Hey hey, Internet! It’s Tuesday, and better than that, it’s the climax of this ridiculous shapeshifter story. Part Seventeen coming at you!

<- Part Sixteen – Confrontation

If you’re looking for the start to Volume 2, look no further! Volume 2, The Wings Take Shape, starts right here!

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The Shape of Family

Finale – Part Seventeen – Meld

by Rick Cook Jr

Claire stared at the creature known as the bandersnatch. It shifted to a dragon eerily similar to Sadie’s form. He rushed her as the fire ignited the pitch in the roof, and with a deafening crunch the wall collapsed behind her as they fell into daylight. The melee was so loud it could have been right next to Claire. So great was her surprise that she hardly felt the splintered wood as it slid out of her side. She collapsed and Jeffrey yanked her to her feet.

“Am I seeing this?” he asked, and she held the open wound, feeling faint.

“Dragons. They’re dragons,” she said.

The burning rot of the mushrooms assaulted them, and the bandersnatch roared with pain. Real pain. “Out, everybody out!” she shouted, focus coming back to her.

They fled the burning church, most hobbling or supporting others. It started its collapse shortly after the last Kingsguard fell down the rough steps.

All eyes watched the dragons.

“This is happening,” Sergeant Hughes whispered beside her. She was hugging the twins to her and their eyes all glistened with tears.

Blue smoke rose from the bandersnatch. “Is that the mushrooms?” Private Tanner asked.

Claire thought it was. “Marie, Renee, Regina.”

The twins and Hughes turned to her. “You struck true with mushroom-coated blades?”

They nodded. “I think the sunlight is turning it to acid on his skin.”

“Truly?” Marie asked. “Who’s this other monster what saved our bacon?”

“That’s our black horse,” Jeffrey said. “My horse-woman, Sadie.”

Marie and Renee grinned at each other. “Will she win, do you think?” Renee asked.

Private Tanner said, “Do we care? Why aren’t we fleeing?” The Kingsguard and the villagers had already done so, and Claire thought it would be best to do the same. And yet she wanted to see this through.

She said, “Dawson, get the scouts to safety. We’ll stay behind in case Sadie needs help. Get on the horses and go.”

“That might be difficult, Captain,” Jeffrey said, and her eyes narrowed at him. “I might have told them to do something else.”

“What did you do, Private?”

The horses burst from the bloody wood into the clearing, charging at the snarling, clawing dragons. Sadie backed away in surprise but the bandersnatch was clearly taken unawares as the horses plowed into him. He swirled into half smoke half dragon, belching flame and roaring. Trying to flee.

Sadie snatched the dragon’s wispy form as if it was cloth, dragged it back to her even as other smoky, oily wisps struggled up around her claws. Flame boiled over the creature’s smoke form as Sadie tore at it with vicious fangs.

Shrieks, involuntary cries of pain. The creature erupted into a thousand forms in the blink of an eye, but Sadie wasn’t letting go. She had it and she meant to end it. The horses fled into the woods, their command outweighed by the terror in the thing’s chorus of horrified voices.

Marie held hands over her ears, crying out, “Make it stop! Make it bloody stop!”

And slowly, by measures, it did. It stopped struggling, became a man once more. And then Sadie was shifting as well, to be herself.

*****

The dragon-scales slipped away and Sadie pushed the pain away. While she was the Jabberwock she hadn’t felt it. The burns, the cuts, the rended flesh and the broken bones, all of it nothing compared to the fury of the dragon. Now she gritted teeth as she held the bandersnatch down.

“I was only trying to save myself from extinction,” it whined, coughing up a mixture of black blood and that oily vapor. “You’ve doomed me, mutt.”

Sadie leaned close, pressing at the black-blood wounds in the man’s body. “I do not care. No creature that takes hostages and revels in slaughter deserves to live.”

“You say that. What about humans?” he spat. “You’re all slaves to a throne. To wills other than your own.”

“That is far away and bigger than me,” Sadie said. “I am just a simple skin-changer, and I only kill what I need to survive.”

He laughed. “This was surviving? You, who have no place among those foul beasts?”

“That is for me to deal with. Tell me, Grandfather, if you can feel this?” A dagger slipped up between his jaw and neck, the creature coughed once, and was still. Staring at the sky with eyes that no longer saw.

His body turned to smoke and oil under her fingers. At first she thought he was playing a trick, escaping, but the smoke seeped into her lungs and eyes when she gasped. The oil covered her like a second skin and then absorbed.

She became something else.

Jeffrey appeared at her side, asking questions. She lay on the grass, panting, feeling this new self.

This better self.

And hid a grin.

“What?” she asked, and realized her voice had shifted to be a little deeper, a little more arrogant.

“Where did he go? Did you win? Are you okay?”

“Gone. He has gone.”

Her pains had gone as well. And she was naked. A moment’s thought and clothing materialized out of smoke. Out of herself.

Jeffrey fell back from her as the others crept forward. The twins. The Winged Riders. Fine warriors all.

“How did you do that?” he asked, and she stood up, offering her hand, smiling.

“I do not rightly know, but I assure you, it is still me inside this skin.” He took her hand and stood. “The plan did not go precisely as envisioned, did it?”

“You can say that again!” Marie called from the crowd of Wings. “That was dead amazing, horse-lady.”

Renee broke from the crowd and approached Sadie. Claire called, “Careful!” but they had won. Caution was for the losers.

Renee stood before Sadie, eyeing her up and down, hands wringing nervously. “You’re the horse that rescued me from the creature? That helped Jeffrey and me get back?”

Sadie nodded. “I am sorry it took so long to save you both.”

Renee’s head shook. “Save, nothing. We helped.”

Marie laughed and Sadie joined her. “You were both very brave. Proper Wings if I ever saw one.” She held a hand out to the young woman and Renee threw her arms around the woman, pulled her tight.

And tears sprang to Sadie’s eyes. She stared at Captain Claymonte, who was not so amused or pleased now that they were all still alive and still had a skin-changer to deal with.

“What happens now?” Sadie asked, separating herself from Renee, sending her back to her sister. They really did not look so much alike once you got to know them.

Claire held her wound, supported on one side by Private Tanner and on the other by Sergeant Hughes. “I suppose we’re done here. We rooted out the cult and got our scouts back. You, Sadie, are just a loving aunt who let her worry for her nephew get the better of her. Isn’t that right?”

Sadie nodded slowly. “And my nephew?”

“I suspect you’ll figure out a way to free him.”

She smiled and held her hand out to the woman. “You are a hard woman to like, Captain.”

“But I hope an easy one to serve,” Claire said, taking the woman’s hand and shaking firmly.

When Sadie let go, she turned to Jeffrey. “I will find you once matters are settled.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “If you are still interested.”

He only nodded dumbly. She patted his cheek and turned to smoke, though it didn’t feel as fluid as it appeared on the bandersnatch.

Oh what a feeling it was, though.

She soared through the trees, on her way to the capital.

On her way to get her silly nephew.

*****

Epilogue

The nightmares never ended. Only grew worse.

She sat up from a sweat-drenched bed, the body next to her sound asleep, snoring. She left the dark bedroom, needing only to shift her eyes to a cat’s to see her way out.

In the next room, Sadie stood over the crib at her changeling son. Almost too big for the crib. She stroked his cheek, scaly tonight until her fingers lit on it. It shifted to smoke and then normal human skin, matching hers. He cooed softly. Her son.

She wasn’t supposed to be able to have a child. She and Calph had tried for years until the strain of it was too great, and they had separated. Friends only.

Whatever the bandersnatch had given her at his death, it had changed her. In this way she was grateful.

In others she was not.

She left the crib, passed her nephew’s room and looked in just long enough to hear his soft breathing. The stories from the capital had been hushed and scared when she’d snuck him free.

She shifted a warm woolen cloak about her as she stepped out into the chill night.

Time alone with her thoughts, her dreams. She sat on the bench on the porch, stared out at the town. Not her town. His. So close to the capital.

She wasn’t given long, though, before the door to their home opened again, and out stepped Jeffrey, wrapping a more mundane blanket around his shoulders to sit at her side, wrap the blanket around them both.

“I did not wish to disturb your sleep,” she said, letting her false cloak fall away to lean into his warmth.

“When you don’t sleep, I don’t.” He kissed her forehead and she sighed. “The nightmare again?”

She nodded. “It is becoming more vivid. It worries me.”

“There’s nothing to worry about. It’s a dream.”

“Dreams have weight, Jeffrey.”

“Only what you give them, love.” He rubbed her shoulders in reassurance, but the chill would not leave her.

She did not give voice to the real fear. “I am sure you are right. I just wish it would stop.”

“Maybe a visit to your old village is in order? A return to the familiar could stop the nightmares,” he offered.

Home. It would be nice to visit. Being tied to the elite Winged Riders as she now was carried with it some privileges she dared not dream of before. Freedom to travel was perhaps the biggest benefit.

“Maybe. They are not comfortable around me since – since I became something more. But it would be good to see them, at least.”

“I was going to wait until the morning to tell you,” Jeffrey started, “but Captain’s got a new mission for us.”

“So soon? You only just returned.”

“Life of a soldier.”

“Is it because you are the best that Captain Claymonte keeps you all so busy?”

“To hear her we’re all slackwits and laggards.”

“Does she expect the twins to be elsewise? They are rebellious and looking for husbands by now, are they not? Almost too big for their roles.”

“Captain’s pulled some strings to put them into officer’s training. I doubt Marie will follow through but Renee sure has the mind for it.”

“What is the mission?” Sadie asked.

He grinned, and though it was dark she could see it with her cat’s eyes. “We’re on the trail of some new rumor.”

“Another cult?”

“Seems so. This one has political rumblings as well.”

“You will be careful?”

“No more than usual.” She nudged him with an elbow and he corrected, “Which is to say always.”

“Is Claire still interested in a skin-changer for her ranks?”

“She talks of little else when she gets me alone.”

“John is going to join if he catches wind.” Her nephew was ever headlong into trouble, and he had heard of the twins’ beauty.

“He would be welcomed and well-cared for.”

Sadie sighed. “It will be too soon that the choice is his and not mine, but if he wants it I will not stand in his way.”

“Claire will be happy to hear it.”

Claire. She had not softened in the intervening years. “Has she bundled up that innkeep yet?”

He laughed. “She still denies they are more than acquaintances.”

“But I bet you will stop in Stalbridge once again.”

“Almost always. Regina’s serving well as her second-in-command. I could join another contingent and regain my status, but Claire is the only Captain that will put up with me.”

“Your tongue does wag,” she said, sitting up. “Come and let us go back to bed. I will not have my husband tired on the day he rides out.”

He yawned and let himself be pulled to bed, where they warmed up as husband and wife can.

He slept, and she stared out the window, at the clouds covering the moon, shifting in the high winds like smoke.

Smoke and oil.

And she felt of her stomach, where new life grew.

If her dreams meant anything, the world was in for a dark time.

Her little destroyers of humanity.

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Click here for Volume 2, The Wings Take Shape!

And there you have it! Hope you enjoyed this story as much as I did writing it.