Broken Elements Read Online Free PDF Page B

If they could procreate as males, why didn’t they do so as humans? The animals represented no threat to our way of life. We had no need to join with them.”
    Simon stretched across the back seat, leaning his head against the window and bracing his feet against the back of my seat. After taking several moments either to make himself comfortable, or to be certain he had my full attention—I suspected both—he decided I was in a state of sufficient suspense for him to continue. “We now know that elemental magic is matriarchal, though no one can say why. Perhaps it is as you say, and the mothers whisper their secrets to their children, though that seems more fanciful than probable. However, we did not always know this, and at first the originals assumed both male and female shapes. Once the females were pregnant, they remained in their human form. The men who shifted into human males had no reason to remain in that form. While they would undoubtedly have impregnated more females if they tried long and hard enough—”
    Sera snickered. “Well, there’s your problem. They needed to be long and hard if they were trying to have magic babies.” I was not going to smile at that. I was not. I turned my face to the window to hide my grin.
    “—the children that were born showed no signs of magical ability, and the original fathers did not choose to linger with the humans.”
    While I was surprised to hear this footnote from a story I thought I knew in great detail, it still didn’t explain why there was a half-man, half-cat taking up Sera’s entire back seat. Unless... “Wait. Are you telling me that they decided to have sex with animals, instead?”
    Sera laughed at my shocked tone, as the pieces finally clicked together for me. I suspected my face held a badly-concealed look of pure horror. Great-grandma had been right, after all. “Like I’ve always said, Ade—men can be dogs. In this case, quite literally.”
    “There is no need to be so puritanical. At the time, having sex with humans was as far beneath the originals as sleeping with animals. I am sure they did not make the same distinctions we would today. But after copulating with humans, it seems those who assumed a masculine shape rather enjoyed the process. They were reluctant to give it up altogether. For their needs, animals must have seemed superior to humans in many ways. They did not talk. They did not expect the originals to linger after the completion of the act. And, most importantly, shifter magic isn’t matriarchal, though, again, no one knows why. And in this way, the first shifters were born.”
    I didn’t miss the way he parroted my own words back to me. This was his origin story, just as the other was mine. His was just a little more... icky. And still possessing a few plot holes. “But you’re a human! At least some of the time.”
    “Of course. The originals had first formed themselves as men, and that memory lived through their seed. We are animal and human, and we are also magic.”
    “How is your magic still so strong? It’s been thousands of years since those first pairings, and yet you still change easily.”
    He shook his head. “Our magic is not strong. It is simple. Unlike you elementals, whose power is directly linked to the amount of magic in your veins, we do not possess power. We possess an ability, which seems to be coded into our very DNA. Shifters can do one thing: change into an animal and change into a human, and retain reasonably solid memories of their time in the other form. That is it.”
    It was going to take me a while to work through all this. Sera hadn’t been kidding about my understanding of the world being shaken up a bit. I felt like a scientist discovering a new species. A really bad scientist who was still a little squicked out by the idea of originals having sex with animals. “Wait. Are you telling me that one of the originals, one of my long-distant ancestors, screwed a house cat?” The thought was