Shapeshifter - 7. The ugly, furry truth

I didn’t scream when I was shot, I was just too surprised. The pain was short and dull, then there was only a throbbing pull in my chest. Hot wetness gushed down my legs, and the innate knowledge that something was terribly wrong gripped me.

A shiver crept up my back and into my lungs, accompanied by a rush of adrenaline that made my heart leap with panic. I grabbed for the guy with the gun, tried to hold on to something— anything—, but my vision blurred and I missed. The thought of dying manifested itself as a giant boulder crushing my chest, and I couldn’t even cry for help, as much as I wanted to. Nobody here would have helped me anyway.

I only understood the feeling of weight on my body and the rush when I fell down on my knees and heard the old wooden floor creak beneath me. In that moment, I suddenly knew what to do. I finally caught on to an instinct that I’d had all this years but never had any reason to listen to. Now I had that reason, and fear of death made it easy for me to give in to that strange, new knowledge.

I simply did what it told me to do: change.

For the first time in my life, the change of my shape was fluent and graceful, and not even the blood, the clothes, or my dislocated shoulder could stop me. Fur broke through my skin like a shiny black wave, spreading from my spine to every extremity. There were no breaking bones, no disgusting sounds, no panting, everything in my body, every molecule jumped at the chance to follow the flow and do what I had always been supposed to do at will. The whole thing didn’t take more than three seconds, and only the hissing of fur rubbing against fur and the ripping of cloth mixed with the cacophony of chaos in the room.

The screams of panic, shock and fear from the humans didn’t bother cat-me as I ripped the last shreds of clothing from my body and jumped the man who had shot me.

I had never ever done anything besides walking around or trying to eat stuff in my cat form, but that didn’t matter now. I still had the instinct to kill, and it told me where to grab the guy’s neck, how to bite and how to twist and tug to kill him. Humans were so fragile when it came to their neck; even small deer had more strength there than them.

Only when another shot hit my shoulder did I remember the other two people in the room, and let the dead man’s neck go. The woman was nowhere to be seen, but the guy from the phone had a small silver hand gun pointed at me. His hand was shaking so bad, the next shot missed me by two feet, but I didn’t want to risk a third shot.

I jumped him too but missed his throat.

He smashed the butt of the gun into my face, blinding one of my eyes with the force of the impact, but my hind claws ripped his stomach open and brought him down. I got his throat just a second later, and even though he hit my head two more times, he stood no chance at all.

There was a wet, popping sound when I broke his neck, but even when I felt his pulse cease I didn’t let go right away. My heart was racing, pushing globs of dark blood out of the fresh shoulder wound, and my long, black tail twitched furiously as I crouched on the dead body, holding his throat between my jaws.

It took Noom about one minute to gather the nerve to make a sound, and at first I paid no attention to it. Only when I heard the downstairs door thump against the wall, followed by a crash right next to me, did I let go of the dead man and turned to the sound. The first crash had obviously been made by lady-thug, who had seen her chance to escape the fury of a nearly grown panther. The second sound had been that of Noom’s chair falling and the arm rest cracking, and thusly setting him free.

Noom was near the stairs, white as a sheet, leaning against the wall, dripping blood from numerous cuts and bruises, and once again he pointed a gun at my head.

I froze, panting through half open jaws, eying him with my alien silver eyes. They were the only thing that resembled my boy-me, and the only thing separating my cat-me from the real animal. I had survived several shots because, although painful, they hadn’t been aimed at vital regions, strictly speaking. But if Noom shot me in the head or broke my neck, even I would stay dead, because there were just some things that super-healing couldn’t do-- like resurrecting the dead, for example. That would be a very poor outcome for my rescue mission.

“Don’t move.”

Noom’s voice sounded like gravel in a tin pipe, but that only made him more convincing, so I slowly sat down. Maybe it would have been cleverer to just morph back to my human body, but I honestly had no idea if I could pull off that trick without another syringe full of heroin. Before, it had been instinct, but now it was gone, and I was quite possibly trapped in ‘furball mode’ for a long time. It had been worth it, though.

The silence around us spread for a few heartbeats, but I faintly could hear footsteps running across the gravel grounds outside. Lady-thug was on her way to get reinforcements, and we didn’t have time for waiting games.

I couldn’t talk, so I pointedly turned my head and perked up my ears, as if everything outside the ratty building was more important than the gun aimed at my head. But Noom was hurt, and it made him slow.

“I said don’t you fuckin’ move, you bastard!” he snarled, and I didn’t have to turn to interpret the sounds his feet were making. He had pushed himself away from the wall to make his point, ignoring his own blood loss and wounds.

I kept staring at the window nonetheless. My concern was much more important than Noom’s freak-out over my hellish metamorphosis.

Only when the voices on the other side of the court grew louder did he finally understand what I was trying to tell him.

“Shit, that bitch got away!” he hissed and stopped pointing the gun at me. I turned my head back to him, relieved that he finally had caught on, and there was a brief moment of confused eye contact. Noom paused, opened his mouth— and closed it again, hobbling down the stairs instead.

I knew he wanted to talk to me, tell me something, but just as my dad had found it hard to talk to a cat, Noom was having difficulties processing it too. I got up and followed him, limping on three paws.

In my cat form, pain registered differently, so I didn’t feel like crying or fainting, but the shot to my shoulder was still more than painful, and it made walking down the stairs pretty harrowing.

There was also a faint ache in my other shoulder and in my stomach, but wounds I got as a human had healed more than half the way when I changed forms. Another neat trick I hadn’t known I could do.

When Noom realized I was following him, there was another short moment of confusion. He pointed the gun first at me, than at the door, than again at me, and finally decided it was best to get me in front of him.

“Move,” he said, waving the muzzle at me, so I moved.

Luckily, the door downstairs wasn’t closed, so I was able to peel it open without having to awkwardly paw at the door knob. Hobbling outside, I scented the air, turned my head to the giant door on the other side of the court, and finally looked back to Noom, who was crab-walking out of the door, pointing the gun at the far side of the buildings. He looked in pain, although he tried to hide it. Just when he got close to me, the giant door on the south end of the court burst open, and five people with machine guns stumbled into the darkness.

It was time to run, fast.

I grabbed Noom’s ripped shirt with my teeth and pulled, trying to tug him into the direction of the inconspicuous door I had come from, but it just got me another hit to the head with the butt of the gun. I finally resorted to just let him stand there and made a limp for the exit. If he wanted to die, so be it, but I definitely wasn’t ready as long as there was a way out.

I had limped about seven feet when I heard a soft “god damn it!” and footsteps catching up to me. He kept behind me, but when we reached the metal door, he finally caught on to my plan and this time opened it instead of waiting for me to do it.

A short volley of bullets rained down onto the yard behind us, but it just made us limp faster.

We actually made it out into the night.

~*~

Have you ever tried hiding a 180 lb panther in any metropolis? It’s a complete impossibility. Adding to it was the fact that Noom looked like a dead man walking and was still bleeding when we took a turn into a moldy, wet, inner courtyard of a big residential building.

Noom was still clutching the gun, but he hid it behind his crossed arms.

His eyes never left me, though he kept a few feet of distance at all times. I saw murder in his face every time I dared look at him. That, and a flicker of madness I had learned to dread.

It definitely was time to try and change back, and now was as good a moment as any. I hobbled a few feet away from Noom and laid down, trying to remember the feeling I’d had when first changing. I closed my eyes and concentrated really hard— And nothing happened.

I tried again and again, but all it got me was pain in my hurt shoulder, nothing more. Seconds passed by with nothing happening, then minutes. I was ready to give up when I heard a dull thud, and then Noom's voice.

“I know you can understand me.”

Noom was sitting next to the small entrance to the courtyard, both legs half stretched, one hand pressed against an evil looking gash at his ribcage, the other still holding on to the gun, although it now rested on his thigh. He looked horrible.

“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing with me, but if you don’t…” for a moment he stopped speaking, obviously fishing for words, then he finished bluntly, “… if you don’t change back to human, I’ll put a bullet in your head, just because you creep me out.”

It hurt in so many ways, I couldn’t even decide which one was the worst. I had rescued him and he wanted to kill me? I had killed his pursuers, and he wanted to kill me? I had come for him—

The gun clicked audibly when Noom demonstratively switched off the safety, then he pointed it straight into my face. I couldn’t fathom how he managed to aim that accurately in the pitch black darkness of night, but thanks to my very accurate night vision I saw it.

“Now.” There was that promise of violence in his voice again.

The command and dead serious note in his voice and face tugged at my instincts in a way I would never feel again. That night it produced a second miracle.

It made me shrink, crouch, and then, out of nowhere, I changed back. The fur crawled back into my skin, bones elongated here and shortened there, the tail shrank back into my back, and when I finally laid on the cold, wet concrete, naked and bleeding a little, I couldn’t suppress a moan of bliss. The sheer tone of his voice had made me shift, something my father had forcibly tried for years and always failed.

If I hadn’t been hurting so bad, I would have smiled when I heard Noom come closer.

My shoulder was still bleeding a bit, my belly was crusty and reddened, my other shoulder swollen, but I was nowhere near Noom’s condition.

I opened my eyes to look up at him, but my vision was still blurry and one eye swollen shut. All I could see was his frame stretching upward and plucking something from the black sky.

“So, you’re cat-boy now. Brilliant.” A faceless, emotionless Noom dropped something soft on me, then turned and started limping to the exit. “We’re not done talking about this fucked up shit. Put that on and get going.”

I felt for the cloth he had dropped on me, and discovered it was some kind of corduroy pants from a low hanging clothes line, at least two sizes too big for me. Since I was naked it had to be enough, and I slowly, hazily, worked my feet into it. What should I do? Maybe if I fled, now that I knew Noom was okay and free…

The thought alone was enough to make me jump to my feet and hastily jog after the huddled figure in front of me. Leaving Noom was unthinkable to me, even though I knew he still thought about killing me. I’d have to convince him I was harmless, that he’d be happier with me by his side. I didn’t know how, but I knew that there was a chance he’d be okay with me. My… species, or whatever I was.

I’d just have to convince him.

~*~

“Here, hold this.”

We finally had found a temporary hiding place in the central control room of an abandoned subway station, 30 feet underground. The ceiling was leaky and dust and mold coated every surface in thick layers, but it was a safe refuge for the moment. We even had kind of reconciled, meaning Noom wasn’t constantly pointing the gun at my head anymore, and he tolerated me being close enough to help him patch himself up.

I pressed my hand on the gauze wound pad on Noom’s chest, as he rummaged through the old, rusty first aid kit we had scavenged in the stair well on our way down. It was the first time he had talked to me since his little verbal spit in the residential courtyard, but the frown lines on his forehead were still there. He also was still angry with me, and I understood, kind of. That didn’t mean I had to keep feeling guilty about what I was.

Unfortunately, he was angry with me for so many different reasons, I had a hard time choosing which one to comment on. I finally just went for the easiest, most harmless one.

“Would you rather I let you get killed?” I grumbled, staring down at the contents of the first aid kit.

“No,” he huffed, and finally found what he was looking for. Pulling out the roll of adhesive tape, he ripped off three pieces and taped the gauze in place, hissing, “I just wouldn’t have pegged you for the stupid kind. But here you are, showing the world that you’re still alive, and that I busted my job. Bloody good work, really.”

At first, I didn’t know what to say to that. He was right, my rescue mission had been stupid. But even now, I couldn’t shake the feeling of satisfaction, and all my instincts told me that I had done good. It was hard to suppress the joy I felt over having Noom here and in one piece, and maybe Noom felt it. Maybe my happiness was what made him stay pissed at me.

Or maybe it was the fact that he had seen me shift shape. He hadn’t said a word about that after his little freak-out in the factory, and that made me wonder. I had no experience in this context, none at all. Were people supposed to act like this?

“Yeah, like you have a reputation to spoil. What went through your head when you just left me in your house unrestrained? ‘Surely he’ll just stay put, out of the goodness of his heart!’ Or did you simply forget? Who’s stupid now?” I bit back. I knew I sounded sullen, but his words stung deeper than they should have. This was, after all, the least of all our problems.

Noom’s frown got deeper, but he didn’t reply right away. He just threw the leftovers of medical supplies back into the kit and grumbled something noncommittal, then finally turned to face me. His battered, bloody face looked serious and humorless as he stared at me.

“Why didn’t you run?”

I blinked owlishly at him. “There was no time. Some guys woke me up when they broke into your house, and I had to hide.”

Noom sniffed dismissively. “Yeah, but you could have run after that, instead of chasing after me. Why didn’t you?”

“I really don’t know. It seemed like the right thing to do.” I looked down at the kit, watching the lid being closed. It was easier to look down than to face him when he stared at me like that, with that look of innate madness lurking behind the piercing blue of his irises.

“You know, I could still kill you, save my reputation, and end all this trouble.”

That tone was back in his voice, the one that told me he actually thought about killing me. He sounded just like on the first day, when he had pointed his gun at my head and nearly pulled the trigger.

A chill went down my spine and into my fingertips, so I balled my hands into fists.

“But you won’t. Just like before. Maybe you can’t, I don’t know. I do know that you’ve already invested too much into me, be it emotion or just inconvenience, and you won’t let that go to waste so easily.” I knew my voice sounded small and hollow, but I just couldn’t put more strength into it. I already had to fight the fear of death, because this time he did seem to seriously consider the easy way out.

I actually could hear his teeth grind, and I missed my moment to react. Hurt as he was, tired as he was, Noom still managed to surprise me when he rushed forward and tackled me to the floor, pressing his forearm against my wind pipe.

Soft, puffy clouds of dust rose around us and disappeared into the darkness outside the light cone the small emergency light produced. I struggled against his steel grip, but either I was too hurt myself or just not that much into freeing myself, because I just couldn’t seem to shake him off.

Maybe I didn’t want to.

When my air supply ran out, I definitely wished I’d gotten myself free, because when I looked up at him with blood-shot eyes, gagging, I could see a lust for murder in his gaze I had never seen before. He was actually enjoying this! I also saw his face, and found it to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, despite the scratches, bruises, and cuts. It was the only thing right in this situation, to see his face, and only his face, when I was about to die.

When the world started blacking out at the edges of my vision, I stopped struggling altogether. It was all that Noom had wanted because he instantly let up.

As I dizzily gasped for air, he grabbed my wrists, pulled his military grade linen belt from his ratty, bloody trousers, and hogtied my arms together. I blinked, coughing, and decided not to provoke him with more struggling. Instead, I tried to reason with him.

“Please, I saved your life, didn’t I? Why would you kill someone who risks so much just to get you out of trouble?” My voice was raspy and didn’t sound right, but I didn’t dare clear my hurting throat. There were so many confusing emotions on his dimly lit face, I didn’t know what would provoke him and what wouldn’t anymore.

His answer wasn’t at all what I had expected.

“You’re not human. I saw you. What are you? Some kind of mutated freak? A honest to god demon? I didn’t even believe in god until I saw you do that.”

His voice was raspy and harsh, and it vibrated with a rage I couldn’t see on his face. His whole demeanor didn’t make any sense, and that freaked me out more than the things he did to me. I even tried to answer, though I had no idea what to say, but he beat me to it.

“Where did the fur go? You look totally human now. You did before, too, but I saw you. I wasn’t hallucinating, damn it! Or was I?”

When he ripped the trousers from my body he pulled me with it a whole foot. I whimpered with fear, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he leaned forward to muster my legs, then my crotch.

I could feel his hot, moist breath on my balls, and despite my fear my dick gave a little twitch of interest. Not enough to get hard, but obviously sheer closeness was enough for my body to get hot and bothered. That twitch wasn’t enough to also catch Noom’s interest in return, unfortunately.

“I knew you were too perfect. I mean, look at you, it’s ridiculous how good-looking you are, how well shaped your body is, and those eyes? Shit, I should’ve known you’re not real. Maybe I’m still tripping from the stuff they fixed me up with back at the factory. For all I know, I’m still in that room with those goons, getting beat into a pulp, and you’re just a figment of my imagination!”

He had talked to my balls, his hot breath teasing me without him realizing it, but now he crawled higher and trapped me with the weight of his body. My throat still hurt where he had gagged me, but for now he didn’t seem interested in harming me anymore. He was intent on finding some trace of the great cat he had seen before, and he was angry, frightened and hurt. Maybe even a little bit high, if what he’d said just now was true, but definitely not murderous anymore.

“Please, I can explain everything, at least to a certain point—” I began, stuttering, but Noom clamped a hand over my mouth to stop my babbling. His scent flooded my senses so completely, I could feel my pupils blow out.

His piercing blue eyes hovered inches over mine, our noses practically touching. His whole body laid on mine, covering every inch of skin with his own. His warmth seeped through his clothing and into my skin, and though breathing was still an ongoing problem, I felt myself become calm and relaxed. Noom was here, and he was alive. And I probably was just as crazy as he was.

“Explain to me, cat-boy, why I simply have to touch you and be near you, even though you freak me out like a bad horror movie.”

The words, though spoken softly, rang through the silence of the underground control room like a thunder clap. For a second, the warm, reassuring weight of Noom’s body on mine felt like shackles, like a means to pin me down and stop me from running, but that feeling passed quickly. Mostly because I could feel his cock pulse and swell in response to our closeness until it poked into my stomach. The size of it felt a little disturbing to me, especially since it was still confined to Noom’s ratty trousers and would probably grow in length once he whipped it out, but it still quickened my breath and made me remember the first night.

How deliriously perfect he had felt inside me.

It was my muffled, lusty sigh that gave Noom the idea to take his hand off my mouth and actually give me a chance to answer his question. He swept his hand through my tousled and knotted hair to get the saliva off it, then dug his fingers into my medium-length mane and tugged once. At some point his face had gotten back in tune with his emotions, making it possible for me to read him at least a bit, and I was able to guess his thoughts again: He very dearly wanted me to tell him that everything in the candy factory had been a dream, that he really was high, and that I was not a so called ‘cat-boy’.

I was inclined to lie to him for about three seconds because that was how long I drowned in his eyes. Only when those eyes got impatient did I snap out of it and grudgingly decided that the truth was necessary.

“I’ve been feeling it since I first met you. You know, this pull. But I have no idea how it works, or why you feel it too… Normally I’m the only one suffering under my curse, and nobody ever felt any— well, pull, or compulsion— towards me. And I really, truly have no inkling of an idea what I am. This I swear to you. I only know that I was born this way, and that it has something to do with my mother. If I knew anything more, I’d tell you, I swear, because—”

I managed to stop myself in the last moment. It was his eyes’ fault, this babbling, this, as I had called it myself, compulsion to just go ahead and tell him every fucking thought rolling through my muddled brain, but I was able to keep it in check… for the time being. A part of my brain didn’t understand why I’d want to keep stuff from Noom, but for now it seemed to just go with whatever I decided. It was reassuring to know I still had some kind of control over my actions.

The weight above me shifted, just enough to let me breathe easier but not enough to worm my way out from underneath Noom. He was still staring at me, I could feel it burning against my temple, and it made me avoid looking up.

A few seconds of silence later, he shifted again, this time to reach down and grab my testes in a very tight grip that made me whimper with fear.

“If you’re lying to me, you little shit, I’ll rip off your balls. You hear me?”

I nodded furiously. I didn’t doubt his threat for one second.