Page 11 of Shifter's Homecoming

Trent woke up gasping, wolfless, pulling away from hazy dreams of running as a wolf in a thick, secretive forest. There’d been a guardian…

Trent pried his eyes open. Above him was a dull and dirty ceiling. Around him, four walls. Light poured in to the room from a small window in one far wall. He sensed movement around him, maybe two or three people. They were rushing. Their voices were urgent but he could pick out no words. Troy moved to his side from somewhere, then bent close to his face and grabbed at him.

Trent tried to speak. “My… wolf. Can’t shift,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t get his tongue to work.

Troy stared intently, trying to understand. Trent gave up and lay still. His brother’s expression was desperate. He grabbed at Trent again and even shook him a little.

“Shift, Trent, please, you have to shift,” he said, his voice low.

Trent did not have the energy to explain to his brother that his wolf was not with him. He could not keep his eyes open. His muscles felt thick and hot and his brain felt mushy and useless. He let his eyes slip closed, sensing Troy watching him.

Trent might have lightly dozed for hours or days. Hours, he thought. He drifted… The movement in the room slowed along with his heart rate. Later, he opened his eyes in dim, subdued light, and Troy was gone, but close by, across the room maybe. Trent could feel him.

Trent lay perfectly still, needing all his strength. He tried to get a handle on what was going on. If he didn’t move around too much, if he didn’t try to speak, he had enough strength to think.

His man-body felt naked, under a cool and light sheet. A beeping sound came from his right. A whooshing sound came from his left. A male spoke from somewhere across the room, but Trent only caught the hushed tone.

Trent gathered his energy and opened his eyes, taking in the inside of the “hospital,” although it was like no hospital Trent had ever seen before, at least not a modern one.

Trent blinked curiously, glad for a ‘breather’ of sorts, glad for a moment to try to accept the fact that he was really in another world. He found it hard to accept. He tried to run over what he knew.

He had something he had to do… and if he could just stay awake long enough, he would be able to figure out what it was, and how to do it. He was in another world, in another body, in another Trent. He grasped his own face, feeling the thick beard, wondering what helooked like.He knew from his conversations withthe dragen, and with Crew and with Dahlia, that he would look the same here as he had at home… except here he was a man, and at home, he’d never been one.

Trent realized his eyes had slipped closed and he was almost asleep. He rousted himself when he realized he was falling asleep then almost screamed when he made the mistake of moving his leg.

Trent gritted his teeth as excruciating pain shot down his calf and up his thigh. His whole body seemed to cramp, the muscles in the small of his back twisted and his shoulders and neck tightened painfully. He focused on the pain, sharpening it into a point in his mind, using it to boost up his strength. He had work to do. He had a mission. He would not fail.

Careful not to move, he scanned the room with his eyes. He saw cots all around him, raised off the ground like hospital beds. Behind him was a wall and equipment. There were tubes running from his body to poles and machines. His right arm was completely immobilized, strapped to a board. A glass container hung from a hook on the wall near his head, filled with red liquid. Blood. Connecting it to him was rubber tubing leading to a thick-bore metal needle that was stuck directly into the vein in the crook of his elbow. He stared at the needle, thinking that couldn’t be right, and it should be plastic.

Trent resisted the urge to tear the needle out of his arm, but only because he didn’t think he would have the strength to do it. He continued to examine the open room he was in.

To his right, desks crammed full of medical equipment lined the walls. There were rolling chairs and filing cabinets. Everything looked mostly normal, if a little different than what he would have expected. He did not try too hard to pick out what was different from this world to his world at home. He would not be here long.

He remembered! The vaccine. He had to findthe vaccine. It could be right here in this room he was in.

Trent levered himself slightly onto one elbow and peeked around the room, internally wincing at the pain in his lower half.

A man standing at a high table in the center of the room caught his attention. It was Troy. He had papers in front of him and a pen in his hand and a pile of medical equipment pushed to the side on his left.

Trent studied his brother in this world. This… “other” Troy looked normal, like Trent remembered him looking when he’d left Serenity and headed out on foot to find the beast. In Trent’s other world, his “real” world, Troy had only shifted for the first time a few days before Trent had set out to track the beast. Trent would bet good money that was not the case with the Troy in this world, this… “mission” world. This Troy looked quite comfortable as a man, quite at home in his own skin. This Troy looked exactly like the Troy at home, same dark hair, same dark eyes, same big but rangy build. He even had that thick mustache, the one that made him look like Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I.

In front of him, his brother’s face was screwed up in concentration and worry. He kept looking back and forth between two papers, then scribbling something, then shaking or nodding his head.

Trent realized Troy was having aruhiconversation with someone. Behind him, Trent saw the doctor working on something in a far corner of the room.

Trent relaxed back onto the pillow, then looked down at his body in the bed. He’d been stripped of all his clothes. His leg felt bandaged. He used his free arm to pick up the sheet and peek down at his body. His left leg was bandaged up tight and it looked good. No blood was seeping through the thick white gauze.

Then he sawit. His penis. It lay on his right thigh, thick and sleeping and he stared at it in wonder. He reached down and palmed it once, because he could not resist, then he released it and dropped the sheet back over him. No sense getting distracted by that thing. Watching the other males in his pack had told him it made them very stupid, very quickly.

One tiny window set in the back wall told him that night was coming. He’d lost some hours, but he didn’t know how many. He hoped he hadn’t lost days, but really, he did not know.

Smokey.

Thoughts of the housecat crashed into Trent’s mind. He remembered Smokey’s last words to him.

— you must go to the meadow each and every night, you must consort with your wolf in the meadow —

Trent did not know how to even begin to make something like that happen, but then he remembered his dream. Maybe it had not been a dream. Trent put his free hand to his head and tried tothink. Hunger and thirst flared inside him.

---