And that is how I came to be adopted as a pet of sorts by Angela... learned how to fly through her help... well and the golden retriever.
somehow we had eventually developed a bond of sorts...

I guess eventually when you are always stuck together, seeing that Angela spent most of the day in college... it was either we got along or we got along.

My new life was a welcome relief, I mean with a human looking out for me, one could almost argue that I had avoided the mortality threat.
I could almost forgive the fact that months after my reincarnation I still hadn't found any golden finger.

Well... almost

Even though life was fun with a pretty girl and a dog on a ranch... and what's more, we could actually have conversations and all, I often found myself just as bored as before when she left for college.
The days were long.

Angela was in her second year at Harvard. I don't know why or how, but now I was certain that the place had a knack for accepting only the very best oddballs.

I had this hunch as a human; now as a raven, I had asserted it.

Take Angela as a case study.

My makeshift nest happened to be in her bedroom, which in itself was another matter.
I mean to her I might be just a stray, 'cute' raven chick she had saved, but in truth, I was a damn man.
So yes, the whole arrangement was as weird as hell.

I mean, I got to watch her strip, shower, and walk naked in her room as well as... well, a hell of a lot of things.
Not that I was complaining...

I mean, she was well-trimmed, and I suppose I could just have told her the truth.

The thing is, she was likely to throw me back where I came from. Try telling any woman that there was some dude inside a raven and see the result for yourself.

But I digress...

you see Angela, despite her beauty and Harvard class brilliance, was downright weird.

Her room was a mess of cutouts and charts and diagrams pinned on her walls.

All this stuff made little sense to me:

names and pictures pinned on some board, some marked with an X, some marked with 'missing' or a question mark, and others with an exclamation mark.

It took me careful study when she was off to school to figure out that she was somehow researching some sort of incidents that were happening in both the university, Cambridge, and the entire Middlesex County.

It appeared that some individuals, mostly college students, had been disappearing or ending up dead in controversial ways.
While I was in the process of examining her work something I least expected happened.

I had just stepped on one of the cutout images that she had left on her desk as I tried to read the notes she had attached along with it when suddenly I found myself fully dressed and towering on top of the workspace.

For a while, I stood transfixed as I tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.
But what had happened was quite simple, and its simplicity was the complex bit.

I was a freaking human.

I mean, I always was a human... but not in this life... in this life, I was a raven, so how the hell was I now wearing some tight ragged jeans and a basketball jersey?

The madness did not end there, though.

Standing in front of Angela's dressing mirror, I was even more perplexed on realizing who I had become.
Memory was one thing that came easily to ravens and crows.

Hastily I reached towards the image cutouts that I had been reviewing earlier, and I gasped when I confirmed it.

I was a complete replica of the youthful face of a Harvard college student that Angela had marked as missing.

What the actual hell!

Could this now be the cheat I had been waiting for?... And if so, what exactly was so special about it?

... As far as I could see, he was just a plain normal guy...

But then something occurred to me.

Tossing aside the first guy's image, I grabbed another one, this time it was one of an older guy whom Angela had marked with a question mark.

Barely ten seconds elapsed before the image of the young man with the basketball jersey disappeared, and in its place, I now stood as the old guy with a loose-fitting brown suit.

'Fuck the ravens.'

I could not withhold my excitement as I grabbed image after image and watched myself morph from one person to another. At the same instance, my mind was running wild with the possibilities this new gift presented.

It was certainly not the most potent ability one could ask for, but if used creatively, it could outdo anything I could think of. What was even more special was that it now granted me the ability to live and interact with humans as one of them.

I was a freaking shapeshifter.

Judie lay on the floor barking as she watched me with accusing eyes as I shifted from one form to another.

Well, it was a lucky thing that Angela could not understand a thing she said...

I was not yet ready to reveal it to her, partly because I think there was a huge reason our paths had crossed.

Not that I am psychic, but as I moved from one life to another, I had come to understand that rarely anything happens by coincidence... most things are carefully laid out in our fates, but good luck trying to convince a human with that.

I mean, people don't like to hear that they are not in control of their lives. I don't know how, but I just had a gut feeling that whatever Angela was working on had a lot to do with me. Reaching towards the board where she had laid out her research carefully, my excitement toned down and in its place was a calm resolve as I inspected her work.

It was then that I conceded that I could no longer spend carefree days here with a dog and a college girl.
I would have to leave.

We could still see each other... sometimes in my raven form and sometimes... well, as one of the billion people who roamed the earth.

Whatever form I would be in... I would be indebted to her.