Stray (Shifters #1)(12)

Both men ran toward me, pulling their shirts off as they came. I paused for a moment to enjoy the view as generous moonlight highlighted every hard plane on their chests and cast shadows beneath each ripple of their abs. Very nice. Almost worth being dragged home for.
The guys never bothered with neat piles. They left their clothing scattered all over the yard, draped across bushes and sometimes hanging from tree branches. It would have been quite a sight for the unaccustomed eye. Fortunately, we had no close neighbors and never had human visitors, other than Michael’s wife, who visited rarely enough that it was easy for us to keep our inner cats on their leashes. So there was seldom anyone around to be scandalized by our behavior.
Naked, I ducked beneath the branches of the nearest tree and into the forest, twigs and thorns scraping my bare skin. Relief rushed through me to ease tension I hadn’t even realized I’d felt. My impulse to rush was gone now; in crossing the tree line, I’d won the race. Jace’s car was mine, if and when I had the nerve to take it. I’d have to remember to thank Marc. Yeah, right.
My means of escape secured, I was ready to relax and stretch my legs in the forest, a luxury I’d sorely missed at school.
As soon as the guys were out of sight, I dropped to all fours and closed my eyes in concentration. Shifting always begins for me with a moment of quiet relaxation or meditation. It sounds like a page from Zen for Dummies, but it really helps and only takes a couple of minutes. It’s just a moment for my mind to acknowledge and submit to what my body wants.
Shifting is possible during moments of extreme stress, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If your brain hasn’t had a chance to adjust to what’s coming, it responds by sending your body more pain signals than necessary. No one wants to experience avoidable pain. Okay, maybe masochists do, but I harbor no fondness for pain. No fondness for experiencing it, anyway.
Dimly, I heard leaves rustle as Marc and Jace entered the woods, but I made no effort to acknowledge them. I didn’t need to. They dropped to the ground, one on either side of me, and began their own Shifts.
On my knees, with my nose less than two feet from the ground, I breathed in the fragrances of the forest, letting the pine-scented air trigger my Shift. Just as certain notes played on the piano can bring to mind an entire melody, so the smell of last year’s pine needles and leaf mold called forth the cat from inside me. An undulating wave of pain and change, the Shift rolled through me, tensing and relaxing my muscles with no pattern I could discern. 
As a teenager, I’d struggled to try to prepare myself for each phase as it came, determined to master the art of Shifting. It didn’t work. In the end, Shifting mastered me. When I gave up trying and relaxed, I realized that while I couldn’t control my discomfort, I could anticipate it, from the first sharp stab of pain to the last nagging bone-ache. With anticipation came acceptance, and that turned out to be enough.
My spine arched and joints popped. I ground my teeth together as my fingernails hardened and grew into claws, remembering to unclench my jaw before the first ripple of pain lapped at my face, announcing the arrival of the tidal wave just behind it. Mouth open, I stretched my chin as far forward as I could, gasping as my jaw buckled and bulged with the ingress of new teeth, pointed, slightly curved, and very sharp. My tongue itched briefly but unbearably, as hundreds of tiny, backward-pointing barbs budded from it in a prickling surge from the base to the rounded tip.
And finally, just as I was starting to catch my breath, my skin began to tingle as fur sprouted across my back, flowing to cover my limbs and stomach, before moving on to my face.
The only good thing about the pain was its brevity, and the worst by far was its intensity. It was like being ripped open and rearranged, without so much as a capsule of Tylenol. Immediately following a Shift, I felt like all my bones had been broken and allowed to heal wrong, like I didn’t quite fit into my new body. Fortunately, it only took one good stretch to improve the fit. I extended my front paws, claws piercing ground cover to grip the fragrant earth while I presented my rump to the sky, my tail waving slowly in the air.
There was a time when Shifting on a regular basis was a normal part of my life, just something else I did, like I slept, showered, and ate. Along with other, normal physical changes, my initial Shift was brought on by puberty. But unlike other biological processes, it could be repressed or initiated, though I’d pay a severe physical penalty for doing too much of either.
Away at school, I Shifted when I had to, or when an irresistible opportunity presented itself, like my yearly camping trip with Sammi’s family. While slinking undetected through a forest swarming with humans is exciting in a forbidden kind of way, it can’t compare to the sense of belonging I felt each time I hunted with the members of my Pride.
And it’s been so long, I thought, watching Marc and Jace writhe, each in the grip of his own Shift. Far too long.
Six

By the time Marc and Jace stood, their Shifts complete, I was ready to greet them on four legs. I weighed a healthy one-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds, which is slim, with ample allowance for curves on a woman my height. As a human, that’s not very impressive. But a one-hundred-and-thirty-five pound cat always gets a second glance—and usually a panicked scream.
But if I was impressive as a cat, Marc was downright scary. Including his tail, he was just over six and a half feet of sleek black fur, sharp claws and jaws powerful enough to split the back of a deer’s skull with a single bite. He was a two-hundred-and-forty-pound mass of graceful, rippling muscles, just waiting to pounce. And few things pounced on by Marc ever got back up.
My father theorized that in cat form we have occasionally been mistaken for so-called “black panthers,” a term used to refer to melanistic jaguars or leopards. In short, black panthers don’t exist, but we do. All of us, regardless of our coloring as humans, have, as cats, the same short, solid black, glossy fur, completely devoid of stripes or rosettes. Length and weight vary with each individual, of course, but in general we are somewhere between the size of a jaguar and that of a small-to-medium lion.
Finished with his own Shift, Marc circled me slowly, stopping several times to sniff my fur in specific places, and once to give my nose a quick lick. Finally satisfied that all was well with me, he rubbed his cheek against mine and nipped tenderly at my neck. I let him. Social guidelines were different in cat form, when it no longer mattered who’d left whom, and why. As cats, we were part of a whole, like littermates.Jace stood back, letting Marc have his way, because just as some rules changed, others stayed the same. Marc walked the length of my body, letting his tail drag across my back. Then he sat on the ground in front of me and roared.
My heart leapt to hear it. I hadn’t heard a roar other than my own in years. Ours is not the distinctive roar of a lion, though it’s nearly as deep and clearly feline. It sounds like a series of low-pitched bleats, rising and falling in volume, each blending into the next.
Deeper in the woods, the playful romping stopped as the others froze in place to listen. Marc had called, and he was their leader in my father’s absence. As the last of Marc’s roar faded from my ears, it was replaced with the sounds signaling their approach: snapping twigs, crunching leaves and deep breathing. Cats could be absolutely silent when they chose, but rarely bothered when there was no need. The guys weren’t stalking; they were responding to a summons.
In moments, Parker burst through the brush, followed by Owen and Ethan, three dark blurs soaring through the air in front of me to land with delicate, easy grace. Except for one. Ethan landed not on the ground, but on Jace, who rolled over onto his back at the last second. He caught Ethan’s throat between enlarged canines and the vulnerable flesh of his attacker’s stomach with exposed rear claws. They were only playing, so Jace neither bit nor slashed, but had it been for real, it would have been bloody. And it would have been over in a heartbeat. But then, if it had been for real, Jace would never have heard him coming.
Jace tossed Ethan to the ground, where he landed on his feet, hissing with his fur standing on end.
They both joined the others in greeting me. In cat form, even more than as humans, our greetings were very physical. I found myself at the center of a writhing, purring mass of black fur and whiskers, tails curling over, under, and around me. The mingling of personal scents was both comforting and invigorating, as were the memories tumbling over one another in a bid for my attention.
When my patience dwindled, I nipped at whatever came near my mouth. I got a whiff of hay and dry soil as I bit down gently on Owen’s tail. Jace’s ear came with the faint scent of the Granny Smith he’d finished for Ethan. But no one paid any attention to my warnings until I growled, and even then they were slow learners. Marc came to my rescue, which I thought was the least he could do, since it was his fault they’d converged on me in the first place. And since even the smallest of them—Ethan—outweighed me by forty pounds.
Marc hissed, and I turned to look at him across someone’s back. He stood several feet away with his neck straining forward and his jaw open to expose a mouthful of sharp teeth, ears flat against the top of his skull. He wasn’t really mad; he was just posturing to get their attention. It worked.