“You could have told me you were a shifter, but you couldn’t demonstrate it!”
“Would you have believed—” he began.
“YES!” Fen shouted. “That’s no harder to believe than that you used to be a shifter and weren’t anymore! YOU LIAR!”
“I didn’t lie to you! I said my snow leopard was dead, and was true, so—”
“YOU’RE A GIANT LIAR AND THAT’S A GIANT EXCUSE!” She yelled that so loudly that Carter felt like his hair was blowing back.
Stop lying,hissed a monster.
Stop lying,growled a monster.
Stop lying, screeched a monster.
[stoplight red]
His ears were ringing. He wanted to put his hands over them, but he felt certain that if he did, Fen would break the sound barrier.
“Just… give me a second, all right?” Carter tried to pull his thoughts together. Everything felt like too much to take in. The only conclusion he could come to was that hehadlied to her, however valid his reasons had been, and she did deserve an apology.
He straightened up, took a deep breath, and looked her in the eyes. “You’re right. I did lie to you, and I shouldn’t have. You were always honest with me, and I wasn’t honest with you. You’re right to be angry. I deserve it. I was wrong and I apologize.”
She gave him a very close look, as if she was examining a new product for flaws, then gave a satisfied nod. “Apology accepted. But why on earth didn’t you just tell me that you were a shifter, but you couldn’t demonstrate because it was excruciatingly painful?”
Confused, he said, “Because that would have just been a different lie?”
It was then her turn to seem confused. “Wait, that wasn’t why you didn’t want to do it? It looked absolutely agonizing. You were screaming!”
“Yeah, it hurts. But I do shift when I have to. It wouldn’t have stopped me from proving it to you if I’d had to.” He paused, then heaved a sigh when he realized that for whatever reason, she wanted him to say it himself. “I really could become a snow leopard once. My leopard was beautiful and agile and strong. And he was me: the most primal, most…me… part of me. I loved him.”
He had to stop there for a moment, unable to look in her eyes. With his gaze fixed on the mud and weeds at his feet, he went on, “When I was kidnapped, they didn’t just kill my snow leopard. They put other animals in me. I don’t even know what they all were. But I was supposed to be able to shift into any of them. It didn’t work out that way. They all got mixed up together inside me. They’re horrible, grotesque, disgusting monsters, and they’reinme. Theyareme. I’m a monster.”
He waited for the sound of her footsteps walking away. Instead, a pair of very familiar hands cupped his cheeks, then slid around to the back of his head and pulled him down. Their faces were so close together that he could feel her warm breath on his face as she said, “Carter, you are not a monster. You’re a man who had a horrible, traumatizing experience that changed you. Something bad was done to you. That doesn’t makeyoubad.”
It was impossible to deny the sincerity in her face or her voice, in her body language or in her nearness. But her words felt impossible. He pulled out of her grip. “But you saw me. You saw the monster.”
“I saw a man choose to do something physically and emotionally painful to save my life. And I saw a weird creature, sure. But it was just one of a whole bunch of weird creatures!” Fen waved her hand at the Defenders who, Carter noticed for the first time, were all watching and listening. “I saw a dog with wings! I saw a size-changing velociraptor! I saw a ginormous bear and a fire bird and a giant smoke dog! And a prehistoric fish with armor plates and way too many teeth! Oh, and let’s not forget Eunice. Do all gargoyles look that weird? Because she was super weird.”
“But…” Carter began, then fell silent. It had never even occurred to him that anyone could perceive a gargoyle or a phoenix to be as monstrous and strange as the monster that he was. But Fen clearly did.
Merlin piped up from where he was sitting beside Roland, who had his injured leg propped up on a gnarled tree root. “There’s much weirder things than you, Carter. When I was at the circus—I was raised in a circus,” he explained to Fen. “An elephant shifter told me that her mom told her that once an elephant shifter who wanted to be a snake instead asked his friend the cobra shifter to bite him, and he turned into a regular-sized cobra with a regular-sized elephant head, which if you don’t know the respective sizes is like a regular-sized mouse with the head of a regular-sized cat. And then he got stuck that way.”
Merlin paused for a moment, thinking it over, then added, “She might have made it up to discourage me from trying to get my shifter friends to bite me and make me a shifter. But, you know, that’s my mental high mark for grotesque. And even that poor elephant-headed cobra who probably doesn’t actually exist isn’t a monster, just a person with a very difficult life.”
“It’s one thing to hear some cautionary tale about an elephant-cobra, and another to see a giant writhing heap of hideous body parts right there in front of you,” Carter snapped.
“Not really,” said Merlin, unperturbed. “I have a very vivid imagination.”
Ransom fixed Carter with a cool stare that reminded him that Ransom had been a sniper in the Marines. “Do you seriously think a strange shift form is going to shock and horrifyme?”
“Well…” Once Carter was forced to discuss it aloud, rather than just thinking about it in a haze of panic, it did seem unlikely. “It’s so gross, though.”
“Gross is spending days covered in mud with only swamp water to bathe in,” put in Fen.
Pete gave an exasperated snort. “Carter, are you telling us you’ve been hiding and refusing to tell us about this because your shift form isn’t pretty enough for you?”
“It’s not about beingpretty.” Now he felt defensive. “I didn’t want you to see something hideous and disgusting.”
