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Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker. That poor man.
It had been scary enough as a kid with a friend who’d gotten sick. We were eleven, and the pandemic had only been around for a half-dozen or so years. We honestly didn’t know how Elliot had gotten it, whether at home or at school or visiting family on the reservation. I remember my parents being upset and worried because Elliot and I were inseparable. If he was sick, what if I’d get sick, too? And then, of course, they worried because they liked Elliot and hoped he’d be okay.
I like to think that it was a sign of my parents’ good character that they didn’t even bat an eye when I asked to see him at St. Christopher’s Hospital, and they never objected to having him come over to the house, even after he’d become a shifter. I’m sure there were mysterious parental conversations that Elliot and I weren’t aware of, but I never saw them treat him any differently.
By the time I’d gotten it, we knew a lot more. That was more than two decades into the pandemic, and Elliot had come over to take care of me—since he couldn’t get it again as a shifter—and he had known to take me to the hospitalimmediatelywhen my bones started to ache.
I knew how shitty Elliot had it in school after his change. But Elliot was a pretty calm guy.Couldhe fuck you up? Yes, absolutely.Wouldhe? Probably not. And if he did, it wouldn’t be because he lost his temper. Elliot Crane doesn’t lose his temper. But you attempt to assault him in a bar, and he will break your arm and make you beg for mercy, calm as can be. I’ve seen it. It’s impressive. Also probably one of the reasons I like Doc—he reminds me of Elliot.
Taavi didn’t. Yeah, there were odd similarities here and there that came from being a shifter, but Taavi was slight and delicate and sweet, and Elliot was blunt and jacked.
Taavi had reached the wooden portion of the path across the pond, and I smiled as he half-danced his way across the planks.
I wondered if he’d had other shifters around him back in Arizona. Clearly no one important enough to go back for, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still talk to them or miss them. Or maybe he just couldn’t afford the trip back.
I’d done quite a bit of research into shifter communities and culture in the last six months, which clearly had absolutely nothing to do with this torch I was totally not carrying for Taavi Camal. What I’d learned was that there were essentially sub-species behavior patterns—canids, felids, ursids, mustelids. Most canids were pack animals—just like the dogs and wolves and coyotes from the animal kingdom whose forms they took. Ursids and mustelids were pretty solitary, generally speaking. Felids varied pretty widely—again, like the creatures whose forms they took. Lions were social, tigers were more solitary, and so on.
What I knew about Elliot—as a badger, he fell into the solitary mustelid category—was that he, like an animal badger, preferred to work alone and until all hours of the night, often finally drifting to bed with the dawn. I’d never really paid that much attention to badger behavior before, and that made me feel guilty all over again, because what the fuck kind of friend was I that I hadn’t?
So I decided to do better. I read a bunch about badgers, and then I read about Xoloitzcuintli dogs. They were likely descended from some sort of wolf or coyote, possibly mixed with some sort of more ancient wild dog, either from Africa or South America, although how an African dog got to Central America nobody seemed to be terribly sure. Xolos weren’t as pack-minded as other dogs, but they were sociable—at least according to the American Kennel Club—and they did get really, really attached to their people.
Part of me wanted to be Taavi’s people. And part of me was certain that as much as I might want that, it would be bad for him. Because, as I’m fully and painfully aware, I’m a selfish asshole.
Taavi reached the far side of the pond, then began to follow the curve around until we met, and he grinned up at me, drawing a smile from me in return.
“Does it snow here?” he asked me, then. “I’ve never seen snow.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
He cocked his head to the side, a familiar-yet-unfamiliar movement. He’d done it often enough as a dog, and it was a little odd to recognize it now that he was in human form. “It doesn’t snow in Yuma, and we didn’t ever get to the mountains in Arizona.”
“Well, snow falls from the sky here, once or twice, most winters,” I answered. “Sometimes it even sticks around for a day or two. But I don’t think I’d call it ‘snowing.’” Last winter—when he’d been here—it had gotten cold, but it had stayed dry and hadn’t actually snowed at all. “Not like back home.”
“Wisconsin, you mean.”
I nodded, finding it a little odd that even after a decade in Richmond, I still thought of Wisconsin as home.
"Do you—do you think you’ll go back?”
That was an interesting question. I hadn’t really thought about it, actually. I’d just assumed I’d work the force until I either retired or died. And now, here I was, a PI working for a witch and a warlock. Not at all what I’d thought I’d be doing.
I gave Taavi an honest answer. “Not planning on it.” Then, before I thought better of it, I asked him the same question. “You want to go back to Yuma?”
“No.” His answer sounded half-swallowed. “Nothing to go back to.” I guess that answered my question about whether or not he had a pack of sorts there.
“Roadrunners aren’t cool enough to draw you back?”
That made him laugh, one dark eye and one white one sparkling as he looked up at me. “They’re really just the bird version of squirrels,” he replied.
“I thought that was pigeons.”
The smile that played around his lips gave him a dimple on one side. “Too hot for pigeons in Yuma.”
Fucking hell, he was adorable.
* * *
By the timewe’d reached the bear enclosure—which Taavi pronounced hadn’t had a bear in it for years, according to the smell—I’d stopped freaking out quite so much and decided to just fucking ask my questions.
