Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…
In the meantime, Mandrake was carefully herding an increasingly terrified orc back to where his pack awaited him. The screams came closer and Gobshite broke out of the treeline at a shambling gallop. When he saw his packmates he hurled himself facedown on the frozen grass.
“Dragon,” he yelled. “Look out there’s a dragon.”
Behind him, Mandrake made the change and dropped the final few feet to the ground in human form.
Knut’s mate grinned so widely I thought her face might crack in half.
“Mega cool.” She offered Mandrake a hugely knotted fist and they bumped knuckles. “Can all dragons do that?”
“No. Only the most highly trained of battle dragons.”
“Useful trick, though.”
“Indeed.”
The rest of the pack had gathered around Gobshite’s quivering figure. One poked him with a booted foot.
“Get up, asshole, there ain’t no dragons here.”
He peered suspiciously about him before he sat up.
“Did you chase it off?”
“Chase what off?”
“The dragon what was hunting me.”
One of the ones I had pegged as female put her face close to his.
“There weren’t no dragon fuckwit.”
Mandrake and his companion came over to me.
“I take it Gobshite is in for a bit of razzing,” I said.
“Was about time that one learned some humility. This hadn’t happened me or Knut was gonna have to kill him sometime soon.”
“In that case…”
“You ain’t like any human I ever met,” she said.
Knut had come across, walking quietly enough so she hadn’t heard his approach.
“May I tell my mate?” I nodded. “Lady isn’t human no more than her mate is.”
“What you saying you old fool? She ain’t no true born critter I ever seen.”
“No. She ain’t. She’s a True Shifter.”
“Don’t you be razzing me. Them’s just a fairy story.”
Mandrake made as of to say something but I put a finger across his lips.
“Mate of the Pack Leader,” I said formally. “Will you show me your fist?”
She looked confused but proffered a huge, scarred and knotted appendage. I laid my own hand on the air beside it and concentrated briefly. The hand and forearm I Shifted was a complete simulacrum of hers. It felt as if it weighed nearly as much as my human body, but I managed to hold it still. She stared, and I let it dissolve back into a human hand.
“Your fist weighs a lot,” I said and I could hear the physical strain in my own voice.
Mandrake moved to the buffet, returning with a thick slice of buttered bread. I sank my teeth in gratefully.
“Shifting uses a lot of calories,” I explained, not caring that I was talking with my mouth full.
The female orc bent her neck in a gesture of respect. “I never thought to meet one such as you.”
“There is only one so far as we know,” Mandrake said.
I swallowed the mouthful of bread and butter I had been chewing.
“There won’t be any more. I refuse to put another being through what I went through to gain my powers. It really isn’t worth it.”
The big she-orc looked into my eyes for a breath, before turning way as if embarrassed. “I don’t believe,” she said to nobody in particular, “that I would like to have the Shifter’s memories.”
Knut, who had stood in unusual quiet while his mate and I worked things out between us, actually tasted the atmosphere with his thick, red tongue. Finding it unthreatening he looped an arm over his mate’s shoulders.
“Not all her memories are bad,” he offered. “I remember a wild ride through the night with a band of marauding orcs streaming across the sky behind a lone female with blood in her eye and The Dagger of Death in her boot top.”
“She got the Dagger of Death?”
“She do and that little bastard don’t miss wherever she throws it.”
The she-orc pushed out her lip in thought. “You led a shitload of orcs on The Wild Hunt.”
“Yup. Must have been seven centuries past. And I never knew Knut was in that raiding party.”
He grinned and farted loudly. “I was on my first pack ride, and when the bikes rose into the sky I all but pissed myself. Fun though.”
His mate turned to him, and I understood that whatever she had to say it was not about anyone but their own selves. I listened anyway.
“Was that the last time the Wild Hunt rode out of the sunset?”
“Last but one. It was not The Lady who led your father to his death.”
“I wasn’t thinking it was. According to Mother it was likely his own stupidity.”
“Likely. He was growing old and unwilling to accept that.”
“And you, Knut. You became Pack Leader in the void.”
“Only after I made a few orcs get dead. But yes. I won the Pack in a void, but I rule it because there is none among the members who can best me.”
She looked at him and her mouth twisted bitterly. “So why did you need to mate with me then? I was told it was to consolidate your hold on the pack.”
He made a harsh sound in his throat. “I mated you from need for you. There is no other reason than that.”
The smile she gave him was so bright as to hurt the eyes, before she thumped him hard on one of his meaty arms.
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Because I thought you mated me for status.”
She groaned as he dragged her into his arms. The female bit her mate’s lip and I saw the blood flow.
“Mine,” he said thickly and she licked his bleeding lip.
I looked away to find Mandrake smiling down on me.
‘Love orc style,’ he whispered in my head, before turning up the music and encouraging me into the dance.
And that was pretty much how the night ended, with drunken dancing and a sense of recklessness.
The orcs finally fell asleep where they dropped from sheer exhaustion and Mandrake and me crawled into the open store and wrapped our tired bodies in thick northland quilts.
Dawn came and our guests awoke. Mandrake helped me to break out loves of bread and slabs of pre-cooked bacon. The orcs made huge sandwiches and rode off munching. I think Mandrake carried me up the stairs to a proper bed.
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