The Shifter's Choice (3 page)

Bri said she would make Johnny the same pack one day. But so far he didn’t need it. They’d been here six months. A year and four months since the attack and still Johnny had to use shampoo on his entire body and had no need for clothing since his fur was so thick it covered his junk. Johnny picked the twigs and bits of moss from his furry shoulder and smoothed his glossy coat.

Mac held out the slate to Johnny. He took it and briefly considered throwing the thing as far as he could.

“You ditched her?” asked Mac.

That answer seemed obvious.

“Why not give her a chance?”

Johnny growled.

“Why do you keep ditching them?” asked Mac. “The guys, too. How can I help you if you keep running off?”

He meant the wounded warriors. Johnny’s own private trial-by-fire team. One member was even a double amputee, as if having the name Dugan Kiang wasn’t handicap enough. Dugan could really run on those kangaroo legs, as he called them, but none of them had experiences that quite matched Johnny’s. They could all visit their mothers, for example, and go on leave and walk into a bar without people screaming. And they could talk to each other and they’d all had women since returning Stateside. All but him.

He shrugged.

“Are they bad company?”

Not bad. They were good guys and good marines. Better than Johnny. At least they still followed orders. While Johnny had been second-guessing orders since they’d entered that building in Afghanistan.

His new comrades talked about what most men talked about. Sports, getting laid, work, drinking, getting laid. But alcohol no longer affected Johnny and as for women, the only ones who had seen him since the accident were the medical professionals with top-secret clearances. None of them touched him unless absolutely necessary and he could smell their fear as clearly as he could scent the wild pig that had tracked past here last night.

There was one woman who didn’t avoid him but she was taken. Mac’s wife, Brianna, had some very special circumstances of her own and that gave her an understanding of Johnny. At least her friendship did not stem from duty or pity or guilt—like Mac’s.

“Johnny?” Mac extended the chalk.

He didn’t like having friends assigned to him like the most unpopular kid in class and he didn’t want a teacher that ignored him. He accepted the chalk, holding it in his large hands with difficulty. It twisted in his fingers, breaking the unsteady white line he scrawled but he managed to write “They’re young” on the slate.

“Twenties. Same age as you,” replied Mac before Johnny had finished writing. “Touma is only twenty. On her second assignment.”

Johnny released the chalk and dusted off his fingers on his hairy thigh. The fine motor control required for moving the chalk was a real pain in his ass. His handwriting had once been a source of pride. Now his words looked as if they had been penned by a preschooler. Johnny scowled at the slate.

“They’re all learning sign language. They want you to start talking to them. But you have to learn first.”

He shook his head. It didn’t make any sense. By not learning he could only listen to the guys’ conversation. By not learning he was keeping himself apart. But he still couldn’t do it even though he knew that his refusal hurt and confused his captain.

“Aren’t you sick of answering questions with a yes or no?”

Johnny answered no.

“Now you’re just being a pain in my ass.”

He was. And if not for Johnny, Mac could spend more time with his wife and less with his guilt. But Mac couldn’t walk away—not ever, because Mac had been the second werewolf that had attacked Johnny.

The scientists said it was Mac’s bite, that second attack, that now made it impossible for Johnny to change back into human form.

Johnny wiped his words from the slate and tried three times to pick up the chalk before succeeding. Then he wrote “Combat duty?”

Mac shook his head. “They said no. Christ, Johnny, you don’t follow orders. You come and go as you please. And you want them to trust you in a combat zone? Not gonna happen. Stay inside the perimeter, follow orders, stop acting crazy and maybe you’ll get an assignment.”

Johnny threw the slate.

Mac watched it disappear into the foliage. “Damn it,” he muttered. Mac’s gaze flicked back to Johnny, hands on hips. His captain looked like his mother when he did that. “Give her a chance. Learn to sign and maybe then you can have a field assignment.”

Johnny raised his lips, showing his teeth. Mac blew out a breath.

“I have to go get Touma. She better not be crying. I hate crying women.” He stepped past Johnny and then paused turning back. “Bri wants you at dinner tonight.”

Johnny shook his head. He hadn’t been to Mac’s place since reassignment from the mainland, even though his quarters were only a half mile away. A new couple needed privacy. While he missed his friend, Johnny was happy for him; though, adjusting to life without his captain as a bunk mate had been hard. Nobody understood him like Mac.

“Yeah. She said you’d say no and said to tell you that if you don’t come she’s coming to your place and cooking supper there.” Mac waited.

Johnny glanced toward the rain forest feeling the urge to run again. That pig was upwind.

“She thinks you’re mad at her for taking me away. I told her that’s bullshit.”

Johnny met his gaze and held Mac’s stare. The pain and regret was back in his friend’s eyes.

“Is it bullshit?”

Johnny picked up a stick and scratched his answer in the dirt. “What time?”

Chapter 3

T
he following day, Sonia’s escort to Sergeant Lam’s quarters was Corporal Del Tabron who was missing his left arm from the elbow. He said he was part of the squad that worked out with John, though she’d come to think of him as Johnny since everyone referred to him that way, every morning and sometimes hung with him at night. Each of the five members was missing something. Sonia asked what Johnny was missing and was met with a blank stare.

“He’s a werewolf,” said Tabron, his brow knitting as if just now considering that she might not know this.

Yes, she’d been made aware of that she assured him, but it seemed that these men were all dealing with loss, while Johnny was dealing with change. The two seemed very different to Sonia and assigning these men to Johnny seemed comparable to giving a gorilla a kitten. The gorilla might love the kitten but the kitten didn’t really get the gorilla.

Del didn’t know why Johnny didn’t want to learn sign but they all agreed that nobody except the captain could ever get Johnny to do anything he didn’t want to do. But lately, he admitted, the captain had struck out a few times, too.

Sonia said nothing to this as she was already familiar with the captain’s charming powers of persuasion.

Del gripped the wheel with a claw that looked like a bent pair of kitchen tongs. Despite her apprehension, he was a competent driver and he delivered her all too soon.

Sonia stared across the open ground to his quarters. She really looked at the building closely for the first time. Nothing about it said military. She wondered if the home was here before the base because the lovely bungalow was set on stilts and surrounded by banana palms and ringed with greenery covered with tiny orange blossoms.

How much rain did they get up here that they needed to put all the buildings on stilts? The angle of the hillside put the second floor at ground level in the back, but from her seat she could not see the rear. The house was all stained wood with a wide porch facing the ocean. There were several chairs on the porch. The roof was tin and painted red. A stream snaked along beside Johnny’s yard and then dropped down the hillside and out of sight.
The same stream that threads past the captain’s?
she wondered. She must have jumped it yesterday, though she didn’t even remember. Or had she used one of the large gray rocks set as stepping stones across the gap?

She lifted her attention to the small house. It looked like an adorable honeymoon cottage instead of quarters for a surly werewolf. She recalled his chasing her yesterday. He was all huff and puff, she decided. She had to believe that or she wasn’t getting out of this Jeep.

Del called for Johnny who did not appear. “Sometimes he does that.”

“What?”

“Ignores us. Takes off.”

Good,
she thought.
Stay away.

“He might not be home,” said Del. “But my orders are to leave you here either way.” He gave her an expectant look and she wondered what he would do if she refused to get out of the Jeep. They stared at one another.

“Fine,” she said and threw open the door, sliding to her feet. She slammed the door and stared at Del through the open window. He handed over the bag that included another set of smaller dry-erase boards and markers, paper, pens and a book of sign language. Del scratched his chin with his hook and put the Jeep in Reverse, but kept his foot on the brake and his eyes on her.

“He might come back.”

Sonia didn’t care if he stayed away for hours. She’d sit on that porch and stare at the Pacific, breathe the warm, tropical air and pretend she was here on vacation with a husband who adored her.

“Oh, and the captain said that he is picking you up and that he wants to see some progress.”

“Progress?”

He shrugged.

“From the invisible man?”

“He’s probably around.”

Sonia stepped back as Del turned the Jeep around and vanished down the road.

Her heart rate increased at his leaving, but not from fear of the werewolf. The captain wanted progress. Johnny was screwing with her freedom. That made Lam’s disappearance a problem.

Sonia’s search of the grounds yielded nothing. His quarters were locked. She had one lesson to teach an oppositional werewolf some signs and she hadn’t even seen Lam.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have called him furball,” she muttered.

Sonia was shaking now with a dangerous cocktail of adrenalin and fury. This monster marine was not going to be the cause of her going to a military prison. She’d rather die right here on this mountain than end up in a cage.

“So you want to play hide and seek? I’m good with that.” Sonia dropped her bag of supplies on Lam’s porch, squared her shoulders and crossed the stepping stones over the rushing water, aiming for the place she had last seen him yesterday. She knew she couldn’t follow his trail. She could barely read a bus map and had completely blown orienteering in basic. Three steps into the deep cover of the tropical canopy and the temperature dropped, the air turned damp and the smell of rot mingled with the fragrance of jasmine. She paused to look about. The birdsong was everywhere, but she could not see a single bird.

“Johnny?” she whispered. He didn’t answer of course. Though her surroundings were inviting they were also unfamiliar, so she turned around and walked back to the clearing. But after six steps she didn’t find it. A little jolt of panic popped inside her, but she held it down. She’d only taken a few steps.
Think, Sonia.

The water. She listened and could hear the sound of the running stream. She blew out a breath and then headed toward the sound. It was farther than she expected and on the way it began to rain, a soft patter on the leaves above that didn’t reach her. She crept under vines and between wide palm leaves that were stiff and sharp as razor blades. The rain fell harder, dripping off the greenery and plopping down on her hat with giant droplets. The patter turned to a drenching. Her teeth began to chatter. She glanced up at the sky and spotted a lovely white orchid growing from the notch of a tree, bobbing in the falling rain as if it was laughing at her.

“That’s why they call it a rain forest,” she muttered and eased over a mossy log.

One moment she was standing and the next she was falling. Her hands went up as her butt struck the ground with a jolt that rattled her teeth. She landed on a dangerous angle and slid on her backside as the world blurred into a sea of green. Vines and leaves slashed across her face and she lifted her hands to protect herself from this new assault. She stopped abruptly by striking something solid and folded over a log losing all the air in her lungs. At least she wasn’t still moving, but she was dizzy. Had she struck her head? Sonia opened her eyes to see she was lying with her legs on one side of a slippery, moss covered log and her torso dangling over the other side with nothing underneath her but treetops and hot tropical air. She stared at the cliff’s edge where the steep incline fell away. The tree trunk, that had saved her life, grew perpendicular from the cliff.

Sonia tried to scream, but the fall had knocked the wind out of her and breathing took all her energy. The dizziness increased and she knew if she passed out she’d fall and if she fell, she’d die.

Below her, silvery sheets of rain fell from the black clouds sweeping up the mountain.

Instinct took over and she grabbed her knees, holding herself about the mossy trunk like a ring on a finger. How long could she hold on?

Something grabbed her by the back of her jacket collar. She gripped the log tighter but was torn loose. A moment later she was thrown over a broad shoulder. Her hands braced on the man’s back only to discover it was covered with soft thick fur. Sergeant Lam! He’d rescued her.

She groaned and relaxed, falling limp against the sable-soft hair that covered him. He gripped her legs and easily swung her before him, carrying her like a bride over the threshold.

Sonia trembled as rain streaked down her face. She was scared, but not of Lam. She’d almost fallen to her death. If not for him, she would have. She threw her arms about his neck and clung to Lam as the relief shuttered through her. Sonia nestled her face into his chest and tried not to let him see that she was crying as he climbed the incline that had nearly killed her. He moved with slow steady steps as if in no hurry to be rid of her. She was grateful because she needed a moment to pull herself together and here in his arms she was warm and safe.

The beating rain ceased as if someone had turned a tap off, leaving only the steady dripping of water through the canopy. The sunlight streamed down in bright ribbons through the gaps. The Sergeant stooped, bringing her back to her feet and she lifted her head from his shoulder forcing herself to release his sturdy neck. Sonia shielded her eyes against the glare and looked around. She was back on the opposite side of the stream where she had made the cosmically stupid move of trying to follow a werewolf into the forest.

Lam stepped away. When her gaze met his, he just looked her up and down as if searching for injury. He lifted a hand toward her. She glanced at it but did not flinch. If he meant her bodily harm he had only to wait for her to drop off that log. Instead he had rescued her. His attention moved to her head as he pulled a stick complete with leaves from her hair. Her neat bun was now a tangled mess of tendrils that frizzed in all directions around her face and neck. She touched her head, realizing she’d lost her hat.

She lifted her hands and began to sign as she spoke. “Thank you for saving my life, Sergeant Lam.”

He nodded his acknowledgment.

“I owe you one,” she said while signing.

He nodded his agreement that, yes, she did. Johnny dipped a finger in the stream. He used the water to write on the flat gray stone, “Sorry.”

She made a fist and then moved it in a circle over her heart. “Sorry,” she repeated as she made the sign again.

He mimicked the sign perfectly.
Sorry.

Johnny cupped a handful of water and used his opposite hand to gently tug her down to her knees beside the stream. He dabbed cold water on her cheek and she felt the sting of a cut. His touch was warm and tender. It made her throat ache even more so she took over using both hands to splash water on her stinging, scratched face.

A Jeep horn blared. Sonia shot to her feet, her face hot. She spun toward the drive, obscured by the house.

“Fucking motherfucking fuck!” she said, still signing out of habit. She glanced at Johnny. “That’s the captain and just look at me!” She held out her arms to show him the whole muddy, bloody catastrophe. “
And
he’s going to want to see your progress! I’m screwed.”

The captain called. “Johnny? Private Touma?”

Johnny headed for the Jeep. Sonia looked back to the jungle staunching the irrational urge to turn and run the opposite way. She glanced down at her soaked clothing, torn muddy trousers and the scrapes that covered her hands.

“There you are,” said the captain clearly speaking to Johnny. “Hour’s up.”

Sonia wiped her face and realized she’d likely just smeared more blood on it. She trailed around the house lifting one foot after the other. She couldn’t manage to raise her chin until she cleared the house. She looked to Johnny as if for another rescue but he stood still as stone, his jaw locked, his big hairy arms motionless.

“How did it go?” asked the captain. His smile died a moment later as he stared at her, his eyes going wide as his gaze swept the entirety of her appearance.

Demerits she thought and then giggled. She slapped a hand over her mouth to stop the sound. Johnny looked at her and raised one tufted brow. He had long hairs growing from his eyebrows, like a sheepdog’s.

“Not so well, I guess,” said the captain, scowling now. “What happened to you?”

Sonia signed as she spoke. “I slipped.”

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, although every muscle in her body ached. She hadn’t felt this bad since basic training.

“Did Johnny have a lesson?” he asked.

Sonia’s heart sank. For just one instant she thought her injuries might have caused a delay in sentencing but this judge had no mercy in his heart. She drew a breath to answer the question honestly when Johnny began to sign, perfectly and in quick succession. He signed,
Slipped. Sorry.
I’m screwed. Fuck.

The captain blinked. Sonia braced for the explosion. Then the captain smiled, a grin really. Wide and bright and some of the tension eased from Sonia’s neck. She looked from the sergeant to the captain.

“Well, well,” said Captain MacConnelly. “Looks like you learned a lot.” His expression seemed to glimmer with relief. That’s when she realized he had fully expected her to fail. “Good work, Private. I’d say you’ve had enough for today.”

He waited for her to deny it and, to her shame, she didn’t.

“Okay. Let’s get you checked out and cleaned up back at base.” He walked her to the Jeep with Johnny skulking along behind them as if he knew he wasn’t welcome. But he was. She’d rather stay here with him than go with the captain and that realization made her gasp. Johnny noticed it. The captain didn’t.

Johnny pointed at her and then lifted his brows and made the okay sign.

A question, she realized and smiled. His first question. She nodded then signed back without speaking,
Yes. I’m okay. Thank you
.

Johnny nodded and the captain had not even noticed the exchange as he swept into the Jeep and started the engine. “I’ll bring her back tomorrow afternoon at thirteen hundred.”

Sonia held her breath. Johnny gave her a long stare and then a single curt nod.

Sonia released her breath in a long sigh. She was coming back. Thank God. She had gotten another reprieve.

* * *

Sonia reported to the medical unit for a check. Nothing was broken but the bruises were everywhere. They’d let her shower there and got her a new uniform. She was discharged and returned to quarters to find her footlocker had been placed at the end of one bunk.

Progress, she thought.

She glanced at the concrete bunkerlike room. Her new home, courtesy of the U.S. Government. It didn’t look a lot different than a prison cell. She glanced at the windows. No bars, she realized. That was one important difference. Still, leave it to the government to make a tropical paradise look like a group home. Sonia unpacked her belongings that were not really hers. Everything she now owned had been requisitioned. She reached the bottom of her bag and her fingers grazed the one personal item she still possessed. A photograph of her and her sister, Marianna, when she was six and Marianna four. Her sister’s hearing aid looked gigantic back then and made her ears stick out. The image was made worse by the short pixie cut that matched her own, a result of the lice they had both had. Her mother had been told they had to stay home until the medication killed all the lice. Instead her mom had shaved their heads and sent them to school. Marianna had earned the name Dumbo that year and it had stuck until middle school.