Lynx Northern Shifters 3

couple of people recalled that Jonah had been in their store—it was notable since the strange young man used only cash for purchases and acted uneasy. Weird , one of them said in describing Jonah. But no one had actually seen him since last June.
Trouble was, like Trey himself, Jonah was a shifter. He’d disappeared from society but where he’d ended up was impossible to trace without a human trail or a lynx’s scent. And Trey could find neither.
~ * ~
    For the first few months after he left home, Jonah just learned how to get in and out of human society. Of course, he’d been into town before, but it had always been the same town, and he’d interacted with few people.
    The first time he ventured into a city, albeit a small city, he frightened people with his unclean clothes and his unshaved face. It was technically difficult to travel this way, as lynx, and emerge as human in the cities. Trey had mentioned that some shifters, moving back and forth between forms, ended up stealing clothes and though he hated it, Jonah snatched some clothes hanging on a line from time to time. They weren’t always easy to find in the late fall.
    He ended up being picked up by police on his third attempt to enter a city. Aaron had declared all police assholes, something that had influenced Jonah no matter how much he hated Aaron. But these men were concerned by Jonah’s inability to answer basic questions or show them any ID. His mother had never registered him for any, so his name was truthful when he said Jonah.
    He landed in a homeless shelter where he was given clothes, food, shaving supplies. He’d expected to find it difficult to be among so many people, and it was. And yet, there was a relief in him, to not be so alone all the time. After Trey had left, the solitude had become more oppressive, and it had been bad before.
    Jonah wasn’t terribly communicative, and he couldn’t last too long at one shelter, because he had to leave off and go lynx for a while, recover from all the socialization. But a year after he’d left home, he’d created a circuit for himself in three cities, at three different shelters, leaving caches of clothing for when he’d shift back to human.
    He tried working from time to time, under the table it was called, but people tended to cheat him or he couldn’t stand the long hours and the restlessness that induced. Recognizing he wasn’t cut out for human society wasn’t the most welcome truth, but he accepted it as he accepted most things these days.
    The only thing that kept him from becoming entirely listless and dull about life was his search for Trey. He’d asked at a few police stations about Trey Walters. The first couple of times he’d feared that he would learn that Trey had been killed in some kind of FBI-related fieldwork.
    But no one knew anything, when they bothered to take his query seriously. A couple of people dug deeper and told him Trey had lied, that no Trey Walters had ever worked for the FBI. Jonah tossed that idea around in his head, that Trey and everything he’d said was bogus. Thing was, as Jonah spent more and more time around humans, he’d begun to pick up signals that they were lying, signals associated with sight and smell. And Trey had seemed to be speaking truth, at least in Jonah’s memories—if they could be depended on.
    Then one morning, a cop came to find Jonah. It was spring, more than a year and a half after he’d left home, and he was thinking he might take a reprieve and return there soon. That morning, Jonah was actually working, paving driveways. The smell on the job was atrocious, and the job wasn’t going to last long, but there was something satisfying about working in society. He planned to leave the money at the shelter since he couldn’t take it with him. Though they didn’t appreciate such gestures and believed them to be counterproductive, because they wanted him to build a life.
“Jonah?”
    Jonah recognized the cop and nodded before they shook hands. This guy liked Jonah okay. The cop tilted his head to the right to indicate an older man, dressed casually, who stood off to the side, across the road from where they were working on this driveway.
    Jonah raised his eyebrows in question and the cop, Neil was his name if he remembered correctly, gave him a brief clap on the back while Jonah forced himself not to flinch. Despite all his human interactions, he wasn’t used to physical contact and didn’t particularly appreciate it,