailer held nothing of value. No electronics, no high-end decorations. All his furniture was bolted to the wall. I glanced around the room, figuring it only qualified as snooping if I opened any drawers or cabinets.

His kitchen counter was clear, the sink empty, and only salt and pepper shakers sat on the dining table. His closet was open a crack, but it was also empty. There were no hangers loaded with suits, no boxes stored at the bottom. Mac’s comprehensive collection of jeans, white t-shirts and flannels didn’t exactly need to be hung up.

The bedroom was equally empty, with just a dog-eared paperback resting on the desk, an old Dashiell Hammett. It was one I’d seen him reading before. I ran my fingers lightly over the well-loved cover, this single indication of his personality. I thought of the story he’d told me, of simply leaving his family and everything he’d ever known behind to start a new life. Glancing around the trailer, it looked like he was ready to do that all over again. If there was nothing he cared about, then there was nothing it would hurt to leave.

And yet, I knew he did care. He cared about other shifters. He cared about Sera, Vivian, and Simon. I’d seen it over and over again, in his warm eyes while we hung around the breakfast bar or stayed up late playing cards, chatting and teasing each other relentlessly. And I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he cared about me. How much, and how it might manifest in the future, I had no idea, but I knew he cared. I needed to believe he couldn’t walk away from us without a backward glance.

The bed was neatly made, and I spared a brief thought for how I’d hoped to spend this morning, waking up next to him in that king-sized bed. Perhaps I’d have opened my eyes to see him smiling at me, hatching wicked plans for how we could spend our morning.

As nice as the thought was, my general unease was more powerful than the image of rolling around with Mac. Everything was just too damned quiet—unnaturally so.

I spun around sharply and headed back to the house, ignoring the biting wind that whipped around me. In the kitchen, I headed straight to my phone, planning to call everyone and demand they return home immediately, preferably with hot chocolate in hand. My panic was brought to a screeching halt when I picked up my phone and found Sera’s handwritten note stashed safely underneath.
Couldn’t sleep. Gave up and decided to chase some bad guys. Talk later
.

She might have stopped using pronouns, but at least I felt a bit less like the only survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Everyone was fine. I was overreacting. I started to dial Sera from the land line, then promptly remembered her phone would also have been ruined during our unexpected swim in the lake. I had no way to contact Sera or Mac directly.

I wandered aimlessly for a few moments, but the silence of the cabin proved too much for me. I couldn’t sit still for longer than a moment. I pulled out my journal and waited for that magic moment that always found me once I put pen to paper, the sense of clarity as the words spilled from my head onto carefully lined pages. It never came. I wrote one page, then another, and the words meant nothing. I didn’t want to just sit around. I needed to do something.

We kept our spare keys lined up on hooks near the back door, and I noticed Sera’s were missing. I grabbed the ones for the Chevy. My car might be a pile of junk, but it could definitely get me to Reno and back.

It took me well over an hour to reach Diane’s front door, a drive made immeasurably better by the absence of Sera’s music. I used the time to zone out a bit and let The Devil Makes Three’s cool vibe do its best to calm that morning’s unexplained nerves. There were, I was certain, few moods an upright bass couldn’t improve.

The first forty-five minutes of the drive were spent on the highway from Truckee to Reno. The final thirty minutes were spent driving aimlessly around the suburban development, turning from one identical cul-de-sac into the next and trying to find any characteristics that might distinguish one beige two-storied house from its neighbors. I finally recognized a tastefully painted satellite dish I’d had the opportunity to closely examine during our time on the roof. Unlike most of the other tastefully painted satellite dishes, this one was relatively close to the skylight.

When Diane opened the door, I relaxed, glad to have found the correct house. She, however, tensed visibly.

“What do you want?” She did her best to block the door completely, barring me entrance. This wasn’t starting off well.

I pasted on my most winsome smile. She did not appear convinced. I held out my hands, palms up, the universal gesture for “I come in peace.”

“I’m just here to talk. Calmly. Without guns or fists.”

“And you thought to come to the front door this time? That is civil, indeed. Where’s your fire friend?”

She knew, then. I assumed she must, despite being human. She’d been raised by a shifter family, and if she was at all like Carmen, she might know more about us than we knew about them.

The old ones felt no need to acknowledge the shifters’ existence. Any strong elemental would find little to fear from a shifter, no matter how sharp the claws or rapid their movement. We had too many ways to defend ourselves and too many ways to heal.

Because elementals did not fear shifters, they did not respect them. Without respect, there was no reason to learn about them, to understand their ways or their motives. I wondered how many times that deliberate ignorance had bitten us on our collective asses.

The shifters were in a very different position. The elementals had placed them on the bottom of the magical totem pole and proceeded to sneer at them, to deny their close relation to our own magic and behaved, over and over again, as if shifters simply didn’t matter. The shifters had good reason to know what we were, because we were the enemy. Everyone should know their enemies.

Diane might be human, but she saw my coloring and my build and knew I was a water, as she’d known Sera was a fire. I’d be a fool to underestimate her.

“It’s just me this time,” I said. “Can I come in for a few minutes? I would really like to talk to you. I’m sure we can both fake civility for a quarter of an hour.”

She studied me, carefully looking for any threat. I thought calm, watery thoughts, making sure no anger lit my eyes, hardening them as they had at our first meeting. She tilted her head, still watching me. “I know why I don’t like you. You skulk on my roof and spy on me and my family. What, exactly, have I done to you?”

“You did punch me in the face and threaten me with a firearm,” I reminded her.

“Again, can I remind you of the spying on my family bit?”

She had a point. In the future, I should really only peep through the windows of families with no shifter blood and the kind of liberal politics that generally reject gun ownership. It would make my life much easier.

Diane watched me carefully, her eyes showing more agitation than she’d admit to feeling. She wasn’t, I realized, just a version of Carmen without the shifter gene. She lacked Carmen’s calm certainty and utter confidence. She’d been raised by cats, but she wasn’t one, and I wondered how much that difference pained her. Everything she did was just a little too big, a little too showy. It felt like overcompensation, and I wondered how I’d missed that before.

“Start over?” I asked. I didn’t hold out my hand, but neither did I attempt to threaten her with a ball of water. I considered that progress.

She nodded. We seemed to know where the other stood for the moment.

She turned, expected me to follow, and led me into a room that looked like the design love child of Ernest Hemingway and a deranged taxidermist. The color scheme was brown and blood red, the furniture was leather, and the overall theme was “Animal Zombie Apocalypse.” On every wall, glassy eyes stared from the faces of surprised and quite dead deer. All herbivores, I noted. No cats or bears decorated the walls, so at least I wasn’t looking at the dismembered heads of Mac’s family.

“Are deers not shifters, then?”

“Of course they are,” Diane said. She offered no further explanation. She sat in a dark red leather chair perched behind an immense mahogany desk.

Directly above her head, a rifle perched in its wall mount. I doubted the placement was accidental. The message was clear: if we were starting over, we were doing it on her terms. I resisted the urge to gather a ball of water, but only just.

Instead, I deliberately turned my back to her and perused the room’s morbid decor, silently letting her know she wasn’t that scary. I was feeling pretty cool until she spoke. “You realize I have absolutely no idea why you’re here, right?”

It’s a lot harder to be cool when the other person only finds you perplexing and odd.

I sat in one of the chairs facing the desk. Unable to find a convincing cover story to explain my presence, I opted to go with the truth.

“You know shifter kids are going missing and then being returned, right?”

She nodded slowly, her stare piercing. She may not be able to actually turn into a cat, but looking at her, I wondered if it was really so simple as Simon had explained to me once. He’d told me they either had the ability, or they didn’t. Human, or shifter. Diane might not be able to turn into a furry, four-legged predator, but with her amber gaze so like Carmen’s leveled directly at me, I had a hard time believing she entirely lacked feline DNA.

“I’m trying to figure out who’s taking them, and I have few leads. You’re one of the few shifter families I know.”

“And?”

I shrugged, unwilling to say outright that I thought she might be involved. It must have been an articulate shrug, because she immediately understood.

“You’re suggesting that, despite all evidence that you’re an ignorant fool who only knows what my family is because Carmen chose to tell you, I’m a suspect simply because I come from a family of cats?”

When she put it like that, even I had to wonder what I was doing there. “Also, someone tried to kill me. Maybe.”

“Just one person?” Her voice conveyed mild surprise that I didn’t have several simultaneous hits out on my person, all of which carried sizable rewards.

“And here I was thinking you didn’t like me that much and would be totally okay seeing me get crushed in a near-fatal car crash. How silly of me.”

Diane leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her lean stomach.

“Did your mommy tell you how special you were? Did she say you were beautiful and everyone loved you and you could do anything you wanted to do? She must have, because I can’t imagine why else you’d be so convinced it was all about you.”

My mother had, in fact, told me that I should never really try to do much of anything, and should spend most of my life relaxing on the family island with her and my aunts. However, I doubted admitting to a life as a pampered trust fund baby would earn me any points with Diane.

I gritted my teeth and attempted to count to five. I made it to three. “I’m not accusing you. I’m trying to explain why I’m looking for answers any way I can get them. As for you, I still don’t know what you would have done with that gun if Carmen hadn’t pulled you off. So perhaps I have good reason to think you aren’t one of the good guys.”