The Turning Season Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œRight. 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?
    *   *   *
    I t’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