When you were a member of one of the most elite rescue teams in the world you were used to being rudely awoken by an emergency call after very little sleep. But, since the GDF were supposed to be picking up the calls for all but the most dire of situations, Virgil could be forgiven for not responding straight off the bat.
His phone beeped with a text and then less than thirty seconds later with a call, both of which he ignored. This would not be an emergency as he knew it. This would be one of his idiot brothers having done something stupid that they needed saving from and he just wasn't ready to face that, thank you very much. This was his time off time too, he was supposed to be having a break, dammit. His brother had just gotten married, he'd had far too many beers the night before and now he just wanted to sleep it off.
He lifted the pillow, the puffy, marshmallow cloud pillow, and stuffed his head under it, hoping that the world would go away. He was just drifting off again when a frantic banging on his door jolted him awake.
"Urghh," he groaned to himself, trying to block out the sound of fist meeting wood. Maybe if he ignored them they would go away. A louder thump rang out, a different sound, burrowing under the pillow with him, assaulting his ears and stealing his peace. He tossed the pillow aside with a growl of frustration. "Did you just kick the door?" he yelled at whoever it was that had dared to disturb his slumber.
"Yes!" Selene yelled back. "Now open the fucking thing, it's an emergency!"
Shit! There was no way she'd be there, pounding the crap out of his door, when she should be hauled up in the guest cottage doing things with his brother that he didn't want to think about, if it wasn't serious.
"Alright! Alright! I'm coming!"
He hauled his arse out of bed, remembering to pause just long enough to pull on a pair of sweats, before throwing open the door.
"Gahh, what the hell?" something fluffy and warm was shoved in his face the second he swung the door open. He automatically reached out to accept whatever it was she had unceremoniously tossed his way. The creature flailed, arms and legs pinwheeling until he settled it more firmly, cradling it in his arms like a baby.
He looked down, realising that it was a cat of some description. He wasn't really up on cat breeds, he was more of a dog person. His knowledge was limited to naked, squashed face or Armstrong, and this cat was none of those. It's coat was a beautiful mix of gingery orange and brown, looking like a cross between a tiger and a leopard but in miniature . It had tiger stripes on its paws, legs and head and leopard spots on its back.
"The cat is the emergency?" he asked, his brain still somewhat fuzzy. "Does John know about it or is that why you've given it to me? Because I'm pretty sure you could get away with calling it a wedding present and guilting him into allowing you to keep it."
"Oh, he's aware," she snorted, and weirdly enough the cat let out a sound that was very similar in both tone and execution.
"Just keep an eye on him for me, try to keep him calm while I go and wake Tanzi and Nikos."
"What? Why wouldn't he be calm?" The cat looked perfectly chilled and at ease to him. Was it a stray that might suddenly go for his eyes? Was it an unexploded bomb of the feline variety?
"Because he's not used to being a cat, obviously. He woke up like that. Now stay there, I'll be back."
"Woke up like what?" he called after her but she was already gone. "What else would he be?"
But she was already running down the hall, her black silk dressing gown billowing out like bat wings as she took off.
"Come on, Kitty," he huffed, beyond confused, maybe he could go back to bed if the cat would settle down with him. The cat moved in his arms, lifting its head to look up at him with a pair of the most startling eyes he had ever seen on an animal. Eyes that were eerily familiar.
Her last words rattled around in his brain as he realised just what she had meant.
"Damn, she wasn't kidding when she said this was an emergency."
"I need to know why this happened now and just how the hell we fix this!" Selene yelled, pacing her way around Virgil's bedroom while the three humans, and one cat that should have been human, watched her every move.
"It's not that I mind this," she waved a hand in the John-cat's direction, "being a thing, but it needs sorting. I refuse to spend the next week with a cat husband without being able to talk to him about it."
John meowed an affirmation and she automatically reached out to pluck him from Virgil's lap. "Don't worry, baby, we'll fix this." She dropped a kiss on the cat's head as she cradled him snuggly against her chest, almost suffocating him between her boobs.
"Well, we know that it runs in the family," Tanzi started, trying to be helpful. "So let's go back to the beginning. Sel, did you manage to do any digging and find out anything more about the family history to confirm our theory?"
Selene nodded, settling John more comfortably in her arms as she paced. "Yeah, I spoke to Jeff about it and we managed to piece most of it together from what he remembered being told, from looking into the family records and talking to shifter families local to the area."
Virgil frowned, as did the John-cat, which was decidedly weird to witness. "Why haven't we heard about any of this yet?"
"Because we hadn't finished putting it all together," she sighed. "Honestly we didn't think there was that much of a rush, you were chill and as far as we knew, no one else was affected by it."
Virgil nodded, the answer making sense, now was not the time to start an argument about sharing with the class. "So what did you find out?"
The John-cat scrambled out of her arms and hauled itself up onto her shoulder, draping his body around her neck like a furry scarf. She absently reached up a hand to fondle his ears as she gathered her thoughts, trying to arrange them into some kind of order.
"Your mum's family have a long history," she began. "Have you ever heard of the Dreamtime?" Virgil and Nikos shook their heads, but Tanzi and John in cat form, nodded.
"The Dreamtime, putting it simply, is the myth of creation. Not the Christian version but the Aboriginal. Australian native mythology tells of ancestral beings who created the world so very long ago." Selene sank to the floor as carefully as she could, trying not to dislodge John who was clinging to her shoulder with his claws. She arranged herself cross legged on the rug and patted her legs, staying still as the cat slunk his way down her chest to curl up on her lap. Once he was settled she continued.
"According to legend, once the creation of the world was complete the beings, instead of vanishing into the ether as many Gods did, decided to stick around, adopting the world as their own. They travelled across the earth, naming the land, the people and the animals who would belong there. These beings then merged their spirits with the natural world. Some went into the sky or the ground, bonding with the hills, rocks and watering holes while others became plants, animals and people." She paused to run the tip of one finger down between John's ears, ending with a gentle boop of his nose. He nipped her finger in retaliation, making her smile.
"These beings were the early shape shifters, who could change back and forth between their human and animal forms. From what we can gather there were a few of these beings that went a little rogue. Rather than staying separate from their creations as they were supposed to, they moved among them, they interacted and some even fell in love. It was from this love that the first human deity hybrids were created. These demigod offspring had wondrous powers, an affinity with the earth and possessed amazing strength, speed, agility and resilience, as well as the ability to shift their shape to any creature they desired."
Selene glanced up to make sure that everyone was paying attention. Nikos and Virgil looked very interested, while Tanzi was less so, having helped Selene with some of the research and, being kind of an expert in mythology herself, knowing the legend already. John's paw landed on her hand, his claws digging in just enough to encourage her to continue both her story and her tickling of the underside of his chin.
"These offspring often came together to form tribes, each bearing children of their own, an intermingling pool of godlike abilities and genetics that produced some truly remarkable humans, each with gifts that they in turn passed on to their children. Over the years their abilities became diluted as the tribes grew, leaving some with only one or two of these special gifts but making them remarkable nonetheless. Enchanted beings that continued to grow and spread out into the world."
"From our research we had concluded that your mothers family must have descended from one of those tribes," Tanzi told Virgil and John. "But, with the genes so diluted now, the gifts either skip a generation or two or lay dormant until you have what is referred to as a triggering incident, like Virgil experienced."
"What triggered it for John then?" Virgil wanted to know, his head spinning with all this new information. "I'd like to think that if he'd had a life threatening accident we'd have known about it."
" Of course you would," Selene glared.
"And I know they've only just got married but I'm pretty sure we can rule out any nasty surprises in the bedroom department."
Three human and one furry head all swiveled to stare at Selene. "Why am I being bogged at? He's the one that sprouted ears and a tail!" she protested hotly.
"Are you sure?" Tanzi asked, one eyebrow raised. "Nothing happened in the heat of the moment?"
"Of course I'm sure! There was nothing weird or unusual about that side of things, I can assure you." John nodded hard in agreement and she stroked his head reassuringly, bending her head to whisper in his ear.
"Well it had to have been something," Tanzi pondered out loud. "These things don't just happen."
"Nothing happened!" Selene threw her arms up in frustration, yanking her dressing gown back into place when it flopped open, falling to cover John.
Nikos was up and by her side in a flash and, ignoring her protests and whapping hands, pulled aside the collar of the dressing gown she had hastily donned.
"What the hell are you doing?" Virgil yelled, coming to the rescue as always, not liking the way she was being mauled.
"There," Nikos declared triumphantly, pointing at her neck.
"What?" Selene smacked his hand away, instinctively covering her neck to protect it.
"Let me see," Tanzi insisted, bending to look, prising Selene's hand away. "Oh, yep, that'll do it."
"What? What's doing it? What even is it?" Selene wailed. "I'm so confused it's not even funny! All I wanted was a relaxed night with my husband where I didn't have to share him with the rest of the world and now he's a cat! I know I'm a witch but this is ridiculous, I don't want a cat husband unless it's on his terms."
"I think that's part of the problem," Tanzi sighed.
"That it's not in his terms?" Virgil asked, confused.
"No, that she's a witch," Tanzi answered.
"You see that there?" Nikos pointed to her neck again and Virgil moved closer to look.
"Looks like a bite to me," Virgil shrugged, a shrug that turned into a grimace when his brain caught up with his mouth. "Urghhh, I did not need to see that." He hadn't thought that cats could look smug, but if he didn't know better he'd think that was exactly what his brother was.
"So?" Selene shrugged, falling back on her old faithful of if in doubt brazen it out. They had nothing to be ashamed of, they were adults in a committed relationship that were indulging in loving and consensual things. "It's not the first love nip and I doubt it'll be the last."
Virgil tried very hard not to laugh when Nikos rolled his eyes so hard he was surprised they hadn't fallen out of the other man's head. Nikos was a light hearted and easy going kind of guy, much like Virgil himself, that he'd gotten to know well over the past year and a half and he knew not to take any apparent grumpiness seriously. Nikos just didn't appreciate being woken early or dealing with idiots, all of which he was suffering from now.
Tanzi smacked Nikos lightly on the shoulder, shoving him out of the way and back towards the bed. He dutifully sat down, not willing to argue with his mate.
"Sel, what did you do yesterday?"
Selene gave her a look that said she thought she was being particularly dense. "We got married, obviously."
"You handfasted, the old way," Tanzi pushed.
"I'm aware of that," Selene sniffed, dropping another kiss on John's snoot when he lifted his head.
Tanzi returned the 'you're dense' look, with interest.
"Well, you obviously know something we don't, so spell it out for us," Selene ordered, getting royally sick of being treated like she was as dim as a dying light bulb.
"You're being thick," Nikos told her bluntly. Okay, apparently her mental light bulb had completely blown.
"Don't say it like that!" Tanzi whacked him again but he just grinned. "What he's trying to say in his dumbass way, is that your handfast was likely part of the reason that this has happened now. You remember how the bonding happens, right?"
"I think so," Selene hedged, mentally rolling through all that she could recall about shifter bonding, which unfortunately was precious little. The shifter community were notoriously secretive about exactly what happened within their lives and traditions.
"I know something about...sex?" she guessed, since it was apparently the cause of all their current problems. She wondered how John would feel about celibacy? As if he had read her mind a nip to her hand told her everything she needed to know about his opinion of that idea.
Tanzi sighed impatiently and Nikos facepalmed harder than Scott the time that Alan had fed Armstrong four cans of food instead of four times from the same can. There had been piles of kitty sick everywhere, Scott's foot had gotten up close and personal with one, it hadn't been pretty. Virgil just looked like he wanted to sleep.
"You handfast, with a blood vow, you then had sex and got bitten, bitch it's not hard to put the evidence together, is it? That's his triggering incident, you dumbasses bonded without even knowing it," Tanzi told them, pointing an accusatory finger at first Selene then John.
Selene opened her mouth like she was about to argue but shut it again when she realised she really had no excuse or answer for it. John lifted up, bonking his head against her chin in a show of solidarity and she instinctively nuzzled her cheek against the top of his head.
"OK, so what do we do now? How do we fix this?"
"There's no fixing it, it's not a broken vase," Nikos snorted. "You're lucky you found each other, it's more than a one in a million chance and you're bitching."
Selene's face morphed from confused to pissed off in a matter of seconds as she scrambled to her feet, John tucked under her arm in what looked to Virgil to be some kind of choke hold.
"I didn't mean I wanted to fix us! This," she shook the cat like a maraca, his legs swinging back and forth, "is my husband, my soul mate, I love him. It's not the fact that we bonded that I care about, I love that, I just care about him looking like a human again! My man needs his thumbs!"
For someone as knowledgeable about all things preternatural and calm in that kind of crisis, Selene was anything but calm right now. She had continued to yell at Nikos while waving a protesting John around until Virgil had removed the cat from her grasp and Nikos had shoved her out of the room with orders to go and get dressed and bring clothes for John, they'd sort him out on their own.
She had banged on the door, demanding to be let in but Nikos held firm.
"No, the more you panic the more it'll stress him out, go away, calm down and then you can come back," he told her firmly.
She argued for a few more minutes before giving up and stomping off down the hall.
Virgil let out a sigh of relief once she had left and peace reigned. He understood why she was stressing out about this more than she usually would, after all, it wasn't every day that you woke up to a cat sitting on your chest and found out it was your husband. But her stress levels would be directly influencing John's , who would be feeling enough of his own.
The major thing about shifting form, Virgil had learnt, was that you had to be calm enough to do it. It required a clear mind and clear intentions to focus, it needed calm breathing and a relaxed body if it was going to go at all smoothly. For him trying to shift while stressed would be like trying to push his 'bird up a hill during a hurricane while wearing flip flops.. Needless to say, it was next to impossible.
Tanzi had been dispatched to the kitchen in order to scrounge up some food, knowing that John's energy levels would be verging on empty by the time he was done. Virgil recalled how he had felt while trying to shift back after his first turn, he'd tried so hard, strained with every fiber of his being, but nothing had worked. As a member of International Rescue he was used to doing almost everything by the seat of his pants, living off adrenaline, his wits and pure determination. But that had been entirely the wrong way to go about it. It hadn't been easy to force his body and mind to act in a way that was totally alien to it , it had been painful and he'd been ravenous after. If John's experience was anything like his he'd be grateful for the food and a chance to rest.
John, now that Selene had been ejected from the situation, was settled on Virgil's abandoned pillow like he owned it, arranged in what Selene called loaf mode, his aqua eyes blinking slowly as if he were about to drop off to sleep. Huh, maybe he wouldn't need that much help to calm down after all.
"John?" Virgil called tentatively. The cat lifted his head, staring at him like it was judging him right down to his soul, which only helped cement the fact that it was indeed his brother. It wasn't that he had doubted it, not really, since he himself turned into a wolf, but it was still a little hard to get his head around.
John meowed demandingly, dragging Virgil out of his musings, as if to say 'well, get on with it.'
"Are you ready to try shifting back?"
John seemed to pause to think about it, then he slowly uncurled, stretching out fully before plonking it's butt down and staring up at him attentively.
"What, are you waiting for some great wisdom?"
John gave him a look that said he'd never expected anything of the sort, which wasn't too encouraging.
"Nikos?" Virgil passed the baton to the more experienced shifter.
"There's nothing to it, you simply think yourself out of it."
John-cat didn't look too impressed with the level of instruction he had just been given.
"It's hard to explain," Nikos sighed, "I'm a full blood shifter, it comes naturally to me, I was born this way and have been shifting for as long as I can remember. It's like asking someone how they think, how you walk, how you do anything. It's second nature and not something you think about. You don't actively say to yourself that you need to cross the room to pick up your phone and give your brain the instructions for the left leg, then right leg, you just do it. And that's how it is for us."
Virgil groaned, knowing it was likely going to be down to him to relay the facts. Trying to keep things as clear and easy to understand as possible, he began to talk.
"The first time I shifted back was hard, the hardest part is keeping calm and your mind clear and focused. Sel talked me through it as you know, but obviously she's too close to this situation to be involved."
John nodded his understanding, head tipped to one side, ears twitching, clearly showing that he was listening intently.
"All I can do is tell you how I do it," he sat down on the bed beside the cat, trying to gather his thoughts. "Nikos is right in a way, you have to think yourself out of it. You have to picture your human body in your mind and kinda command it to come out. You have to almost imagine it changing, stretching, growing in your case or shrinking in mine, see the change happening in your head. For me, I picture the different parts of my body and focus on how they will change, almost like a checklist and I let it come."
Frustrated he dragged his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in all directions even more than it already was from what little sleep he'd had. John continued to watch him carefully as if sensing that he had more to say and waiting to hear it.
"I don't know if you remember anything of your shift, Sel said you woke up like that, but I don't know if that was possible. When I shift I feel a kind of buzzing energy, almost like my whole body has pins and needles. It starts somewhere in what I suppose you could call the pit of your stomach but Sel insists on calling the Solar Plexus and radiates out until it fills every part of your body."
"We call that the changing," Nikos added. "It's the power of the shifter, your magic if you will, a natural energy that all shifters possess and that you need to tap into any time you wish to change. The feeling diminishes once the change is complete, meaning that you need to focus on finding it and building it up once more so you can shift again."
"I use something like meditative breathing, closing my eyes and locating the little bubble of power, once you know it and recognise it you can feel that it's always there. Almost like…" Virgil paused trying to think of a way to describe it. "Almost like your intuition, your gut feeling. You know that feeling you get when something doesn't feel right or when you know your hunch is correct?"
"Everyone has that," Nikos agreed, "but for us it's more than that, it's animal instinct. I'm sure you'll have noticed that your intuition, your hunches are stronger and more reliable than most peoples? That's the reason, your heightened awareness and instincts. That's what you have to tap into, that gut feeling, locate it, focus on it then fuel it so that it expands and grows more potent. Once you feel it fill you, you focus and you shift."
"It takes a lot of practice," Virgil warned John, who had gotten to his feet, apparently bored with the conversation. Padding across the bed he leapt down to the floor. "It took me a good few hours to shift back the first time and it left me so drained I slept for almost an entire day, as you well know. So don't give u-" Virgil paused, his eyes widening in shock.
John had listened carefully to everything the two men had said, well, what little of it had actually made sense. They had a habit of beating around the bush rather than just getting to the point. He cared about facts, logical instructions and advice that would actually help. It seemed simple enough, just focusing your thoughts, something he excelled at, keeping that focus and willing it to happen. Piece of cake.
He knew what Nikos meant about the slumbering power inside him, in truth he'd always felt it there but dismissed it as many would as just a gut feeling or some kind of intuition that could be pushed aside until needed. Since meeting Selene he'd learnt to listen to it more, to pay more attention to it when it made itself known, seeing it as a reliable source of information rather than a fanciful notion that could be explained away.
He'd learnt to hone it, to focus it over two years of silly games that Selene insisted on playing with him when she was bored and wanted to keep her skills sharp. She liked to lay out her Zener cards and make him guess which ones she had. At first he'd found it silly, but soon even he had to grudgingly admit that, with practice, it had become easier for him and more often than not he was correct. They had progressed to her picking a card, focussing on the symbol and projecting it to him to try to pick up. Again the connection had come naturally to him and he would almost instantly see one of the simple symbols -a square, circle, cross, star or wavy lines- in his minds eye. He rarely got one wrong.
The same worked in reverse, he'd found he could project a simple image in much the same way and she would pick it up. At first he had seen it as a slightly tedious game of chance that she forced him into. But, the more she begged him to play with her and the more he'd beaten the odds of being correct, the more it had intrigued him.
As was his custom he had researched and found that the cards had been in use, with various degrees of success, for more than a century and that they were seen as a legitimate tool, although he was still a healthy sceptic on the subject. But, scepticism aside, he could not find a way of explaining just how he seemed to do so well with the game even though he had eliminated every possible way of inadvertently cheating.
Now that he had an idea what he was supposed to be doing he found it easy enough to locate the origin of the power inside him. It felt just as it had the night before. It had buzzed there like a low level electric current, a small ball of something he couldn't find the words to describe but knew it all the same. He recalled how that energy had started as a barely there thing, dulled by the fact that he had been focused on much more interesting and pleasurable things at the time. He'd felt it, sure he had, but he'd paid it little attention, not when he had his woman under him.
But even he, distracted as he was at the time, had noticed how hot he'd grown, how her fingers skimming the length of his spine had set off sparks that felt like static electric shocks on contact. He couldn't explain in words, or even in his own mind, what had happened or how that energy inside him had seemed to expand, reaching outwards for the calming feel of her that he'd always been aware of since the first night they had met. Her calmness had done its job once again, acting like a balm to his, syphoning it off, blending it with her own, leaving them connected more deeply than any game of cards, any healing, any comforting action ever had.
Thinking back on it as he was it had become clear in his mind just what Nikos and Tanzi had meant when they said they had bonded. He'd acted on instinct, pure and simple and, although he'd gotten a little nippy with her before, that time had felt different. It hadn't been a purely pleasurable instinct but a far more primal one, on some level he had wanted to leave a physical mark of their joining. He'd never felt the need to mark his territory before, he was not a jealous man by any stretch of the imagination. She was not his property and he'd never felt the need to stamp his claim as many men would, yet the urge had been there and he'd been unable to ignore it. Shit.
He needed to find Selene, the urge to talk to his wife, to off load, to explain and probably to apologise, was great. And to do that he needed to get out of this form and into the one where he could actually talk. Wasting no more time he jumped down from the bed.
Clearing his mind of everything but the need to be human he focused on the energy inside him. Logic told him that a small amount wouldn't be enough even if Nikos hadn't said the same, so he did the only thing he could think of, he pictured Selene in his mind, bringing into focus the way the energy had flooded through him the night before. It responded easily to him, following his instructions as if he'd been doing so all his life.
He felt very much like he had the previous night, like he had a fever, like his skin was tightening, pins and needle like sensations spreading out, enveloping him in a bubble of sensation that felt both alien and strangely familiar all at once. Not really sure what he was doing but allowing his instincts to guide him he closed his eyes and pictured, as best he could recall, how he usually looked. He was not one to stare into mirrors all day and take that much of an interest in his appearance as certain brothers of his did. He managed to dredge up the last time he had studied himself, looking in his bedroom mirror, dressed in his wedding suit, about to head down to the beach.
He'd heard the shift was painful at first until you were used to it and braced himself to feel like he was being ripped apart from the inside, as described in such lovely detail by the man currently staring at him from the bed. Virgil looked so big, huge in fact, like a giant, an alien concept for John, since he was more used to looking down at the top of his brother's head or seeing him in holographic form.
He took a deep breath and focused on the image he needed. He imagined his legs elongating, the fur being replaced with smooth skin, his snout returning to a separate nose and mouth, his pointed ears shrinking down and rounding out to his normal human ones. Quickly but methodically he catalogued every body part, seeing it in his mind's eyes as it should be rather than as it was.
The tingling, buzzing sensation increased to the point that it was hard to keep the focus he needed, sounding like a swarm of bees in his brain, yet he refused to let it distract him. If there was anything he was good at it was blocking out unwanted sounds and focusing on one particular thing, he did it every day, he was the master of calm, collected focus. He didn't allow anything to ruffle him if he could help it. As long as he had a clear goal in his mind, as long as he knew the mechanics and the workings he could focus on his objective and succeed. He always did.
"Get your dick out of my face!"
Who the hell was yelling when he was trying to concentrate? He swore to all that Selene worshipped if one of his brothers had chosen that moment to do a drunken, celebratory streak through the room while he was having his own body crisis, he'd smack them into next week.
Virgil had expected a lot of things from his brother, but that had not been one of them. He'd steeled himself to dive in to help, to dispense comforting back rubs and fur strokes as Selene had done for him. He'd imagined himself as being a calm, supportive presence while John writhed in agony on the posh, antique rug as he forced his body and mind to accept that which at first seemed impossible.
What he hadn't expected was for John to close his eyes and within a few moments start to shift as smoothly as Nikos, as if he'd been doing it his entire life. Less than a minute later and his fully human brother stood before him, very healthy, very whole and very very naked.
John's eyes snapped open. The first thing that registered was the fact that Virgil was no longer towering above him, in fact they seemed to have switched roles. The second was that he was completely bare arsed and apparently treating his brother to a showing of parts of his body that were now independently owned and maintained by his wife.
"Shit!" his hands shot down to cup and cover as much as he could as quickly as he could while Virgil, apparently now out of his shocked stupor, jumped up and whisked the blanket off the bed to toss at his brother.
The blanket landed on his head, leaving him momentarily blind while he tried to figure out if it was better to let go of his crotch in order to grab the blanket and arrange it to cover his modesty or if he should wait to be helped.
"You humans, so hung up on clothes and covering up," Nikos sighed as he was forced to take pity on them, tugging the blanket down to drape around John's shoulders.
"Thanks," John said, releasing one hand to pull the blanket closed, not freeing the other until he was adequately covered.
"How did you do that?" Virgil asked, still stunned both by the sudden up close and personal with John's danglies and the speed and ease in which his brother had shifted once he put his incredible mind to it. He really shouldn't be surprised, if anyone was going to listen once, think it over and then grasp the concept as easily as if he were buttering a slice of toast, it was John. He mentally added that to the long list of things John was instantly good at.
John shrugged. "I'm not sure, I just did what you said, focused, built the power, envisioned how I should look and the next thing I know I'm giving you an eyeful. Sorry about that by the way, wasn't intentional."
"Well, I guess you don't need me now," Nikos butted in. He was tired, he was a bit fed up with being woken up early on two consecutive days and the jet lag from going from england, to the island and back again over three days and having some weird times in between was taking its toll on both his human and his wolf side.
"Wait, don't we need to see if he can change again once he's had some food?" VIrgil asked, not wanting his brother's continued education to be left to him.
"Learn by doing, my friend, learn by doing," Nikos said, brushing him aside with a shoulder slap as he walked away. "Send Tanzi back to bed when she comes with the food."
"He's pleasant," John remarked as he tucked the blanket more securely around himself and sank into Nikos's vacated chair.
"Not unlike yourself," Virgil sighed, dropping his tired head into his hands and giving his face a vigorous rub. "How are you feeling?"
"Fine," John answered immediately, mostly out of habit. At Virgil's raised eyebrow he actually paused, taking a moment to conduct a proper inventory of his body. He felt a little shaky, like he would after a burst of intense physical exercise that he hadn't warmed up for or cooled down from after. There was a little ache that might or might not blossom into something worse, but most of all he just felt hungry, more hungry than he had done in forever. He was well used to going without food for long periods of time or having his meals interrupted, they all were, but him more so. He was used to stuffing food in either when the opportunity presented itself, on the go or when Selene yelled at him. Mostly he could take it or leave it, but now he felt like he hadn't eaten in a month.
"Hungry," he announced, since that seemed to be the most pressing issue.
"Yeah," Virgil snorted, "I'm not surprised, that's normal. Tanzi should be back with something for you any minute now, hopefully with Selene and your clothes."
John nodded, confident in the knowledge that his woman and her friend would scrounge up whatever they could in as timely a manner as possible.
If it had been a movie or a novel Selene would have burst through the door at that moment, as if summoned by Virgil's words, but as it was real life and not some fictional world he had to be content to wait.
Not having anything else to say he lapsed into a contemplative silence, giving his brain time to turn everything over. He examined it all, recalling the process of shifting, storing away the information that he had learned, tumbling it around in his head until it made as much sense as it was going to, only then did he feel ready to engage in an actual conversation.
"Is there anything I need to know?"
"In what way?" Virgil asked, looking up from his phone with a guilty look, clearly having been absorbed in texting someone, probably Scott and likely about his situation.
"I know you've been through this and, while the rest of us have watched from the sidelines I've not been as present as the others, so I haven't seen the day to day challenges you might have faced. Is there anything I need to know? Will this affect me or my job in any negative ways?"
Typical John, thinking about work.
"It hasn't affected me in any negative ways really, I just have to be careful of my energy levels, making sure that I eat more often and bigger portions. My shift was triggered by my life being in danger, so I'm constantly aware that a very dangerous situation could trigger it again which could be disastrous. By keeping well fed it allows me more control over it. I know yours is different but as we don't know how or really understand why, it's probably best to be prepared. Other than that and having to make sure I shift regularly to help control the urge, nothing has changed for me."
John nodded, seeing the sense in it. "Yours was very much a violent shift and, while I can't recall much about mine, I know it was not the same. I woke up feeling very hot and tossed the covers aside since I believe it would have been bad etiquette to throw my new wife off me instead."
"Yeah, I can't see her being too happy about that," Virgil agreed, his lips twitching in amusement.
"The heat grew almost unbearable and I felt, no, I sensed, everything more keenly." John sighed, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. "This isn't really making sense and is very hard to describe, but it seemed like I could hear everything very intently. For example, it was still raining which should have drowned out most things, yet I could clearly hear something walking near the cottage, and I could smell toothpaste as she always forgets to put the lid back on the tube. I shouldn't have been able to notice any of that."
"That's perfectly normal," Virgil assured him. "What happened next?"
"I don't honestly know. I just know that Sel rolled even closer and I had a fleeting thought that if I were smaller she'd have suffocated me by now but that if I were I could have made an escape."
"And then?"
"I must have pictured something because the heat grew worse for a moment, I felt like my whole body was on fire but also strangely numb and tingly. But losing blood and sensation to body parts when you share a bed with a limpet like her is not unusual, so I didn't think anything of it until I really was squashed."
"So, let me get this straight," Virgil clarified, barely able to believe what he was hearing. "You had a brief thought about being smaller, and you pictured something-"
"Armstrong," John recalled, interrupting his brother, "I definitely pictured Armstong because last week I walked in late one night to find her pinning him to the pillow with her arm across him and I had to rescue him."
"You pictured the cat and that was all it took? No, pain, no screaming, no fear?"
John shook his head.
"You literally just thought yourself into shifting by accident after bonding by accident?"
"Seems that way," John admitted.
"You're that super focused that you shifted without trying because you were being squashed?"
"Saying it over and over won't change my answer."
"I give up with you. Surely a cuddle isn't that life threatening?"
"You weren't there. Besides , it's not like I did it on pur-"
"We're back!" Tanzi yelled from outside, their only warning before the door was pushed open and the girls barged in. Tanzi was carrying a tray piled high with scavenged food and Selene was thankfully holding a pair of sweats and a T-shirt.
"Oh, thank the gods!" the clothes were unceremoniously dumped on the floor as Selene launched herself at John from across the room like she'd been shot from a cannon. Her arms locked around his neck as she smacked kisses all over his face, squashing him against her chest. He flailed but not only were his arms trapped in the blanket, resistance was always futile when she was determined to shower you with affection, Virgil knew this from his own bitter experience. Maybe he had been a little too judgemental about his brother's near death experience by wife suffocation.
"Are you alright? Does anything hurt? Can I do anything? Do you need anything?" she continued to fire questions at him like bullets, not giving him more of a chance to contribute other than repeating that he was fine over and over and that he couldn't breathe.
"Sel, maybe let him go so he can get dressed and eat, yeah?" Tanzi suggested gently, placing the tray on Virgil's bedside table then retrieving the clothes. Virgil gave the tray a cursory glance, seeing it was filled with far more than even a hungry shifter could eat. He guessed that meant that he wasn't getting his room back any time soon.
"Oh, yeah, sure, you're right," Selene disentangled her arms, freeing his brother, although she stood far too close to him, like she was half expecting him to vanish in a puff of smoke.
"I'm fine," John assured her, nudging her gently with his foot, since he refused to let go of the blanket, urging her to step back a bit so he could stand up. "Can you put the clothes in the bathroom, please?" he asked Tanzi, who nodded, obliging by tossing them through the open doorway.
"Thanks," he said, just about managing to keep the sarcasm out of his voice as he shuffled through the door into the bathroom, shutting it behind him. Selene looked lost the second he vanished from view, even taking a few steps towards the bathroom before she stopped herself.
Virgil might not be as close to her as Scott was but he knew her well enough to know that something was really bothering her. She'd been the one to help him through his first shift, keeping him as calm as she could, supporting him, talking to him like he was still human so that he had some clue as to what was happening to him. He knew that, without her intervention or if she hadn't been there, he would very likely have died, stuck somewhere mid shift, unable to complete it, lacking both the knowledge and the power at that time.
She'd also been the one to talk him through shifting back, even though she had no experience of it herself. As before she had been a calm, reassuring presence by his side, lending him her strength and conviction that everything would be OK. she had faith in him and that faith had helped so much.
Not much ever seemed to phase her when it came to pitching in and helping out when things took a turn towards the strange and unusual. So, now that he thought about it, it was rather unnerving that she had deemed this an emergency and rushed to seek him out.
The moment of his own shift had been one of panic and fear, no one but Grandma and their dad had known anything about that side of their family or that such a thing was even a possibility. John's would have been different, for one they now knew about the shifter gene and secondly he would have been a lot more relaxed since he wasn't fighting for his life. Logically she should have been as cool as a cucumber.
So why wasn't she? Why hadn't she calmly talked John through it like she had him? He could understand the initial panic, and why she might have felt she was unable to help, that was her husband after all. But now she had seen the he was fine, she'd talked to him and he was at that moment getting dressed ready for breakfast.
So why was she looking like her world was about to cave in?