Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Daniel
I wake up in agony. Pain that feels unreal spears my body everywhere. I gasp and open my eyes.
And I close them again.
“Danny?”
I blink and slowly adjust to the lighting of my hospital room. I see my sister Tina standing over me. “Danny!”
I can only moan for water. She pours a drink. Then, she tells me I’ve been out for four days and the doctors have been worried. “You’re pretty bad, Danny.”
I nod gingerly. “I feel it. I need to shift.”
She understands, of course, that shifting will allow me to heal in a way that modern medicine can’t help. “That’s why I’ve been waiting here. Let’s get you out of here while the getting’s good. They just checked in on you. We should be able to sneak out.”
To say that the trip down to her car is excruciating is to minimize the absolute searing nerve-blasting agony I experience. I have no room for any thought other than putting one foot in front of the other. I lean on Tina heavily.
Admittedly, during this initial time, I don’t have many thoughts about the boys or Samantha. I focus only on the next breath and the next. We get to Tina’s car and she bundles me in. I pass out again.
She gently jogs me awake. The car is stopped. I see the fear in her face. Will I even be able to shift? Am I just too weak at this point?
I stumble out and she finally steps back to let me go ahead and shift. This is the first time ever I feel pain in the transition. My body seems to rip apart and shatter.
But then it’s fine.
I’m in my tiger form and the world is fine again. I shift back to human form and say, “I’m starving. Can we get some food.”
“Hang on,” she says. Shifters don’t perceive nakedness like humans. In fact, most shifters don’t bother with clothes unless they have to. We’re hard wired not to even pay attention to it. This is why what Tina does next isn’t strange to me. She walks up and looks all over me. She stares at me with a great deal of intensity and then finally says, “I brought food for you but you need to shift back.”
She goes to the trunk and I walk back there and shift. She opens an ice chest and there are a great many cuts of beef. She tosses me steaks, roasts, shoulders, and briskets. I gorge on them and finally feel full. I switch back to human and say, “Thanks. That hit the spot.”
“Bro, you have got to stop this hero shit. I can’t afford to keep buying you sides of beef.” That’s not true. We’re very wealthy. All tigers are. It’s part of what makes us what we are.
“Tina, thanks. Why the hell didn’t they just take me to the woods or something?”
“Is your boss a guy named Barrett?”
“You mean Garrett?”
“Primate of some sort?”
“Gorilla.”
“Yeah, that’s him. He told me you ended up, somehow, in an ambulance run by humans.”
I laugh. Then, it occurs to me that I’ve just walked out of the hospital with no notice. “Damn, I better call the hospital.”
“Well, no shit Sherlock.”
It’ll suck to try and explain my decision to leave hospital care, but I know I can’t avoid it. There’ll be hell to pay if they file a missing person’s report. Tina gestures a duffel bag next to the cooler. Inside are my clothes and my phone. My wallet is there, too. Basically, all of my personal effects from the hospital along with new clothes. I was so out of it, I don’t remember her taking them from me.“I’ll call on the way,” I say, “but get me home.”
It’s time to head home and talk to the woman I love.