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It's April, not long after her thirteenth birthday, when Denice notices her first familiar. She doesn't familiarize him right away; the fluffy black cat is clearly busy, stalking through the underbrush after some unseen prey, and Denice has no way of getting his attention through the glass, or at least not without attracting more attention herself than she can afford. But he's out there; the felt sense of oh, that one is just like the stories say. He'll be back, probably. It's more hope than Denice has had in a long time, anyway.
Two weeks pass before she manages to familiarize the cat. Most of it is waiting to be noticed; she seems just as interesting to the cat as he does to her, once she's spotted. The rest turns out to be much easier than she was expecting: all stories say that you need to touch your familiar to complete the familiarization process, but actually it's trying to communicate to him that he needs to stay away from this window during the day that brings on the warm sense of companionship and, unluckily, improved hearing.
It's fine, though, it's fine, she'll need to find a second familiar to truly escape, but she's free, now, in a very real way; she can sit on the couch or lie in bed and drift away from her surroundings, seeing the world through her new familiar's eyes with no one the wiser.
That only mostly works. The staff don't guess that she's found a familiar - and they wouldn't, she's been presenting as pig-spirited for years now and there are no pigs anywhere nearby - but they do figure out that something is wrong, and they can't make her stop but they can make themselves harder to ignore, changing her drugs around and tying more of her meal allotment to her compliance with their demands. Her new familiar becomes obsessed with hunting and scavenging, trying to ease the hunger he doesn't understand the cause of; she learns to soothe him across their bond, trying to reassure him that while the felt hunger isn't pleasant, they aren't in danger, merely in discomfort.
It works out in the end, though. His new obsession sends him farther afield, into territories he'd usually avoid, and it's in this roaming that he meets another cat, a lanky grey female, and while he isn't as interesting to her as she is to Denice - which is common enough, and won't stop Denice from adding her to their group - she is willing to follow him back to the institution, with Denice prompting him the whole way.
It's early July, then, by the time she familiarizes her second cat, gaining the other two types of mammalian magic in the process - telekinetic digging and a slow but powerful healing ability - as well as the ability to fully shapeshift into a cat. She doesn't stay long in the institution after that, waiting only until the night shift has settled in at their stations to assume her sleek grey kitten form, claw a careful six-inch tear down the edge her window screen, and wiggle out to join her familiars in body and not just in mind.
Being a cat goes well for Denice. She has to learn how, of course, but her familiars are happy to show her how to hunt and where to find water and what smells and sounds mean dangerous predators, and soon enough she's using her magic to find mouse holes that she can dig up to send the rodents into her familiars' waiting claws; they're a bit confused at it - the familiar bond does go both ways, so they can see what she's thinking, but it'll take them some time to make sense of it - but that doesn't make the tactic that much less effective at getting them all dinner. She puts on weight slowly - being a stray cat is a lot of work - but she does start to put it on, little by little, and her fur gets sleek and glossy.
And then something goes wrong: over the course of no more than a couple hours she goes from healthy to nauseous and weak, almost too weak to breathe properly, certainly too weak to travel like her grey familiar wants her to.
The black one stays close when the grey one finally goes off on her own, hoping to bring a human back to help; Denice tries to explain to him how to activate their healing power, but he hasn't seen it in use enough to understand what she wants, at least not without a better explanation than she has the strength to come up with right now. He stays with her, at least, and that's a comfort.
She's still alive when her familiar makes it back, leading a parrot-shaman to their nest. "Oh, honey," he croons to her when he gets a look at Denice, "is that your baby? I'm the wrong kind of shaman for this but I'll see what I can do." And he picks Denice up and tucks her into his shirt, and takes her away.
It's all a bit of a whirlwind at the vet's office, as they get her a warm blanket and IV line and draw blood for testing while she tries to keep breathing. It's very different from back at the institution - not that she's any less trapped, but there's no pretense about it, no hidden back rooms for decisions to be made in; when the tech runs her blood sample through the machine to check that she's not a familiar, there's nothing to stop her from overhearing.
"Hey Sandra?"
"Yeah?"
"The familiar scan, it's three for cats and seven for cat familiars, right?"
"...yeah..."
"What would like a twenty mean?"
"Uh, a shaman I think? Or that you used the wrong activator. Why?"
"...oh, you know what, I did grab the wrong one. Thanks."
"No worries, just make sure it goes back in the right spot this time."
"Will do."
Denice has scrambled to the back of the cage by the time the tech comes back over to peer into it, the wide-set floppy white dog ears she's wearing giving her a surprisingly regal look - Pyrenees, Denice guesses, which is about as good of news as a species presentation can be, but in any case not good enough to stop her from panicking about being found out.
"Hey, kiddo, calm down, I'm not going to tell anybody. You're Denice, right?"
The base of her tail fluffs out like a bottlebrush, involuntarily, as the edges of her vision start to darken.
"Okay. Well, we'll take care of you, and I'll get you back to my house when my shift is up, and we'll go from there. Just try to relax, okay? Your secret's safe with me, guard dog's honor."
Denice doesn't have anything further to say to that; her vision goes dark entirely, and she faceplants into her blanket.
When she comes to again she's not in a cage anymore, but resting on a piece of sheepskin on the tech's chest with her hand laid very gently on her back; her entire body hurts, and she wants to go back to sleep, but the tech notices the tension in her muscles and speaks to her.
"Hey, kiddo. You need to shift back, all right? You've got spalosizoonosis, it's a tick disease, and we'd usually be able to fix it but I don't think we can this time. Humans don't get it, though, so just shift back human and you'll be all right."
She's so tired. She hurts so much. And if she shifts back nothing will ever be all right again.
"Kiddo, I'm not sure you're going to make it through the night this way. We can figure something out once you shift, okay, I'm not going to tell anyone I found you, I won't make you go back."
She thinks about it. Does she want to die? Not really, she guesses. It's hard to care while she's so sick. Can she shift back? ...she's not sure she remembers how, exactly. It went... something like this, maybe? ...no, that's not doing it. Like this? ...no. She's so tired. Maybe she'll just sleep, and try again when she wakes up.
That is, as it turns out, not how it goes.