Page 74 of Shaped to Be Yours

He cracked a smile at me.

“If others from the village hadn’t found me that day, I would have perished,” Bo continued. “I still scouted as often as I could, tried to find some way through the dangers to another land, another portal, anywhere. Our forest is vast but leaving it has proven impossible. It’s more often that others seek us out to escape what is beyond our borders. The unstable portal has been active from time to time, but we can never predict when, and it never lets anyone through from this side. I have spent every waking moment these years away from you hoping to find some way, any way back to you.”

“And now we’ve both left Mom alone.” Jason stared at his lap.

“She is well?” Bo asked.

“She’s amazing. Most of the time. She never got over you. She never stopped believing you didn’t mean to leave us.”

“I didn’t. I never would have. But I had to protect you from getting pulled in. You were so young. What if it hadn’t sent you to our people? What if you’d ended up in some other part of this realm? I didn’t think, I just stepped between you and the portal to be sure it couldn’t take you too.”

“Everyone is always trying to protect me,” Jason muttered.

I squeezed his hand again. “Because you’re always trying to protect us.”

He smiled wider at that, but then his eyes popped to saucers. “Shit, I haven’t even introduced you. This is Ricky, um…Dad. He’s my boyfriend.”

“A pleasure to meet you, son.” Bo extended his extremely cool replacement hand to me.

I shook it, the scientist in me unable to not wonder how it worked. It was warm, and the skin felt like, well,skin. I catalogued for later to remember to pay attention to how it looked in tree form.

“Dad?” Jason shifted to sit taller. “I don’t really know how I ended up like this. Before my form that looks like yours, I had other ones. I was bitten by three different animals, and after each time, I turned into a monstrous version of them, and the first transformation for each, I couldn’t control it.”

Bo looked contemplative. “Perhaps because you are the first half-human of our kind.”

“Which is, um, what?” I asked.

Jason’s eyes went saucer-mode again, like he couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked for the name himself yet.

“We areleshy,” Bo said. “I know I could not have been the first of our kind to end up in your realm, because I discovered mythologies around that name. Not all accurate, but proof that we had been in your forests before. We are… part of forests. We are nature and beast and sentience in one. You, being half human, could not have found it easy to balance that.”

“Yeah, balance isn't my best skill,” Jason said.

“You will learn to control it. I am certain of that. Your body was simply confused, because it is every animal and part of all nature as much as it is human. Eventually, you should be able to transform into nearly anything you wish, regardless of if it bites you,” he finished with a chuckle.

Jason chuckled too. But then the emotions he had been trying so hard to suppress started to bubble up. It was like his smile melted into a mournful snarl, and he started sobbing.

“Jason…” Bo beckoned to him, and Jason launched off the sofa into his father’s arm, tearing his hand from my grasp.

I didn’t mind, because Jason needed this. They both did.

I definitely felt like an interloper now, even if Jason had needed me at the start.

“I’m going to give you two a minute, okay?” I said.

They both nodded but didn’t let each other go.

I slipped outside and was almost immediately confronted by one of the other leshy.

“Will you please calm the others? They are eager for an update from their home realm, much as we try to explain to them that it might not be good news.”

“Oh, uh… sure! Of course.” I followed her to where the other humans were gathered around a fountain like a central point in a town square. I realized along the way that she was the same older female leshy who’d first tried to speak to us—and who Jason had blasted back.

The humans seemed to be arguing, mostly everyone else against Mr. Jensen, no surprise there, while Colt was chatting quietly to Ellen, who looked about the same age as him.

“Finally!” A woman, maybe close to fifty, turned to me with hands on her hips. “Mark is no help at all. He thought these people were turning humans into monsters of all inane ideas, and now everything’s in chaos back home. Is that true?”

“It wasn’t great when we left.” I passed Jensen a hard stare.

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