Geir strained his eyes and ears trying to figure out what was going on. His specialized senses were made for detecting movement in the water, and completely useless on land. He still heard yells and children’s cries, growls of sharp-toothed mammals and the calls of predatory birds. Gunshots rang out.
This didn’t seem to be going well. He’d imagined that with four vans, this would be overkill. How many people could be guarding three small children?
This wasn’t his fight, though. Someone else would rescue May. His only goal was protecting Declan.
He turned to see Declan, now in the front seat of the van, and looking nervous.
Maybe he should go stand by the van where he could be closer.
He heard rapid footsteps coming closer as someone crashed blindly through the trees. A tall, skinny man dressed in a white lab coat stepped into the road and looked quickly to the left and right.
Geir kept his position. The man was evil, certainly, but someone else would take care of him. There were dozens of trained warriors available.
The man darted across the road, his run made awkward by something large and bulky in his hand. Geir squinted to make it out in the gloom and finally figured it out when he hit a patch of moonlight just before entering the trees on the other side.
He was holding a cage, and there was a small animal inside it. The animal let out a series of high-pitched squeaks, sounding frantic and afraid. It didn’t sound like May, though.
He strained to make out anything further, but the man was safely behind the first row of trees and any noises he made were lost in the general din. No one was going after him.
Geir considered the animal in the cage. It was bigger than May, he thought. She’d been tiny. Hardly a handful. This one was perhaps the length of his arm.
It wasn’t his battle. Whether that small animal lived or died, caged or free, there were millions of other lives. Millions of other times. Its life was just one among many in the stream of time.
He looked back at Declan, his pale skin barely visible in the safety of the van. Declan would value this small life. He would want Geir to save it.
That decided him. Geir was faster and stronger than the scientist. He would take him down, rescue the small life, and bring it back to Declan before he even realized he was gone. Then Declan would be pleased with him.
He sprinted into the forest, tentacles sprouting from the base of his spine without a thought. With them out, new senses became available to him. The scent and taste of the night. Vibrations as something disturbed the air. The physical shape of the space around him filled in every direction.
He heard crashing to his left and turned that way, letting vibrations in the air automatically guide him around trees and other barriers. He ran fast, ignoring the pain when he stepped on sharp rocks or broke twigs.
The man was in front of him now. He looked behind him, saw Geir, and tried to evade him through the trees. He stumbled and fell, then scrambled back up, the cage jerking and thudding with every movement.
Geir captured him from behind, wrapping his muscular arms around the scientist’s chest and one tentacle around his neck. With the other tentacle, he squeezed his wrist and slithered under his fingers. The cage dropped to the forest floor.
“Please,” the man gargled. “Let me go.”
Geir grunted, squeezing his neck tighter.
“I wasn’t hurting it,” the man gasped out. “They’re not human anyway. We followed all of the regulations for cruelty to ani—”
Geir tightened his tentacle suddenly. The man raised his forearms frantically but couldn’t reach his neck while Geir had him pinned.
He struggled more, kicking and squirming. Geir held him tighter.
“They’re human,” he finally said into the night, as the body went limp in his arms. He could still feel a pulse of pressure fighting to break through his constraint on the large artery in the scientist’s neck.
He waited long minutes until the pressure stopped. The scientist wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone again, and he felt an angry satisfaction. It was what he deserved.
The child who had been imprisoned, however, hadn’t deserved any of this.
He dropped him to the ground, then knelt by the cage and the animal inside scampered back. He saw fur in patches of black and white. A raccoon? An opossum?
“Shhhhh…” he murmured. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
The animal whimpered.
He couldn’t see the cage in the dark, so he felt around it with his tentacles. “It’s alright,” he soothed the animal. “I’m just trying to get you out. This is just me. I’m a shifter, too.” He found the lock on the door, a flat panel with a tiny hole for a key. He tried to tease the tendril of one tentacle inside, but this wasn’t one of the simple, fat locks from a century ago, and he had no idea how to manipulate all the tumblers.
“I can carry your cage back to the truck where there are tools to cut you out, or I can try to break it open. If I try to break it, I might hurt you.”
The animal ran around in a frantic circle, bashing its head against the bars, and Geir could now see its long, furless tail. An opossum. The child’s mind in that animal body had a strong opinion, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Calm down. Um… nod your head when I say what you want, OK?”
The opossum immediately stilled and nodded.
“Back to the van?”
An emphatic no.
“Break the cage open here?”
Yes. The little body shook with conviction.
The cage was built of overlapping links, a bit like chicken wire in structure but much stronger in material. Geir fit his larger fingers into the circles and pulled. He was warping the material, but not making any particular hole bigger. He couldn’t just tear it apart.
He tried again, teasing the tips two fingers into one hole and just trying to enlarge it. He increased the diameter from about one inch to two, but that wouldn’t be enough.
The opossum slowly nodded at him, its body language showing… trust? Confidence?
“I’m going to need to cut you out.” He bent to pick up the cage, but the opossum started running frantically around it again.
He could only think of one solution. “Um, I’m going to do something to get you out. Don’t be scared, though. It’s just me.” He felt stupid as soon as he said it. Of course it was just him. But he wasn’t quite sure how to explain.
He could do a half-shift, but he’d only used it in battle before. His appearance was so terrifying that enemies had run at the sight. Others went into a frenzy, trying to kill the monstrosity and leaving themselves open to other attacks. It wasn’t anything he would do in front of a child.
The opossum calmed and nodded again. Hopefully he wouldn’t traumatize it for life. Or not worse than it had already been traumatized.
Now he was feeling angry. Whatever this poor child had gone through that made his own monstrous appearance the better choice should never have happened.
Fueled by that rage, he shifted. His vision went hazy, but the subtle changes in lightness and shadow popped. His skin went lax and wobbly and his bones scrunched and elongated as his teeth melted into hard, black chitin, thrusting out of the place where his mouth had been.
Unlike his other full and partial shifts, this one hurt.
He clenched his hands at his side, his tentacles automatically pulling back as he absorbed the pain.