motions became more frantic, his determination to cross increased. Even if she no longer wished to see him, he had to speak with her, if only to thank her for her courtesy, the first ever shown him in his long, long life. And it was only when the water reached his chest that he understood her warning, because the greedy current snatched him away. He stretched his hands out to her, and she ran. In despair, he prepared to give himself to the river. But then he saw she wasn’t running away, but running alongside the river bank, keeping pace with him even as the current played with him like a lion with a brace of hares.
And when the river finally tired of him, he was so exhausted he would have sunk beneath the water save for the woman who had kept pace with him all the day, and now swam out to him and took him in her arms and tugged him back to shore.
After his ordeal, the man fell into an exhausted sleep, and when he awoke, he feared the woman had been a fever dream. But she was still there and smiled at him. And he looked at her and knew her, as she knew him, and they were together for all of their lives and raised many fine strong cubs together, for he was a good hunter, having hunted for himself all his life, and she was a fierce mother and gave him fearless cubs.
And when death finally came for them, it came as a swift, sweet river, but these waters were gentle and bore them away together, and wherever the river brought them, they are still there, together.
* * *
“Well! That was…” Lila trailed off. “I’m not sure what you want from me right now.”
“I just think it’s interesting that every culture has legends about soul mates. And that’s our version.”
“Okay.”
“But there’s another version where the man is a Shifter, and the woman he sees across the river is a Stable. And he swims to her and they become the Adam and Eve of Shifters, with all the fine qualities of both. If they hadn’t mingled the bloodlines, both their species would have died out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which is silly. Obviously we’re simply a different branch of evolution.”
“Like Homo erectus and Neanderthals,” she suggested.
“Right. It’s just a story. But sometimes you meet someone and you instantly connect with them, don’t you know? And it’s overwhelming and strange and wonderful all at once.”
“I’m desperately afraid to ask where you’re going with this.”
Macropi spread her hands. “I’m just saying that it happens, whether you call it a crush or a soul mate or Kama-Rupa. Sometimes you meet the exact right person at the exact right time. Even if you don’t know it, the universe does.”
Lila (barely) held back her snort. “I’m not swimming the widest river Oz has ever seen—which would be the Mississippi, I’m assuming—no matter how attracted I am to him. That’s all it is, y’know. You’re talking about soul mates and connections and crushes, but you left lust off that list. Which, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, is what it is.”
“Oh, yes,” Macropi agreed. “But you’re one in one hundred, Lila. And so is my Oz. All I’m saying is, sometimes strangers are brought together for reasons even they don’t understand. Both versions of Kama-Rupa are about lonely people who will die alone if they don’t find their physical and spiritual counterpart.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Macropi brightened. “But in the second version, meeting the right person didn’t just save their lives, it birthed an entirely new dominant species. So you have to ask yourself, ‘What am I missing in my life? What’s the thing that is slowly killing me that Kama-Rupa is trying to fix?’”
“Again: Jesus Christ! Look, this has been weird and interesting, like every other thing this week, and I guess butting in is your prerogative as the neighborhood mother figure, but I’m not Oz’s Kama, or his Rupa, or his Karma Chameleon, or whatever you want to call it.”
Macropi shrugged and smiled. “As you like, dear.”
“So to get allllllll the way back to what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place, in return for me not taunting Garsea too often about her Honey Bear nickname, you were gonna tell me about Shakopee.”
Macropi’s smile disappeared. “Oh.”
“That killed all the fun in the room, didn’t it?”
“Just a bit, yes. But.” She spread her hands. “A deal’s a deal.” She leaned against the counter, folded