LITMIR.BIZ

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if you keep acting as though she’s contracted the plague. You have to pretend you don’t know. When the time is right, Kaitlyn will tell her. Just go about your life as if nothing ever happened. If you can. And stop talking like you have three college degrees.”

      “I’ll do my best,” Cole said.

      “You can talk to me anytime. You know that.” I got up.

      “You were always a good friend.”

      It shocked me. The way he stated it was so mature, so not my son—so Cole Kinsley the old soul.

      “Hey, Shelby. If my memory serves me correctly, I’m still the boss of you, so I’m changing my bedtime.”

      “You keep talking like that, and I’ll move it up two hours.” I pulled the door behind me.

      “Love you, mom.” Cole’s thoughts filtered into the hall.

      “Love you too, sweetie.”

      * * * *

      Once in my room, I shut the door.

      Every mother dreads the day her little boy officially grows up, but who could you cry to when your boy grows older than you? Though he was just down the hall tucked under his favorite Batman blanket, I felt as though I had lost him in some strange way.

      “I can hear you all the way down the hall, Mom. Stop that. I haven’t gone anywhere. You will always have me. Remember, I never die. I keep going on. When I leave this body, I will find you. Allie isn’t the only one I am connected to anymore. I love you. More than any other mama I’ve had. Now laugh, because you know that in some other plane, some alternate reality, this is funny. I used to infuriate you. Now you’re crying over me.”

      “You don’t get to tell me what to do just yet. Hush and go to sleep,” I said.

      “I’m still the boss of you.”

      “Are not.” I grinned.

      He remembered our playful banter so many years ago.

      “Are too.”

      “Go to sleep, Cole Kinsley.”

      “Edwards, not Kinsley. I’m not ready to completely move into that identity just yet. Let me be a kid while I can, for heaven sakes.” He sounded like my little boy again.

      As I tugged my own blankets up and rolled to face my husband Trevor, I couldn’t conceal my joy. Cole had had twelve mothers, and I was his favorite. Cole never said anything just to make someone feel better. He’d had trouble with honesty in his past lives due to his severe obsession with Allie’s safety.

      I hoped now that he had learned some of who he was that, that wouldn’t change.

      * * * *

      Cole

      Though I still had the body of a little boy, I was Cole Kinsley on the inside. I had corrected Shelby to make her feel better. The complete transformation from the me I knew to some guy who haunted my dreams would happen someday, and there was nothing I could do about it. She would have to have time to adjust, just the same as I would. It would have been different if only my voice had changed and new hair had grown in strange places. An alternate personality had begun revealing itself little by little since I’d been old enough to talk.

      Suddenly, just as I was about to pull the covers up to my chin the way I did when I was little—which had been only two weeks ago—I decided that I wanted to sprawl out on the top of the blanket. I didn’t want the comforting sensation of confinement that the blankets normally offered, which also two weeks ago felt like protection from the big, strange world.

      Another thought mingled with that one.

      I remembered Allie’s long beautiful legs folded as she lay on her side of the bed. I had rolled over to her, placed everything on the front of me to the back of her and held on as if I never wanted to let go.

      My twin bed was too small for anyone else to fit, so at least I didn’t have to stare at a vacant spot beside me.

      I tried to close my eyes and block out all the stupid memories.

      Bad idea.

      When my eyes closed, the memories advanced and my hands were moving over her.

      I felt like a restrained animal. Since two weeks ago, I felt as if I was on the edge of some huge precipice when I was in the same room with Allie, as if I was going to fall off it and flip head over feet into a ravine of the unknown.

      I hadn’t asked Mom why that was.

      I needed to learn the rest on my own. I could tell tonight that she really hadn’t been ready to give me the talk, much less, The Talk.

      It was funny how, in two weeks’ time, the embarrassing moment every kid was supposed to have with his or her mother had escalated to a whole new level.

      My father, Trevor Edwards, an attorney she’d met when they’d bought a house a few miles from Rollins Estate, had always seemed to know just what to say when Mom got especially neurotic over me. Even in the years before my recent birth, neuroticism had always been a part of her personality.

      Early in my eleventh year, Dad told her after she’d almost had a nervous breakdown over me using words bigger than I should have for my age, “He’s Cole. Everything is always going to be more complicated with him than any other kid.”

      I had taken it as an insult at the time and had forgotten it shortly thereafter, but it hadn’t been a jab at my personality, it had been the truth.

      For the first time ever, I decided to go against the rules. I wasn’t allowed out of the house after dark. Tonight, I needed air.

      The night air. The breeze blowing through my hair. Twigs breaking under my feet as I walked. Or ran.

      I needed to run.

      I padded softly down the corridor to the stair well. Though the house was gargantuan in size, the walls seemed to close in. All I could think about was outside.

      It was odd, but when I was outside, all the stomach churning, nausea, and feeling caged in alleviated as soon as I took a deep breath. For the last fourteen days, I had come outside at night when the thoughts of Allie made me tremble and my stomach feel as though it had been turned inside out. I thought it was those weird hormones so many other kids talked about and that we were being taught about in school, but tonight there was more than hormones at work inside me.

      Uncontrollable trembling and a throbbing ache in my joints had begun around the same time Allie had started developing and budding in places. I tried not to stare, thinking it had merely been a reaction to seeing her change.

      Tonight, the fire that ran through my veins and the strength that felt as though it could explode like fireworks out of my muscles at the thought of her was different. Amazing, but different.

      I was powerful.

      Dangerous.

      And very unable to sleep with such an adrenaline rush.

      The trembling intensified and a strange pain originated in my joints.

      Whoa. That was more than uncomfortable.

      More changes took place.

      Both my arms stretched, and my spine grew longer.

      I clenched my eyes against the next wave of pain.

      My skin seared as it stretched over the new shape of my bones.

      This was not puberty. “Mom!” I thought-yelled.

      “I’m on my way. Keep thinking. I’ll find you.”

      “I’m pretty sure you won’t. At least not in the way you left me. Why am I in the shape of a big … yep, I’m black. A black cat?” I hadn’t been angry at her or—wait. How many of the people in the house knew I was like this? A freak. Was that why they’d

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