Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

A shley shifted back to human and yelled, "Holy shit!" at the small, extremely startled-looking partridge in the snowbank a few feet away from her. "Holy shit, Penny, what the hell!? You just turned into a partridge!"

This is not supposed to go this way, her bear said, flabbergasted. Our mate is supposed to be the one who shouts and is surprised!

Our mate wasn't supposed to turn into a partridge! Ashley yelled back, although she tried to keep the yelling inside her head. Not very successfully, apparently, because the poor partridge—Penny—flapped her wings and fluttered back in alarm at all the noise Ashley was making. Then it dumped itself wing-first into the snowdrift, panicked, and started beating its wings even harder.

"Penny! Oh my God! Penny! Calm down! It's okay! Holy shit!" Ashley hurried forward to try to collect the panicked partridge in her arms. Penny started beating her wings harder and rose a few inches into the air, then let out a horrified squawk and collapsed into the drift, quivering with terror. Ashley, trying to sound calm and trustworthy, managed to drop her voice into a croon. "Hey, it's okay, baby. It's all right. I've got you, Penny. It's me, Ashley. I'm going to pick you up, okay? Don't scratch me. It's okay. Yeah, see, there? Everything is okay, baby."

The partridge did not look like everything was okay. On the other hand, she didn't fight or claw or flap any more as Ashley brought her arms down slowly and gently to scoop her up. "There," Ashley murmured. "There we go. That's it. That's all right. I've got you now. You're safe. Can you hear me, Penny? I want you to think about being human again, okay? You can just shift right back as easy as you shifted to being a bird. It's okay, just—oh! Oof!"

She went down into the snow with a thump as Penny did shift back: an armful of woman weighed a lot more than an armful of bird did. For a moment snow and her gown and cloak and everything flew everywhere, settling with Penny's weight in Ashley's lap. She was warm and soft and smelled mostly wonderful, although there was a tang of sweat and possibly panic to her scent just then. "Good. Good job, that was good, you?—"

"Oh my God!" Penny wailed. "What happened to my clothes ?"

Ashley looked down at the woman in her arms. The very, very naked woman in her arms. Penny's skin was already turning blue from the cold, her shoulders covered in goosebumps. The rest of her probably was too, but she was crunched up in Ashley's arms, shivering, and there wasn't much else visible as she huddled against Ashley's warmth.

Ashley's brain sputtered and so did her voice, a short series of attempted explanations that didn't get any farther than consonant sounds in the back of her throat. Then she managed the one word that really mattered: " Car ."

It wasn't easy standing up with a small ball of woman in her arms. Her bear said, I could help! , but Ashley shook her head as she staggered to her feet. It wasn't Penny's weight that was a problem; it was just that sitting cross-legged with someone bundled up against her was an awkward way to start, and the fact that she really, really didn't want to put Penny down in the snow. After a couple of attempts, she managed to scramble to her feet without dropping her poor shivering mate and hurried to the car, saying, I think shifting to a bear underneath her is more than she could handle right now, apologetically to her bear.

The bear rumbled a reluctant agreement as Ashley managed to get the car door open and to not-quite dump Penny into the passenger seat. "Hang on. I've got winter gear in the trunk." She closed the door, turned the car on with the remote starter, and got the coats, snow pants, and boots out of the car's trunk before crawling into the driver's seat. "Okay. Here you go. It's going to be fine, Penny. C'mon, let me help you get these on."

Penny was balled up in the passenger's seat as small as she could go, which was pretty small. Ashley tilted her away from the seat enough to drag the coat around her shoulders, and all of a sudden, in a scramble, Penny pulled it on and yanked the snow pants on before balling up in the seat again. "What happened to my clothes ? What happened to me? What happened to you! What's going on ?"

Those were all excellent questions, and Ashley barely knew where to start. She said, "This isn't typical," in a sort of high funny voice, and Penny's head popped out of the hood to yell, "You think ?"

Ashley winced and Penny's expression crumpled into near-tears. "I'm sorry."

"No. No, baby, it's okay. It's, this is insane. This must be insane for you. Look, do you think we could crawl into the back seat? I think maybe you need some hugs while I explain this and it's hard to hug across a gear shift."

Penny, with a sniffle, said, "This is an automatic," but crawled into the back seat over what was, in fact, not a gear shift at all. Technically it was the storage compartment between the two front seats, but it had been a gear shift in Ashley's first car, and apparently she still thought that's what that space should hold.

That was probably more than she needed to explain to Penny right now. Especially since there was quite a lot else to explain to her. Ashley crawled into the back seat after her, and offered a tentative arm to hide in. Penny, wide-eyed and obviously stressy, shook her head, and Ashley nodded gently. "That's okay. Okay. First, you're a shifter, Penny."

Penny, hollowly, said, "'Yer a wizard, Harry,'" and shivered. "What does that mean? I'm a shifter. What does that mean? You turned into a bear ."

"I did. I'm also a shifter. But I grew up knowing I was one, and you clearly didn't. That's…" Ashley took a deep breath. "That's very unusual. But we'll come back to that, okay? One thing at a time."

Penny's high-pitched laugh filled the car. "Sure. Right. One thing at a time. What happened to my clothes?"

That was as good a 'one thing' to start with as any. Ashley gave her mate a weak smile. "Usually when we shift, our clothes come and go with us. Anything touching our skin. Glasses, earrings, clothes, shoes, whatever. But it's something we learn when we're babies, like being potty trained, so we don't have to think about it when we're even just a little bit older. You've never shifted before, I guess, so you don't have that practice. So your clothes are…" She winced. "Gone."

"But I rented that dress!" Penny's voice rose even farther. "Can I get them back? If I, I, if I shift again and, and I don't know, call them? Will they come back?"

"I don't know," Ashley said slowly. "When young shifters forget their clothes, that's it, they're gone. But I don't know that a toddler could understand the idea of going to get the clothes they left behind."

"Well, could you?" Penny demanded.

"I—I've never tried. I've never forgotten my clothes. I can try. But not here, I can't shift in the car, I'll explode it." Ashley laughed out loud suddenly, all too aware it was the wrong moment, but reminded of something. "Poor Bill, he shifted in a Honda Civic once, and he's huge . I mean I'm big but he's huge . Now he drives a monster truck because he's afraid of getting stuck like that again."

" Bill is a bear, too? " Penny's voice shot up again. "And Gwen knows? And didn't tell me?"

"Well, we don't…" Ashley smiled with consternation. "We don't usually tell people who aren't…intimate…"

"You told me! We're not intimate!" Penny hesitated. "Yet?"

This, Ashley thought, was much, much more difficult than just telling a regular true human about fated mates. She said, "Yet," a little faintly, and tried to figure out where to go from there. Penny just sat there, staring at her with huge eyes, looking so lost and afraid and confused that all Ashley wanted to do was pull her close and promise it would all be okay. "Look, I'm just going to lay it all out, okay? This is way more complicated than I expected and we'll figure it all out, but let me at least tell you why I was telling you, because…I think I should," she finished awkwardly.

Penny made a small gesture that more said 'okay, whatever' than showed any enthusiasm for the idea, but Ashley couldn't blame her. The poor drummer had just turned into a partridge, for God's sake. Adults didn't just randomly discover they were shifters. Usually that kind of thing hit at puberty if they didn't already know, and that was hard enough.

"Okay. Intimate. Um. So I'm a shifter, and one of the things about shifters is when we meet the person we're meant to be with, we know right away. We call it fate." Ashley hesitated. "You're my fated mate, Penny. Usually our mates are either other shifters, who know about it already, or true humans who have a shock to get over, but they adapt very fast. In this case…" She wet her lips. "In this case I don't know why you didn't already know you were a shifter. I don't even know why I couldn't tell you were OH MY GOD, Maggie Ross knew!"

Penny shrank down into the seat, all wide eyes and confusion from within the over-sized winter coat. "Maggie Ross? What does she have to do with…" Her eyes closed and after a heartbeat she said, "She was the swan. The gigantic swan?"

"I don't know how she knew!" Ashley half-yelled, struggling and failing to bring her voice down. "But she knew what the hell how did she know about my fated mate when I didn't maybe it's because she's a bird shifter oh my god ! Oh my God! Okay!" She clutched the sides of her own head, trying to calm herself. "Okay. I'm sorry. Okay. The thing is, shifters can usually sense each other. But shifters also usually know they're shifters, so…I don't know, Penny. Maybe that's why I didn't know right away you were one. I've never met an adult shifter who had never shifted before."

Penny wailed, "This is very weird!" and pulled the hood even farther up over her head, until she'd disappeared into it entirely.

Ashley sank down into the warm seat and sighed agreement, then crept her fingertips toward Penny, hoping to offer some comfort. After a few long seconds, Penny's own fingertips emerged and laced through Ashley's. A bubble of relief popped in Ashley's chest and she whispered, "It really is going to be okay, Penny. I'm sorry I freaked out. This didn't go how I imagined it would."

A thin giggle came from within the parka. "Imagine how I feel."

Ashley sat up again and carefully snaked her arm around Penny's shoulders, tugging her closer. The drummer slowly tipped over until she was pressed up against Ashley's side, completely hidden within the winter gear. Ashley, softly, said, "I'm not sure I can imagine how you feel. Which is why me freaking out was really not helpful."

Penny whispered, "Tell me about shifters," from within her bundle of winter clothes, and Ashley smiled, pressing her mouth against the parka's hood.

"We've been around for a long time. As long as true humans, probably. Maybe longer. I don't know. There aren't that many of us, but at the same time, there are a lot more than you'd think. Renaissance is a shifter town, which just means there are a lot of us who have settled here. You've never had any kind of major injury or anything, have you?"

Penny made a surprised sound and shook her head, just a rustle of movement. Ashley nodded. "I didn't think so, because we almost always instinctively shift to help ourselves heal. And if you've ever had blood drawn…do you have a rare blood type?"

For a moment, the drummer emerged from the parka, eyes large with surprise. "Yeah. How did you know?"

"Shifters usually do. I'm not sure if we've all got the same rare blood type or if it's something that shows up in true humans, too, but we're careful about getting our blood drawn, or having surgery. Mostly we're just people, Penny. It's just we can also turn into animals. And I don't know why you didn't know you couldn't. Your parents can't?"

"I was adopted," Penny said after a moment. "And I remember…I can hear it now." She sounded sad. "This dumb little voice in my head. It used to drive me nuts when I was eleven or twelve and I just wanted it to go away because I was afraid I was actually crazy. It finally did and I forgot about it, but I can hear it again now."

"Oh, honey. You weren't crazy. That's your partridge talking to you."

Penny sat up and pushed her hood back so she could give Ashley a hard stare.

Ashley couldn't help blurting a giggle. "Okay, okay, yes, I hear how that sounded. But it's true. My bear talks to me all the time. So you were never crazy, sweetheart. I get why you must have thought you were, though. You must have an awful lot of willpower, to suppress it that thoroughly. But you don't have to anymore. Everything's going to be okay now. You're a shifter, not crazy."

"I don't know," Penny whispered. "I think I might be crazy. You can't hear this thing. It sounds like a lunatic."