I felt my neck heating up. “I’d just… never done it on purpose before. Or been aware of what was going on. Every other time was always just me panicking.” The heat spread. “I—I didn’t like the idea of losing control. So I think I fought it, and that…” I trailed off.
“Made it worse?” Elliot finished.
“Yeah, I think so.” My face was hot now.
“You don’t need to be embarrassed about that,” he said gently, accurately reading the flush of my skin.
I shrugged. “It—Noah never seemed to have the same fear of it. And you’re not.”
“I’ve been shifting for thirty years,” he reminded me. “And your brother transformed as a teenager, right?”
I nodded.
“So he’s got at least a decade or so of shifting, too.”
“I know,” I said. “But I lived with Noah when he first shifted.” I shuffled my feet, looking down at my toes. “It wasn’t like… me.”
“Well, I don’t have Lyme. Does Noah?”
“No,” I admitted.
“That might have something to do with it,” Elliot replied calmly. “If shifting hurts, when you first transformed, it might have increased your panic-response.”
I blinked. “What does that mean?” I asked him.
“When we’re shifted,” Elliot said, taking a loaf of bread and pulling out half the slices. “Especially when we’re just learning what we are and how it all works, we operate mostly on instinct. It’s why we’re fully feral when we first turn. Instinct takes over and the logical parts of our brains shut off.”
“We become animals,” I said.
“We’realreadyanimals,” Elliot replied, pulling turkey, cheese, and non-dairy cheese out of the fridge, along with mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickles, and onions. “Human beings can be just as feral as any non-human animal—or Nid,” he said pointedly. “The only difference is in strength and power of claws or teeth.”
“People don’t go feral,” I pointed out.
“The hell they don’t,” he retorted. “Berserkers, blood rage, fog of war, whatever you want to call it. How many homicide scenes have you worked? And you wanna tell me that people aren’t feral?”
He had a point.
I convinced him—oversandwiches and Doritos, the sweet chili ones for me, ranch for Elliot—that shifting wouldn’t actually be that bad of an idea. Running was much less painful in wolf form, and, God, thesmells. I understood, now, why dogs always wanted to smell everything… although maybe I’d draw the line at other people’s butts.
Maybe just Elliot’s butt. When he wasn’t looking.
It was his idea that this time we’d just go out in fur—no clothes to carry back, and both of us could go shifted. It would be the first time I saw Elliot as a badger, and that was making me oddly nervous. I’d seen him naked, he’d seen me naked, and he’d seen me shift, so I don’t know why the idea of seeing him as a badger made me anxious.
Maybe it bothered him, too, because he’d left the room to shift—and that made me feel self-conscious, so I went back into the room where I was sleeping, stripped down, then stood there naked, staring at the mirror on the back of the door.
There were a few new scars—some small ones that I didn’t remember getting and probably related to the hospital, the bite mark on my upper arm from Noah, the small punctures in my palms from my own claws—but nothing dramatic. Nothing like the swath of white that ran through Elliot’s hair.
I’d started to put back on a little of the massive amount of weight I’d lost in the hospital, but I could still see my ribs and hipbones to a degree that I’d never been able to before I’d gotten sick—even when Noah and I had been homeless and living in foster care and Hands and Paws housing, I’d been thin, but not hollowed out. And once I’d gotten into my twenties, I’d had a little bit of padding. A little softness on my belly, a little bulk in my shoulders and arms and at my waist.
Most of that was gone, now. As was most of the muscle that had been underneath it. My arms and legs felt thinner, weaker. My back hurt more, probably because the muscle that had helped me hold it straight had atrophied or been consumed by my body while I couldn’t keep down food even though my metabolism had ramped up.
I didn’t like the way it looked. I also didn’t like the way it felt—weak and awkward in a way that I hadn’t been before. I wanted my body to feel more like mine again. At least when I was shifted, everything was new. It feltbetterin that body thanthis one, even though neither one felt familiar. But it was less upsetting for a wolf’s body to feel strange than my human one. The one I’d supposedly been living in for the last thirty years, and which felt like it no longer belonged to me.
I sighed, then took out my contact lenses, then closed my eyes and tried to focus on my heightened senses—smell, hearing, taste—using them to draw the rest of myself into the shift, the tingle-turned-itching of fur growing, the tension of stretching bones, the pain of adjusting joints, the surge of saliva as my whole mouth reshaped itself to accommodate the longer, sharper teeth.
It wasn’t until I was in full wolf form that I realized I’d stupidly shut the damn door.
I really didn’t want to shift back just to open it.
