Chapter 12
Kayla Walsh, former high school goth girl cutie, now the most beautiful woman Jordan Rhodes had ever seen, disappeared right there in the middle of his living room, and an owl took her place.
In deference to his masculine dignity, Jordan decided the sound he'd made was a hoarse yelp, not the high-pitched, pre-puberty squeal that he actually emitted.
Unfortunately for his masculine dignity, there was no rephrasing that could make the way he jolted backward and fell over on his ass anything except a total physical collapse.
He didn't quite fall all the way onto his back in the moment, but after half a frozen second, he let himself drop the rest of the way to the floor, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.
He was pretty sure his mind wasn't playing tricks on him.
He was pretty sure Kayla had actually just vanished and an owl had replaced her.
There was no movie magic going on in his living room, not even the chemistry they shared, which Jordan was certain was absolutely real.
He still lay there, staring at the ceiling and trying to wrap his mind around what he'd just seen.
His heart was beating like a jackhammer, slamming inside his chest and making breathing difficult.
His eyes were drying out from the stare, but he was a little afraid to blink.
The world had changed between one blink and the next, a minute ago.
He wasn't sure he could take another reality shift like that.
There was a very soft, unfamiliar sound in the room, and then the owl walked up beside Jordan to gaze down at him worriedly. The wings, he thought: he'd heard the owl's wings brushing against something, or against itself. That was the strange, soft sound.
It was…it was a very large owl. Jordan wasn't enormously familiar with owls in general, but he was pretty confident they didn't usually stand four feet tall.
Or maybe not quite four feet, but he was lying on his back and it was peering down at him, and it looked pretty tall from down here on the floor.
It was mostly white, with small dark brown wing-like markings across its wings and belly.
A crown of the little markings framed the white face and the huge, bright gold eyes.
It tilted its head sideways, gazing intently at Jordan, and said, "Hoo? "
Jordan said, "I'm…" and couldn't think of what else to say. He wasn't quite sure he was fine. "…Kayla?"
She shifted back to her human form all at once, head still tilted, eyes still large (although blue now), expression still quizzically concerned. "Are you all right?"
"I'm…" Jordan closed his eyes, counted to three, and opened them again.
Kayla was still a woman. There was no evidence of an owl anywhere in the room.
Jordan swallowed. "Did you…just…turn into an owl?"
Kayla pressed her lips together and nodded. "I did. I'm a shifter. An owl shifter."
"And that…is why you don't want people to know about Virtue? Because you're a shifter?"
"Because there are lots of shifters here," Kayla said gently.
She offered her hand, but Jordan didn't think he was quite ready to get off the floor yet.
The floor was nice and stable and hard to fall off, whereas it had been pretty easy to fall off his feet.
"Owl shifters are kind of rare, although there are a couple of families in town," Kayla said, still cautiously gentle.
"There are more wolves and bears and big predators and things. "
"You…were a big predator," Jordan said cautiously.
A startling grin split Kayla's face. "That's true. I am. Snowy owls are big birds, and shifters run larger than our true animal counterparts. And bird shifters can be unusually large even for shifters."
Jordan said, "Hnneengh," in the same kind of gentle tone Kayla had been using, and guilt flashed across her face. She sat at his side, reaching carefully for his hand, and when he didn't pull away, wrapped her warm fingers around his.
"Sorry. I should have made sure you were sitting down. It's just…this is why I knew you wouldn't believe me if I just told you."
"That's true. That's definitely true. That's very true. Virtue is…how do I not know this?"
"I don't know," Kayla said apologetically. "I really thought everybody who grew up here did, even though we're told to be secretive about it. I'm sort of having to recalibrate everything I knew."
"You think you are!" Jordan half-shouted in helpless disbelief, and to his relief, Kayla laughed instead of flinching.
"Yeah, no, that's fair enough. I think probably not more than fifteen or twenty percent of the people here are shifters, if that helps? There are a lot more true humans. But there's a really high concentration of shifters, for a small town."
"Because shifters settled this place?"
Kayla nodded, still holding his hand. Jordan felt like he was adjusting, maybe. Like if Kayla kept holding his hand, he could cope with pretty much anything. "Tell me more?"
"Well, you know how the township is the largest in the state? It's because we needed the room to roam. It's why the town square is so silly-big, although I guess it had forest on it for a long time and it's less useful for stretching your lion legs as a huge lawn."
"There are lions in Virtue?" Jordan's voice went up again, and he wondered if maybe he wasn't adjusting so well after all.
Kayla pursed her lips, which was distractingly pretty. Maybe he was all right, at that. Maybe he was on an emotional roller coaster.
Maybe this was the most amazing evening of his life.
That hit him like a brick. Kayla had just shared what had to be the most important secret in Virtue, in her life, with him.
She was trusting him completely with a secret history of the town and its people.
Sharing that with him, so he would understand why she didn't want her stardom to shine any extra light on her hometown.
Suddenly all Jordan wanted in the world was to be worthy of that trust. He sat up, turning his hand in hers to catch her fingers and squeeze them as he whispered, "Thank you for telling me this.
I honestly had no idea, but no wonder you want to keep Virtue out of the limelight.
Zane Bellamy must have flipped out when the woman who won his design was living in his hometown.
Anybody from Virtue who gets famous must spend half their lives redirecting attention from it. "
Relief swept Kayla's face. "Exactly. Zane tried not to even come back here, but he was stuck with the rules of the contest, and besides, he found his f—" She swallowed hard, like she was struggling for words, and started over again.
"He found his fame didn't cause too much trouble, but we don't want to risk it again.
Only maybe it doesn't matter if we're trying to keep Virtue off the map, because it seems like the town is trying really hard to get on it. "
"Well, it's…" Jordan trailed off, completely seeing her point of view, and trying to consider the town as he'd come to know it in the past few months since his return.
"It's so much more alive here than it was when we were kids," he said slowly.
"Maybe trying to keep it quiet and hidden was backfiring.
If everybody leaves, even the shifter kids, then…
well, where do they end up? Not in one safe community with a lot of people looking out for each other, for sure.
Maybe it needs to be a living town to be a good sanctuary.
Maybe you and Zane were brought back here by fate. "
He laughed at the idea, and at the way Kayla's eyes popped. "Well, don't you think I could be right?"
Kayla mumbled, "I do, although—" and Jordan went on more enthusiastically.
"Maybe Virtue needed attention brought to it.
Maybe it needs the railroad to come back.
Maybe it needs this big holiday market and the great harvest fair and new people moving in, even if they're not shifters.
Maybe the shifters here need to trust people like me, who aren't, so we understand how to help Virtue grow safely for them. For everybody. Maybe—"
Whatever else he'd been going to say, he forgot it forever, because Kayla Walsh leaned forward and kissed him.
Her mouth was soft and warm and confident, and Jordan fell into the kiss, letting go of her hand to slide his fingers against her face, to sink them into the scruffy, messy haircut she was sporting.
The whole world stopped for that kiss, as far as he was concerned.
When it ended, he gazed at her, stunned, while she gave him a funny little smile. "Sorry. I just had to do that."
"I think that's…that's great," Jordan said a bit hazily. "Feel free to do it again, if you have to."
Kayla laughed and leaned in to do it again, in fact, although a little less intensely the second time.
Then she bumped her nose against his and murmured, "I think you might be right about all of that.
I've spent my whole professional life worried that I was going to out my hometown if I talked about it, but maybe it just needs us to have a little faith in it. "
"I have faith in you," Jordan said, maybe a bit stupidly, but Kayla's beautiful, bright, movie-star smile flashed again, and it was all worth it.
"I have faith in you, too."
"Could I…may I see the owl again? Now that I'm not going to fall over a second time?"
"Sure." Kayla scooted back and shifted.
It was exactly like before: the woman disappeared and somehow an owl magically took her place.
There was no movie-style transition between forms, or any awkwardness about it at all.
No poof, no feathers flying, no nothing, just a woman, then an owl.
Jordan, awe-struck, started to reach out to touch her, then pulled his hand back, abruptly aware he was going to pet this big shifter bird like it was a dog.
Kayla stretched a wing toward him, inviting the touch.
The interior of her wing was astonishingly, unexpectedly white, without any of the markings visible on the outside.
Jordan turned his hand over to brush his knuckles against the soft feathers there, then against her belly.
She bounced, and he was almost certain it had tickled. "Sorry! Holy crap, look at your feet!"
Kayla blinked those huge golden eyes at her, and with a laugh, he recognized that slow blink from her human form.
But then she extended one of her feet as if examining it, and Jordan's attention was drawn back down to it.
The talons were gorgeous shining black, and the incredibly long fine feathers around them looked enormously like fur.
Jordan made a fist, comparing the size of her foot to his hand, and whistled.
"You have huge feet. I would not want those talons digging into me. "
"That's nothing," Kayla said, shifting back to human. "You should see me in my largest form. As it is I'm about twice the size of a true snowy owl."
"You get bigger?" Jordan asked in astonishment. "And…smaller?"
"It's harder to match a regular snowy owl.
Let me try." Kayla shifted again, and this time was much smaller, maybe two and a half or three feet tall instead of four, but she was shaking her head as she became human again.
"That's still too big, but it's hard to get down to size.
Like I said, bird shifters run big, even for shifters who are big anyway.
I think it has something to do with the conversion of mass, like there's a point at which even the magic goes 'look, I just can't deal with this. '"
"Sure," Jordan said, amused. "Yes. Of course. Obviously. Where do your clothes go?"
Kayla stared at him, then laughed. "They come with us.
I can shift in and out of them, but it's much more of a bother, and also you don't want to suddenly be stuck somewhere without your clothes.
Hard to explain to the set manager or the costuming director why you're suddenly naked and where your clothes went. "
"That's…" Jordan shook his head helplessly. "That's magical."
"It is. Literally." Kayla spoke with a smile, then glanced down the hallway as a truly pathetic whine emitted from the bathroom. "How do you think Barney would take the whole shifter thing?"
"I have no idea. Do you want to try introducing your owl to him?"
Kayla tilted her head in a way that Jordan could now see echoed the owl. "Well, I am sure I can keep him from trying to eat me. He outweighs me, but I'm a lot taller than he is. I'll go into the living room," she suggested. "You bring him out, and we'll see."