Dead to the World

coffee into a mug.
    “Yes,” he said after a moment, as though he’d had to think about it. “That was the most incredible experience of my life.”
    For a second, I thought he meant throwing up in my bathroom, but that was sure no new experience for Jason. He’d been quite a drinker in his teens, until he’d figured out that there was nothing glamorous or attractive about hanging over a toilet bowl, heaving your guts out.
    “Shifting,” I said tentatively.
    He nodded, cradling his coffee mug in his hands. He held his face over the steam rising from the hot, strong blackness. He met my eyes. His own were once again their ordinary blue. “It’s the most incredible rush,” he said. “Since I was bitten, not born, I don’t get to be a true panther like the others.”
    I could hear envy in his voice.
    “But even what I become is amazing. You feel the magic inside you, and you feel your bones moving around and adapting, and your vision changes. Then you’re lower to the ground and you walk in a whole different way, and as for running, damn, you can run . You can chase. . . .” And his voice died away.
    I would just as soon not know that part, anyway.
    “So it’s not so bad?” I asked, my hands clasped together. Jason was all the family I had, except for a cousin who’d drifted away into the underworld of drugs years before.
    “It’s not so bad,” Jason agreed, scraping up a smile to give me. “It’s great while you’re actually the animal. Everything’s so simple. It’s when you’re back to being human that you start to worry about stuff.”
    He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t even despondent. I wasn’t aware I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. Jason was going to be able to live with the hand he’d been dealt. He was going to be okay.
    The relief was incredible, like I’d removed something jammed painfully between my teeth or shaken a sharp rock out of my shoe. For days, weeks even, I’d been worried, and now that anxiety was gone. That didn’t mean Jason’s life as a shape-shifter would be worry-free, at least from my point of view. If he married a regular human woman, their kids would be normal. But if he married into the shifter community at Hotshot, I’d have nieces or nephews who turned into animals once a month. At least, they would after puberty; that would give them, and their auntie Sook, some preparation time.
    Luckily for Jason, his first full moon after being bitten had fallen on a weekend, so he hadn’t been obliged to take time off work to recover. But I had to work tonight. As soon as Jason left in his flashy pickup truck, I crawled back into bed, jeans and all, and in about five minutes I was fast asleep. The relief acted as a kind of sedative.
    When I woke up, it was three o’clock and time for me to get ready for my shift at Merlotte’s. The sun outside was bright and clear, and the temperature was fifty-two, said my indoor-outdoor thermometer. This isn’t too unusual in north Louisiana in January. The temperature would drop after the sun went down, and Jason would shift. But he’d have some fur—not a full coat, since he turned into half-man, half-cat—and he’d be with other panthers. They’d go hunting. The woods around Hotshot, which lay in a remote corner of Renard Parish, would be dangerous again tonight.
    As I went about eating, showering, folding laundry, I thought of a dozen things I’d like to know. I wondered if the shifters would kill a human being if they came upon one in the woods. I wondered how much of their human consciousness they retained in their animal form. If they mated in panther form, would they have a kitten or a baby? What happened when a pregnant werepanther saw the full moon? I wondered if Jason knew the answer to all these questions yet, if Calvin had given him some kind of briefing.
    But I was glad I hadn’t questioned Jason this morning while everything was still so new to him. I’d have plenty of chances to ask him later.
    For the first time since New Year’s Day, I was thinking about the future. The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time. As I pulled on my waitress outfit (black pants and a white boat-neck T-shirt and black Reeboks), I felt almost giddy with cheer. For once, I left my hair down instead of pulling it back and up into a ponytail. I put in some bright red dot earrings and matched my lipstick to the color.