“Jared,” she said.
He nodded at her. “Shirley.”
His dad started praying, thanking God for the food. Shirley’s expression was one of a person who’d just found a hair in her meal. She caught Jared’s gaze. “Bullshit for idiots who can’t think for themselves.”
“God bless you, Shirl,” his dad said.
“Keep it in your pants, Phil,” she said.
—
Jared lay in the tub listening to Phil and Shirley arguing downstairs. The water was going cold, so he turned the hot tap on with his foot. He stared at his missing toe, chewed off by the river otters. He supposed he could grow one back now. The thought made him slightly nauseous. His foot stayed the same.
He didn’t feel inhuman. Unhuman. Non-human. Whatever the term was for being not the same kind of human as everyone else. He still felt like himself, more or less. A little hungover from universe-hopping and then dying and coming back to life, but still Jared-ish.
Glass broke downstairs, something small, like a bottle or a cup. A long, uneasy silence and then a door slammed.
He should phone Mave. He lived in his aunt’s spare bedroom in Vancouver and she’d be worried. But how would he explain that he’d ended up five hundred miles north in the basement of his mother’s newly sold house in Kitimat and that some moving men had found him wholly nude, beaten up and babbling nonsense, and called an ambulance?
Because of Georgina. The thing that had called itself Georgina.
He couldn’t quite catch his breath. He unplugged the tub, dried himself off and pulled on his borrowed clothes. His thoughts were not things he wanted to spend time with. His memories of the last few days were not safe. His face in the mirror hid all the insanity behind an ordinary mug—aside from the ring of bruises around his neck where Georgina had last throttled him, calling him a brainless chicken. He needed to fix that. Make it less obvious, at least. Heal, he told himself. But that made his heart speed up and his palms clammy. He was still Jared. He was human. He didn’t want to be some freak like his biological father. Although his hospital-bathroom organ roundup screamed of the weirdness that could only be caused by a Trickster.
God. He also didn’t want to talk to his mom. Maggie would know he’d changed, know it right away. She hated Wee’git. Loathed the Trickster. Was gleefully responsible for Wee’git’s last death. Jared could lie to her. Not say anything. Or just grab some balls. Hey, Mom, guess what? I took after the sperm donor after all.
Shit would hit the fan. Matter would touch antimatter. Grenades would be placed in belts and AK-15s would be tenderly cleaned. His mom’s love was like a bridge with alternating lanes—sometimes everything flowed towards him and other times stampeded away. She’d kill for him, sure, but he had to pick her side or else. Like when she found out he was helping his stepdad pay the bills after Phil’s prescription for Oxy was cancelled and he kept blowing through his disability cheques to fund his new habit. That was a particularly long deep-freeze she put him in that only broke because of all the shit happening in his life—the otters, the talking raven who turned out to be Wee’git, the spooky things that happened when his ex, Sarah, and he put their minds to it. When he quit drinking and joined AA, his mom seemed to think he was judging her and they’d had a brittle relationship since.
He emerged from the bathroom and went to his stepsister’s old room. She and her baby had finally moved out, but Destiny’s vision board was still tacked up over the bed, filled with happy families on picnics, at carnivals, on the beach. Italicized, glittery notecards: Family is wealth. Children are the greatest blessing. Her sheets were mint green with pink roses. A fluffy white rug by the bed. Nearby, an empty bassinet filled with the stuffies she’d left behind, all the off-brand and no-name generics.
Jared didn’t have to go back to Vancouver. He could stay here. Phil would never kick him out. He could curl up on the rosy bed and put a pillow over his ears to drown out the renewed fight downstairs. And so he did.
But he couldn’t close his eyes because, when he did, he had a flashback to the thing that had claimed to be his aunt Georgina, cracking his bones and sucking the marrow from them. And he didn’t want to think about what he did in response.
Not a single person he knew was going to be happy about his shiny new shape-shifting ability. No one liked his biological father. Not his mom, not his grandmother, and not his new friend, Neeka, whose otter people had bad history with him. Certainly not the thing that had been claiming to be his aunt. Was she really? He hadn’t thought to ask, being in the middle of a kidnapping and then a torture session that had apparently only lasted a weekend but had felt like forever.
Jared should have avoided Georgina. But that was the thing about being desperate for help, flailing in a strange new ocean. You grabbed on to anyone who reached out to you, hoping that the person lending you a hand was really a Good Samaritan even as you marked the exits and smiled.
“Hey, kiddo,” his dad said, hesitating in the doorway. “Did you hear all that? Sorry.”
“No worries,” Jared said, lifting the pillow off his ear.
His dad came and sat on the edge of the flowery bed. His eyes drifted down to Jared’s neck. He hesitated
