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“Apparently a lot.”

Mara ran her fingers farther into his thick fur, smiling as the morning light picked out the warm reddish-brown tones. Cinnamon, she realized, and nearly laughed.

She should probably have been more frightened than she was. Instead, the longer she stood there with her hand buried in his fur, the more familiar he seemed. Considerably bigger and hairier, admittedly, but still Gabe.

“Of course,” Mara murmured. “You spend all day making cinnamon bears, and you actually are one.”

The bear huffed.

She laughed and scratched behind his ear again. “You cannot tell me that isn’t funny.”

His head tipped into her hand, which Mara chose to take as reluctant agreement.

For a few seconds she simply stood with him, letting herself absorb the impossible reality of warm fur beneath her fingers and a bear who watched her with the same steady patience Gabe had shown her all week.

Then another memory surfaced.

Mara narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute.”

One rounded ear twitched.

“All those times Gabe looked distracted for no reason…”

The bear didn’t move.

Her suspicion sharpened. “You two talk to each other, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Actually talk?”

Another nod.

Mara looked at him. “Oh, I have questions.”

The bear huffed again, and she could have sworn he looked amused.

Before she could decide which question to ask first, the bear stepped back and her hand slipped from his fur.

“Gabe?”

He held her attention for a moment, calm and steady, before the air around him shimmered.

This time Mara knew what to watch for. There was still no gradual change, no impossible rearranging of one body into another. The bear simply vanished in the faint distortion of the air, and Gabe stood in his place exactly as he had before, fully clothed down to his boots.

Mara looked from him to his clothes.

“They disappeared.”

Gabe glanced down. “The shift is magic. Clothes go with us and come back when we change again.”

“Magic,” Mara repeated.

Until this morning, magic had belonged to stories and movies and things people believed because they wanted the world to contain more than it appeared to. Now Mara had just scratched a bear behind the ears and watched it become the man she had slept beside.

“Okay. I’m going to need a minute with that.”

“You can have as many as you need.”