From the Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (5 page)

Served me right for not phasing regularly or eating properly
since the Day of Hell.

I jumped off the couch and walked toward the kitchen as the delicious smells wafted throughout the apartment.
The stranger (by this point I had thought of him as “the stranger” or “my host” so many times I wished he’d have had a reason to let his name slip) was pulling the steaming pie from the oven as I rounded the half-wall and he grinned at me. “Dinner’s ready, Angel Eyes.”

I howled softly and danced around again. Quick work was made of cutting the pizza into slices. He put one slice on a plate that he plucked from the dish drainer and put it on the floor in front of me. I leaned
down and took a good, long whiff—damn did it smell good—then lifted my head and tilted it to the side, looking at him as if to say, “Really? This is all I get?”

My expression must have been comical, because he laughed as he picked up another slice and bit the tip off of it. After swallowing, he said to me, “Make you a deal, pooch
—you eat all that, you get another one.”

Oh, now he’d challenged me.
Bad idea, pal
, I thought with amusement as I immediately dove for the hot slice of pizza and began to devour it. Either I was really hungry or I was meeting his challenge like a champion, because I had my first slice gone before he’d eaten half of his. I then sat on my haunches and looked up at him expectantly. Shaking his head, he reached over to the pizza on the counter and grabbed two more slices, laying them down on my plate. I ate these two more slowly, and even though I probably could have eaten another slice or two, when I was finished I simply sat back and whined. All that salt, meat, and cheese had made me thirsty. I hoped he got the point as quickly as he had when I let him know I had no interest in raw meat.

“What’s the matter now?” he asked. “Still hungry? Or are you thirsty?”

I barked when he said “thirsty,” and the stranger immediately turned and opened one of the upper cabinets. He pulled a large mixing bowl out and carried it over to the sink, filling it with water and then setting it on the floor next to my empty plate. It was room temperature instead of ice cold, as I preferred to drink water, but I was hardly in a position to complain. It soothed my throat and washed down the pizza just as well.

Now I just needed him to go to the bathroom or pass out so I could sneak out the door. Though earlier I had thought of how I wanted to get to know him, and certainly how he had come to be involved with vampires, the fact that I couldn’t be entir
ely certain if he was fully human or two-natured—and my unusual attraction to him—had disturbed me to the point that I just wanted to get out. Let it be one of the mysteries that plagued me as I tried to sleep at night; better to wonder about some guy I was likely never to see again than suffer the nightmares of the Day of Hell.

Once I had slaked my thirst, I turned and padded back over to the couch, hopped back up onto the end I had occupied earlier, and laid down, placing my head on top of my crossed forepaws. The stranger picked up the plate I’d eaten off of and put it in the sink, then scooted the bowl of water over to the side so he wouldn’t kick it. He then placed the last of the pizza on a
nother plate, grabbed a Dr. Pepper out of the fridge, and came back over to sit next to me. He warned me in a joking tone of voice that what was on his plate was his and that I wasn’t to touch. I so wanted to roll my eyes, but settled for a huff and simply ignored him.

***

I must have been more tired than I thought, either from my virtually sleepless nights or from having to expend so much energy to stay a dog, because I fell asleep soon after he turned the TV to a football game. I wasn’t much into watching the game when I’d rather be playing it, so I’d closed my eyes thinking I’d get up and sneak out when I heard him go to the bathroom.

Next time I opened them, however, the TV was off and I was alone in the room, the only light coming from the parking lot lights shining through the blinds on his windows.
Thankful that my energy hadn’t run out while I slept and caused me to automatically revert to my human form (as I knew sometimes happened to an exhausted shifter), I raised my head and looked at the clock on his cable box, noting that it was just after midnight.
Shit
, I thought sourly. None of the busses would be running at this hour and I had no money for a cab—how the hell was I going to get back to my hotel room?

Obviously I had no choice but to walk, but if I did so as a dog I chanced being picked up and taken to the pound
, which was definitely not a situation I wanted to end up in. My only other option, as I saw it, was to go in human form…and to do that, I was going to have to steal some clothes. I felt bad about having to turn thief on someone who had only been nice to me, but there was nothing else for me to do. Stepping down off the couch and stretching, I then walked down the little hall and into the bedroom. On the wall directly in front of me was a closet, to my right the bathroom, and to my left was a large area with a bed and a desk. I didn’t see a dresser so it appeared that all his clothes were in the closet.

Glancing
in the direction of the bed, I listened for a brief moment to the sound of the stranger’s steady breathing. He was sound asleep. I phased back into my human form and stepped to the closet, sliding the left-hand door open as soundlessly as I could. I grabbed an OSU hoodie off its hanger and quickly pulled it over my head. Now I needed pants. A second’s glance told me that the side I had opened was all shirts, so I slid the door closed and stepped over to the right. Opening that door, I found the matching bottom and took them off the hanger. After sliding the door closed again, I stepped into the sweatpants as quickly as I could, tightened the drawstring and knotted it so they wouldn’t fall down, then turned and walked cautiously out of the bedroom.

I paused when I reached the front door, wishing I could have thanked the man for being so nice to me. But it was impossible, I thought with a sigh, and reached up to turn the deadbolt.

“Were you really going to leave without even saying goodbye?”

I froze instantly at the sound of his voice
—I hadn’t even heard him get out of bed. My heart was now tapping a staccato rhythm against my ribcage as I thought frantically, wondering if I should reply or just leave. My manners won out and I said softly, “I’m sorry. I really have to go. Thank you for everything.”

“At least tell me what else you can turn into. Please
—you’re the only shapeshifter I’ve ever known besides myself.”

Though my head snapped up at his words, I still did not turn around.
It’s just not possible
, I thought immediately.
How could he be…?

But if he was, did that explain why he smelled so different than other shifters? Was it possible that I’d met a “true” shapeshifter?

“I’m not technically a shapeshifter,” I said slowly. “I’m werekind, specifically a weredog. Werekind can only turn into one kind of animal.”

“Oh
,” he said, and I could hear a slight note of disappointment in his voice. “I was hoping you were like me. Looks like I’m still the only one I know.”

“What do you mean?” I said, compelled to face him then. My next question died on my lips as I turned and looked into his eyes
—not that I had the breath to speak it. The moment our gazes locked I felt all the air in my lungs expel in a soft whoosh, and I took an involuntary step forward. In that moment it was as if all the pain, all the misery I’d been feeling after my ordeal…it was all bearable now…because he was here. He would hold me up when I felt like falling, he would dry every tear I cried, he would fight beside me when I was challenged, he would half my pain and double my joy.

He would complete me, because he and I were two halves of the same soul.

He
can’t
be the one
, I thought.
But…he is. How is this possible? I’m supposed to know him. He’s supposed to be a man of many talents, someone who was once my friend
.

It occurred to me that, if the man before me was truly a chimaera, then he most certainly was a man of many talents.
So the psychic had at least gotten that part right.

I took another step toward him and he took a step toward me. “Who are you?” I asked at the same time he said, “What just happened here?”

I blinked. “What…what do you mean?” I asked a second time.

“Try not to take this the wrong way, but the craziest fucking thing just happened to me,” he said. “I just looked at you and it was like… Never mind. It’s impossible.”

I chanced a smile. “Excuse me, but two seconds ago we were talking about werekind and shapeshifters. I’m not sure ‘impossible’ applies. Crazy might if a normal human heard us talking that way, but we’ve already established that neither of us is normal. Please tell me what you were going to say.”

The stranger, who because of what I’d just experienced no longer felt like a stranger to me, sighed and ran a hand through his tousled hair. I noted then that h
e was shirtless, and was clad only in a low-slung pair of pajama pants. He was lean but toned, his chest hairless, though there was a thin line of curls trailing from his navel that disappeared into the waistband of the gray cotton sleepwear. My already speeding heart kicked into overdrive at the sudden wave of heat-filled lust that washed over me.

“Fuck, there it is again!” the stranger said.

I shook my head to dispel thoughts of dragging those pants off his hips to see if he was wearing anything underneath. “Talk to me. Please. If you’re really the only person like yourself that you know, I may still be able to help you. I mean, we’re not entirely dissimilar.”

I wanted
,
needed
, to hear him say the words I suspected he had been about to say, which was that he had felt it too—the pull of the pair bond. My earlier suspicion had proved true after all: I had imprinted on this man, this stranger, and I had the feeling that he had imprinted on me. Such a thing hadn’t happened in the two-natured community in at least three hundred years, according to our history. Werekind, for some unknown reason, had stopped imprinting on each other and had begun imprinting exclusively on humans. No one could figure out why, but it struck me then that it might well have been because the last known chimaera had died around that time. The beastly community no longer had a Beast Master to ensure that his subjects found their perfect matches among each other, so the magic had been forced to search for matches elsewhere. Not that we hadn’t been imprinting on humans even then, but in those days imprinting on other werekind was more common than imprinting on a human. Now, imprinting on humans was the norm. It was the only way to ensure the continuation of the species.

He raised both hands to his hair this time, fisting them in the strands as he looked at me. “I felt…” he began. “I felt this incredible sensation come over me just a minute ago. When I looked at you, i
nto your eyes, I just felt like…like I’d been waiting for you all my life. Like you were everything I could ever want in this world, and that I would do whatever it took to ensure you were never hurt again, even if it meant sacrificing my own life. That’s crazy, right? Or did you just feel something too? What does it mean?”

“This is going to be difficult for you to accept, but
I believe you just imprinted on me,” I told him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“For werekind, imprinting means that we have found our soulmate—the one person in all the world that was made just for us,” I explained.

“But I’m not w
erekind,” he countered. “I’m a different kind of freak—sorry, shapeshifter.”

I tried not to take offense at being called a freak
—after all, hadn’t I once felt that way, when I’d first begun phasing? That I was a freak of nature? That what I was couldn’t possibly be real? If I really was the only other person with the ability to change form that he had ever met, then I could understand how he’d be confused about the difference between us.

“You’re what we call a chimaera,” I said then. “A true shapeshifter. At least, you are if you really can become more than one animal.”

He laughed without humor. “I’ve been a few dozen different things in my lifetime,” he told me. “What about this imprinting?”

“Like I said, you imprinted on me.
According to our history, chimaera imprint the same as werekind do. That feeling you got was your body physically reacting to my nearness…same as I just reacted to yours. I’ve imprinted on you too.”

His eyes widened. “But I didn’t get this feeling when you were a dog.”

“Neither did I,” I replied, refusing to admit right now that I’d still been incredibly drawn to him. Whether that was some sort of early sign of my impending imprint or a normal human reaction to his being an attractive male was debatable. For all I knew, it was both. “But then we hadn’t looked into one another’s eyes as man and woman. The old saying about the eyes being windows into the soul isn’t entirely off the mark. Hell, it was probably coined by a shapeshifter.”

He shook his head. “I
’m confused. You said you’re werekind because you can only turn into one animal, and that I’m a true shapeshifter because I can turn into anything. But you keep talking about shifters. Have you known others like me?”