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Fuck.
I swallowed, trying to decide if it was a good idea to ask if Taavi still talked to his dad or not—and decided on not since he hadn’t bothered to even mention the man before now.
Again, my face must have been too obvious, which you’d think wouldn’t be the case after almost two decades as a cop.
Or maybe Taavi just knew me too well.
“My papá went to try to find her two days after I turned eighteen,” he said, his voice soft, but steady. “I got one postcard from somewhere in Veracruz, then nothing.”
“Fuck,” was all I could think to say.
Another flickering smile. “It was a long time ago,” he replied.
“I’m sorry I brought it up,” I told the ground between my feet.
“It is what it is,” he replied, and there was no hint of irritation or resentment in his tone that I could hear. But I also knew that you didn’t go through that kind of fucking shit and come out the other side without some deep scars.
Not that I had many myself. Happy home life, two adoring, still-alive parents, college and the career I had desperately wanted. At least until I quit after having been nearly killed by my own colleagues twice.
But even though I hadn’t grown up poor, I’d seen my share of the kind of scars poverty left behind.
Elliot and his parents had lived in town near us, but his aunt and uncle lived on the Menominee Reservation with his paternal grandma, who was Mamaceqtaw. Most people living on the reservation were poor, and poverty left its mark, often in the form of alcoholism, violence, and depression.
It made me wonder what kinds of scars Taavi was carrying around. Other than the obvious being-romantically-interested-in-me kind, because I was pretty sure that was the first red flag. Of course, if I ever wanted to have a relationship, I kinda had to deliberately ignore that one.
“Where did you grow up?” he asked me, then.
“Oh. Um. Wisconsin.”
“Is it as cold as they say?”
I barked a laugh. “Colder, probably. A couple times when I was a kid it was cold enough that they had to close school because you’d end up with frost bite in under five minutes.”
Taavi’s eyes were wide. “That… why would you live there?”
I laughed again, a little less bitter that time. “Oh, that kind of cold is rare. I think two days out of my entire childhood that happened. Usually it’s just cold enough that you wrap yourself in lots of layers and you’re fine.”
We’d reached the pond at the back of the garden, and Taavi grinned at me before hopping his way across the cement lily pads they had placed for precisely that purpose. I went around the side as he did, watching him. I’m not really the hopping-across-things type.
Taavi was quite agile, although I wouldn’t quite have called him graceful. Not that he was clumsy or awkward, but just… sharp. Like his movements could have been bigger, but he deliberately cut them all short.
He didn’t quite move like a human moved, which, okay, yeah, shifter. But there was something about him that was different even from the other shifters I’d met. Maybe because he’d grown up as a shifter. He’d had a supernatural body his whole life—the speed, the strength, the stronger senses of hearing and smell—those were all he’d ever known. They were natural to him, not something he had tolearn.Those of us who had transformed into our arcane forms later in life had to relearn our bodies, but he’d always been what he was.
I wondered what it was like to grow up as a shifter. To grow up being the thing that so many people spent so much time tryingnotto become.
Of course, there was more to it than that—Arcanavirus wasn’tjusta transformational illness. Some people made it through exactly the same as when they started. Some people didn’t. And some people died. Some people made it through the first time unchanged or as an Arc-human only to get it all over again. And sometimes those people died, although you couldn’t—as far as we knew, anyway—acquire a second Arcane ability. You could still get really sick or get dead.
The wholemight diething meant that of course it made sense to try not to catch it. But people equated—as they so often did—might diewithmight wake up as a different sub-species, and some people even suggested that death was preferable… Well, that could do one fuck of a number on one’s self-esteem, especially as a teenager.
Being a teenager had sucked enough without also being an Arcanid. And what I’d experienced as a regular old teenager had paled in comparison to what Elliot had gone through as a recently-changed shifter.
And then I wondered whether or not Taavi’d had control over shifting when he was really little. Raj and Elliot had both mentioned—during the whole why-can’t-the-dog-shift escapade six months ago—that heightened emotions or trauma could inhibit shifting. I’d seen articles that suggested they could trigger it, too—kind of a flight or fight or freeze thing.
Now imagine being a four-year-old throwing a tantrum and ending up as a dog in the middle of a grocery store. Honestly, that was probably pretty cool for the four-year-old, but would have been a nightmare for the parent.
I suddenly felt a lot of sympathy for Taavi’s dad.
Especially since it sounded like Taavi was a shifter because of his mother—she’d gotten sick. And that meant that his dad probably hadn’t been one, so he had no idea what to do with his can-turn-into-a-dog infant son early in a pandemic when nobody seemed to have a fucking clue what was going on.
