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One of the things they did for shifters, vampires, ghouls, and orcs who came through most federally funded Arcanid hospitals—which was almost all of them—was take dental impressions post-transformation. For ‘identification’ purposes.
Nothing quite like having your teeth put on record to remind you that society thought you were that much more likely to snack on the neighbor than everybody else.
They didn’t do it for fauns or elves.
One, we’re prettier. Or at least more aesthetically palatable to the average human. Sure, vampires and shifters might look human—mostly. But there’s something about fangs that makes people nervous. People don’t feel nearly as threatened by fauns or elves, even if people were a little creeped out by their neighbor having hooves instead of squishy toes.
Two, fauns and elves are forced by our new genetics to be vegetarian, so while wecouldbite somebody, we wouldn’t actually be able toeatanybody. That apparently goes a ways in terms of making us seem less dangerous. Nevermind the fact that both species have more strength than a human and either one could easily snap a human neck with their bare hands.
No, I haven’tactuallydone that. Fantasized about it, sure, but I have yet to actually kill anyone with my bare hands.
But capacity for violence aside, there was something a bit… extra dehumanizing about the assumption thateveryonewho transformed into one of the so-termed ‘potentially predatory’ types of Arcanid was automatically assumed to be a possible threat.
And people had thought racial profiling pre-Arcanavirus was bad.
But without identifiable bite-marks, that left me only one lead: the weird-looking dog currently scratching his ear with the hind leg that wasn’t in a cast. And right now, I, Doc, Ward, and a vampire vet were the only people who actually knew that. Everybody else just thought I’d adopted a dog we found at the crime scene and had shit-all to go on.
To be fair, until the damn dog shifted and started talking, Ididhave shit-all to go on. Because all Ward had been able to get from Mark Roberts and Leon Jones—like Tatiana Zhirov—was more or less what we already knew: five shifters, at least one vampire, and three humans. Or possibly Arc-humans, although the dead couldn’t tell Ward anything more about them other than that. Leon had learned Daria’s name, but none of the ghosts seemed to know who the dog was.
Leon had told Ward that both the wolf and wild dog had already been there—and shifted—when he’d been taken, and Daria and Tatiana had come after him.
When Ward had summoned Mark Roberts, the dead man had said that the dog had already been there when he’d been abducted, although he couldn’t tell me wheretherewas. I’d made Ward ask if he’d been able to shift, and he’d said no. They knocked him unconscious, and he’d been shifted when he came to—and couldn’t shift back. But the dead wolf shifter couldn’t tell me why and couldn’t give me anything more on his captors, either.
None of this helped me with the shifter in hairless dog form who might be stuck that way, if Roberts’s account was anything to go on. As far as everyone at work was aware, he was just an ordinary, if kinda ugly, dog.
They all thought he was adorable.
People who didn’t usually give me the time of day had started bringing dog treats over to my desk, and Caro—Caroline Little-Bruneski, my favorite dispatcher—had brought him a little doggy sweater. It was ridiculous. Baby blue with little sparkly snowflakes knitted into it. He had practically done a little dance with his front paws when Caro pulled it out of the bag. She’d put it on him, and he stood absolutely still while she did. I suppose the fact that it was January and still unseasonably cold probably had something to do with that, since the sweater probably kept his weird-looking, hairless ass warm.
Doc had dropped off a doggy bed, which was much more banal than the sweater—just brown and fluffy. The dog had insisted I bring it back to my apartment, which, okay. It wasn’t like I had doggy beds in my house. Apparently Doc had an extra, since the date on the tag was from a year ago, but it was clearly unused.
I wondered what Alma, Doc’s actual dog, would make of my new friend.
“You really should give this handsome boy a name,” Caro had told me. She wasn’t wrong, since just calling him ‘dog’ and ‘bud’ all the time was probably rather dehumanizing.
But it felt weird giving him a name when hehada name—I just didn’t know what the fuck it was. So I tried to find out, painstakingly going through the missing shifter databases, both state and national.
I knew I was looking for an Indigenous Latino male, although I had no idea how to search for his shifted designation, since Xoloitzcuintli was definitelynotan option in the database. ‘Wild dog’ got me some hits, but none of the people who came up were Latino or First Nations. I’d found a handful of African wild dog shifters, which looked a bit like hyenas, and one dingo shifter. I hadn’t known thereweredingo shifters.
Of course, until three days ago, I hadn’t known Xolo dogs were even a thing, much less that there were Xolo shifters. I’d switched to “unspecified canid” and gotten a few Latino men, but the incredulous doggy looks I got when I showed them to my furless wonder suggested that he was insulted that I thought they might be him.
Honestly, I didn’t think they looked much like him, either. I know that sounds ridiculous, since a human and a mostly-naked dog don’t generally share a lot of physiological characteristics. But the funny part about shifters was that you could often see the animal in the person, and vice versa.
How do I know this?
Well, my best friend growing up caught Arcanavirus when we were kids. I’d talked to him every day he was capable of talking on the phone while he was in the hospital, and I’d been the first person who wasn’t his parents to see him once he was released from St. Christopher’s.
Elliot Crane, who was Ho Chunk and Mameceqtaw, or what white people call Menominee, was a badger shifter. He honestly had already looked kinda like a badger. The American kind, not those cute-nosed British ones. Elliot is stocky, short, and looks like he would just as soon fuck you up as say hello. Which is pretty accurate. There’s a reason we get along.
When I’d contracted Arcana from a shithead perp in Milwaukee who had ripped my mask off and spit in my face, Elliot had also somehow convinced my extremely worried parents that he should be the first person to see me after I’d stopped screaming and trying to claw my own skin off.
Elves might look pretty at the end of our transformations, but I had been five-nine and stocky when it had started, and when it was over, I was six-four and leggy as fuck.
Trust me when I say you donotwant to grow seven inches in four days.
I barely even noticed when my ears had reshaped themselves and definitely didn’t notice when all my hair had fallen out.
When I woke up, my skin on fire and my bones feeling like Jell-O, my eyes and ears hypersensitive, and my whole body tender as though I’d been beaten like a gristly steak, I hadn’t given two fucks whether or not I hadhair.
