Page 33 of The Claiming of the Shrew
As soon as the door was locked behind him, he shed his clothing and went raccoon-shaped. If he’d only thought of thisbefore Leah took the pillowcase, he would have had the freshest scent of all; that was what he got for letting his higher brain functions go out the window. But as he sniffed his way all over the floor, then climbed up on the bed and sniffed all over that, there definitelywasanother scent here. Leah’s was the strongest by far, and difficult to ignore. But someone else had been in the room. It was familiar; he had definitely smelled them around somewhere recently, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly where.
Great. I’m going to have to sniff everyone in the theater company. As a raccoon.
Might as well get to it.
He put aside talking to Leah as a problem for Future Fawkes, which might also go along with being able to bring her the culprit’s identity like a particularly tasty piece of trash, and tried to push down the part of his brain that was jangling anxiously at him:Where is mate? Find mate now!If it was going to be like this every time he wasn’t sure where Leah was, he’d better start learning to ignore it. Leah was not exactly an easy person to keep track of.
Instead, he stayed in the room just long enough to get dressed and grab his dark backpack for stashing his clothes while exploring. Then he was off, slipping out a side door and under the dark trees, and a few moments later a raccoon was wandering about the grounds of the lodge.
It was a good thing this was a shifter-friendly area and not the sort of place where someone was going to set traps or take potshots at a random, not particularly well-loved pest mammal. He had spent more time as a raccoon in the last two days than he normally did in two months.
Rather unexpectedly—though he should have guessed—he came upon other shifters under the trees, taking advantage of the night’s privacy to exercise their shift forms. In rapidsuccession, he met a gazelle, a pair of porcupines, and an aardvark. He took the opportunity to come up and touch noses with each of them in a friendly shifter greeting, which also gave him the chance to sniff them.
Shifters didn’t have a unique smell compared to normal animals or humans—that is, a shifted gazelle just smelled like a gazelle. But what they did tend to do was carry some of their other shape’s smell with them. This was particularly true of shifters in their animal form, because they had just been in contact with their human shape’s clothing and personal items.
If he hadn’t been looking for a certain smell, this would have told him nothing except that these animals had been in contact with humans recently. But with that smell strongly patterned in the back of his brain, he was seeking its elusive vibe.
None of these animals had it.
He still felt as if he was on the right track. He made a circuitous path through the encampment, and when he got to the set, among the crisscrossing scent trails, he suddenly stumbled on the smell he was looking for. There was a clear patch of it on the stage. Someone had sat or leaned on it, touched it with their hand. All the surrounding scent tracks were too confused for him to actually trail the person like a bloodhound; it was just a big mishmash of different people smells. But they had been here very recently, just hours ago. They were either in the camp or the hotel tonight.
Fawkes wrinkled his muzzle, drawing it back from his teeth in something that could be read as a snarl or a smile, or both.Gotcha.
Now he just needed to figure out who it actually was, and find Leah so she could be in on the takedown. Piece of cake. How hard could that be?
LEAH
It was dark,and Leah’s head hurt.
She could tell that she was a shrew by the rapid beating of her heart—much faster than a human heartbeat, even if she’d had twelve cups of coffee. Gradually awareness trickled back to her. She was in some sort of enclosed space. It didn’t smell like her shrew pocket in her purse, or anywhere else she was familiar with.
She wriggled a little and nosed at her prison, trying to determine what was around her. There was a set of smells that she identified as laundry soap, dryer sheets, and coffee. The last one was faint, but it was probably why she kept thinking about coffee. Delicious, invigorating coffee.
She was lying on top of something soft. After struggling around a little and bumping into the walls of her prison a few times, she decided that she had been shut into a rinsed-out coffee can with a soft object in the bottom, probably a sock.
The can was metal, so she didn’t think trying to shift would be a good idea. At best, she would explode the can and lacerate herself on the shards; at worst, she would—well—implode herself.
It was completely black inside the can, from which she concluded that either there was something on top of the lid, or it didn’t have air holes poked in it. Leah squeaked furiously at the top of the can, a litany of cursing in Shrew that mostly amounted to:What kind of idiot are you that you don’t know you’re supposed to add air holes if you’re keeping a live animal?
As her head cleared further, she decided that the can was large enough that air probably wasn’t going to be an immediate problem.
At least not as much of a problem as something else.
There was nothing in here to eat.
Whenever she designed a shrew space for herself, she made sure to stash food in it. She guessed that Fawkes had probably thought her shrew snacks were adorable. And they were, if she did say so herself. But they were also necessary.
A shrew’s metabolism was incredibly fast. So fast that a shrew deprived of food could starve to death in a matter of hours. As a human, she was in no more danger of starvation than a regular person. She just got hungry quickly and could eat a lot without gaining weight.
As a shrew, however, she had a shrew’s abilities—all of them.
Including the ultra-high metabolism and need for food.
She was already jittery with hunger. She wondered how long she had been unconscious.
If she remained stuck as a shrew, she would starve long before morning.
FAWKES
