“Try thegalbi. They make it right here.”
When I hesitated, trying to decide which one he meant, Dodge leaned over to scoop up thick slices of beef to put on the small plate in front of me. Then he scooted a basket of lettuce leaves in front of me as well, and pointed at the little dishes of a red bean paste. “Beef in leaf, then sauce.”
I watched him make a beef-leaf taco, stunned when he nearly swallowed it whole, and took a moment to appreciate the way his forearms flexed each time he used the chopsticks and reached for more food. When I caught Deirdre watching me with that faint damn smile, I flushed more and tried to drag my thoughts back to the matter at hand.
“Look, I understand you’re probably – concerned about this, but I promise, the moment our business is concluded, I’ll just go back to my boring life without any interaction at all with this... community.” I forced a smile. “I like boring. Boring and normal. I’ll work on the habitat for Silas, if you still want me to and assuming I survive the next few days, but after that... I’m fine with closing the door on our acquaintance.”
She made a thoughtful noise, nodding along as I talked as if she agreed, and watched as Miles kept putting more and more food on her plate. “I can appreciate you wanting to limit interaction with the shifters. They’re very pushy, aren’t they?”
Miles elbowed her and gave her a dark look. “Eat, woman.”
Deirdre rolled her eyes with a “see what I mean?” expression, but picked up her chopsticks to make her own beef-and-leaf pocket. “But I can say from recent experience, Percy, that when the various supernatural elements realize you know about them, they’re unlikely to let you simply disappear.”
A knot tied up my throat. “What does – what does that mean?”
“It’s not dangerous,” Dodge said. He shook his head and half-stood so he could lean down the table and retrieve thick slices of pork belly for both of us. “It’s rare for humans to know about us, so if you have a particular skill that they would find useful, once everyone knows that you know about us, it’s less risky to bring you in to work on different jobs. They don’t have to worry about dancing around the specifics of a requirement, like we tried to do with Silas.”
“I can’t imagine there’s a lot of demand for habitat specialists,” I said, and tried to laugh it off. The thought of being an in-demand architect for a bunch of werewolves and witches and whatever Smith was sent chills down my spine. “Unless everyone has some kind of mutant in their basement? Is that common?”
Todd made a face. “No. Silas got caught up in a conflict with a sorcerer and ended up... changed. We’re still not sure how to fix it.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I stuffed down the demand to know what a sorcerer was and how it was different from a witch, since apparently knowingmoreabout them just meant getting roped deeper into the craziness. I was already neck-deep; going any deeper meant drowning.
“He was forced to shift his form and then frozen in between,” Deirdre said. Her expression hardened and grew icy around the edges. “We just need to understand how to force him back.”
I studied a piece of pork belly as I tried to understand all the layers of impossibility in that conversation. It could have all been a really crazy, intense dream or nightmare. Maybe a hallucination or bad trip. “How does it all work? I mean, the turning into an animal thing. Are they always people in their head? Is there a – a wolf brain or something?”
It was ridiculous. A completely ludicrous series of questions. If any of the waitresses overheard us, they’d call the police and have us all committed to the psych ward.
But Dodge didn’t hesitate to answer as he tore up a few lettuce leaves and handed me one, along with more rice. “There’s a wolf half and a person half. The person usually stays in control in both forms, though the wolf is always there. Only when there’s severe stress or trauma does the wolf take over; that’s usually to make sure we survive a situation, then the wolf retreats after most of the danger passes and the person can take over again.”
It sounded insane. I eyed him. “So you’ve got – a wolf in your head? All the time? Just – talking to you?”
“Not quite.” The corner of his mouth quirked up. “He’s me, just... a wolf. We’re connected, we think and want the same things, just sometimes he’s more observant than I am. He noticed the guys following us this morning, and he sensed that something was wrong with the SUVs at the sanctuary when we went to get you.”
The way he referred to himself and the wolf side as “we” kind of threw me off. “So... there’s no difference between the two sides? Could they get separated or mixed up when you go between... forms? God, this sounds so fucking weird.”
“Mixed up?” Todd leaned back, rubbing his jaw. “Not typically. Sometimes when shifters are turned, instead of born...” He must have seen the “what the fuck are you talking about?” look on my face, because he smiled wryly and started over. “Most shifters are born to parents who are also shifters. On occasion, a shifter could bite a human and turn them into a shifter – what we’d called a ‘turned’ shifter. It doesn’t happen often; usually when a human is mated to a shifter and wants to transform for their own reasons.”
“So their heads are different, if they change later?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to parse all of this new information. I needed some kind of wiring diagram or flow chart to work out all the possible issues and decision points. “But the ones who are turned later, are their kids then born as – as shifters?”
“Yes,” Dodge said.
I looked at all of them, certain I’d missed something. “So there functionally shouldn’t be anything different between the wolf-person relationship based on whether someone was born that way or turned later. Maybe it’s... degrees of awareness? But the relationship between the two entities, such as they are, should be identical. Right?”
“It’s difficult to say,” Deirdre said slowly. “Since a born shifter can’t understand how a turned shifter relates to their animal side, and vice versa. They’re using two different vocabularies to describe a situation where nuance is vital to understanding.”
I frowned as I scooted my chair back, wanting more room so I didn’t accidentally whack Dodge if I got excited and waved my arms around. It had happened more than once in architectural school. “Okay, so let’s assume it’s fundamentally the same but perhaps different... by degrees. There’s maybe... more distance between the two sides for someone who’s turned, because they’re learning to manage a fucking insane change to their brain and personality and awareness.”
All four of them watched me, apparently waiting for the light bulb.
I held my hands out, waiting for them to see it. “I don’t know fuck-all about sorcerers, but if he did something... What if he intentionally or accidentally created more of that distance between the wolf side and the person side? Would that explain why he’s – stuck like he is? And why there’s clearly not a person in charge of what remains? He may not be able to resolve the discrepancy on his own because he doesn’t have the – the vocabulary to understand what changed.”
Deirdre’s head tilted and she went very still, her eyes flashing silver in an eerie reminder of Smith. “Creating more distance between the wolf and the man. That might...”
She trailed off, staring into the distance, while I waited on the edge of my seat for her to proclaim I’d figured out the problem. Miles hardly paused in doing his best to eat his weight in marinated beef, not taking his attention off the food in front of him. “It’s a hypothesis, and one we hadn’t considered. We’ll test it when we get back to the house.”
“We?” The hair on my arms prickled. “I’m not sure...”
