Chapter Two
Dev stood in the shadows, masking his scent, and watched the adorable little owl shifter with eyes of golden-brown strip out of her nursing scrubs, sparkle into a tiny owl with yellow-gold eyes, and then fly into the trees.
The biker took a few seconds longer to remove his boots and then his jeans.
He stripped the shirt off, stowed his clothes into the truck along with the owlet’s clothing, and then shifted into a mighty snowy owl with better than a six-foot wingspan.
He took to the air as well, wings thumping the air at first, but then he was totally silent.
Dev’s home encompassed a little over twenty acres, and all structures were below ground. He had a bedroom in most of the Birmingham coterie houses, but this was the one he called home.
On this night, Brooke was staying here so she could feed from the tiny owl once she was back in human form.
He watched the miniature owl swoop down and catch a small field mouse. Twenty minutes later, she caught another. The snowy owl caught and ate a squirrel, but he noted the larger owl kept an eye on the smaller one even while he ate.
Snakes aren’t generally territorial, but the human parts of Dev needed to know who was in his space. It was more about security than a need to mark his land.
If you look up the largest prehistoric snake, you’ll find information on what archeologists call a Titanoboa, as big around as a school bus, with an estimated weight of over two thousand pounds.
Dev wasn’t quite that big, but by modern standards, he was huge when he shifted into his full size — his body bigger around than a refrigerator, and his head half the size of a small sports car.
Usually, he shifted into a smaller version of himself, so he wasn’t as hard on the wildlife.
Buying a bison and having it delivered ahead of time before a change was expensive.
If he was half his normal size, three or four good-sized deer were enough to fill him up.
The tiny owl shifter wouldn’t be a meal for his snake under any circumstances. Dev’s snake wouldn’t consider the larger snowy owl worth his time.
When it was clear the two were simply going to fly and enjoy the night once they’d fed, he went back belowground to finish preparing for the cougar shifters Brooke had agreed to take on.
Their paperwork warned their control wasn’t great, which was to be expected. What had their mother been thinking? When her boyfriend had been killed she’d gone to cougar and stayed the cat. She’d given birth to them in animal form — cubs rather than babies.
No one is certain how the mother raised the cubs in their first months.
It’s possible they stayed in animal form until they were old enough to learn to walk on two legs.
Their paperwork said they appeared approximately three years old in human form when they were found by werewolves running in the forest. At that time, the boys were in their two-legged forms, smelling of mountain lion, with no mother to be found.
If the infants had stayed in animal form from birth until shortly before they were found, it’s possible they were only a couple of months old even though appearing to be three years old.
He knew the swans raised their babies in bird form for several months, so the first time they saw them in human form, they were toddlers.
But birds are hatched, and need their parents to change them between animal and human forms until they grow strong enough to manage the change on their own.
Mammals are born, and aren’t supposed to shift for the first time until puberty. Nothing about these young men was like it’s supposed to be.
The new acquisitions would need to be kept isolated until he could properly assess their strength and control — or lack of it.
Brooke had purchased them on the auction block to keep them from being sold as sex slaves, which was what they’d been trained to be.
She’d sell them as sex slaves and make a profit on the sale if they couldn’t be domesticated, but she was depending on Dev to do his best with them, so he would.
They had a room on the lowest level, rather than a cell.
He wanted to start things off with them gently, if possible.
If he determined they needed to go into a jail cell, those were available, but from what Brooke said, they were looking forward to proving themselves capable of becoming freepersons, so he’d begin with that mindset.