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The pain didn’t stop, but the feeling of isolation, of being lost to everything but agony, receded. I began to hear sounds. Whispers that turned into shouts. It sounded like a battle.
After a while, the battle ended, and the pain began to fade. Good. No pain is good, I thought.
Del’s voice came again, louder. “I said slow your blood, your breathing, you squirrely girl! You’ve got shit to do. Focus!”
FOCUS!
I tried. I honestly did.
But it was so hard… and then it got harder. A deeper voice called out to me, a command I couldn’t resist. SHIFT.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what that meant. But my body knew. It meant pain.
I felt myself begin to tear, as if all my limbs were connected by loose seams that had suddenly lost the binding threads. My legs tore away from my torso, bending, breaking, followed by my arms. My nose and mouth and chin split, and I tried to scream, but my throat had torn in two, and was regrowing in a new shape. My ears stretched, grew, lengthened, heard more. Breathing, voices I knew, surrounded me.
God, she’s beautiful.
Smallest wolf I’ve ever seen.
She’s not healing.
She has to shift back.
Now!
The deep voice boomed again. SHIFT.
The tearing reversed, the strings reappearing around my limbs and stitching me back together with threads of fire, of lava. Melting my whole body into a shape that felt like it was too small to hold the pieces that had been torn away. I tried to resist.
SHIFT.
Shift yourself! I wanted to yell. I didn’t know who that goatsucker was, but if I ever got to meet him, I would punch him in the jaw so he couldn’t torture me with this shift nonsense.
I wanted to curse. Instead, I felt my mind twist, as if it were trying to exit through my ears. Then the places on my neck and skull that Trevor had savaged began to burn like acid had been poured on them.
Toadfucker probably gave me rabies. Goddamn motherfucking cockmuffin. I’d tear off his tiny little limp dick and stuff it in his nostril, if it wasn’t so small it’d fall out…
I panted, wondering why I could hear laughter.
Laughter? Was someone laughing at my pain? I didn’t care if I was dead, I wasn’t going to lie still and listen to that.
I opened my eyes and saw the moon shining, heavy and full, above me. I wasn’t dead. Lifting a hand to my face, I felt for my nose, my chin, all the parts I was sure had been taken from me.
I was whole.
I staggered to my feet. I was drunk, too. Or something like it. I tilted to one side, watching the ground rush toward my face. But it stopped when something caught me.
Something that thrummed and surged with energy, heat. I grabbed hold of it, leaned to smell it. It smelled like the ocean, and citrus… exactly how I imagined those beach cocktails I’d once seen in a magazine might taste. I licked my lips, suddenly thirsty. Maybe I’d died and gone to paradise.
If it was Heaven, the cocktail would be real. I gave it a lick to see. Yummy as fuck.
Yep, this is paradise.
Laughter again. I swung out with one arm. “Who’s laughing? If that’s Trevor, give me a damned second and I’ll… I’ll…” I had no idea how to finish that sentence.
The ocean citrus arm that had been holding me pulled me in tighter and spoke into my ear with a voice that gave me chills. “You’ll tear off his tiny dick and stuff it in his nostril, right?”
I blinked, and suddenly the world came into clearer focus, although everything was too sharp somehow, and my face was turned to the ground so all I saw was dirt. But every single particle of dirt was outlined, like I was viewing it through a microscope, somehow.
