“Does it feel like you’ve hit a wall?” he asked me.
“Yeah, a brick one.”
“Then you’ve reached the end of your transformation.”
“So I do what now? Rewind?”
“Try out the hand,” he invited me.
“How?”
Luke looked around the room and his eyes fell on a bowl of fruit. He grabbed an apple, turned to me, and held it up in front of him. “Try to catch this.” He tossed it to me and I swiped it from the air. I didn’t know my own strength because the hard fruit squished in my hand and apple juice ran down my arm.
“Ugh. You could have warned me about that,” I growled at him.
“Practice is the best teacher,” he argued.
“So I should fire you?”
“Do you want to learn this on your own?”
“No. . .”
“Then I recommend I stay on as your teacher.” I cleaned myself up and he grabbed another apple. “Try to slice this one as it flies toward you,” he suggested. There was the windup, the toss, and in the blink of an eye my claws swung down on the apple. The fruit was cut to ribbons and I was again covered in its juicy, sticky guts when it flew into my shirt.
“I’m starting to see a pattern with me and fruit. Maybe we should try something else before I attract flies,” I quipped.
“All right, let’s try reversing the process. Return your arm to its human form,” he instructed me.
“So do everything, but in the reverse?”
“Exactly, and imagining your human hand instead of your wolf paw.”
“I’ll try.” I closed my eyes and focused on my old hand. Nice, smooth skin that didn’t look like it needed a shave. Manicured nails that couldn’t cut fruit into snack-size. Fingers that were kind of short and stubby and-
-not appearing. I didn’t feel any of that changing magic happening, so I opened my eyes and saw my still-transformed paw. “Um, something’s wrong,” I told Luke.
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not changing back.”
“You’re not trying hard enough.”
“I tried as hard as I did to change it into a claw.”
“Try again.”
I nodded, closed my eyes, rinsed and repeated. I got the same results, but was now a little more panicked. My hand was still as furry, clawed, and definitely not human. “How do I get it off, Luke? It’s not coming off!” I yelled in my panicked voice.
“Becky, you don’t get it off. It’s your hand,” he reminded me. “Also, stay calm. This happens occasionally to those learning to transform.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Don’t make me use this clawed hand on you.”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
“And I would rather you tell me how to get it back to the hand type I can safely scratch myself with, but right now neither of us are getting what we want.”
“In this situation you only have two choices. Either fully transform or wait until your hand naturally changes back,” he told me.
“But I don’t know how to fully transform,” I reminded him.
“And I would rather you not do it inside Sanctuary. Fully transforming is also dangerous in that you could become stuck in the full werewolf form, or go even farther.”
“Even farther?” I repeated.
“To a complete wolf. It’s the risk every werewolf takes when they transform. In that stage the Beast completely takes over and you may never regain your human consciousness.”
“I’m starting to see this whole transforming thing as a curse.”
“It’s a responsibility,” he corrected me.
“Responsibility is a curse of adulthood,” I replied.
Luke sighed and stepped up to put his hands on my shoulders. “We’ll wait for you to transform back. I’ll be very surprised if it hasn’t happened in twenty-four hours.”
I cringed. “That long?”
“That long.”
“Fine, I’ll wait, but don’t expect me to be happy about it.”
23
That was a long twenty-four hours. I was stuck with a clawed hand, Alistair was unconscious on the bed wrapped like a mummy, and our enemies were out there plotting and planning. Stacy arrived after dinner, or rather with dinner. I was starved for something more than just the survivors of my chopped fruit exercise, and she provided us with meats, but not with any good news. She deposited the food on the table, plopped herself down in a chair and her eyes glanced at my clawed hand. “It looks like I wasn’t the only ones with problems this afternoon,” she mused.
“A temporary problem, but what did you learn out there?” Luke asked her.
Her face grew grim and she shook her head. “I went as far as his scent trail led me and I couldn’t sniff out a single smell other than his own.”
Luke forsook the food and stood close by the table. I didn’t wait for an invitation before digging in. Transforming was hard work. “Were there any tracks to follow?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No, the ground was swept clean of all tracks, even those left by the walkers along the path. Whoever Alistair ran into are very good at covering their activities.”
Luke frowned and strode over to the balcony door. He glanced through the glass out onto the moonlit deck and mountain below us. The sun had set a few hours before, and all was quiet in anticipation for the voting tomorrow morning. “If we only knew what they were planning,” he mumbled.
“If we knew that we’d be able to go to my father while he still retained the position of High Lord,” she pointed out. “As it is, we don’t have any proof anything suspicious has happened except for what Lance spoke about and Alistair here.”
I paused and frowned in mid-eating. “What did Lance talk about again? Something about stolen gunpowder?”
“Explosives, to be exact. Of the plastic variety,” Luke corrected me.
A horrible thought drifted into my mind, and I suddenly lost my appetite. “And he said somebody would try to blow this place up?” I squeaked.
Luke turned to me with a raised eyebrow. “Yes, why?”
I nodded at Alistair. “What if he found out who took it?” I suggested.
Luke and Stacy froze, and then they whipped their heads to each other. The looks of horror on their expressions told me I’d hit on an idea. One I wish I hadn’t. “Then Lance wasn’t lying?” Stacy gasped.
“Perhaps not as far as we assumed he had been,” Luke corrected her.
I raised my hand. “Can I be excused from this vote tomorrow? I think I hear my bed calling me back at Luke’s house.”
“This is no laughing matter,” Luke sharply scolded me. “We are dealing with-” -a knock on the door.
We all glanced at one another, and all of us shrugged in reply. Apparently none of us had ordered a pizza. “Who is it?” Luke called out.
“A message for an Alistair,” came the reply. It was a man’s voice, and sounded old and feeble.
“Written or verbal?” Luke asked him.
“Written.”
“Slide it under the door.”
“I’m afraid it’s too large, sir. It’s in an envelope. Can’t I hand it to you?” the voice pleaded. Luke growled under his breath and strode to the door. He opened it a crack, but the person on the other side was pushy. The delivery man shoved it open with his shoulder and knocked Luke back onto the floor. The stranger hurriedly stepped into the room, closed the door softly behind himself and pointed the barrel of a muzzled gun at the four of us. He was a wrinkle-faced old man with speckled hands and wore drab clothes two sizes to big for him. Luke raised himself onto his arms, but froze when the barrel turned on him. “The first to move dies,” the man warned. His voice had dropped forty years from the tone, and I recognized it from the train station in Wolverton.
“Alston!” I gasped.
The man grinned and bowed his head. “I thank you for remembering me, but another word and I will shoot you. I promise these bullets will hurt, they’re made from pure silver.” We all stiffened, and I tried not to breathe too deeply. Alston strode through us and over to Alistair. He sneered down at the unconscious man. “A bullet would have been more effective than a beating,” he mumbled.
Luke whipped his head around and growled at Alston. “So you’re the one who injured him.”
Alston tilted his nose up. “I wouldn’t have dirtied my hands with such an impractical method of ridding ones’ self of an annoyance, especially not when there are more than enough mindless volunteers to do the deed for us.”
I noticed Luke’s hand wrap around something on the floor. “Us? You mean Lance?” Luke asked him.
Alston chuckled. “This is really too much talking.” He aimed the gun at Alistair’s head.
“How do you intend to get away with this?” Luke asked him. “There’s three witnesses here and your scent-” Luke paused and his nostrils flared.
Alston grinned from ear to ear. “Neat, isn’t it? No scent, so you can accuse me all you want but there won’t be any proof.”
Luke scowled and threw something small and sticky at him, one of my leftover fruit slices, and it lodged itself up the barrel of his gun. Alston jerked back in surprise, and Luke took the chance to jump up and lunge toward the assassin. They collided and knocked into the wall beside Alistair’s bed. The gun dropped to the floor and was kicked away by their dancing feet as each of them sought to strangle the other one.