12. Kendra
12
KENDRA
A my was asleep in her car seat, her neck at an angle that gave Kendra a headache just looking at it. The drive out towards Tabby’s farm was mesmerizing in the dark, and Kendra had to shake herself back to wakefulness several times. The laundromat shower had been long, warm, and decadent after getting so chilled, and now she wanted nothing more than to crawl into her clean pajamas and go to sleep.
But she had promised the bull (she was calling him Ferdinand in her head) to come back that night to check on his injury and try to solve his magical mystery, or at least figure out how to get him help. She told him about the abandoned gravel pit down the highway where she had camped out several times and he had given one of his cartoon-character nods. Kendra suggested that she meet him there near nine, not that he was wearing a watch, and it was a few minutes later that she was pulling down the rough road to find a place out of view of the highway.
Ferdinand was nowhere to be seen as she used a set of leveling blocks to get the van flat enough to run the propane fridge and stove. It wasn’t quite cold enough to justify the heater, and she’d deliberately warmed the living space as they drove. If she was careful about opening the doors, the van would hold the heat long into the night, and her blankets were thick and cozy.
She set up a folding chair outside of the van to wait and see if the bull would show up, listening in case Amy cried. She idly wondered if a phone would run out of power while it was transformed with a shifter for so long. Shifting itself didn’t always make perfect sense if she stopped to think about it too hard, and watches kept time as if they existed while shifted. Where did her extra weight go? Clothing couldn’t turn into feathers, because she wasn’t bald when she shifted naked. How could something you were holding just vanish and come back?
Just as she was ready to give up and get Amy to bed, hoping that the bull wouldn’t crash her van again to wake her up, instinct gave a little jangle and she heard heavy, uneven footsteps on the gravel.
The bull would have been deeply alarming breaking through the brush if Kendra hadn’t been expecting him. He was enormous in the darkness, and his horns were bright and sharp. He snorted in greeting as Kendra rose to meet him.
“How’s the leg?” she asked. “Better?”
Ferdinand bobbed his head and gave a tired sigh.
Kendra felt better prepared for this one-sided conversation, now that she knew what to expect. “Do you have some family I can contact? Someone who might know how to help you? I wrote letters down on this whiteboard and thought you could point to them so we could get a name and details about how you got this way. Oh, I should add numbers.” She fished a marker out of her coat pocket, but the bull was shaking his head.
“No one?” Kendra said skeptically. “There’s no one I can contact.”
The bull gave a mournful lowing noise and shook his head again.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kendra said, and it seemed natural to reach out and pat his nose.
“So maybe you can tell me how this happened,” she suggested. “Was it a person?”
Kendra had never heard a cow growl before, but this one definitely did. A person, probably.
“So, let’s start with how long you’ve been like this. That wound was probably a week old. Have you been stuck that long?”
The bull shook his head, stretching his nose to the right.
“A month?”
He shook his head again, scooping even harder to the right.
“A year? ”
The bull’s head bobbed left, but not vigorously. Not that long, at least.
“Was it in the winter? Late winter?”
Vigorous shaking of his head.
“Early winter?”
Nodding.
That would mean he’d been like this for nearly a year.
“Alright, let’s get your name and some data points. Do you know who did this to you?”
Bulls couldn’t shrug, they didn’t have shoulders that made the same motions as human skeleton, but Ferdinand did his best.
Before she could get the whiteboard up to shame and name, there was a pay attention jolt of instinct and the bull’s head swiveled towards the road.
There was a vehicle pulling off the highway, crunching slowly on the gravel, and it paused just as it came into sight. Its headlights were off and everything about it suggested stealth. Because Kendra hadn’t heard it on the highway, it must have been waiting there for some time.
Kendra felt her face fall into a scowl. “I’ll be right back,” she promised, and then she launched into the air as she folded herself into owl form and spread her wings.
As an owl, she had good night vision, and although she was bright white (useful for snowfields, less helpful in dark shrubbery), she could fly silently. She rose up above the scrubby trees that fringed the gravel pit and could make out a dark SUV just off the road. A semi came barreling down the highway then, its light and noise distractingly keen. Kendra banked and circled the stationary vehicle, just as the driver’s side door opened, and an unexpected figure emerged, his braided dark hair sparkling faintly with glitter.