The Shape of Desire by Sharon Shinn
“Babler.”
“Live?” When I nod she says, “Did it just happen?”
I nod again. “They’re going to chase it down. The animal. In their news helicopter.”
“Jesus H. Fucking Roosevelt Christ.”
She’s dropped my arm, but now I clutch at hers. “Ellen—if it’s William—and Dante is there, trying to find him, trying to help him—I just don’t know, I don’t know, what if he gets shot, what if both of them get shot?”
She pats my arm. “I don’t know, either. Do you want to watch or do you want to turn it off?”
“I don’t want to watch,” I whisper, “but I have to.”
She nods and then pushes me toward the couch. We both sit, but it hardly matters. I am as stiff and upright as a telephone pole, my shoulders hunched so tightly that my muscles ache, my hands grasping each other so remorselessly that my knuckles burn.
When the commercials finally give way back to news programming, we are instantly taken to a wavering, noisy view of Babler State Park as seen from the Channel 5 helicopter. We hear Brody Westerbrook’s voice, but we no longer see his face. The camera is trained on the ground, where packs of dogs and men and horses make irregular black lines across the tired tan and russet autumn landscape.
Brody shouts over the pumping of the rotary blades. “For those who are just joining us, we’re above Babler State Park, following police and other officials as they search for an animal they believe has carried out several fatal attacks in the St. Louis area over the past few weeks. We’re currently above the southeastern portion of the park, heading west and slightly north, as searchers with trained dogs track the route of the animal—”
His voice continues, but it’s hard to hear him over the grinding of the motor. Anyway, I am too focused on the images on the television to have patience for words. Autumn has stripped every tree in the park down to its skeletal frame, but even so, the landscape is a dense, cluttered brown of tree trunks and undergrowth. The terrain looks difficult for anyone on foot to navigate, and the interlaced weave of branches ensures that watchers from overhead get only a partial view. Even so, my eyes flick from corner to corner of the screen, looking for some hunched, desperate creature running for its life, too winded or too terrified to summon the energy to change back into its human shape. You would think I would feel some sympathy for the mauled jogger, the unfortunate dead; you would think I would want the cops and the rangers to find the rogue animal and put it down. But part of me is hoping William escapes the net, saves himself—and all of me is afire with fear for Dante, who might forget to flee if his brother gets captured, who might fall into the trap as well.
“There it is,” Ellen says suddenly, jabbing her finger toward the screen.
Brody sees it a second later, a midsize, brownish shape weaving through the jumbled landscape of bushes and bare trees. It is running in a strange fashion, an awkward lope, as if it sometimes falls to all fours and sometimes rises to two feet, and it constantly swivels its head back as if trying to gauge the closeness of the pursuit.
Brody is speaking so fast—or my brain is so frozen—that I can’t really comprehend his words until he says, “Roy, let’s get a closer look,” and the camera zooms in on the fleeing animal.
“What the hell is that?” Ellen demands.
Indeed, it’s hard to tell. The creature might be about the height of a small man, if it would stand upright, but it continues its mad forward scrabble in a half-bent posture. It appears to be covered with long, dingy fur the color of baked mud. Its paws are the size of Ellen’s paper plates, but its nose—which we see as it swings its head back one more time—is long and pointed, like a dog’s. It looks like a Halloween outfit put together by someone grabbing mismatched parts from a costume shop. Now I can understand why someone would say it looked like a bear and someone else would think it looked like a wolf.
Brody has echoed Ellen’s question. “I can’t definitively identify what kind of animal we’re looking at,” he’s shouting into his microphone. “It doesn’t correspond to any of the breeds I’m familiar with—”
The canine trackers have either broken free of their handlers or been released, because suddenly there are eight or ten dogs circling the strange, terrible creature, baying and darting forward to nip at its heels. It draws itself taller and fights back, swiping at its attackers with those big, clumsy paws. Except those paws seem smaller now, more articulated; the fur is receding from the claws and knuckles.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ellen breathes.
“He’s changing,” I whisper. “He’s becoming human.”
“Well, this is the wrong-ass time to be doing that!” she exclaims. “He needs to turn back into an animal and fight if he’s gonna get out of this!”
Trust Ellen to always take the side of the underdog.
Brody has just now noticed the transformation occurring in his quarry. “Mike, can you see this back in the studio?” he asks, his tone incredulous. “It almost looks—from here it seems like the animal is changing shapes—turning from one thing into another. It’s—it looks more human than it did a few minutes ago.”
Human enough, at this point, to snatch up a fallen stick and swing it hard at the nearest dog, connecting with its ribs and sending it yelping to the ground. The other dogs rush forward, but they seem confused, uncertain. I’m guessing that the transmogrification under way is changing the scent of their prey, and they’re not sure this is what they’re supposed to be tracking. At any rate, they fall back, and the creature staggers forward, falls to its knees, gets up again, and begins an ungainly run. It’s clear he’s winded, maybe wounded, very close to the end of his resources.
But determined to be taken dead, if at all.
“It’s on the move again!” Brody calls out, as if we can’t see that for ourselves, as if the searchers might not have noticed. Briefly, the camera pulls back to give us the whole scene again, and I hear myself utter a cry of alarm. The pursuers are closing in; the nearest one can’t be more than thirty yards away. At least two have raised their weapons, and I can’t tell if they’re carrying tranq guns or rifles. Two shots are fired simultaneously, a third one immediately after. I shout in pain as if the projectiles have landed in my body.
The creature jerks, stumbles, jerks, falls, tries to rise, then collapses in a strange twitching frenzy of skin and fur. “Closer! Closer!” I hear Brody urge, and the camera swoops in on the spasming body. Its hands—definitely hands now—claw at the air; its mouth works as if it is starving for oxygen. The shape of its face is becoming clearer as the brushy hair recedes, but it is still impossible to tell who or what will be revealed when the fur gives way to flesh.
“This is simply incredible,” Brody mutters. “Folks, I’m telling you, this was an animal when we first caught sight of it, and now it looks like a person—”
Someone, either the anchorman in the studio or the cameraman in the copter, asks, “What’s that around its neck?”
I shriek and leap to my feet, trembling so hard I almost fall over. Ellen scrambles up beside me. “What? Maria, what is it?”
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “Oh my God.”
The camera is zooming in even closer, narrowing in on a glittering object tied around the animal’s throat.
“I can’t tell what that is,” Brody says. “A necklace of some sort?”
A key. The camera can’t quite get the object in focus, but I know what it’s supposed to be, so I can recognize it, even from such a distance, half obscured by the slowly thinning hair. A key, hanging on a leather cord…
Brody is still speaking. “Maybe an identification tag? Could this animal be part of some government project?”
I cannot breathe. I can only stare at the screen, where the camera is still so tightly focused on the key that it’s hard to tell what condition the animal is in now. We can see it thrashing, but I think it’s still stretched out on the ground. I think I see blood kicked up by its incessant flailing, but I ca
Was William wearing a key?
I stare outward at the television, and I stare inward at that memory from two weeks ago. William, slouching at my kitchen table, dressed in jeans and a worn shirt. Were the frayed ends of a knotted cord poking out from the collar? I can’t remember. I can’t remember. He had said he liked the way Dante wore the key to his storage locker, he would get a leather necklet of his own, but had he bothered to do it? Is this really William, panting and straining and growing gradually weaker, shifting from animal to human state as his blood seeps out and the whole world watches?
Or is it Dante?
I whimper and fling my arm out; I am so dizzy I think I might fall. Ellen’s hand closes over mine, warm and reassuring. I cling to her with enough force to break a bone.
Brody’s voice sounds again. Even above the whirring of the blades I can hear the stupefaction in his voice. “Mike—all you viewers out there—I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
The camera pulls back again, and again we get the whole scene. It is a strange hunting tableau, the trophy animal on the ground in the center, a ring of dogs crouched around it, a ring of humans drawing near enough to touch it. But no one has extended a hand; no one is even poking at it with a rifle. Some are standing, some are kneeling, all are staring, as the creature lies before them on the dead grass and slowly makes itself over.
The fur turns from a muddy brown to a battered gold, then suddenly transmutes into cold white flesh wrapped around limbs that have drawn into a fetal position. Masses of dark hair spill all around the animal’s head, obscuring its face, but it is possible to see, beneath the rough tangle, a smooth cheek and the angular jut of a nose. Someone reaches out with a very long stick and pushes back the hair. The creature sighs and flops over, its mouth open but its eyes closed.
Its whole face is visible, recognizable, and it’s a face I know.
Christina.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Beside me, Ellen takes a hard breath. “That can’t be Dante,” she says, her voice loud with relief. “Or his brother. That’s a girl.”
“It’s his sister,” I say very quietly.
She jerks around to stare at me. “I forgot he had a sister. And you said she’s a shape-shifter, too?”
I nod and sink to the couch. I am shaking so hard I really think I might vibrate through the furniture, through the floorboards, and into the earth itself. “Yes, but she—she was always the one who could control it. She said. She only became an animal a day or two a month, and she could hold off the transformation if she needed to.” I put a hand to my forehead. My fingers are like ice. I wonder if I’m in shock. “This is terrible.”
Ellen sits beside me and takes my hand again. Her fingers are warm enough to remind me what a real person should feel like. “But it’s not Dante,” she says firmly. “You have to be grateful for that.”
“I am but he—he’ll be so upset, and he—I mean, Christina. It didn’t even occur to either one of us. She was always the sane one, the normal one. It was William that Dante was worried about, especially after the blood transfusion…” My voice trails off as I consider a new thought. “Although, I suppose, maybe she had a blood transfusion, too, when she had the baby? She never mentioned it, but—”
“Baby?” Ellen says sharply.
Suddenly I snap back to alertness, a fresh surge of adrenaline coursing through my body. I turn to meet her big eyes with mine, wearing an expression that’s equally appalled. “Lizzie.”
“Where’s this baby now?” Ellen asks.
I shake my head. “Christina lives in Rolla. Surely she got a babysitter if she was going to be gone. If she knew she was going to be gone—”
“How old is Lizzie?”
I rip my hand free and run across the room, where I left my purse under an end table near the sliding glass door. Pawing through it for my address book, I say over my shoulder, “Three months, I think. Something like that.” Kneeling on the floor, I pull my cell phone from my pocket and punch in Christina’s number. “None of the attacks happened more than three months ago. Jesus. How can this be?”
Ellen snorts. “How can any of this be?”
Christina’s phone goes straight to voice mail. Still on the floor, I slew around to stare at Ellen. “No one’s answering,” I say. “Maybe she left the baby with a neighbor.”
Ellen looks straight back at me. “Or maybe she didn’t.”
In my heart, I know she didn’t. In my heart, I know that whatever primitive, feral imperative had Christina in its grip, it didn’t allow her time for rational thought. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Christina loved Lizzie. She loved her brothers, and she probably had a whole circle of friends that she genuinely cared about. But the affectionate, goofy, odd Christina I knew wasn’t the one who had shifted into a grotesque, imperfect animal shape and gone lumbering through the world wreaking mindless mayhem.
“I have to go to Rolla,” I say. “I have to see if Lizzie’s all right.”
Again, Ellen makes that snorting sound. She’s already on her feet. “We have to go to Rolla,” she says. “I’m not about to let you drive there on your own. You can’t even stand up.”
“But—”
“Just give me time to bank the fire and feed the cats, and we’re outta here,” she says.
While Ellen locks up the house, I call Dante’s cell phone. He doesn’t answer, of course, and I cannot bring myself to tell him this devastating news in a message. So I just say, “It’s me. It’s really important that you call me as soon as you can. No matter when you get this message. I love you.”
Five minutes later, we’re on the road and heading for Highway 44. Ellen’s driving, but we’re in my car. She’s the one who said, “We can’t take the Miata. No room for a baby seat.”
I hadn’t been thinking that clearly or that far ahead. But of course I’ll be bringing Lizzie home with me. At least temporarily. At least until we can figure out what to do next.
That is, if we can find her. If Christina has left her with an acquaintance—what then? How do we locate her? It’s not like Dante or William can sit patiently at her house, waiting for someone to bring the baby home. Do Christina’s friends and neighbors even know she has brothers? Would they willingly turn over that small, sweet, fragile life to anyone who looks as unkempt and unsafe as Dante or William?
I close my eyes. There are too many questions.
Ellen has tuned my radio to KMOX, where all the talk is of the dramatic capture in the park. The word “capture” yanks my eyes open and has me staring at the dashboard, but the next few exchanges make it clear that the creature under discussion did not survive the hunt. “Unfortunately, the perpetrator died at the scene,” one commentator says. Another one jumps in, “Unfortunately? This is an animal that is responsible for at least four deaths.” The first one responds, “Yes, but there’s great confusion about what exactly this creature was. Animal? Human? Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t watched the live footage of the pursuit, you will be astonished at what you see…”
“They’ll be talking about this for weeks,” Ellen says abruptly, her eyes fixed on the road. She is driving at least fifteen miles over the speed limit, and we are passing cars as if they are all being driven by octogenarians out for an afternoon of sightseeing. I didn’t know my Saturn could go this fast. “It’ll be in all the papers. ‘Half-Animal, Half-Human, All Killer.’ Stuff like that. Your Dante and his brother might be exposed after all.”
I rub my forehead. The second adrenaline rush has dissipated, and I’m getting a headache. But I can also feel my body marshaling its reserves, using this brief period of comparative calm to recharge, preparing for the next onslaught. This is a day when I will have to survive multiple assaults on my emotions; I will have to be ready for extended battles.
“Maybe,” I say. “But if they can’t identify Christina’s body, they won’t be able to trace her back to Dante and William. Or Lizzie.”
“What about that key?” she asks. “What’s it to?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know she wore one. She didn’t until recently.” I’m silent a moment before adding, “Until a couple months ago, only Dante wore a key like that around his neck.”
She gives me one quick, marveling look as she now comprehends some of the anguish I went through back at her house. “Jesus.”
“But if it’s, say, a key to her house.” I shrug. “How will they track that down? Unless she’s in the system for some other crime—which I don’t think she is—I don’t know that they’ll be able to identify her.”
“Okay, but her friends. The people at her office. Won’t they notice that she’s missing? Won’t they start to put it together? And if any of them saw the footage today—or reads a newspaper or checks the Internet ever—”
“There’s a chance someone will recognize her,” I admit. “But—I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t been expecting to see William or Dante. And—seriously—would you think it was possible that someone you know could turn into a monster? I mean, this is like something out of a comic book. No one’s going to look at photos of her face and say, ‘Hey, she looks like Christina Romano.’ I just think they won’t credit it.”
“Okay, maybe, but she’s still missing,” Ellen points out. “So the timing is going to make them suspicious. And if you suddenly say, ‘Oh, how sad, Christina died,’ and you don’t produce a body—I just think people will start adding up the pieces.”
I nod. I’m trying to think it through. “She’s still on maternity leave, so we have a little time where her coworkers are concerned,” I say. “I know she has friends in St. Louis, but I don’t know how many. I don’t know how close they are to her, how often they keep in touch.” I ponder for a moment. “If someone can get me into her e-mail account, I can send all her friends a few messages, as if I’m her. Maybe I’ll say I’m going on a trip down to—Florida or somewhere. I’ll be gone for a few weeks. And then she’ll conveniently die in a car wreck on the way home, and I’ll have Dante or William send that message out to all her friends. That will change the timing between the deaths.”