Was Lizzie here? Was she okay? Was it this Elric she was sensing?

‘She’s fine,’ Danny said.

Dee turned on him. ‘Could you at least wait for me to say it out loud?’

‘You did.’

‘No, Danny. I didn’t. And how do you know Lizzie’s okay? She just lost her guy this morning. This guy I’ve never met…’

‘I hear it. Like I heard the witches. This gives me a good feeling. A… hmmm, wow. Whatever she’s been up to, she’s enjoying it.’

‘Well, thanks for putting that image in my head.’ His grin was impish. ‘You wanted me to believe I can hear things.’

‘I just don’t want to hear what you’re hearing. Not about my little sister’

‘From what I saw of her, she’s not so little.’

Dee physically turned him for the stairs. ‘Come on. I brought you here to see my studio. Not eavesdrop on my sister’

Dee’s studio shared the second floor with Mare’s bedroom. Fourteen steps up and a slide of the hand along the banister from the outside world to hers. She had no control over the outside world. The downstairs rooms were kept fairly anonymous. Even her own bedroom was nondescript. Pale gray walls, black duvet, and thrift store dresser. Zen, Lizzie called it. Disinterested was the truth. What was the point of decorating a room that would see such uninspiring use? Dee saved all her whimsy for her studio.

She climbed the fourteenth step and led the way into her room. She flipped the light and held her breath.

‘Good God,’ Danny breathed, frozen to the spot.

Dee stayed where she was by the white hutch she used as a storage cabinet. This room was her sanctuary, her soul. It was what kept her sane when the responsibilities and the isolation wore her away. It was the only place on earth she didn’t feel like somebody’s mother.

The studio faced south, a stark wood-floored, slant-ceilinged, well-windowed space furnished in secondhand rockers, her grandmother’s trunk and a pair of cluttered worktables she’d painted cobalt teal, the very color, she realized, of Danny’s eyes. Multicolored bottles filled the sills to catch the sun, and every flat surface held a vase or bowl or pot stuffed with flowers from the garden. The air was thick with their scent. Her easel stood by the north wall, and jewel-toned saris draped the windows in purples and reds and oranges. Travel posters took up the stark white walls. Vienna, Rome, Bali. Peru. And, of course, Montmartre.

‘You’ve really never been to those places?’ Danny asked, bemused.

Dee looked at the Byzantine dome of Sacre Coeur. She knew how many steps it took to get to that door, too. ‘Some day.’

He turned to look down at her. ‘I’ll take you.’

God, she wanted to just say yes. ‘Thanks for the offer. But there’s stuff you need to know first.’

‘About your painting, obviously.’ He walked over to where canvases sat stacked against the bare white walls. He bent, hands clasped behind his back as he studied each one carefully. Dee rubbed her hands along her jeans and prayed for strength.

‘Do you know what that is?’ she asked Danny as he stood considering a painting that looked like a patchwork quilt of greens and golds. ‘Salem Valley. See the river snaking through? And the cliffs at the edge? See the design?’

It was what she painted. The designs of her life. All experience reduced to geometries and color, as primary as it got.

‘I shifted into a hawk to get that perspective. I also ate two mice and chased a pigeon for three miles. And that one, the violet and green? It’s the flowers on Salem’s Mountain.’

He tilted his head, trying to pull a flower from the simple lines.

‘I was a hummingbird to see that. Exhausting. Those little bastards never stop fighting. And a cat to see the white one. It’s a garage door.’ Titanium white on Payne’s gray on burnt sienna with just a stroke or two of alizarin crimson, the composition of genteel decay. ‘I trotted all over town for two weeks before I found that one. A subject has to strike me, and it usually doesn’t until I’m shifted. The one by your arm is the sun reflecting off the rim of Linda Rose’s trash can. I was a rat that day. Rats see a lot. And they have a passion for trash cans.’

And, of course, if I even tried to have sex with you, I’d turn into your mother faster than you can say Oedipus.

He stopped in front of each painting. He fingered through the stacks as if checking CDs in a record store. He was silent. Dee waited where she was, her hands twisted together, her chest suddenly constricted with dread. Say something.

‘These are beautiful,’ he breathed, turning on her, his hands up as if trying to take it all in.

‘I use acrylics. They’re cheaper, have purer color, and they work faster. I get up before the sun comes up so I can be shifted and anonymous by the time I’m seen. I’ve only been caught once. Fortunately it was a frat jock on the way home from a kegger. Much better than the time in Ames, Iowa, when I got mad at Lizzie’s high school principal and turned into a rott-weiler in his office chair. That was the second time we moved. The third was when Mare started her period in the middle of chemistry lab. Everything in the room started flying. She almost burned down the school. Well, we didn’t move because of that, really. It was that Xan smelled Mare’s power coming on and-’

‘Dee,’ he said softly as he came up to her. ‘Shut up.’

He laid his hands on her shoulders, stilling her. He looked down at her as if discovering something amazing. His eyes, like pools at sunset, seemed to glow in the dim light. ‘You don’t show these, do you?’ Not a question at all.

‘Of course not.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re personal.’

‘They’re unique and amazing. You could be famous.’

Dee scrunched up her face. ‘Oh, yes. I enjoyed being famous so much I changed my name and moved across the country. I’m happy as I am.’

Her heart had gone on alert again. She was trembling. He stroked her shoulders as if it were the most natural thing to do, and it took her breath, because it was so alien to her. It made her shoulder flare, as if his fingers had lit that butterfly into sunlight. It made her ache. This was so important. Didn’t he know how important this was?

‘You’re not happy,’ he said. ‘You’re in prison here. You’re dying and you don’t even know it. God,’ he said, shaking his head in amazement. ‘I knew you were special, but I had no idea. I don’t think even you have any idea.’

‘I didn’t bring you up here for that,’ she protested, suddenly afraid of things she hadn’t even anticipated. Beautiful? They were beautiful? ‘Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you hear how I painted them?’

‘I don’t care if you rode a monkey in a wet suit to paint these. They’re magnificent.’

Dee was rubbing her forehead again. ‘I. Shape. Shift. I’m not delusional. I’m not lost in Dungeons and Dragons. When I was thirteen I shifted into a wolverine and treed Mare for two hours when she broke my bike. I do this, Danny. You have to believe it.’

For a long moment, he just looked at her. Just held her, his big hands gentle on her sore shoulder. Dee couldn’t look away. He was mesmerizing, a phantom in the shadows who dangled terrible possibilities before her.

‘Dee,’ he said. ‘You don’t belong here. You belong out in the world, where your work can have a chance to be seen.’

‘Much tougher to turn into a ferret if you’re famous, Danny’

‘You can be anything you want. Don’t you get that? This can get you out of the bank and off wherever you want. The rest doesn’t matter’

She looked at him a long time. ‘Does it matter to you?’

He shook his head. ‘Dee…’

She closed her eyes and made a last-ditch grab for courage. ‘I’m going to have to show you, aren’t I? Oh, this would be so much easier if Mare were here. She’d just hit you in the head with a muffin and be done with it.’

‘You don’t have to do this. I don’t care.’

‘What’s your favorite animal? And don’t make it too big. Or a golden retriever. I have too many breakables in here.’

‘You don’t need to prove anything. I love you.’

That brought her eyes wide open. Even Danny looked stunned. ‘I mean it,’ he said, and suddenly grinned, hands up in the air. ‘Good God. In twenty-four hours I’ve fallen madly in love with a four-star, grade-A-’

‘You say shrew and I’ll have Lizzie turn you into a wart.’ How could he make her want to laugh when she was inches away from losing him?

His grin softened, and he bent to cup her face in his hands. ‘Genius. I’m in love with a goddamn genius, and I want to show her to the world. She doesn’t have to prove anything to me.’

It was almost enough to make her melt. She wanted to close her eyes and lean into him and be comforted. She wanted to meet him skin to skin, clothes tossed in a heap, mouths bruised with the force of their kissing. She wanted to be safe and she wanted to be free, and there was only one way that was possible. She lifted her own hands and laid them over his.

‘I do have to prove it, or I can’t trust that you love me.’

‘Why not? It sure feels like it.’ He touched noses, his eyes whimsical. ‘I thought it was gas, but that would have gone away.’

‘Because you don’t know me. Not the real me. You have to meet her before you can decide. Now pick your favorite animal.’

‘Why?’

She struggled against the tears that crowded her throat. ‘Because it’s who I am, Danny. It’s inseparable from the rest of me. If you can’t live with it, then you can’t love me.’

‘Hedgehog.’

She pulled away. ‘Your favorite animal is not a hedgehog.’

‘Of course it is. It reminds me so much of you.’

She glared. ‘Fine.’ Pulling out the rubber band, she let her hair loose, shucked her sweater and kicked off her basic boring white tennis shoes. ‘I’ll be a freakin’ hedgehog.’

She did a couple of stretching exercises. Hedgehog. Hedgehog. She tried to concentrate, but Danny was standing there with his hands on his hips, a silly grin on his face as if he were waiting for a card trick. She closed her eyes. Hedgehog. The image appeared, a quivering, sharp-nosed little thing. Great. Well, at least it wasn’t a shrew.

She eased herself down and curled her legs up under her, which saved time when she had to minimize. Four legs, round body, a quiver of bristles. He couldn’t have likened her to a fawn. Maybe a kestrel. The air around her seemed to congeal. Sound sharpened, light intensified, and she could smell the charge of her power as it gathered. Lime. Lizzie got flowers. Mare got candy. She got a garnish.

Another charge shot along her nerves. Something alien that glittered a dozen colors behind her eyes. Was Lizzie setting something off downstairs? It was distracting her.

She’d find out later. Right now… Hedgehog.

The tingling began in her chest, a disruption that spread and congealed like the air, so that her blood slowed, settled. Her lungs contracted. Her skin shrank.

Hedgehog.

One last push and she should have it. The power coalesced. Her body fizzed and itched, trembling so hard she was sure her cells convulsed. She squeezed her eyes shut, wrapped her arms tightly around her legs, gathered that odd little animal deep until…

Poof!

She coughed. She opened her eyes. She found herself waving away the cloud of green fog that filled the room. With hands.

‘Damn.’

She stared at her fingers as if they’d betrayed her. She hadn’t changed. Something had thrown her off. ‘Dee?’

‘I’m going to try again.’

She tried three more times. All she got was a lot of fog and a couple of lame snapping sounds.

‘The green fog is a nice touch,’ Danny offered, sounding bemused somewhere inside the cloud. ‘It kinda matches the butterfly.’

Dee didn’t move from where she was curled up on the floor, her face in her arms. ‘Green is my color.’

Silence. She’d exhausted herself with the trying. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to eat chocolate and cry. She didn’t have the luxury. She’d wasted too much time already on this party trick.

‘I do love you,’ Danny whispered, and Dee realized he’d crouched down on his haunches right in front of her.

She lifted her head, miserable tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I love you, too.’

He looked startled. ‘Really?’

She nodded, trying to keep from openly sobbing. I’m so sorry.’

He wiped at her tears. ‘Why?’

She wailed like a little girl. ‘Because now we’re going to have to have sex!’