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“Okay. Hmmmm. Black Beauty? Seabiscuit? War Horse? The Black Stallion?” I roll over on top of her and she shrieks as the tickling begins. Through her laughter, she shouts, “I think we can find Mr. Ed!” I can’t help myself and I end up laughing, too.
Finally, I say, “How about a movie without a horse?”
She chuckles and asks, “Are zebras okay? Donkey? Mules? Cowboy movies?” She finally stops and says, “Seriously, though, you’re going to have to tell me all about being a shifter. Are both your parents shifters?”
“Fuck,” I say.
She looks at me and asks, “Was that offensive?”
“No,” I say. “But… Both of my parents are shifters. Two shifters can only have a shifter child. Shifter father means one out of three, give or take. Shifter mother is a fifty-fifty chance.”
“Why fuck?”
I grin at her. “I can think of a bunch of reasons.”
“No deflecting. Why did you say it?”
I sigh. “I’d be breaking a cardinal rule. I need to check something. Do you have Reggie’s medical record from the hospital?”
“I can get it on my laptop. Our physicians already checked it. He’s not terminal or anything so there’s no motive to start cashing in for his heirs. There was no chemical inhalation or anything that indicated an accelerant. I mean, they found nothing that indicated a problem I need to know.”
I nod. “Can you pull them up?”
“And then you’ll explain what this is all about?”
“I hope so.”
She opens her laptop and a moment later hands it to me. I look at the admittance forms. “Right here,” I say. I point to the number.
“188620?” she asks, “Why is that important?”
“It’s a code. Hospitals don’t record someone is a shifter unless they have to.”
“So that code means Reggie is a shifter?”
“Yes,” I reply. “It’s a simple alphanumeric code. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a number, so A is 1, B is 2, and so on. The letters here—18, 8, 6, 20—correspond to the letters SHFT.”
“Wow,” she says. “Is Reggie a horse shifter like you?”
“Yes,” I say. “He’s the one who taught me how to be a shifter.”
“Wait,” she says. “You have to learn how to shift? I thought that shifting just happened.”
“It does,” I say. “For horses, at least. That’s the problem. One instant, you’re a normal human, then the next day, you’ve got long, spindly legs with hooves and a jaw with extra molars. Horse shifters need to learn how to control their shifts so they don’t shift randomly at the wrong times.”
“Your parents didn’t teach you about this?”
“My parents… were uninterested,” I say. “Reggie took me under his wing and let me stay with him for six months while he taught me how to control my shifts and how to care for myself in horse form—what plants to eat, which ones to avoid, how to run properly, how to get used to hooves instead of fingers—all that kind of stuff. He also taught me about the shifter community and the unwritten rules that govern us so we can live peacefully with non-shifters.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says quietly. “I never knew it was so hard for you guys.”
“How could you?” I ask. “No one who isn’t a shifter can understand what that means for us. Anyway, I didn’t bring this up to talk about myself. I brought it up because I think I can see why Jason might have burned his brother’s house down, if itwasJason.”
“Why?” she asks.
“You remember how I said that kids with shifter fathers and non-shifter mothers have a fifty-fifty chance of becoming shifters themselves? Well, Reggie and Jason had a shifter father and a non-shifter mother. Reggie was a shifter. Jason wasn’t.”
“So his parents loved Reggie more,” Kellie says.
