Thank God, I wasn’t born in a hospital. My mother didn’t like them. Didn’t like doctors. Since there weren’t any complications with the pregnancy, she hired a midwife and gave birth at home. It was all very gentle. I was put straight on her breast, and she held me until the midwife left. Then she handed me over to my dad to hold. I guess I didn’t like that. I let out a howl, and I turned into a tiny tiger cub and bit him.

I didn’t have any teeth yet, but I still can’t believe he didn’t drop me. Dad’s a great guy. Mom took me back and cuddled me, and I turned back into a baby.

And that was how it went for my entire childhood. I got upset or angry or even excited, and I turned into a tiger. I calmed down, and I turned back into a baby or a toddler or a little girl.

It was lucky we had that family legend, because that gave my family some sort of vague idea of what was going on. No one thought I was a monster or a demon or anything like that. Once they knew the legend was real, they also knew that the people in my family who had been shifters had led normal lives. They hadn’t been locked in an attic, they’d been dressmakers and firemen and soldiers and so forth.

My family figured that shifters must learn how to control the shift once they got old enough to understand why they ought to. So they told everyone that I had a problem with my immune system and couldn’t have visitors, but I was getting treated and hopefully it’d be fixed when I was older. They figured that if shifting is like knowing not to take off your clothes in public, I’d be able to control it by the time I was five, and if it was more like learning to play a musical instrument well, I could do it by ten or so.

You see, they didn’t know any shifters, or know how to find any. If they had, they would’ve known that shifters usually don’t get the ability to shift until they’re older. Nine or ten, usually. Sometimes not until puberty. As a toddler, at the very earliest. And even then, they can control it themselves, though whether or not they want to might be a different story.

Our house had a big backyard with a wall around it, and my family would sometimes sneak me into their van in the middle of the night, then drive out to the wilderness for a hiking trip. So I wasn’t locked inside all the time. But I never saw anyone but my family or their very closest friends.

My family tried their best to make teaching me not to shift be a normal thing, like teaching me to read or not to throw tantrums. But I couldn’t do it. It was like they were trying to teach me to fly by saying, “Flap your arms! Now lift off!” And I’d flap and flap and flap, and finally I’d start cryin

g because it was the millionth time and I still couldn’t get off the ground, and then they’d say, “Don’t cry, honey, I know you’re trying. You’ll get it eventually.”

But I knew I ought to be able to do it already. I felt like a failure.

By the time I was nine or ten, they’d figured out that there was a real problem. They’d been trying the entire time to get in touch with some other shifters, but since the entire existence of shifters is a secret, they’d had no luck. They have some pretty funny stories about all the weirdos and lunatics they met on the internet. My poor dad had coffee with a whole bunch of them just in case they were for real, but none of them ever got past his screening to meet me.

Finally, mom thought of trying something different. She pretended she was into genealogy, and she started tracking down every relative she didn’t already know, no matter how distant they were. Finally, she found a branch of the family who were still shifters, and we met them.

It wasn’t much fun, to be honest. They tried to be nice, but I could see how they looked at me: like I was a freak. And they had no idea what to do about me. Some aunt made a snooty remark about us being proof that she was right about ‘keeping the blood pure.’ Mom grabbed me and stormed out. Dad stayed long enough to get the names and phone numbers of every other shifter they knew, and then he thanked them for their time, told the aunt he hoped she was proud of herself for making a little girl cry, and left.

Then we spent a year contacting other shifters. After a while, word spread in the shifter community and they started contacting us. We got emailed by shifters from all around the world. Only they all said stuff like, “That poor child, I’ve never heard of such a dreadful situation, I don’t have any ideas but let me know if there’s ever anything I can do to help” and “I’ve never even heard of anything like this but my auntie in Beijing knows lots of shifter history, here’s her email” and “I’m so sorry, in all my years I’ve never heard of such a thing, best wishes from Beijing.”

It was horrible. I’d spent my whole life feeling like I was this freak and wishing I could find other people like me. Then I found them, and it turned out that I was even more of a freak than I’d realized.

Finally, we got emailed by a woman in India. She was a ratel shifter—we had to look that up, it’s sort of like a badger—and she said she didn’t know how to help herself, but she lived in a town that had a lot of shifters and some of the families had lived there for hundreds of years. She said she thought that if we showed up, the town could collectively figure it out. It sounded pretty unlikely, but by then we were so desperate, we decided to do it.

Then there was the problem of getting there. If I got on a plane, I might shift on the way. They could sedate me, but then they’d have to explain why they were putting an unconscious girl on a plane. Finally, they emailed one of the “if there’s ever anything I can do to help” shifters, who’d mentioned that he owned his own plane, and offered to pay him to fly us there. He refused to take any money from us and flew us there for free.

It was the first time I’d ever been on a plane. He saw how excited I was and invited me to come into the cockpit and see how it all worked. My parents were nervous about me turning into a tiger and crashing the plane, but he laughed and said he was an Army veteran and a lion shifter and he’d be ashamed of himself if he couldn’t handle one little tiger cub.

I didn’t shift once. I just sat there, completely entranced. He spent the whole trip teaching me to fly. When my parents were taking a nap, he even let me take the controls for a while. When we landed at the airport, he said he’d be happy to give me real lessons later. I said I was too young, but he said I could learn at any age and get my pilot’s license when I was sixteen.

For the first time in ages, I felt like I had something to look forward to.

By the way, that Army vet was Al Flores, Rafa’s great-uncle. He not only taught me to fly, he introduced me to Rafa and Hal. We eventually had yearly get-togethers to bond about being military shifters, which isn’t that common. Al and I would rag Hal and Rafa over being in the Navy—Al called our get-togethers “kid the squids.” And when Hal and Rafa decided to start Protection, Inc., I was the first person they recruited.

Anyway, after my family and I arrived in India, the woman who’d emailed us, Priya Desai, picked us up at the airport and drove us to her town. It was an eight-hour drive. At first it was fun looking at the scenery, but after a while, I got so bored and antsy I turned into a tiger. Twice. So I had to spend a lot of the drive crouched on the floor.

But once we arrived, things picked up. It seemed like the whole town turned out to greet us. They didn’t all speak English, so some of them just smiled. We got served really great food on banana-leaf plates, and some people gave me little gifts like a kite and a set of bead earrings and a painted clay tiger. I caught my mom shooting that guy a look like she thought it was tactless, but I loved it. I still have it.

Then this old lady marched up, grabbed my wrist, squeezed my hand so tight I thought the bones would crack, and tried to shove something on to my wrist. I turned into a tiger cub and hissed at her. She held up a set of iridescent glass bangles and said, “These are for you when you can wear them.”

I tried to snatch them with my claws. When I was a tiger, I had no self-control at all. She held them out of my reach and told my parents, “Bring her to my house.”

Dad said, “When she changes back?”

The old woman shook her head. “Now.”

My parents glanced at Priya, who said, “That’s Mataji. Go with her, she’s the reason I thought we could help.”

I’d shifted back by the time we got to her house. It was a really cool house. It had an indoor swing, a polished wood plank suspended from the ceiling with cloth ropes tie-dyed blue and green. Mataji sat in it and made it sway like a rocking chair. The rest of us sat on cushions on the floor.

One of her daughters brought us a tray of drinks and sweets and snacks. My parents sipped and nibbled to be polite, but I was a bottomless pit for sweet things and I tried everything.

Tags: Zoe Chant Protection, Inc Paranormal
Source: readsnovelonline.net