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3

MY CONFUSION ONLY grew as Brandon pulled up in front of Bill Hayes’ house. Bill had been my father’s best friend for as long as I could remember. Why on earth were we here when Brandon said he was taking me to see the pack leader? 

When Brandon opened his door to get out, I asked, “Why are we at Bill’s house?”

“You know the Anikitos?”

“I don’t know who this Ani-key-toes you keep talking about is, but I do know that this is Bill Hayes’ house. Bill is Dad’s best friend. I’ve known Bill my whole life.”

“Do you trust him?” Brandon wanted to know.

“Well, yeah, of course I do.” 

“Good. Then this’ll be easier. You already know he’s not going hurt you and you know you’re in good hands if you, or he, want me to leave.”

“You keep acting like one of us is going to throw you out or something. Why would we do that? You’re my friend. You’re telling me that you and he are the same thing I supposedly am, so why would we throw you out?”

“It’s a Kindred thing and he’s the Anikitos, the boss. If he says jump, I ask how high and then I do it. End of story. I know you don’t get it now, but later you’ll understand. Maybe not right away, but eventually, you’ll get it. I just want you to be prepared in case it happens.”

“Okay, if you say so, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s just get this over with,” I opened my door and climbed out of the car. The heat of the day rushed in to smack me in the face after the cool of the air conditioning. I was starting to feel the ravenous hunger from earlier return. “When we’re through here can we find something to eat? I’m starving.” 

“I don’t see why not, but let’s see how things go before we make any solid plans.”

Brandon had already made his way up the short walkway and was standing at the door by the time I managed to tiptoe around the car on my bare feet.

I’m so glad that Bill keeps this place so shady, it’s saving me from burning my feet. Brandon rang the doorbell while I was still padding carefully up the sandstone walkway. By the time I got to the door, it had been opened and Karen, Bill’s wife, was standing in the open doorway. 

“Alekto, I offer my apologies for showing up without warning, but the Anikitos ordered me to bring Nickie as soon as possible,” Brandon said to Karen in a formal and subservient tone. It baffled me as I’d never seen Brandon behave like this. I looked back and forth between the two of them and noticed that Brandon was carefully avoiding looking Karen in the face. What’s going on here?

“Not a problem, Brandon. Bill told me you would be coming. I’m glad to see you both. Come on in, Bill’s in his office. Nickie,” she turned to me for the first time, “you know where it is. Please let Bill know I’ll be there in just a moment. Is there anything I can get for you on my way?” 

My stomach chose that moment to let us all know just how hungry I was by growling loudly. I felt the blood rush to my face as I blushed a bright red. 

“Did you have anything to eat after shifting?” she asked kindly. 

“I had a couple of protein bars,” I tried to pretend that had been enough to satisfy me.

“Oh, dear! Is that all?” She seemed surprised. 

“Sorry, ma’am, it’s all I had in the car. The Anikitos told me to bring her straight here,” Brandon put in apologetically. 

“Ah, no worries then,” she smiled. “I’ll just put something together for you, and then I’ll bring it in with me. You two go on in and see Bill though, he’s waiting.”

I led Brandon down the hall toward Bill’s office. I’d been here many times with my dad and I’d thought I’d known Bill well. Apparently not as well as I had thought. I wonder if Dad knows about Bill being some kind of werewolf leader? I didn’t know Karen quite as well, but we’d always gotten along. The door to Bill’s office was standing open and I stuck my head in first, looking to make sure he was actually in there before I just walked in. He looked up from the papers he had been studying on his desktop, and I could see a smile jump to his face as though he had been unsure who was coming in the door. 

“Nickie!” he said as he stood up, pushing the wheeled chair backward. He skirted his desk and approached me. “I’m so glad to see you, and that you’re safe and sound too. Why don’t you come on over here and have a seat? Then you can tell me exactly what happened today,” he invited as he guided me, with an arm around my shoulders, toward the sofa and chairs arranged into a conversation area at the opposite end of the long, narrow room. There was about ten feet of empty space between where I sat and his desk, with nothing but an elegant throw rug between the two. 

“I thought Brandon already told you what happened?” I asked, confused. I took a seat in my favorite of the large black leather chairs. Curling my bare feet under me as I settled into the familiar overstuffed seat. I remembered many hours spent in this same chair over the years, listening to Bill and Dad talk. 

“He did, but I’d like to hear it from you if you don’t mind,” he sat on the matching leather sofa across from me. Only Brandon was still standing. He looked uncomfortable, like he was waiting to be told what to do next. 

“If that’s what you want, I don’t mind. Oh!” I remembered, “Karen said she’d join us in a few minutes and to let you know.”

“That’s fine…” Bill said, and he almost absently pointed at Brandon and then to the other chair in the seating area, silently ordering him to have a seat, but his eyes never left me. 

I was quiet for a moment as I tried to figure out what to say. “Where do you want me to start?” Does he want just the shift or what led up to it, or everything that happened to me in the last few months since we’ve seen each other? 

“Wherever you want to. Where were you, what were you doing? Tell me as much as you feel comfortable with.”

“Ok…” I said, deciding to start with this morning. “Well, Brandon and I left early this morning…” I told Bill what happened, getting caught up in the memory of it. “The next thing I knew I was looking up at Brandon and he just looked so surprised. He said something like he thought it would never happen, and at the time I had no idea what he meant. It was several more minutes before I realized I wasn’t human anymore.”

“You were and still are the same person you’ve always been, dear, you just weren’t in human form,” Bill's voice was firm. “Remember that. You are always you, no matter what shape your body takes. You were still able to think, weren’t you?” I nodded. “Then you’re still you. End of story.”

I nodded again, accepting his reassurance, and continued my story, “He picked up my back pack and told me to follow him back to the car. I have to admit it took me a few minutes but once I got the hang of it, the trip was a lot easier on four legs instead of two. Anyway, we got back to the car, and Brandon got these out of the trunk,” I said, pulling at the loose black sweats I was wearing. “He told me how to shift back. After I got dressed, he gave me a couple of protein bars, told me I’m not crazy and I’m something called Kitsune, and that you and he are, too. Then he brought me here.” I turned to look at Brandon. “Why did you have these in the trunk anyway?” I asked.

“I always carry an extra set of clothes,” Brandon shrugged.

“Oh.” I only have clothes in my car for specific reasons, like a trip to the gym or helping out on the farm, so I didn’t know what to say.

“Can you tell me exactly how you managed to shift back to human form?” Bill asked, once again taking control of the conversation. 

“I just listened to Brandon and did what he told me to do. I pictured my human body and concentrated on how badly I wanted to be back in it, and it worked. When I opened my eyes, I was normal again.”

Bill turned to Brandon, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, “You didn’t help her?”

“No, sir, that’s not something I have the talent for. I just told her how to do it. I was hoping she could manage it on her own. If anyone has the force of will to manage their first deliberate shift without help, it would be Nickie.” I found his confidence in me startling but, at the same time, comforting and reassuring.

“What would you have done if she hadn’t been able shift back on her own?” Bill said.

“Wait a second,” I interrupted, feeling myself start to panic again. “Are you saying I could have been trapped as a wolf? That I could have been unable to shift back?”

“Kind of, but not really, or more accurately, not for long.” Bill's voice was gentle. “I’ll get to that in a minute, but I want this answered first. Just give us a second.” He turned back to Brandon and his voice hardened. “Well?”

“I’d have brought her here to you. I called you while she was trying to shift, I didn’t know if she would manage it or not at that point. If she hadn’t managed, I would have told her what I could and kept her as calm as I could while I brought her to you. I know our Harmonia has the talent to call and restrict animal forms. Once I got Nickie to you, you would have been able to see to it that Nickie got the help she needed to shift back to human form.”

“Very well,” Bill seemed satisfied, finding the answer acceptable. He turned back to me and his tone softened again, as if he had gone from speaking to an employee to a beloved family member. “As Brandon just said, we have someone who would have been able to help you to return to human form. Being stuck, as you put it, would only have been a temporary inconvenience.” 

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to relax away some of the tension that had seized my body when I thought I could have been trapped as a wolf. 

“Now, how are you feeling? Physically, at least, I’m sure your mind is spinning at all the new information.” Bill seemed concerned. 

“Honestly? I’m starving.”

“That’s to be expected. After all, you’ve shifted not once, but twice, and healed the snakebite too all in a very short amount of time, I’m sure. Changing shapes takes a lot of energy, even shifting once will make you hungry, and two energy bars aren’t nearly enough to replace what you’ve burned. I’m willing to bet if I know my wife,” Bill smiled fondly as he spoke of Karen, “that’s what’s taking her so long. She’s fixing you something to eat.”

“She did say she was going to put something together before she joined us,” I recalled.

“Very well,” he said. He turned to Brandon and again his voice cooled as he spoke to him, “You can go.” It sounded like a dismissal and I looked at Brandon, expecting him to protest being treated like a subordinate.

Brandon looked at me and asked, “Are you all right here without me or do you want me to stay?” I saw Bill’s eyebrows rise, as though Brandon’s not immediately leaving surprised him.

I turned back to Bill. “When Brandon told me he was taking me to see the pack leader, I had no clue who that might be. I was more than a little nervous. I made him promise not to just drop me off or leave me somewhere I wasn’t comfortable. He promised he wouldn’t leave without my permission.” Looking back at Brandon I said, “I’m fine here if you want to go. Bill will take good care of me and see to it that I make it home, I’m certain.”

“Of course,” Bill agreed easily.

“But I’m going to need my backpack out of your car, it has my PCD and some other things I’m gonna want.”

“No problem, I’ll bring it in before I go. Give me a call when you can, we’ll get together,” Brandon said before turning back to Bill. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.” 

Bill nodded and Brandon backed out of the room, almost as though he didn’t want to turn his back on Bill. I must have had a confused look on my face. 

“What has you so baffled, dear?” 

“Him, you, all of it. I’m going to ignore everything that’s happened to me today and let that process for a while. But what I can’t understand right now is Brandon acting almost afraid of you. I’ve never seen him like that before now with you, and with Karen when we arrived.” 

“It’s not fear exactly, more like healthy respect. I’m the Anikitos for our pack. The pack alpha, for lack of a better term. It’s a position I had to earn by battle and dominance. Simply put, I’m the strongest and the most powerful in the group. As such, I have the right to punish or have punished anyone in the pack, as I see fit, and Karen as well, though her title is Alekto. Normally, he’s not quite so submissive, but I think he was afraid that after you were injured and shifted so suddenly, I would be angry. Maybe a bit more so after he found out how well we know each other.” 

“Oh.” I was still confused, but not sure what else to say. My eyes were still on the doorway Brandon had left through, but I wasn’t really focusing. I’d let them go unfocused as I thought about what he was telling me.

“Now,” Bill said, changing the subject. “Would you mind showing me where the snake bit you?”

I shook my head slightly, jarring myself from my thoughts and pulled my attention back to him. 

“Not at all.” I scooted forward in the chair, pulled my right leg out from underneath me and tugged the elasticized bottom of the leg on the ill-fitting black sweats up to my knee. I carefully propped my bare foot on the edge of the table that was situated between the sofa and chairs and leaned my leg to one side so the spot we were looking for was on top. “Here it is.” I pointed to a spot on my calf. “You can see the marks, but they look days old and mostly healed now, more like healing scrapes than any kind of puncture or bite.” I looked at him and back down at my leg again. “I really don’t understand it.” I tilted my head to one side and looked back up, watching him for his reaction.

Bill slid forward on the sofa until he was seated on the edge of the couch and leaned forward so that he could get a better look at the marks on the meaty part of my calf. He reached forward with one hand but stopped mere millimeters shy of touching me. “It appears your shifting has healed any damage the venom might have done, not that it had time to do much damage, and it’s well on its way to healing the wound too.”

“It wasn’t quite this healed when I shifted in the car. I could still see a wound, it was starting to scab over but now it looks at least a week old.”

“That’s not uncommon, the worst of the damage was healed when you first shifted, it healed more with your second shift and now your body’s working on finishing up.”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“Well, I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you for certain, but I can give you my best guess based on my experience with Kitsune healing…”

“Okay,” I waited to hear what he could tell me. Maybe he’ll say something that will help me understand what’s happening to me.

“Well, we already know that you panicked, you said that when you told me what happened today. I would place bets that your panic in turn sent your wolf into a panic. Though you have yet to know her, your wolf knows you well since she is a part of you, and she knew that if you were in a panic then you, and therefore she, were in danger of dying. So she took charge, forcing you to change. The process of your change itself pushed the venom back out the open wound and healed any damage it had done so far.

“You said you were bitten, panicked, and then found yourself in wolf form. I’m assuming this happened in the space of just two or three minutes? There probably wasn’t a great deal of damage yet, so the healing needed for that would have been minimal.”

“It seemed like hours at the time, but in reality, it was probably no more than two minutes. Brandon wasn’t far ahead of me on the trail. I heard him stop when I fell and it probably took him less than a minute to cover the distance, and by the time he managed to reach me, he looked so surprised, I must have already shifted.”

Bill nodded. “All right,” he said as he moved to sit back on the couch again. “I realize this has to be more than a little bit of a shock to you.” 

“What did Brandon mean when he said he thought it would never happen? How could he know that I might someday shift?” I pushed the leg of the sweats back into place and settled back into the chair again. The discussion about the process of my shifting reminded me again of the statement. “You don’t seem particularly surprised either, why not?”

“I’m not surprised. I’ve known for years there was a possibility you would shift. Brandon knew it was a possibility because I told him.”

“You never said anything to me? What about Dad?” Bill was shaking his head and I knew he hadn’t told Dad either. “Why would you say something to Brandon, but not to us?” I couldn’t hide the hurt and confusion in my voice.

“I couldn’t, not until I knew if you were actually going to shift.”

“What do you mean? If you could tell that I’m one of these Kitsune, how couldn’t you know if I would shift?”