Chapter 29: Tara

Tara was impressed with how Isabelle handled herself through all this. When she went in to take care of the bump Isabelle had gotten from her escape attempt, Isabelle stared her down and didn’t flinch at the salt water mixture Tara pushed against her scalp.

“This is an old fashioned remedy,” Tara said, holding the wet cloth in place and moving Isabelle’s hand to secure it there.

“If I’m really hurt, I could die,” Isabelle informed her. The tone she used was flat and blank. She didn’t bother with histrionics in a situation that called for them. “I could have head trauma or a brain injury that will kill me in my sleep. Then what will you do?”

Tara gave no response. She liked Isabelle so she didn’t want to be the one to tell her how easy it would be to explain away her death. They would call in to town for emergency services, saying that the day before Isabelle had been riding and, since she was inexperienced and perhaps trying to do more than was safe, she was flung from the horse, hitting her head badly. Everyone on the ranch would confirm that Cormac had offered her a ride to the hospital to double check that nothing was wrong but she refused it, claiming she felt fine and it was just a bump. A sad, unfortunate, and avoidable event they had all seen before.

In the bathroom, Tara rung out the compress and rinsed it in the sink. Some blood swirled down the drain, caught in the vortex of running water. The sharp smell of it, rust and heat, caused Tara’s body to shiver. She hadn’t shifted since well before Isabelle had arrived at the ranch. At that point, she claimed she was too old to shift unless it was for a reason. Then when she heard about Gus, she thought maybe she should stop doing it at all.

But it was in her nature. It was like breathing or eating. There was only so long she could go without doing either of those before she felt the weakness in her body.

“We are a link between humans and animals,” she tried to tell any shifter that would listen. “We are a step in evolution that no one ever expected.” In not shifting, she felt like she was devolving, losing a piece of herself she treasured.

There was a time when she had almost gotten caught. She was already on edge following what happened with Eli, and her father harangued her endlessly about how careless she had been but all that did was make her reckless and restless. Her attempt at a love life had been ripped away from her; she saw how easily someone who claimed to care for her could change his mind. Being cautious seemed like a fool’s errand by then.

Tara had slipped out before her father woke up and walked for over an hour until she came to a collection of rock formations hiding a murky pond. The water in the pond was too dirty for anything but a few sips for horses so she didn’t expect there to be anyone else around. A truck was parked behind one of the larger rocks. In the darkness, Tara hadn’t noticed.

When she got to the pond, Tara stripped off her clothes and bent forward, letting the rush of the change flood her body with endorphins, chemicals churning inside of her, changing that actual shape of her bones and muscles. She snarled as her nose became a snout and her mouth extending into a set of animal jaws. Her legs crouched forward into a hunch, her arms twisted and her hands grew out like paws. Human might have been her default shape but wolf was the one she preferred.

As her claws poked out and the pads on her four feet filled out, Tara found the horizon, saw the cascade of light spilling onto the sand, and howled into the dawn air with all the abandon of a feral creature untethered in the wild. She sprinted as fast as she could towards the expanding sunlight, hoping she could crash right into, get swallowed up by it.

There was a hole in her gut where Eli had torn the trust out of her. At first it had oozed shame and ire like an open wound but now it made her more aerodynamic. She flew across the desert, all four paws lifting from the terra firma as the sun grew bigger and wider then lifted higher into the sky. Howling while running wasn’t something normal wolves did, even for shifters it proved a bit of a challenge, but there was so much energy inside of her at the moment, too much for her to control. Tara’s snout lifted into the air and she howled again, less lonesome this time. She wanted it to sound like a rallying cry, a call to action for shifters everywhere.

We could run this world, she wanted the howl to tell them. We could be all the answers to all the questions of how and why humans exist. No one would hear the call aside from the lone nomad who had been camped out by the rocks, shaken awake by the sound of a wolf too close for comfort.

The run back to the spot where she had left her clothing was over too quickly. Tara wasn’t ready to be human again but she also knew it would take her some time to walk home and if she was gone for too long after sunrise, her father was going to raise hell. He was constantly reminding her of how right he had been, that humans were better off not knowing anything about them. That none of them, even the ones who seemed curious and open, wanted to see the ease with which they became beasts.

Tara slowed to a trot as she approached the rock formation. She was frothing from the mouth, specks of spittle from the run and the howl caught in the coarse fur around her jaws. The pond would do well enough for a drink so she could shift and head home. In her human form, she would never put her lips to a body of water so dirty and dark but as an animal, it didn’t bother her at all. She lapped up a few mouthfuls then plunged her furry face under the surface to cool down.

The cocking noise of a gun perked up her wolf ears. Slowly, she lifted her head from the water to see a scrawny, sun burnt man standing on the other side of the pond pointing a hunting rifle directly at her. Tara made a whimpering sound as if to let him know she posed no threat, meant him no harm. The man’s arms shook but he didn’t lower the gun.

“I don’t want no wolves sniffing ‘round my camp,” he said in a low growl. She smelled the fear coming off of him in eye watering waves. “I’ll skin ya right here, leave your organs for the vultures.”

Tara whimpered again, shrinking herself down and trying to look small. The man’s face was heavily lined, his eyes were red rimmed. Plenty of people disappeared into the desert for a reason. It was a landscape that swallowed them whole. This man looked like the kind people would see passing through a town, telling everyone that he was tired of being part of society and wanted to free, alone. They might catch glimpses of these kinds from time to time, arriving in another town to get supplies, looking worse for wear and stumbling over the basics of casual conversation. This man was as feral as any wolf but he was armed and operated on human instinct rather than an animal one.

The best idea Tara had at the moment was an idea that her father would hate but what choice did she have? She shut her eyes and engaged the shifting process, letting whatever it was that turned them back and forth take over. Her spine straightened and her paws began to reshape into hands. She listened for the man’s reaction, hoping to hear him drop the gun rather than take aim and pull the trigger so he could freeze the abomination she was in her tracks.

Fur pulled into her pores; her snout sank and moved from her wolf jaws into human cheekbones. Her shoulders extended as she stood upright, her waist tapering then blooming into hips, and her breasts filling to their normal size.

When her eyes opened, the man was staring at her, agog. He hadn’t dropped the rifle but it was hanging limply beside him, the barrel of it pointing into the earth.

“What in the hell are ya?” he asked, stepping forward, unafraid. One hand reached out and touched the smooth skin of her shoulder. “You some kinda monster?”

“I’m just a woman,” Tara answered, hoping to appeal to his masculinity, the drive in him that couldn’t look away from a taut naked form. As long as he didn’t shoot her, she was fine with whatever he wanted to do.

“I ain’t never seen no woman do nothing like that.” The man circled around her, his gun still hanging next to him though Tara wasn’t worried about him using it on her. “How’d ya change? How’d ya go from wolf to this?”

Tara wasn’t even sure if she should confirm that she had been anything but a human. She demurred, smiling gently at him over her shoulder as he passed behind her, taking in the entire view.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said.

“You didn’t do nothing like that.”

“Well, let me just get my clothes on, ok?”

The man shook his head. “Not till you tell me how you did what you did.”

“I’m a witch,” was all Tara could think to say. At least it was an answer and one that wouldn’t lead him on a search for more of her kind. If she was a witch, this could end with her and not bring every shifter in the desert into the crosshairs of a loner.

“A witch,” the man repeated sarcastically.

“Well, what do you think I am?”

“Can’t be no werewolf ‘cause it ain’t no full moon.”

Tara nodded. “Right. Plus, it’s broad daylight.”

The man lifted his rifle up again and leveled it at her. “Alright, witch. Get ya clothes and get the hell outta my camp, ya hear me? Don’t come back this way with none of your witchy friends or I’ll shoot them right where they stand.”

Tara raised her hands to him palms up and backed away. She didn’t turn around until she was out of his line of sight and found her bundled clothes next to the rocks. Gathering them up, she started to walk across the hot sand, glancing over her shoulder to see the man standing ramrod straight and aiming his rifle out into the open.

When she was far enough away from the rock formation that she couldn’t see him anymore, she paused to get dressed. She hadn’t wanted to spend another second within range of the man or his gun to do so earlier.

For a few years after that incident, she heard people laughing about some crazy old codger who would come in from the desert for supplies and tell everyone about the witch he had seen, a woman who changed from a snarling ferocious beasts into a gorgeous naked specimen right in front of his eyes.

“You know how those nomad types are,” a bartender told her when he recounted the story of the last time he saw the man. He tapped a finger to his temple. “Their brains get cooked out there in the heat. They don’t even know what they’re saying.”

Tara would laugh alongside them, ignoring the knot in her stomach growing tighter from the idea of someone somewhere hearing about the wolf witch and believing there might be more to the story.

Decades had passed though and nothing ever happened. Maxine had been the first casualty in a long time, which made the hurt of it all the more gut wrenching. Tara wanted to tell this to Isabelle in whatever words she could but she knew in the end what Isabelle would hear is “we are willing to kill to keep our secret.”

Tara hung the compress cloth over the windowsill of the bathroom and went to the kitchen, hoping to busy herself by preparing dinner. Out the window, Gus was walking aimlessly, his eyes staring off into space. The others blamed Isabelle but she blamed him. He was aware of a human on the premises and his own failing abilities. How could he have been so sloppy as to shift out in the open and get caught on film?

Sweat broke out on Tara’s upper lip. She wiped at it so hard that she scratched herself. The thoughts pulsing in her mind turned her stomach and tightened her chest. She felt like her father, angry at anyone for daring to put them at risk. Her anger expanded to include Cormac, herself, whomever had called from the television station to see if they could send Isabelle to them, a lamb to an unknown slaughter.

Living as they had was the safest way. They had always thought that if they kept themselves isolated then danger wouldn’t find them. Tara watched Gus stop in his tracks and stare off into the distance, focused on nothing. Looking for something. Her anger broke like a heatwave, like the moment of respite on a broiling summer day when the storm finally rolled in and cooled the earth.

What else was he supposed to do? Tara thought, resting her hands on the kitchen sinking and sighing deeply. We can’t help what we are.