Since caves weren’t exactly easy to spot from the air, and if he had to sleep outside, he might as well have stayed in the freezer, he broke into an isolated barn. Well, he had to squeeze through the big double doorway—with a belly full of deer he couldn’t change either his size or into skin—but, technically, nothing broke. The barn smelled of cattle, probably rounded up and taken off the high pastures with the end of summer if Heartland could be trusted to have slid a few facts in under the angst. He only watched Heartland because Charlie watched it and Charlie only watched it because she knew one of the writers and the two of them agreed that no way Caleb should’ve divorced Ashley. He shoved two big round bales of hay against the walls out of his way, and curled up with his chin on a third. Protected from the wind, his body heat soon got the barn up to an almost comfortable temperature. Wrapped around the place he and Charlie overlapped, he drifted off to sleep.

“Hey, you.”

Jack knew he was dreaming. Not because the Charlie facing him was his age, or, at least, well within his seven-year break, all army boots and attitude and blue/black hair, but because the connection he still felt didn’t lead to her. For all she looked and sounded like Charlie, he couldn’t even count it as wish fulfillment because it wasn’t Charlie. He sat up, still in scales, putting them eye-to-eye as she walked one of the barn’s beams. “Go away. I don’t want you.”

“Too bad.” Arms out, she pivoted at the end of the beam and headed back, dust motes dancing around her like Pixies. “You can have me. You can’t have her.”

“You can’t tell me what I can’t have.”

“Yeah, dude, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“If you want to be a Gale, you have to follow this one rule. You can’t have her.”

Tail out for balance, he reared. “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want to be a Gale!”

“If you’re not a Gale, you can’t have her.”

“Stop saying that.” His wings slammed into the walls. The walls shook. “She’s not something to have.”

“Okay, fine.” A dismissive flip of blue/black hair. “She can’t have you. Works out the same either way. Big fucking hole in both your hearts that’ll never be filled.”

“Stop it!”

“You can’t be together.”

“Shut up!”

“No way, no how.”

“Shut up!”

She burned, fat crackling, skin peeling in blackened strips. Smiling, not screaming.

She smelled like pork.

His mouth watered.

And he woke up, clutching at his connection to Charlie.

It hadn’t changed.