Aiden grabs his phone. “I’m gonna order pizza. You want anything?”
My nose wrinkles. “Human food is disgusting.”
He laughs. “You say that about everything I eat.”
“Because it is true. Your water tastes like chemicals. Your meat comes wrapped in plastic. Nothing is fresh.” I wave a hand at the bathroom. “I watched you brush your teeth with water from a pipe this morning. That water has been sitting in metal tubes for days. You put it in your mouth.”
“It’s treated water. It’s clean.”
“It is dead water. Water should come from rivers, from rain, from the earth. Not from pipes.”
Aiden shakes his head. “And you eat raw antelope.”
“It is food. Fresh meat that was alive an hour before I ate it, not sitting in a refrigerator for a week wrapped in plastic like a corpse in a coffin.”
“Jesus, Kojo.”
“You asked.”
He taps at his phone, shaking his head. “One large pepperoni. If you change your mind, there’s plenty.”
I will not change my mind. Pizza smells like grease and processed tomato and fake cheese. In my village, we ate what we killed, blood still warm, the life force still passing from prey to predator. Everything here is dead and packaged and old. The humans call it convenience. I call it an insult to the animals who died for it.
They do not understand, my Bouda says.They have been separated from the hunt for so long they have forgotten what real food tastes like.
Aiden finishes ordering and cracks open a beer from the mini fridge. He offers me one out of habit, even though he knows the answer.
“Water,” I remind.
He grabs a bottle from the fridge and tosses it to me, then settles back on his bed with his beer, eyes on the television. Shifters only drink water. Our bodies reject everything else. Aiden learned this the hard way when he pushed for me to try a beer our first week together and I vomited on his shoes.
A new show has started. A man in a suit is talking to a woman in a sparkly dress, and they are both smiling too much. Fake smiles. Humans make that face when they want something.
“This one’s about finding love,” Aiden says.
“Do they find it?”
“Never. They pretend to, and then they break up three weeks after the show ends. It’s all theater.”
Humans mate for theater?my Bouda asks, confused.What is the point of that?
I have no answer. Human mating rituals make no sense to me. They date and break up and date again, cycling through partners like they are trying on clothes. Shifters do not work that way. We have one fated mate, chosen by Mother Fate before we are born. We spend our lives waiting to find them, and when we do, we stay with them until death.
Or we die alone, never having found them at all.
We watch together. The snow falls harder outside, visible through the gap in the curtains. The fake couple on the television is kissing now, and Aiden is making gagging sounds around his beer. I will miss this. Sitting in silence with a man who does not expect me to talk. A friend who filled the empty space when I had nothing left.
The knock comes thirty minutes later. Aiden gets up, grabs his wallet, heads for the door. I keep watching the television.
Then the scent hits me.
My Ridge snaps upright beneath my shirt, every spike calcifying before my brain catches up to what my body already knows. The television noise drops away. The room shrinks to nothing but the crack under the door and what is coming through it.
It slips through that crack, cutting through the motel’s smell of bleach and old dust. My nose isolates it. Tracks it. It is the smell of the first storm hitting the plateau. That heavy, electric scent of rain-washed earth slamming into sun-baked red clay. The smell of home.
What is that?My Bouda is alert now, every trace of laziness gone.
Underneath the damp earth, there is the honey. Wild honey, raw and golden, like my mother used to harvest from the hives. That scent does not exist in Michigan. Especially not tonight.