Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Nathanial

I need air.

I need soil.

I need leaves.

I need forest floor detritus.

I need everything other than humanity right now. I need to get away from all of the humanity filling me at the moment.

Damn it, I can't help but want Addy. No matter how desperately I need to be free of the emotions running through me, I can't help but want her. I feel a war raging within me. I feel stupid about that, too. On more than one occasion, I've made it a point to harass other shifters about their complaints of feeling a war inside of themselves.

Well, now I feel it, and I really don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do. I feel foolish. I feel stupid, in fact. This is exactly the kind of thing that's such a stupid cliché in the world of shifters that my first inclination when I hear about it is to roll my eyes. Seriously, is there anything more cliché? Beauty tames the savage beast, right?

Fuck! That's a cliché for humans, too!

I'm on my way back from the store where I grabbed light bulbs for the station. We don't ordinarily buy them but a power surge used up everything we have in stock so until the next order comes in, we've got no spares. I dial Garrett. When he answers, I say, "I need to go wild."

"You're a sergeant now. You know, you don't really have to let me know anymore." Sergeant . It doesn't really change anything I do.

"Well, consider it a courtesy, then. I have to tell someone, right? Who the hell should it be?"

"Telling me works," he says, "but I guess when you're back tomorrow we ought to figure that out for sure, right?"

"I might not be done tomorrow," I say.

"No problem. Whenever you're back. We got you covered."

"I'll drop the light bulbs off and then take off."

"Pretty sure none of us here are afraid of the dark," he says.

"Thanks, man." I hang up and take a deep breath. I need to be a bear and I might even have to find a river. There's something about hunting fish that calms us. For a bear shifter, a creature far larger than a normal bear, it's an extraordinarily inefficient foraging process. It's inefficient to eat in animal form at all, actually. I'm a big man and I eat about three thousand to thirty-five hundred calories a day. A normal-sized bear is going to eat close to twenty-thousand calories in autumn. I would decimate a forest if I remained in bear form unless I lived alone in a forest with a herd of elk or something.

None of that is really relevant to now. I don't need to eat. I need to go wild. That's how we shifters describe moments like this, when our minds are troubled or in need of clarity and shifting is the only thing that will settle us so we can experience enough calm to actually focus on something. It's not something that's easy to explain to a non-shifter. It's even more confusing if you understand that in our animal form, we most certainly don't think any more clearly than we do in our human form. Some of us are very much the animal, even mentally.

Soon, I'm on the freeway heading out of the city and toward the mountains. There are a number of undeveloped areas within an hour and a half but I don't want to run into any shifters either so I end up driving almost five hours North until I'm deep in pine territory and high in the mountains.

Only then do I find an RV Park, buy a space, park my truck, and just start walking into the woods. The RV Park is empty at the moment but it's in one of those places where it's probably left empty all day and then right around dinnertime people start thinking about holing up for the night. Maybe it's like a hotel where people check in after three o'clock. Who knows? The point is, though, that I have to walk for quite a while because I don't know when there will be a great many people around.

Finally, I found a good place. It's a little meadow. When I step in, a number of smaller animals rush away. They're not hiding from a man. They're fleeing from a bear. They know immediately what I am, I think. There's some disagreement on that but most of the scientists believe our ability to instantly know another person is a shifter comes from our animal side. So, they also believe natural animals can sense the same thing. They may become a bit confused when they see us as humans but they think of us in an animal form. Most shifters can't have small animals as pets. We give hamsters and guinea pigs too much stress. Cats and dogs do better but only in relation to their ability to handle the actual animal. Dogs aren't going to take well to a lion shifter.

Hell, I'm thinking about this stuff to keep from thinking about why I'm here. Every little thought that enters my mind feels urgent because I'm trying my best to allow any thought to take my mind away from the thoughts that I most definitely ought to have. It's really not complicated even though I'm doing what I can to complicate it. Make something irrelevant urgent and you don't have to focus on the relevant but difficult items. For example, maybe you spend some time thinking about the fucking thought process of procrastination in order to fucking procrastinate!

I need to shift so badly. Nothing is urgent to a bear. I almost shift without undressing, which basically means I almost reduce my clothing to shreds and leave myself trying to figure out how to get back into my car without the people at the RV Park seeing a naked man getting into his car. Thankfully, I come to my senses and take a breath. I get my clothes off as quickly as I can and bundle them up. I take two steps forward and shift.

And I can breathe.

There's just no way to explain the emotional transformation to a non-shifter. I know an addict. He's a bear shifter, too. He's eleven years sober. He says the need to shift is a lot like the need for a fix except in reverse. He says being human is like being high and shifting is what brings you back to reality. He uses the term "go out" to describe getting high. It means going out on the streets, I guess. There's a desperation when you go out but when you're out for a long while, the need to come back is stronger. The desperation isn't for the fix but for the sanity.

Anyway, that's a roundabout way to explain what it feels like for me to shift is to return to normalcy. All of the stress disappears. All of the confusion disappears, and all of the worry disappears. I don't mean I've been able to arrive at a decision about Addison. I'm just not dealing with the weight of all the emotions involved anymore.

When I shift back, I'm surprised but not too surprised that more than a week has passed. That happens sometimes.