Juniper and Thorn knelt at her side, and the girl touched the long, blonde hair that was covering Penny’s face.
“It’s okay, Penny,” she said. “Nothing bad happened.”
Penelope sniffed loudly, pushed her hair away, and straightened her back.
“Nothing bad? Poor things, you don’t even understand what’s going on.”
“We do,” Thorn said, timidly.
“He asked you to shift! As if you were shapeshifters! Sheep? Sheep-shifters? No, he’s clearly gone insane!”
The twins were silent this time, and Penny glanced at them suspiciously. She had heard of shifters before. It wasn’t a secret that they existed, but they were rare, and usually didn’t like big cities. Personally, she had never met one. Or, if she had, then she hadn’t known, because shifters were very good at acting perfectly normal and human as to not bother anyone. As long as they minded their own business, humans minded their own business too, and everyone was happy.
“Nina, Kosta… you’re not shifters, are you?”
She couldn’t believe she had asked the question. As soon as she said the words, she wanted to take them back because, if they said “yes”, then the implications of the scene she’d just witnessed downstairs could be horrible.
“Please tell me Goldman is just a crazy old man who got it all wrong. You’re not shifters. He… he kidnapped the wrong kids.”
That word… Kidnap. It made Penny sick to her stomach.
“He didn’t kidnap us,” Juniper said carefully. “I remember he came to the orphanage and asked to see us and only us. He didn’t want to see any other children. He said he’d done a lot of research and asked around before he found us, and he promised he would take us away from there and we could live with him and his family in a beautiful house in America. He said his house was like a palace, and we could have our own room, eat whatever we wanted, and play with all the toys we liked.”
“Oh my God.” Penny covered her mouth with both hands. “He didn’t!”
Thorn nodded slowly. “We believed him. He was nice to us then, but when we got here, he changed.”
“He said we could go with him on one condition,” Juniper continued. “We had to shift so he could see for sure that we were sheep-shifters, and not a scam.”
“We… we thought he was a good man who wanted to protect orphan shifters,” Thorn added. “You know… it’s hard when you’re an orphan, but it’s even harder when you’re a shifter, too. All the other kids bullied us, and the ladies who worked at the orphanage treated us badly. They wouldn’t even feed us sometimes because they said there was not enough food for everyone, and we could go without dinner because we were shifters and were more resistant than the other kids.”
“Jesus!” Penny stood up and started pacing the floor. She didn’t know what to do. She felt like screaming, like punching a wall, like taking Juniper and Thorn into her arms and promising them she’d never let them go.
“You don’t believe us,” the girl said.
“No, no… I-I believe you!”
“Do you want to see?”
“See what?”
Juniper nodded at her brother, then they both stood up. The next thing Penny knew, their little bodies started changing right before her eyes. Bones snapped, muscles rearranged, their faces elongated, and their clothes ripped at the seams when soft wool sprouted out of their pores. Soon, all that was left of the girl’s dress and the boy’s shirt and jeans were strips of fabric on the floor or hanging off their back and hind legs. In the blink of an eye, Juniper and Thorn weren’t two children anymore. They were two lambs.
“Holy mother of…!” She bit her tongue to stop herself from cursing.
The white lambs stepped closer to her. Her first instinct was to back away and put distance between herself and the two shifters, but she made an effort to stay put. The last thing she wanted was to make them feel even more rejected. The fact that they’d shifted after they had refused Goldman earlier meant they trusted her. They needed her help, although they hadn’t asked for it yet.
Penny took a deep breath, released it slowly, and centered herself. She bent down and reached for Thorn. When her hand came in contact with his wooly head, he sighed and leaned into her touch. She giggled. She hadn’t played with little lambs since she was a kid and she’d visited some distant relatives of her mother who lived at a farm. She knelt on the floor and reached for Juniper as well. Soon, she was pulling at their ears playfully, scratching their back, and digging her fingers in their soft, rich wool.
“Now you believe us,” the girl whispered.
Penny blinked in surprise, then shrugged. Okay, so they could talk even when they were in their sheep form. She could get used to that, too.
“I believed you the first time, but thank you. Thank you for trusting me with your secret.”
“It’s not a secret,” Thorn said. “Mr. Goldman and his wife know. And Killian.”
“All the people who were at the party, too,” Juniper added. “Now, Mr. Salvador.”
