The Turning Season

Book 3: A Shifting Circle Novel

by Sharon Shinn

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Shifters; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

As the national bestselling Shifting Circle series continues, a woman must choose between hiding her nature—and risking her heart...
 
For Karadel, being a shape-shifter has always been a reality she couldn’t escape. Even though she’s built a safe life as a rural veterinarian, with a close-knit network of shifter and human friends who would do anything for her, she can’t help but wish for a chance at being normal.
 
When she’s not dealing with her shifts or caring for her animal patients, she attempts to develop a drug that will help shifters control their changes—a drug that might even allow them to remain human forever.
 
But her comfortable life is threatened by two events: She meets an ordinary man who touches her heart, and her best friend is forced to shift publicly with deadly consequences.
 
Now Karadel must decide whom to trust: her old friends or her new love.

Release date: November 4, 2014

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

I’m at the supermarket in town, trying to decide between two brands of apple juice, when the first fiery pains go ripping up my back. I panic. I almost drop one of the bottles in my haste to get it back on the shelf, and I simply abandon my half-full cart in the aisle. By the time I push my way past dawdling shoppers, make it to the parking lot, and stumble into my Jeep, the pains have gone from intermittent to continuous, and the visual migraine has kicked in. It’s as if something has taken a bite out of my right eye’s field of vision, leaving behind a circle of serrated tooth marks. Within five minutes, that circle will uncoil into a straight line of marching Vs and begin pulsing with gray and orange shadows.

Fuck! I think as I try to start the car, my hands so shaky that I almost don’t have the strength to turn the key. This isn’t supposed to happen for at least another week!

Normally I have about an hour between the first tendrils of pain and the onset of transformation, but the timing is off, so who knows what else might be affected? I’m in broad daylight on the busiest street in Quinville on a Wednesday afternoon. Oh God, if I change here, everyone in the world will see me . . .

I finally get the motor to catch and I screech out of the parking lot and onto Highway 159 as fast as I can, cutting off some poor old woman in a beat-up sedan who’s trying to turn left into the grocery store. I’m calculating in my head. Quinville makes a modest clump of civilization along both sides of 159, but within five miles, the road will shake off the urban clutter as it heads back into open Illinois farmland. Say ten minutes to get clear of the worst of the traffic. Another twenty minutes till I reach the County Road W turnoff. If I can make it that far, I can just pull off the road, cut the engine, and wait for disaster to strike. Thirty minutes. Surely my body can hold on that long.

I’m stuck behind three cars at the longest light in town; otherwise, I would have been tempted to run it when it turned red. The back spasms have morphed into a slow, steady thrum, not unbearable, but the migraine is starting to build; I lean my skull against the headrest and let terror and pain fight for dominance. I squint against the sunlight and the flashing visual cues, wishing I had my sunglasses with me. Keeping my left hand on the wheel, I fish in my purse till I find my cell phone. The light changes to green just as I open my list of contacts, so I hurriedly push the first name that comes up.

It happens to be Celeste’s, and of course she doesn’t answer. “Listen, it’s Karadel. I’m heading home, and I’m about to change. Don’t know how far I’ll get. I’m going to need someone to come get me. I’m going to call everybody, so whoever gets there first . . .”

Traffic is slow enough to allow me to call and leave messages with Bonnie and Aurelia as well, but then we clear the last light and cars start moving at the speed limit. I’m too rattled to try to drive and talk at the same time, plus the pulsing lights of the migraine aura are making it hard for me to see the road. I toss the phone onto the passenger’s seat, clench both hands on the wheel, and concentrate on driving.

For about three miles outside of Quinville, Highway 159 maintains two lanes in each direction, divided by a sad strip of prairie grass and flowering weeds, but soon enough it will slim down to two lanes separated only by a double yellow line. Every driver’s goal is to get ahead of the slowest-moving vehicles before those lanes converge. Theoretically, you can pass cars at a dozen spots in the next thirty miles, but practically speaking, those opportunities are few because the oncoming traffic rarely lets up long enough for you to take the chance.

Like the red Camaro ahead of me and the black Escalade behind me, I’m in the inside lane going as fast as road conditions will permit, just praying that no one swerves into my path or comes to a sudden stop, because I’m in no condition to make defensive-driving maneuvers. I’m barely alert enough to recognize that I’m running out of road. The Camaro guns its motor and zips ahead of a rusted-out old Ford pickup, but I don’t react quickly enough, and the truck eases over in front of me at a maddeningly leisurely pace. I brake so hard that the Escalade looms menacingly in my rearview mirror, but nobody hits anybody, and we all continue down the road at a greatly reduced rate of speed.

The near-miss has dumped adrenaline into my veins. Great—now my heart is pounding as well as my head, and my hands feel rubbery on the wheel. I’ve lost much of my peripheral vision, but darkness hasn’t started encroaching on my eyesight yet. How much time left now? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?

Not nearly enough time to get to my house.

I shift my grip, take a deep breath, and stare so fiercely at the road ahead of me that my eyes would start burning if they weren’t already hot. Maybe five minutes to the turnoff. I can make it that far. I have to. The pickup has slowed to something like forty miles an hour, but that might be a good thing; I can sort of keep things together at this speed. To my left, an unbroken line of family cars, 18-wheelers, motorcycles, and SUVs whooshes past. The driver of the Escalade is riding impatiently close to my bumper, and I know he’ll take the first chance he sees to pass both me and the pickup. But even if the oncoming traffic were to thin down to nothing, leaving a straight and empty stretch of road bordered by cornfields on either side, I wouldn’t make the same attempt. I don’t think I have the hand-eye coordination. I don’t think I have the judgment. I’m not sure I could make it back on the road.

Then suddenly—finally—like the mile marker to heaven, I see the green sign for the cutoff to W. I don’t even bother with the turn signal, just peel off from 159 with a faint whine of tires. There’s hardly ever any traffic on W, which leads only to a few isolated homesteads like mine and huge tracts of undeveloped land offering a pretty equal mix of grass and trees. Of course, the isolation of the route is a mixed blessing on most days. The road is well behind on necessary maintenance, and the asphalt is an obstacle course of potholes, cracks, and failed repairs. I’ve increased my speed as much as I can without running the risk of hurtling off the road, but every bump and fissure jars me against the seat belt and slams my head nauseatingly against my spine.

Nausea—that’s usually the last symptom. Five minutes or less by now. The September day is chilly, maybe fifty degrees, but I hit the controls so the four automatic windows roll all the way down. The only thing worse than transforming in a public place in the middle of the day would be transforming in a locked car with all the windows up. No way to get out. I try not to think about what will happen if I change into something too big to crawl out the window. That hasn’t happened for a while now—years, really. Even a deer, even a wolf, would be able to squeeze through a car’s rolled-down window, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been a bear or a giraffe—a moose only a couple of times—and the elephant—well, that’s never happened again—

My stomach clenches and I slap my hand across my mouth. I don’t actually throw up, but I can feel the bile at the back of my throat. Almost time, almost time. I’d love to get another mile down the road, but the trade-off isn’t worth it. The blackness has started to build up at the corner of my vision, little lights are dancing through the pulsating Vs of the visual migraine, and I’m in so much physical pain that it’s hard to tell what’s slamming up from my backbone and what’s jackhammering down from my skull. Stop gambling, I tell myself, and wrench the Jeep to the shoulder. It’s really just a little strip of crumbling asphalt that drops into a low ditch of prickly weeds, but even a semi ought to be able to get past my vehicle without smashing it to pieces.

I leave everything in the front seat—my phone, my purse, my clothes—and exit through the passenger-side door. Immediately, I feel better. No matter what happens next, at least I won’t be trapped. At least I’ll be able to go crashing off into the undergrowth and look for some kind of cover until one of my friends comes to find me.

I’m crouching barefoot on the side of the road, but the pain drives me all the way to my knees. I can feel the dry knife-edges of the weed leaves slicing at my bare toes and ankles; I can feel the broken stone of the asphalt digging into my calves. But I scarcely notice. The migraine has enveloped my whole body. It is cracking my skull in two, it is pummeling my stomach, and I am bent over so far that my nose rests between my knees. If I move a fraction of an inch in any direction, everything on my inside will spill out, in vomit, in blood, in viscous leaking fluids of mucus, saliva, and brains . . .

One more powerful compression, as if a giant hand is squashing me from above with such force that I grunt involuntarily. And then it’s all over.

The pressure, the pain, the nausea. Gone, evaporated. I feel light, almost weightless. I feel lithe and strong and absolutely right. My body has once again survived a violent passage and rebirth and delivered me to a shape that calls to it as seductively as its own.

For a moment, I just revel in the bliss of well-being, then I take a moment to determine what I am. I extend my left arm, to find it covered with fluffy marmalade fur; I’ve unsheathed five impressively sharp claws, and a slinky tail wraps around from behind. A cat then—housecat, probably. I don’t feel large enough to be one of the bigger wild felines. I bunch myself up against the right front tire, but my arched back doesn’t even clear the wheel well.

Good. A cat is the best I can hope for. Mobile, self-sufficient, commonplace. I could fend for myself for weeks if I had to, make my way to my property under my own power, and never raise the slightest bit of curiosity from any passersby I might encounter.

I wonder if this transformation is purely random or if my serums are actually taking effect. I have been trying—with limited success—to guide my body in the choices it makes, to channel it into more socially acceptable creatures when the imperative to change takes it over. I have, in fact, been injecting a specialized concoction for the past few weeks, hoping to become this very animal. Perhaps this is proof that I’ve been successful—to a point. Perhaps the early transformation came about because of that very concoction. Perhaps I have staved off one side effect only to incur another.

Worries for another day.

As always, once I enter animal state, I find it difficult to focus on the everyday, ordinary concerns that usually preoccupy my mind. I’m still me, I have my own memories and my same powers of reasoning, but all the familiar obsessions seem distant and unimportant. New imperatives claim my attention—usually, depending on the shape I’ve taken, revolving around finding food and finding safety. I’m easily distracted by scents, sounds, movements on the periphery. I’m much more focused on the challenges of the immediate present.

Which, I have to confess, is sometimes a relief, considering how much my human brain usually frets over the unsolvable troubles of the future. Sometimes descending into the wild is like a brief vacation from my chaotic and all-too-demanding existence.

But right now I can’t afford to give in to the cat’s impulse to go stalking through the high grass toward the promising rustle of bird wings. I can’t go chasing after butterflies and bees. I’m still far from home, and someone should be on the way to get me. I need to be here and relatively alert whenever that someone arrives.

I face the car, bunch my muscles, and make a smooth leap through the open window on the passenger’s side. I’d forgotten about the purse and phone and clothes I’d left on the seat, so I skid through them in a sloppy landing, then hop over the gear shift to the driver’s side. The afternoon sunlight has painted a golden square on the fabric, and both the warmth and the color are inviting. I pat at the cloth with my left paw, find it suitable, then drop down into a contented curl, wrapping my tail around my head. A nap is the best way to pass the hours, stay out of trouble, and conserve my strength, all at the same time. I feel my narrow jaws open in a gigantic yawn, then I resettle my face against my paws. I am instantly in a light, untroubled sleep from which I know I can wake at a moment’s notice.

Cats really do have the best lives. If I could choose, this is the shape I would always take.

No. If I could choose, I would always stay human.

*   *   *

I’m not paying close attention, but I think it’s about a half hour before I hear the sound of a car that doesn’t just zoom past, but actually slows down then rumbles to a stop as it pulls over right in front of me on the shoulder. I instantly come awake and scramble up, setting my paws on the top of the steering wheel so I can peer out the windshield. Shapes and colors are weird, distorted, so I have to concentrate to pull out human memories to compare against the images I’m seeing now. But I recognize the battered old station wagon even before the door swings open and the driver steps out.

Bonnie. My luck is in. By far the most reliable of my friends, she has not only shown up to rescue me, she has no doubt phoned everyone else in our circle to let them know their services aren’t required—hell, she probably picked up groceries, paid my electricity bill, and arranged to have Highway W resurfaced while she was at it.

She doesn’t spot me right at first, so as soon as she slams her door, she stands beside the car for a moment, hands on her hips, and looks around, as if wondering where I’ve gotten to. She’s probably six feet tall, 140 pounds if she’s just finished a big meal, angular, knobby, impatient, brilliant, and totally unaffected by anyone else’s opinion. Her short, curly black hair is showing a few singular strands of gray, one of the few clues to the fact that she’s just over sixty. Her eyes are dark brown and even when she’s laughing, her expression is fierce. If she were a shape-shifter, which she’s not, she’d be a bird of prey, I’ve always thought. Hawk. Falcon. Eagle. Something you wouldn’t mess with. Something that rarely, if ever, failed.

I drop to all fours, gather my muscles, and leap through the open window to the street. The motion catches her attention and she sees me. Relief crosses her spare features as I trot over.

“Karadel. Thank heavens,” she says, bending down to pick me up. In human shape, I don’t often seek out casual physical contact, but this particular body craves affection. I like how she cradles me against her thin chest; I respond with a low purr of contentment. She takes a moment to pet my head and scratch my chin, but Bonnie’s not one for lingering on niceties, especially when there’s work to be done.

“Let’s get you home,” she says, opening her car door.

I prepare to jump inside, but my claws catch on Bonnie’s arms to halt my forward motion when I realize there’s somebody in the passenger’s seat. Alonzo looks over with his usual deadly serious expression.

“Hey, Karadel,” he says.

I squirm in Bonnie’s grip, trying to get a look at her face, and attempt to express my opinion. What’s going on? It comes out, of course, as a musical burble. I could as easily be asking for dinner.

“I know, I know, he’s fourteen years old,” she says. She has known shape-shifters for most of her life and never seems ill at ease conversing with them in animal form. “But you know he knows how to drive. He can go on first in the Jeep and we’ll come along behind him. If he has any trouble, well, we’ll just pull over and leave the Jeep on the side of the road.”

Of course I know Alonzo can drive. I taught him myself—in my Jeep, as a matter of fact—but we stayed mostly on my property and were never this close to a well-traveled road. It’s true I’ve never seen cops on W, but they’re constantly patrolling 159, and that’s entirely too close. Bad enough that Alonzo’s too young to get a license; he’s also African-American, and most of the cops in this district are white.

When I try to get this point across to Bonnie, she just shrugs. “She’s worried that you can’t handle it,” she says to Alonzo.

He nods. “I’ll be careful. Keys in the car?”

“That would be my guess.”

He climbs out of the station wagon, unfolding his lanky body with care. He’s taller and skinnier than Bonnie, growing taller and skinnier every day, though I know she and Aurelia feed him enough calories to turn him into a linebacker. But it’s not just adolescent awkwardness that makes him move so stiffly. He was an abused child, a shape-shifter whose father feared and hated him, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know the extent of the damage done to him. Bonnie says his torso and limbs carry dozens of scars, though she hasn’t seen a physical reason for the precise way he moves and holds his body. But I’ve never seen him loosen up, even for a minute. Never seen him dance with abandon or run with joy. I don’t know if he can.

I give up trying to argue and make myself comfortable on the seat still warm from Alonzo’s body. It’s a matter of moments before Alonzo starts the Jeep and edges it past the station wagon and Bonnie takes off after him. In this shape, I can’t accurately judge speed or distance if I’m not moving under my own power, but it seems to me that we’re traveling pretty sedately. If we don’t, in fact, encounter any police, we are home free, because Alonzo is the most careful driver on the planet.

Bonnie talks for the duration of the trip. “I don’t know how long you won’t be human, but I thought I’d leave Alonzo with you for the next few days,” she says. “He can do the chores and feed the animals and call me if you need anything.” She glances over at me. “We’ve taken him out of school for the semester—thought we’d try homeschooling for a year and see if that goes any better,” she adds. “He does have a couple of friends, and they’ve been coming over in the evenings but the classes just weren’t—they weren’t—I don’t think Quinville Middle School is the right place for him.”

Bonnie and Aurelia have been taking care of Alonzo for the past two years, ever since Ryan rescued him and brought him to us. They’re the perfect foster parents. Bonnie’s a retired teacher and Aurelia’s a lawyer, and they’ve fostered kids off and on for the past ten years, so they both know the system. Oh, it might seem like a black kid from an urban neighborhood wouldn’t find the best home with two whiter-than-white lesbians in a rural setting, but I can say this for certain: When he came into our lives, he wouldn’t speak. He was afraid to touch anything. He only ate when no one else was looking. He slept on the floor for the first three months, seeming to believe that climbing into the bed made up in the room set aside for him would result in punishments too dire to describe. And now he eats and sleeps like a normal kid, and he answers direct questions, and once in a while he ducks his head and smiles.

And when he changes shapes into a deer or a badger or a coyote, no one chains him to a pole in the basement and beats him on the head with a metal pipe.

So, yeah. I think he’s where he belongs.

“I left a message with Ryan and actually spoke to Celeste before I found you,” Bonnie goes on. “Celeste says she can come out over the weekend, so maybe I’ll come get Alonzo then and she can take over.” She glances at me again. “Am I wrong, or is this not your usual time to shift?”

Mrrrr, I answer.

“Right. Well. You can tell me later,” she says. “But I’m under the impression that your cycles have been a little out of whack lately. And if that’s the case, you might start thinking about more permanent solutions to your situation.”

Right, I want to say in sarcastic echo. If I had the faintest idea how to come up with a permanent solution to “my situation,” I’d have implemented it long before now.

But I know she’s not referring to my random and unpredictable shifts into alternate shapes. She merely means that someone who’s caring for close to thirty animals on a remote property needs to display a certain level of responsibility—needs to make sure that if she’s not going to be available to put out food and clean out cages every single day, someone else will be around to do the necessary chores.

There’s a lot of irony here. I’ve always been the most responsible person I know. I have never shirked a task. I have never let my own dreams and desires interfere with the duties I knew I had to assume. I’ve never even allowed myself to entertain too many dreams and desires. Mine will be a short life, but a rich one, built around a guiding imperative: to care for a distinct group of wild and exotic creatures who have no one to defend them but me.

It is only on days like this, in shapes like this one, when the buried feral instincts briefly come to the fore, that the traitorous thoughts even have the power to rise to the surface of my mind.

What if? I think on days like this. What if I could just run away?

*   *   *

It’s still bright afternoon when we arrive at my property. Alonzo, with utmost care, turns from W onto the rutted gravel of my drive. The Jeep doesn’t even jounce along the track as it usually does under my impatient heel. All of us climb out, and Bonnie and Alonzo turn toward the barns and cages. There’s not much I can do to help them, so I just head for the porch of the rambling old farmhouse and hop up on the wooden bench set under the overhang. I sit there, tail curled around my front feet, and take a moment to glance over the property.

From this vantage point, I can only see part of the compound, which consists of about ten buildings clustered together in a relatively cleared and cultivated area, and another fifty acres of land that has been left entirely wild. The house, the barns, the toolshed, and a couple of trailers—housing for visiting shape-shifters—were already here when I arrived eight years ago. At the time, the place was a veterinary office run by a woman named Janet Kassebaum, who specialized in shape-shifters. I inherited her practice when she left. In the past five years, I’ve made some changes: adding corrals, fencing in dog runs, turning one of the barns into a sort of animal dorm. I needed to have places to keep all the creatures I was collecting, the injured birds, the lame dogs, the tortured cats. Sometimes I heal them and let them go. When they’re too badly hurt, I heal them and give them homes for life.

It takes Bonnie and Alonzo about an hour to feed and water the animals, and by then it’s coming on toward sunset. Bonnie ushers Alonzo into the house to make sure I have human food supplies on hand as well, before she pushes back out through the door to tell me good-bye.

“He says he’ll be fine out here on his own for a couple of days, but I’ll call in the morning, of course, to make sure everything’s all right,” she tells me. “As soon as you’re human again, give me a call, and we can talk over a few things.”

I don’t answer, of course, and she sighs. “Known shape-shifters for more than forty years and I still forget that they can’t talk to me,” she says. She comes close enough to scratch the top of my head with her short, blunt fingernails. “Catch you later.” Five minutes later, she’s gone, her car lights sending a brief searching arc of illumination across the barns and trailers and clumps of grass as she makes a U-turn and drives away.

I hear Alonzo rummaging in the kitchen, then I catch the beep of the microwave. I wonder what he’s found in the freezer that appeals to him. I’m not a particularly inventive cook, but I like to make batches of chili and stew and soup and freeze them against the erratic onslaught of company. There are weeks at a time when I’m the only human for five miles. Then there are weeks when I have five or six other people staying on the property. I like to be prepared to feed them, at least till they’ve had a chance to lay in their own groceries.

The door creaks and Alonzo steps outside to join me on the bench. It’s chilly, but that never bothers Alonzo; he likes being outdoors in all kinds of weather. He’s balancing two plates and has stuck a can of soda under his left arm. One plate holds a steaming pile of chili con queso so thick it doesn’t need a bowl. The other features a small mound of canned tuna and a slowly melting scoop of vanilla ice cream.

The chili’s for Alonzo. The tuna and ice cream are for me. I don’t care much for fish when I’m in human form, but this shape loves it—and Alonzo, being Alonzo, remembered that.

Ice cream I love in about ninety out of a hundred of my incarnations.

The thoughtfulness makes me wish I could put my arms around Alonzo and give him a big hug, but instead I rise to my feet and prance around on the bench to show how excited I am about the prospect of a meal. He sits down, placing my plate on the bench where I can easily reach it and resting his own on his knees, then pops the top of his soda. We settle in to eat in companionable and satisfied silence. He must be as hungry as I am, because we’re done in about ten minutes, and—being Alonzo—he straightaway takes the dishes in to wash them.

When he comes back outside, he’s already got his iPod in his hand and his earbuds in place; unlike Bonnie, he’s not going to attempt to make conversation. But he sits next to me again, which for Alonzo is a striking overture of friendship, and he gives my head a cursory pat. I feel my mouth stretch in a huge feline yawn, exposing all my wickedly sharp teeth, and I lick the last trace of ice cream from my whiskers. I’m tired again, and I curl up in a ball beside Alonzo, close enough so my back rests against his thigh. He lays a gentle hand along my rib cage and I hear him laugh out loud when I begin to purr.

I think, for this short period of time, anyway, Alonzo is actually happy. All in all, the day that started so disastrously has brought with it its own extraordinary gifts. Not at all what I expected.

CHAPTER TWO

The next two days pass harmoniously enough, with Alonzo taking Bonnie’s phone calls every morning and evening, spending a couple of hours a day caring for the animals, and the rest of the time playing video games or reading. He’s not a natural reader, but Bonnie has insisted he finish a book a month and she’s told me he’s found a few authors that he actually admits to liking. Most of them appear to be horror and science fiction writers, both of which she regards with deep suspicion, but she’d never renege now. My guess is that he’d rather watch television or surf the Internet, but I get crappy reception out here and my selection of DVDs has never held much interest for him in the past. But he makes do. God knows he wouldn’t complain. And he still seems—if not actually happy—content. Which for Alonzo might be the best that it gets.

There’s obviously not much for me to do, but I spend part of each day prowling through the various animal shelters, making sure all is well. None of the avian species like it when I pace past their cages; the songbirds flutter and chirrup, and the birds of prey bridle and fidget. The hawk with the broken wing watches me with unnerving intensity, and I’m just as glad there’s a wire crate between us. I’ve never actually seen a hawk kill or carry off a cat, but I’ve been assured it’s possible, and this particular one looks like he’s ready to make the attempt, broken wing and all.

None of the birds react this strongly when the barn cats stalk through the aviary, eyeing them with longing and c