Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (6 page)

I recognized the other flavor in Gantry’s posture, too.
 

He was trying to decide if he might have to restrain Nik in some way, or maybe even fight him, if Nik’s delusion got any more elaborate than it already was. He also was trying to decide if this “demonstration” might get violent, probably based on the story about the golf course.

Therefore, when Nik gave me a last glance, then appeared briefly to concentrate, as if recalling some far away memory, I could tell Gantry didn’t expect anything to happen really.

So his eyes bulged larger than the others’ did when Nik’s skin abruptly lost its shape.

Nihkil’s arms, shoulders, chest, face and neck began rippling and shifting under our stares, sliding into what looked at first like scales and then brown fur then bright orange feathers before the stumps of wings sprouted out of his back.

The last of these grew so rapidly that I pressed my back to the kitchen cabinets to get out of the way as one swiped vaguely in my direction.

Nik’s face flattened. His black hair sprouted into more of those purple and orange feathers around features that included two slits in the place of his nose.

Within a few heartbeats, Nik had transformed entirely into one of those birds with the vaguely person-like faces that I remembered from the planet, Trinith.

Stomping his considerably thinner and now down-covered legs, he managed to extricate himself from the human pants before falling on his face, but only just. He let out one of those strange, scream-like cries which reminded me of a peacock I heard once...

Right before he changed again, this time growing taller and losing the feathers.

Within a few more seconds, we found ourselves staring at a green-scaled, semi-human-shaped biped with webbed hands and feet. In that form, Nik stood about eight feet tall and had thick, seaweed-like hair. Since he’d lost the pants with the bird shape, he stood naked before us once more, although with a decidedly un-human-like shape below the waist.

“Nik,” I said, averting my eyes with an embarrassed sigh. “What is it with you and the pants right now? Can you find something less...exhibitionist?”

Jake let out a hysterical-sounding cackle.

Irene just stared, her coffee cup held at chest height.

The green-skinned Nik gave me a faintly offended look with his baseball-sized, deep-black eyes, blinking a set of transparent lids before his shape changed again.

That time, he transformed back into the shape of a human, but instead of the Nihkil shape I knew, he looked exactly like Gantry...including the naked parts. I couldn’t help wondering, how, exactly, he’d managed to get that part right.
 

Because it was right.

A little too right, frankly.

My wondering must have gotten through that thread we shared in the lock, because Nik answered the question as if I’d spoken it aloud.

“There’s a DNA element,” he told me.

“DNA?” I said, frowning. “But you didn’t touch him.”

Nik shrugged, as if my question were irrelevant.

Deciding getting answers out of Nik on the specifics of how the lock and shifting worked, I glanced at the original Gantry. His normally cinnamon-colored skin had paled to the color of rancid milk.

He also looked like he’d forgotten how to breathe.

“Okay, Nik,” I said, as the morph blinked at Gantry with his own face. “Okay,” I said, sharper. “That’s enough. Seriously. You’re going to give him a coronary.”

Nik immediately transformed back into his usual form, the human version.

When I pointed at his pants, which now lay on the floor in an inelegant heap, Nihkil dutifully picked them up, untangled them, and shoved his now human leg into the correct pant leg. Only then did I spare another glance in the direction of Irene and Jake.

Jake looked pretty similar to Gantry, actually.

Irene, on the other hand, now looked at Nik with pure, unfettered adoration.

I might have to nip that little crush in the butt, honestly.
 

Avoiding the twinge of jealousy that arose at the thought, the one I’d been pretending wasn’t there, I looked back at Gantry.

“Well?” I said. “You wanted the truth...Tonto.”

Gantry swallowed.

It seemed to take most of his concentration to get it right after the first two tries. He looked up at Nik, his irises and pupils like two black dots punctuating the white of his eyes, then up at me, then back at Nik again, as if trying to decide if I’d conjured Nik there somehow, if it was all some kind of trick with computer animation and projection screens.

Then Gantry cleared his throat, motioning towards Nik with a muscular hand for a few seconds, as if trying to remember how to work his vocal chords.

“...that...that thing...” he said finally. “...Could I see that again?”

Nik looked at me, maybe for permission.

After another pause, I sighed. Shrugging, I leaned back against the cabinets, raising my mug of coffee to my lips.

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever. Knock yourselves out.”

3

Breakfast and a Poorly-Conceived Plan

That went on for awhile.

I think Nik took at least twenty different forms during that time, including imitating the shapes and faces of every one of us in the room, down to each excruciatingly embarrassing detail. He also made himself into the blond golfer guy from that day in Washington Park, and I hadn’t even known he’d
seen
that guy.
 

By the last handful of transformations, Gantry was walking around Nik in increasingly tight circles, touching the different forms Nik took, maybe to feel the textures of feathers, fur, skin and hair. All the while he did it, Gantry kept frowning and muttering to himself, as if still trying to convince himself it wasn’t some kind of elaborate hoax.

When he finally seemed to get it through his head that, yeah, Nik was telling the truth, and that yes, he really could change into pretty much any animal or person with which he had sufficient familiarity, Gantry seemed to relax, strangely.

Well, maybe not
relax.

But he seemed to accept it.

Moreover, he seemed to accept the other things Nik had said, too...like the fact that there really were other morph in Seattle now, and that those morph could do the same thing Nik was showing him. Also, it seemed to sink in that those other morph might not be particularly benign about how they used that ability, given their previous experiences with human beings.

In the end, that’s the part that seemed to stick in Gantry’s head the most.

Meaning, the image of other shape-shifters, less friendly ones, wandering around Seattle and its surrounding environs, taking on whatever form they chose.

At that point in the demonstration, Gantry sat back down on one of the chrome-plated kitchen chairs.
 

He sat heavily enough that the chair’s screws let out another of those loud squeaks.

“Well, shit,” Gantry said, glancing up at Irene. “Is anyone else hungry, besides me?”

“I am,” Nik volunteered.

He was putting on his pants for like the fifth time, having somehow managed to not destroy them in all of the changes, despite Gantry’s somewhat overly-thorough need to watch the shifts occur in various ways. Maybe being a shape-shifter made Nihkil all-too-familiar with the risks of shifting while he wore clothes, enough that he knew when to take them off...and when to shift into something smaller than the body wearing the clothes in the first place.

In any case, he put them back on matter-of-factly, as if demonstrating shape-shifting to a handful of uninitiated Earth humans was just another day in the life.

“...Shifting makes me hungry,” Nik explained to Gantry as he began shouldering on the black shirt once more, too. “It takes some energy to change forms. It takes additional energy to maintain them, unless the form is one we have taken often enough for it to solidify into a base form that can be evoked more easily. Even then, we can only have one of those base forms per species-type...with very few exceptions.”

Gantry blinked at him, then seemed to let that mouthful of whatever pass.
 

“Gotcha,” he said, nodding to Nik. He looked back at Irene. “Do you have anything to eat? Or do we need to go out?”

Irene tore her eyes off Nik with a kind of sigh.

“No food,” she explained simply. “We could get donuts? Sit in the park?”

She meant the nearby coffee shop for donuts, I presumed, and Cal Anderson Park, which was only a few blocks away, in Irene’s neighborhood of Capitol Hill.

To clarify, Irene’s house wasn’t in the super-hip section of Capitol Hill, which is what most people think of when you tell them that you live there. Irene’s part of the neighborhood was a bit warehouse-y, the houses were a lot more run down, and it was probably a good mile and a half, maybe two, from the main strip on Broadway and even further from any part of the neighborhood that might be considered hip.
 

Walking around at night wasn’t exactly a picnic by her place, either, and not only because there weren’t a lot of places open.

Still, the park was a close walk, and the bus downtown closer still, so it wasn’t a bad place to live, all in all, and Irene inherited the flat so she didn’t even owe rent.

As for the park itself, it wasn’t fancy, but a decent-sized fountain broke up the middle of it and it had a baseball field on one side, along with other assorted greenery, benches and lawns and a reflecting pool where Irene and I would occasionally drink coffee and talk.

Since I was reasonably sure it was a Tuesday, there wouldn’t be a ton of other people around mid-morning, so it wasn’t a bad suggestion, really.

Jake wrinkled his nose at the mention of donuts, but he seemed to have more or less gotten on board with the rest of the proposal. He also appeared to have more or less recovered from Nik’s demonstration. Looking Nihkil over with a slightly more cautious expression on his face, although more than a small amount of fascination, too, I noticed, Jake folded his arms. He frowned as he looked between the three of us, then settled for staring at me.

“Well?” he said, as if prompting me to make the decision.

Rolling my eyes at how slow their brains all seemed to be moving, I hopped off the counter. I didn’t bother to explain I was leaving the room to scrounge up some actual clothes, but everyone seemed to get the idea, since they were waiting for me by the door when I emerged from the bathroom.
 

Nihkil had buttoned up the dark shirt by then, too, and added shoes to the pants.

About thirty minutes later, we all sprawled on a stretch of lawn in the park, about a hundred feet from the fountain and the nearest foot path, with no other people around.

We all had various pastry, coffee and sandwich combinations in our hands.

Mine was a scrambled egg sandwich on a poppyseed bagel.
 

I chewed on it with a lot more energy than I would have expected...at least until I had the thing right under my nose and realized I was famished. Moreover, given that I’d only been back for a relatively short time, Earth food, even the most basic, generic––and okay, unhealthy, processed crappy––Earth food still made me ridiculously happy.

“So?” Gantry said, chewing on a piece of bacon from his own sandwich. “What’s the plan?” He looked pointedly at Nik. “...I mean, with those other morph-people? You said something about stabilizing another portal. I need you to explain what that means exactly...in a way I’ll get it. And how you plan to get them through it, even if you succeed.”