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"No." He stared at the cabin, looking so sad that I had to resist the urge not to slide closer. "It started soon after she began Shifting. Just small things at first. Not interested in her art anymore, not interested in school, getting restless, wandering off and staying away until she was hungry. I figured it was just a combination of the Shifts and our mom's death."
"But it wasn't."
He shook his head. "It kept getting worse. She's not ... She's not Annie anymore. I mean, she is, in some ways, but she's ... simpler."
"More animal than human."
He nodded. "She still takes care of me, but in a different way, protecting me, like with that guy today. But now I'm the parent. I make sure we have clothes and food and a place to live. I'm not complaining--she did it for years, and it's time I took some responsibility. But ..."
"You want your sister back. You think she'd want to be back."
"I know she would. I mean, if that happened to me ... If it happened to you ..."
My heart started thudding so hard I struggled to breathe. Shifting into animal form, running and experiencing life as a cougar--that part sounded amazing. But truly becoming an animal, giving up all my dreams, my future? I felt sick just thinking about it.
"She's getting worse," he said in a low voice. "She Shifts more and more. One day, maybe she won't Shift back."
"But that's not normal, right? Obviously skin-walkers were still human. Something went wrong with the experiment. That's why you're here. You came looking for another subject, hoping to find leads to the group that did this, to see if they can fix her."
He nodded. "When Mom found out about the cancer, she started searching for the other subjects. She contacted someone who really didn't want to tell her anything but finally said he knew where one girl was. You. Here. When Mom was dying, she said if anything went wrong, to come here and look for you. She knew the name of the town and what your mom looked like, but that's all I had."
"Only my mom is my adopted mother. So you started going through all the girls, trying to find the one with the birthmark. If you were looking for a Native girl, though ... kind of obvious, wasn't it?"
"I wasn't. Your mom's white."
"W-what?"
"That's what my mom said. It's how your mom's family hid. Intermarriage. She had Native blood, but she looked Caucasian--hazel eyes and light hair."
"And my dad?"
"I don't know. It was all in vitro fertilization."
My guess was that the sperm donors carried the gene, too. That would make sense, if you were trying to resuscitate a genetic trait. My dad must have been full Native, then. Not that it mattered now. Well, it did matter. I was half white. Or close to it.
For genetic shocks, that didn't quite match finding out I could change into a cougar, but it was close. I felt a weird squeezing panic in my chest, like waking up one day and looking in the mirror to see a stranger.
"So you figured I wasn't the girl you were looking for. You gave it a shot, but halfhearted, just in case."
"It wasn't like--"
"You thought it was Hayley, didn't you? Hazel eyes, blond hair, right age."
"Kind of. But not really. I was--" He exhaled, gaze dropping to his hands, folded in front of him. "Hayley liked me. Enough to tell me anything I wanted without asking why I wanted to know it. She was on the swim team, and she'd have seen just about every girl here in a swimsuit ..."
"She could tell you if anyone had a birthmark. She's seen mine, but she didn't mention it."
"No, and I got the feeling she wouldn't even if you had one."
So he had to see for himself. That was why he'd wanted to go swimming yesterday. To confirm his suspicion.
He continued, "I thought maybe it was Sam. Hayley wouldn't have noticed if she had a birthmark. Mom wasn't completely sure that you'd be here with your mother. She knew she'd given up one of her twins."
"Twins?"
"A boy and a girl. Multiple births are common with skin ..." He trailed off. "You really didn't know, then."
"That I'm a skin-walker? That my mother is white? That I have a twin brother? No, apparently there's a lot about myself I didn't know."
