Page 38
The den stays quiet after Arlo leaves for Kael’s, but I can’t settle with it. His warmth is trapped in the fleece blanket under my arm, leather and coffee worked so deeply into the fabric that I smell him every time I breathe. I told him I was fine because I wanted him to leave without watching me like I might come apart, and the lie felt manageable while he was still standing in the doorway. Alone, it starts falling apart almost immediately.
A vibration has been building behind my skull since before breakfast, too steady to be a headache and too deep to rub away. Every time the hallway light flickers, the pulse seems to answer it. I press both palms into the rug and reach through the bond for Arlo, expecting the familiar sense of him somewhere else in Wolfscorge. He is there, but the connection is muffled enough that I have to reach harder than I should just to find him.
My animal instincts react before I understand why I’m scared, pushing hard beneath my skin while I force myself to stay human and name what is actually in the room. The den door is open, the dresser still blocks most of the window, and the shirts I stole from Arlo are piled where I left them. Nothing is touching me, and nothing has changed since he walked out. I repeat that until I look down at my hands and lose the next stretch of time.
When the room comes back, I’m standing in the kitchen with blood across my knuckles. Arlo’s heavy gray mug is shattered beside the refrigerator, one cabinet door hanging crooked from a hinge twisted almost free. I don’t remember leaving the den or hitting anything. Both my hands are split across the knuckles.
It happened again. The coyote comes back first: blood in the sink, mud on my clothes, an entire stretch of time I never got back. That time I could at least tell myself the shift had happened somewhere inside the blank space, that the bear had enough size and strength to explain what I found afterward. This time my shoulders are still human, my jaw still fits my face, and the blood across my knuckles came from my own hands. I didn’t even need claws to destroy something I can’t remember touching.
I reach for Arlo so hard through the bond that my chest hurts. His name forms inside me with nowhere to go, swallowed by the same muffled distance that has been there all morning. I cross the house checking doors and windows because I need something concrete to prove I didn’t leave, hurt somebody, or bring danger back with me. The front door is locked, the back is bolted, and nothing outside has changed, which leaves the worst possibility inside the house with me.
My knees give out in the hallway and I sit with my back against the wall until the shaking reaches my wrists. The Collective spent years telling me fur and claws were the dangerous part, that the animal side of me was what made me unfit to be trusted. Now I have broken Arlo’s kitchen in a human body and can’t remember doing it. The distinction they built every cage around suddenly means nothing.
The knock comes while I’m still staring at the blood drying over my knuckles. Arlo never knocks on his own door, and my animal instincts surge at the sound before retreating just as quickly, unwilling or unable to finish the shift. I stand because staying on the floor won’t keep whoever is outside from entering. Wolfscorge taught me a long time ago that a locked door only matters until somebody with a key decides it doesn’t.
The Doctor waits on the porch with two Council guards behind him. His white coat is too clean for the damp morning, and the chemical scent clinging to him cuts straight through the blood on my hands. He looks past me before he looks at me, taking in the damaged kitchen with the satisfaction of someone finding evidence exactly where he expected it. I put myself between him and the hall even before he steps forward.
“Orion, this is precisely the instability we were concerned about.” He walks inside without permission and looks over the broken cabinet, the ceramic on the floor, then my hands. “The Alpha’s presence is no longer sufficient to regulate the progression.”
“Arlo isn’t here.” My voice comes out rough but steady enough to use. “You don’t come into this house without him.”
The Council representative follows the Doctor inside and shuts the door as though the house belongs to them. “Your placement here is conditional. Mr. Maddox remains useful because the arrangement appears to stabilize you. If that stops being true, the Council has no reason to preserve either placement.” His tone never rises because he already knows Arlo’s name is enough.
I can picture the Doctor on the floor and both guards against the wall before the representative finishes speaking. Fighting them would be easy for a few seconds, and my hands already know where the first throat is. What comes after is Arlo walking home to alarms, bodies, and an excuse to take him somewhere I can’t follow. I force my fingers open one at a time.
“It was an accident.” The lie sounds pathetic beside the wreckage, but I hold the Doctor’s gaze. “I blacked out. I didn’t hurt anyone.”
He doesn’t bother pretending to believe the first part. Instead he opens his bag and removes a narrow silver cylinder sealed inside sterile plastic. “We have a suppression device for this stage of the trial. It dampens the autonomic pathways associated with the Feral response and should prevent further episodes like this.” His mouth shifts around the next word with clinical satisfaction. “It will make you manageable.”
Manageable used to mean sedated enough to strap down. Cooperative meant too drugged to fight, and stable meant useful to somebody else. I look at the device while the memory of the missing kitchen sits behind my eyes. “Will it stop the blackouts?”
“It will stop the dangerous response.” The Doctor points to the only chair still upright. “Sit down.”
Heat moves through my spine and my nails start to ache with the beginning of a shift. I almost let it come until the Council representative says Arlo’s name softly behind the Doctor, and my claws stop growing. I sit. One guard moves behind each shoulder while the Doctor tears open the sterile packaging, the plastic crackle loud enough that I can hear it over my own breathing.
The Doctor swabs the base of my neck with something cold. I jerk at the smell before the needle ever touches me because the same antiseptic lived in every room where they restrained me. One guard presses down harder when my shoulders start to widen, and the other catches my arm before my hand can change all the way. I feel the shift trying to tear through me while the Doctor says, almost bored, “Hold him still.”
“Get off me.” My teeth are already too large when I say it. The words drag around them, and one guard grunts when I twist against his hand. “I said get the fuck off me.”
“Mr. Maddox,” the Council representative says from behind them. He doesn’t add anything else. He doesn’t have to.
I go still enough for the needle to enter. Sharp pressure drives beneath the skin at the base of my neck and keeps going until my vision flashes white. My shoulders jerk wider, bones starting to change while the guards lock their hands down harder. For one second I can feel everything at once: claws, teeth, rage, Arlo distant through the bond, and the heavy animal pressure I have carried for so long that I stopped knowing where it ended and I began.
Then the connection disappears. I reach for my animal side instinctively and find nothing, so I try again harder, digging through the familiar place beneath my skin where there has always been an answer. Nothing comes back. The shift stops in the middle of my body and unwinds without me telling it to, my hands becoming fully human under the guards’ fingers.
“No.” I don’t know whether I say it aloud the first time. I search again and get the same empty space. Panic should rip through me, and for a few seconds it does, my lungs dragging too fast while I reach for something that is simply gone. Then even that begins to flatten until I can remember being terrified without being able to hold onto the feeling itself.
I know the guards are hurting me. I know there’s blood drying over my knuckles and metal under my skin that I never wanted there. My body does nothing with any of it.
“Stand,” the Doctor says after the guards release me. I stand because there is no reason not to, and when he orders me to shift, I search the empty place again even though I already know what I’ll find. “I can’t.”
The Council representative smiles at the Doctor. “Compliance without resistance.” They speak over me for several minutes, discussing dosage, observation windows, and what Arlo should record if the effect changes. I remain where they put me while one of the guards sweeps broken ceramic into a pile. Before the implant, watching him move Arlo’s things would have made every muscle in my body prepare to attack. Now I watch the broom scrape over tile and feel no more than awareness.
After they leave, I stay standing in the hallway until my legs start to ache. Nothing in me tells me to move, inspect the doors, retreat to the den, or listen for guards outside. Eventually the ache becomes inconvenient enough that I sit on the edge of the bed. That is where Arlo finds me when the front door opens sometime later.
He stops in the bedroom doorway and looks at my hands before my face. Concern strikes through the bond so sharply that I understand it should pull something from me. It doesn’t. “I’m coming closer,” he says, and waits until I nod before crossing the room to sit beside me.
“Did you hurt yourself during the blackout?” His eyes stay on my knuckles. “Tell me what happened to your hands.”
