The Last Daffodil

6

6

"What?" I tried not to sound incredulous, I tried to keep my eyebrows from shooting to the top of my forehead, I tried to not look they way they all thought I would.

"Told you she wouldn't believe us." Aeneas muttered, sitting back down on the chair he had vacated before I had entered the room.

Travis sighed in the older man's direction, earning a glare, then turned back to me to try and explain. But before he had the opportunity to do so...

Quincy turned into a cougar.

I screamed, scrambling backwards towards the door. I had just swung the door open when it occurred to me that no one else in the room was panicking. Travis looked annoyed, Christiana looked sheepish, and Aeneas looked like he was going to yell again.

The tip of the cougar's tail was pink.

"Was that really necessary?" Travis asked, exasperated.

Quincy turned back into a human, and laughed.

"I thought it would be faster and more effective than standing around explaining it all day. I have a deadline you know." She was now dressed in sandy yellow furs, exactly the same colour that she had been as a cougar.

I just stared at them, at all four of them at once, before I finally asked the question that was clogging my brain.

"You can all do that, can't you?"

Travis looked at me, seeming surprised. I couldn't decide if it was because he didn't expect me to say anything, or if he didn't expect me to make the connection. "Yes."

"You were that bear, weren't you? The one who saved me that night."

Travis nodded slowly. "That was me, yeah."

I slid down the door and sat on the cold kitchen floor with my legs straight out in front of me. I could feel my arms trembling from the aftershock of the adrenaline. "And those guys, Dalton and Silvia Cravel, they're looking for you guys because you can turn into animals."

"Yeah basically." Travis scratched the back of his neck nervously, as though he was worried that I would turn into some kind of sobbing wreck at any second.

I thought I would too. I thought I would go into shock. I should have been going into shock. Maybe the surprise of me not going into shock was keeping me out of shock. "You saved my life."

"Well, Quincy did to. She was the one who did the healing." My eyes flicked toward the much prettier girl who I was yelling at earlier. She smiled at me so wide that her teeth showed.

"We can't just turn into animals you know." She purred. She actually purred the words. "We're... rare. All four of us have additional powers besides skinwalking. I, unfortunately, am a healer." I didn't even have to question why she said 'unfortunately'. Quincy was, for lack of a better term, violent.

"Elements," Travis said. He snapped his fingers and a small flame erupted between his fingers. I tried not to scream again.

"Telepathic tendencies." Christiana said. Those two words made me suddenly understand why she had been looking at me with that sad look in her eyes this whole time.

"Superhuman strength." Aeneas said gruffly. That one didn't surprise me either.

"And those guys that came to your house, Dalton and Silvia, they're poachers. And we're rare... you can see the connection." Travis said. I nodded slowly, completely speechless.

My best friends are animals, my brain kept saying. Actual real magical animals.

"I hope this isn't too much for you to handle." Travis said, looking worried that my brain had been totally fried. I was worried about it too. "I can drive you home, if you want," he offered, crouching and touching my elbow lightly. His touch seemed to awaken my senses, and I nodded. He smiled at me, and helped me stand.

***

"Am I ever going to see you again?" I asked. We were sitting in my driveway, sitting in the warm bubble of the small car he had opted to take instead of the motorcycle.

"Not if you don't want to." Travis answered, staring at his fingers, which were tapping against the steering wheel.

I stared at my house through the windshield. It had started snowing and the windshield was covered in little wet spots, which slightly obscured my view of the house. "I don't want to not see you again."

"Even after..." he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, and we both burst into laughter. I don't know why. The original atmosphere had been so somber.

"Yeah," I said after I had gotten enough breath to speak again. "Even after."

"Then you'll see me again." Travis's eyes were glowing from his laughter. "I promise."

***

And I did.

Neither Travis nor Quincy ever came to school again. They said it was too public, too easy to be found. But they came every day afterwards. The bell would ring and I would run outside to see them standing on the grass outside the building. They would see me, and they would smile, and I would smile, and there was always a disgusting amount of smiling.

I spent a lot of time at their house, and even more time asking everyone questions. Christiana's animal was a fox, Aeneas's a wolf. They were all forced to be in their animal forms for twelve hours a day. Travis liked seven to seven as his human hours. Quincy preferred eight to eight. They had moved into the house a little after my attack, and the reason made me cry.

All four of them said the same thing. All four of them agreed that they had forgotten what it was like to be human. They lived in their animal forms all day, and succumbed to their animal instincts. They lived together in a cave outside the city of Tofino, where my dad, my brother, and I camped every year.

They lived this way for ten years, since Travis was only eight human years, completely forgetting how to live like humans, how to live with humans. I think they even forgot that they were human, partially anyway.

And then I came along.

Travis told the story best. He said he usually wandered late at night. It helped him sleep to look at the stars and feel the air around him. Then he had heard a scream, a very human scream, and went to go investigate. He saw the bigger bear, and then he was me trapped underneath, and something just snapped.

Suddenly he was running. He didn't know what he would do, he just knew he had to do something.

"Then I just, sorta, lept at him," Travis would say. "I caught him off guard, and I think that's the only way I beat him. And even then, I didn't really beat him, I just sort of annoyed him so he left.

"Then I saw you." The way he said that always made my stomach flutter uncomfortably. "And you were dying, and I had to help you. Then I started tingling, then I looked like this. I immediately took you to Quince, because she had a gift for healing."

"I remembered what we were truly capable of the second I saw him and changed into a human instantly." Quincy would jump in.

"Travis came to us right after he had dropped you off at the hospital. He told us he had to look after you, so we became human, and moved in." Christiana would say, smiling at me tenderly. She had become more comfortable with my presence once she realised that I didn't plan on running away and checking myself into a mental institution.

Aeneas was a different story. Every time I entered the house, he found an excuse to disappear.

"He's just uncomfortable with the idea of someone else knowing about us." Travis said, trying to make me feel better. "I'm sure he'll come around."

I wasn't so sure. Whenever I did see him, he would glare, or raise his eyebrows, or something terrifying like that. I was pretty sure I was more scared of him then he was of me.