Shifting. Part 7

We walked into the school through the gym doors and I froze, like a deer staring at headlights. My hand fell from Bridger's.

The other girls weren't dressed like me. Not at all. To say they wore dresses was like saying I was poor. I was dest.i.tute. And they all wore gowns. Gowns that showed flashes of bare shoulders, cleavage, and thighs as they sparkled beneath dis...o...b..a.l.l.s.

Stepping in front of me, Bridger blocked my view of the gowns and placed his hands on my shoulders.

"Maggie," he said, leaning close so I could hear his voice over the music. "I want you to promise me something."

I looked into his eyes, wondering if he was as embarra.s.sed about being seen with me as I was to be wearing such an inappropriate dress.

"What promise?"

"Don't worry what anyone in this gym thinks about you except for me. I'm the one you're with. I think you're beautiful. That's all that matters."

His words stirred something deep in my chest and I found it hard to breathe, let alone maintain eye contact. I looked down at my white sandals and wiggled my toes, wis.h.i.+ng we'd never come to prom. A warm hand cupped my chin and Bridger angled my face up to look into his eyes.

"Do you want to leave? We can go to a movie or something."

I nodded, relief flooding me.

"Okay. I have one favor to ask first."

"What?" At this point, I'd grant him just about anything.

"One dance."

My eyes flickered past him, to the crowded gym. To the other students.

"Please?"

"Okay," I whispered, though the word sc.r.a.ped out of my mouth.

Bridger led me onto the dance floor and everyone stared. Girls snickered and pointed at my dress.

"That is the cheapest dress I've ever seen," someone called. "Where'd you buy it? The Wal-Mart clearance rack?" Bridger's hand tightened on mine. "This is prom, not a church picnic," someone else called. Bridger's hand tightened more.

He stopped in the middle of the dance floor, right beneath the biggest dis...o...b..ll, and took me in his arms.

"Don't listen to them," he said. "And if you don't want to see their faces, just look into my eyes."

I nodded and stared into his dark eyes, trying to find the pupils in the irises, but it didn't matter. Sure, I couldn't see the other students. But I could still hear them.

"... embarra.s.sed to be seen with her."

"So shoddy, especially next to O'Connell."

"I hear he doesn't have to rent his tux. He owns it, and it's Armani."

"The least he could've done is buy a halfway decent dress for her."

I closed my eyes and laid my head on his chest. One of his hands left my back and moved to my ear, gently pressing the voices away. So he could hear them, too. My heart seemed to double in size at his small gesture and I smiled.

Yeah. I might have been wearing the wrong dress. And the wrong shoes. And I didn't have a teeny, sequin-covered purse to clutch. But when it came to a date, I had the best one in the entire room. I lifted my head and looked into his eyes again.

He smiled and my gaze moved to his lips, to his white teeth. I licked my lips and prayed he'd kiss me good night.

"Not so bad anymore, is it?" he asked.

I bit my bottom lip and looked back into his eyes. "No. Not bad." The song ended and I let go of Bridger, ready to bail. Prom was way overrated. But his arms tightened and he pulled me closer.

"One more song?" he asked. I looked around the gym. For the most part, I'd been forgotten. I put my hands back on his shoulders and got lost in his eyes. More than one song pa.s.sed, and if the other students were talking about me, I couldn't hear them over the music and my drumming heart. My gaze moved between Bridger's eyes and his mouth. Once, when I'd been staring at his lips so long I could almost imagine how they'd feel on mine, he leaned closer to me and his lips parted. My eyes met his and we stopped moving to the music. But then he looked away and stared toward the doors we'd come in through. His hands left my lower back.

"Bridger?"

"Sorry," he said, shaking his head. He took me in his arms again, gazing into my eyes. We swayed to the beat for half a song and then he slowed, no longer moving to the beat, his eyes far away. He tilted his head to the side and I wondered who he was listening to. Who was verbally beating me to a pulp this time? I strained my ears but couldn't separate one voice out of them all. Bridger frowned and he stopped dancing.

He took a step away from me and said, "I'll be back in a couple of minutes. Want some punch or a cookie or anything?"

"No, I'm-" Before I could finish, he turned and wove his way across the dance floor, disappearing through the door that led into the main part of the school. "-fine."

I folded my arms over my chest and stood in the middle of the dance floor, waiting and trying not to make eye contact with anyone. But I could hear them.

"Look, he couldn't stand her dress anymore. He ditched her."

"Dude, O'Connell's got more guts than you could string on a fence-he left her on the dance floor."

I tried to shrink out of existence. When that didn't work, I dodged dancers and found a shadowed place close to the refreshment table to disappear. The song ended and another started. And then another.

Finally, when more than twenty minutes had pa.s.sed with me skulking in the shadows, I went to the door Bridger had left through and entered the dark school. The loud music muted as the door closed behind me.

I stood with my back to the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust. And when they did, I started down the long, empty hall.

The hidden moon did little to light the window-lined hall, seemed to create more shadows. My sandals echoed with every step I took and my heart started to pound. I caught myself jumping at nothing and looking over my shoulder more than once.

"Bridger?" I called as I approached the end of the hall.

A dark shape moved up ahead, framed by an inky window. I stopped walking and squinted.

"Bridger?" I whispered.

A female chuckled. She stood and the eerie gray window silhouetted an ample Cinderella ball gown.

"Who's there?" I asked, taking a step backward.

"You're not so tough in the dark, are you." The person moved away from the window and a swis.h.i.+ng sound followed her.

"Danni?" I guessed.

"Uh-huh."

I turned to go back the way I'd come. There was no way I wanted her to know I couldn't find my date.

"If you're looking for Bridger, he left," she said. So much for her not knowing.

"You're so full of c.r.a.p," I said, my feet slowing.

"I'm serious. He ran out of here like his dad's car was on fire. Go check the parking lot if you don't believe me."

"He wouldn't leave without telling me," I said, but my statement sounded weak, even to my own ears. I wiggled my toes in my cheap sandals. Would he leave without telling me?

"He would if he knew about your past."

9.

I ran back to the gym door, shoved it open, and pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring their condescending looks and mocking remarks as I searched for Bridger. Not finding him, I burst through the doors leading outside and gulped the cool, damp air.

I trotted through the parking lot to where Bridger had parked the red sports car. And found an empty parking s.p.a.ce.

Tears filled my eyes and anger burned in the pit of my stomach. I wasn't angry with Bridger, though I had every right to be. But I was too busy being furious at myself for caring about him. Mad that I'd started to count on his interest in me making life a little bit nicer, because now that things would be going back to not so nice, I'd feel the difference every single day.

I looked down at my inappropriate dress and hated myself for wearing it, for giving in. Yanking the tulips from my wrist, I chucked them across the parking lot as hard as I could.

My anger mixed with the pull of the moon and the hair on the back of my neck bristled. My nails began to sharpen. Bring it on, I thought, reveling in the fact that my stupid Wal-Mart dress was about to get shredded.

I stepped between two cars and crouched. My skin shrank and squeezed against muscle and bone. I gasped and fell forward on my hands and knees. My ribs expanded and the dress strained against them. The fabric, unable to withstand the pressure, ripped noisily and the dress hung limply against my shoulders. The night sounds intensified and my brain filled with sharp, primitive instinct. The change was complete.

But something was different. I tasted every scent on the air-new things growing, a distant skunk, a hundred different scents of car air freshener, rain trapped in the clouds. My eyesight and sense of sound weren't as acute as normal, either. I looked down at my paws and whined. I wasn't a tabby cat. I had big, black, furry paws and short, blunt claws.

Even though my brain flowed with dog-instinct overload, my appearance was a shock. Since the very first change I had always been a cat. But tonight, judging by my s.h.a.ggy black-and-white-spotted coat, I was probably the spitting image of Mrs. Carpenter's border collie, Shash.

I turned my nose to the sky and inhaled. The desert smelled alive despite its lack of vegetation, as if it held secrets in its dirt, air, even rocks. Another smell mingled with the desert's scent and my stomach rumbled. I trampled my prom dress and left it, torn and filthy, in the parking lot, and ran to the cafeteria Dumpster. With my front paws braced against the Dumpster's side, I inhaled, drooling over the thought of eating rotting corn dogs and Tater Tots wriggling with maggots. If I could just jump high enough ...

Desperate to withstand the temptation, I started running again. As I pa.s.sed from the school parking lot to the suburbs, I knew a dog was going to start barking, as if our minds were connected. The night exploded in barking and howling. A flicker of worry danced in my mind. What if the other dog attacked? But then the night called to me.

I ran with a grace and agility no human can understand, past houses and farms and into the uninhabited desert. Even in the tar-black, fog-coated night, I could sense each tree as I approached it, could leap over fallen logs and fly over uneven ground. Cactuses and sage grabbed at my fur, poked me, tried to find flesh, but my fur kept me protected.

When the clouds dropped, releasing a deluge of fat, soaking drops, I hardly noticed. My outer fur shed the water before it came close to my skin.

Rain turned the dusty desert to a bed of mud. With my nose to the saturated ground, I continued exploring, discovering new scents-coyote, fox, snake, human, and dog. Once or twice I even overlapped my own scent.

I ran down country roads that led back toward town, through neighborhoods and across grocery store parking lots until I was in downtown Silver City, dodging the occasional car and running after cats. I spent hours with my nose to the street-it was like another world-when I sensed rather than heard the approach of another canine.

My head lifted, my front paw came up, and I pointed in the direction of the approaching animal.

Shash, his black-and-white fur slicked against his narrow body, loped down the road and stopped at my side. A low, pitiful whine echoed from his throat and he began pacing back and forth.

Where in the world did you come from? I thought at him. I have no idea if he heard me, but he yelped and trotted off. Before he was a block away, he turned and looked at me over his shoulder, tail wagging. Waiting for me to follow.

We ran through the town and back into the country. It was easy to stay behind Shash because his scent, musky and strong, saturated not only the muddy ground, but every single twig, branch, rock, and blade of sagebrush he touched, not to mention the very air. I could have followed him with my eyes closed.

We wound our way through the bushes in a steady direction-home-when I smelled something that made me stop dead. With my snout held up toward the falling sky, I inhaled. My fur bristled and a sudden, primitive instinct overtook all human control: Evil-RUN!

Up ahead Shash started barking-ferocious, murderous barking. As one, we resumed our sprint through the scraggly brush. And that is when I spotted the gleam of wet, mangy bodies through the narrow gaps in the trees.

Shash and I darted through the underbrush. Fear lent fresh speed to my legs. But whatever chased me was so unnatural, so malicious, it took sheer willpower not to lay on the ground, frozen with terror, and let them have me.

They were not the glossy, wet-coated dogs that they appeared to be. They were something more, something different. Wrong.

Though Shash and I ran at top speed, I could feel them behind me, could smell them when the wind s.h.i.+fted and hear their ragged breathing.

When one got so close I could hear its pounding heart, teeth snapped and pain seared my ankle. I fell, rolling on the muddy ground. The animal was on me before I stopped moving, its snarling, long-toothed mouth searching for skin through my thick fur. I bit back, something so natural I hardly gave it a second thought as wet fur filled my mouth. My teeth came down hard and I smelled blood before a single drop touched my tongue. And then the creature was off me and Shash was at my side. We tried to run, but my ankle was useless, my tendon severed.

Side by side, my head by Shash's tail, Shash's head by my tail, we waited. A large, menacing pack of doglike creatures crept out of the underbrush and circled us. There were all sorts of breeds, all larger than us. My lips pulled away from my teeth in a snarl and I tensed my hind legs, ready to spring. When a solid Doberman-looking animal leaped at me, I leaped, too, and we met in midair, both of our mouths finding the other's neck.

We crashed down and I landed on top of the rock-hard creature, shaking its neck with all my might. Hope, that I might actually kill the unnatural thing beneath me, lent power to my jaws and determination to my tired body-until the rest of the dogs pounced on my back.

Hundreds of teeth sank into my flesh, from my shoulders to my haunches.

A yelp screeched into the rainy night, the sound a dog makes right after it is. .h.i.t by a car, a split second before it dies. When another yelp ripped through the night, torn from my throat, I realized I was the dog about to die.

With every ounce of strength I possessed, I bit and scratched the motley, stinking mound of animals smothering me, but I was outnumbered. The weight of death pressed me down and I couldn't get up.

An ear-deafening boom rattled the night, vibrating my bones and swallowing the rumble of animals snarling. Time seemed to pause as every set of teeth so intent on ripping my head from my body paused inside of my skin. The boom sounded again. A dog yelped. Teeth released my flesh and the creatures scattered so quickly, so silently, I almost wondered if they had existed at all.

A third shot rang out, this time from the opposite direction, and Shash whined a low, pitiful sound.

I whimpered and struggled to get up but was too hurt to move. A new scent entered my nose and a copper shadow loped over and began licking my snout. Duke. He whined and pushed at me with his nose. Slowly, shakily, I found the strength to stand. Duke began trotting away. Shash and I followed, though my hind leg dragged behind me, as useless as a stick caught in my fur.

I hadn't gone ten paces when I froze. A rottweiler, eyes glazed, mouth gaping, lay in a growing pool of blood. I shuffled around the dead body and followed Shash and Duke.

We pa.s.sed the school bus stop and loped toward home. It wasn't long before Mrs. Carpenter's brightly lit barn and house came into view. On three legs I hobbled toward the open barn door. Inside, I fell onto a pile of straw, every inch of my body hurting, and slid back into my own shape. I lay curled in a trembling, naked ball and wondered how I was lucky enough to be alive.

Beside me Duke and Shash whined.

"Dear Lord almighty, if you're a Skinwalker, I'll shoot you before I ask questions." It wasn't until Mrs. Carpenter spoke that I realized she was in the barn, too.

Shocked and horrified, I looked up to see her standing over me with a rifle in hand.