“It’s hard formeto believe,” he admitted. “You have to understand, shifters are normal to me. But up until I got kidnapped, all the shifters I’d ever known turned into ordinary animals. I’d never heard of magical animals outside of fantasy books, or of shifters who turned into anything that didn’t exist. I knew we had to keep shifting a secret, but I’d never met anyone who’d actually gotten captured by a lab. I didn’t even think of shifting as magic. I thought of it as a bit like having an unusual genetic trait like six fingers, and a bit like belonging to the world’s coolest secret society.”
“When did you find out about Voldemort?”
“After I got kidnapped. The black ops group that took me was experimenting on shifters, and on turning ordinary people into shifters. I got broken loose by two other people they’d captured.” He kept his voice as even as he could, but it wasn’t easy to talk about.
“I don’t need the details about that,” Fen said. She was obviously picking up on how stressed he was getting. “Just jump ahead to Saruman.”
He forced a smile. Her fantasy references did amuse him, but there was more going on than not wanting to talk about a traumatic experience. Once again, he was leaving out crucial information, and it wasn’t the sort that she was assuming.
If she ever found out what sort of person I really am…
He plunged ahead, speaking quickly to drown out his guilt and his secrets and the shrieks of his monsters. “Thanks. Well, the people who broke me loose were with an all-shifter private security agency on the west coast called Protection, Inc. I owed them a favor, so I offered to fly them or their whole team anywhere, anytime, with no questions asked. They called in the favor a while later to ask me to fly them to the lab I mentioned before, the one with the magical animals.”
Precious, who had been napping in his lap, stirred in her sleep. He stroked her until she settled down.
“That lab was also experimenting on shifters and turning ordinary people into them, but it was under different management from mine. They called themselves wizard-scientists, and they really could do magic, not to mention weird science. We blew up the lab, but some of the wizard-scientists escaped. That place I do tech support for, Protection, Inc: Defenders, is the guys who got turned into shifters there. The wizard-scientists have been stalking them ever since, one by one. I figured I was exempt since I’m not actually part of their team, but obviously not.” He waved his hand, indicating the swamp.
“Wait.” Fen’s eyes narrowed. “You think the guys who dumped us here are wizard-scientists? Those guys in the plane were them?”
“Not exactly. I think they’re employed by wizard-scientists. This is exactly the sort of trick they’d pull.”
“Did you know this all along?” Fen asked indignantly.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like I could tell you. What would you have said if I’d told you in the plane that we’d been kidnapped by wizard-scientists?”
“Bitten you, probably,” she admitted. “If I could reach.”
Carter spread his hands. “See? I was hoping to get us both out and send you on your way without you ever finding out. And if it wasn’t for Precious, I might’ve been able to.”
She frowned. “So are we being hunted or aren’t we?”
“Oh, we’re definitely being hunted. Just not in the way you’ve been thinking. I’m still hoping we can get out of the swamp before they catch up to us. But if not, based on what happened to the other guys, we’ll get chased around and menaced by the most bizarre shifters you can imagine—those will be the wizard-scientists’ minions—and when they think we’ve been beaten into submission, they’ll tell me to join them or else.”
She blinked a few times, taking this in. He didn’t blame her. It was a lot, even for him. “What sort of bizarre shifters? Dragonettes? Big dragons?”
“If only. The last time one of the Defenders got attacked by them, the wizard-scientist was this awful woman named Elayne who could turn into a harpy. She also had the power to manipulate shadows and make them solid, so literally every shadow you walked by could grab you.”
“Ugh!” Fen shuddered. “Something so creepy about that.”
“This all went down in an amusement park after dark, so it was even creepier. And she had henchmen who were shifters she’d created in a lab, so they had weird shift formsandspecial powers. One of them could give you vertigo, one could tell if you were lying, and so forth.”
“And their shift forms were…?”
“One could turn into a chupacabra.”
Her eyebrows rose. “A goat-sucker? Those are real?”
“You mean, other than her? Got me. And there were two dinosaur shifters. One was a giant lizard-bird, and one was this enormous armored fish.” Carter laughed. “The fish couldn’t breathe on land, of course. You’d think the guy who could turn into it would have stayed human and used his power to give us vertigo. But no. He kept turning into a fish and trying to flop after us or whack us with a fin for as long as he could hold his breath. At one point he got into a swimming pool he could barely fit into and stayed there for ages. Elayne had to order him out.”
“What was up with him? Did he just really like being a fish?”
“I guess so.” He’d been amused at the memory, but her question made a pain go through his chest. Probably the fish guy… what had his name been? Boris? Morris? …hadloved his shift form. It wasn’t one Carter would have wanted, but he understood the feeling. He’d loved being a snow leopard.
“We should get some sleep,” he said.
“What if we get attacked by a chupacabra?”
“We won’t. Elayne and her gang got arrested and tossed in a special shifter jail. And the wizard-scientists love mind games. Whoever’s after us probably did give us a head start, to wear me down before they make their big move. Anyway, if we stay up all night, we’ll be exhausted tomorrow, and then it’ll be harder to fight if they do catch up.”
