“I’ll be right back,” Jace said, and that time he grabbed the car keys before heading out the door.
Marc unwound the gauze from my arm gently, and I didn’t brave a look until it was bare.
“Oh, shit!” I whispered. I looked more like Franken-stein’s monster than the Mummy. All I need now is a bolt through my neck…
Marc rubbed my back, and I leaned into his touch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it…neater. Hopefully there won’t be permanent muscle damage, but it’s gonna scar.”
Yes, it would. A long, jagged gash ran nearly the length of my left forearm, my swollen skin held together with suture thread and a prayer. When I held my arm parallel to the floor, the new wound resembled an erratic heartbeat on a hospital monitor. Or a small, bloodcrusted range of mountains.
I shrugged and blinked back tears. Enforcers weren’t supposed to have smooth skin, anyway, right? “Don’t worry about it. I doubt Dr. Carver could have done any better. Besides, it looks bad-ass, right?” I forced a teary smile, and Marc returned it.
“Without a doubt.”
“Figures, though. My most obvious scar is from falling through a fucking deer stand, instead of fighting some ferocious foe.”
Marc laughed. “So we make up a story. You were defending a huddle of innocent orphans from some psycho with a broken steel pipe. He caught you across the arm, right before you kicked his ass back to his padded room.” He smiled, gold specks sparkling in his eyes.
My heart melted. “I love you.” I leaned forward and kissed him.
He smiled. “I know.”
“I wanna Shift at least once before Jace gets back. Can you help?”
“Of course.” Marc held my elbow to steady me while I sank to my knees on the rough carpet. Holding my breath, I pulled my stitched left arm to my chest and tugged the towel free. It fell to the carpet, and Marc pulled it out of the way. My arm hurt, but not like it had hurt before. Closing the wound had helped, at least a little.
Careful of my broken wrist, I brushed the fingers of my right hand gently across the new stitches. My left arm felt oddly numb, with only an echo of the pain I should have felt. And the chemical smell was stronger up close.
“What’s on my arm?”
“Benzocaine,” Marc said. “It’s a topical anesthetic. Normally you shouldn’t use it on such a large area, or on an open wound. But technically yours is closed now, and I thought Shifting might be easier this way. It dulls pain in your skin, but won’t affect your muscles or movement at all.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank Jace. He got it from the convenience store next door.”
Oh.
“Okay, I’m ready.” Except that I couldn’t support weight with my broken wrist. “Crap. Suggestions?”
“On your side.” Marc shrugged. “It’s awkward, but it’ll work. I had to do that after I broke my arm a couple of years ago. Of course, I wore the cast for three weeks first.…”
I stared at him in surprise. “You broke your arm?”
“Some asshole swung a two-by-four from around a corner while Vic and I were trying to corral him. You were at school.”
I’d been at school for five years and had rarely called home. And even when I had, I hadn’t asked about Marc, because I hadn’t wanted to encourage him. I’d thought I was done with the Pride—that I would graduate, then get a job in the human world and live a normal life.
Turns out there are several different definitions of normal, and now I couldn’t imagine living in a world in which the daily grind included little pummeling and almost no face smashing.
“You hit him back?” I asked, and Marc grinned.
“With my other fist. Broke his jaw.”
“Damn right.” I smiled, and his hand found my elbow again, helping me lower myself to the ground. I lay on my right side and stared at the bathroom door as Marc backed away, giving me space.
I hadn’t Shifted since the night Kevin Mitchell had broken my arm nearly two weeks earlier, so I felt more than a bit overdue. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet hit the point at which not Shifting would damage my health.I closed my eyes and let my head rest on the floor, then inhaled through my nose—and immediately regretted it. I hated Shifting indoors, and especially hated Shifting in motels. Instead of the scents of pine needles, ferns, and fresh creek water—which long-term habit had taught my body to use as signals to begin the process—I got chemical cleaning products, and all the disgusting odors they hadn’t been able to kill. Cigarette smoke, stale takeout, and bodily fluids I didn’t even want to imagine.
Springs creaked as Marc sank onto one of the beds, and I resisted the urge to look at him. For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t want to Shift, because I knew it would hurt. And that I’d have to do it over and over again.
I’d never considered how necessary the actual desire to Shift is to the process itself, until I finally found myself faced with the lack of it. I sighed, frustrated.
“What’s wrong?” Marc asked, and I answered without looking at him, trying to keep the distractions at a minimum.
“I’m truly dreading the pain. Does that make me sound like a total wimp?”
He laughed. “It makes you sound like an enforcer. No one else would even consider Shifting with a broken wrist and thirty-seven stitches in a massive gash on her other arm.”
“I wish I weren’t considering it, either.”
“Okay, think about it like this…” Marc slid off the bed and sat beside me on the floor. He started rubbing my back, and I began to relax almost instantly. He always had that affect on me—when we weren’t yelling at each other. “If you don’t Shift, we can’t get to Lance, and Kaci’s going to die.”
I stared at him in horror, waiting for the punch line that never came. He wasn’t joking. “Yeah. No pressure.”
Marc cringed. “Wrong approach?”
I shook my head, and my scalp scraped the carpet. “Nope, right on target.”
“Good. I have another one.” He was smiling now. “If you don’t Shift, you don’t get to kick any Appalachian Pride ass. How’s that?”
“Better…” I smiled. “Say it again.”
“Shift, and you get to kick the shit out of any of Malone’s boys who get in your way.”
My smile became a grimace of pain. The Shift had begun.
Marc backed away as the initial wave of agony rippled out from my spine and over my upper arms and legs. My limbs convulsed, and I lay on the floor in a paroxysm of pain, unable to speak. Barely able to think. I’d never Shifted on my side before, and was surprised by how much the process differed with no weight bearing down on my changing parts.
My legs retracted toward my stomach. My arms folded up to my chest, and an inarticulate, guttural sound of agony erupted from my throat.
That wasn’t just Shifting pain. That was rebuilding pain.
My body was tearing itself apart, joint by joint, ligament by ligament, and in the process of putting itself back together—albeit in a new form—it would heal much faster than it would have without the transition. But in addition to the typical pain of the process, my broken radius was being stretched and pulled. The bones in my arms and wrists narrowed and elongated as they reformed. The pain was like nothing I’d ever felt before, including the gash in my other arm.
Evidently ten days in a cast isn’t enough to heal a broken bone. Let’s hope half a dozen Shifts are.…
My teeth ground together until I forced my jaw to relax, afraid I might crack it. I tried to let the pain take over, to let the change choose its own course through me, as I’d learned to do more than a decade earlier. But the agony in my arms—particularly the right one—was unbearable, and I found myself resisting the transition in my broken wrist, while everything else went according to the usual plan.
My back arched. My ball joints cracked in and out of their sockets. I moaned as my pelvis contorted to accommodate a quadruped’s stance and posture. My mouth fell open out of habit when the Shift flowed over my head, creating new bulges and hollows in my face. Repositioning my eyes for a predator’s vision. I gasped as my jawbone undulated with the lengthening of my blunt human teeth into longer, deadly curved points. Hundred of tiny barbs sprouted in a wave across my tongue, arcing toward my throat, so that I could now lick a bone clean of all edible tissue.
For several minutes, my body pulled itself apart and reassembled the pieces in my new shape, but the familiar licks of pain from my joints and restructured musculature never eclipsed the acute agony in my right arm. Toward the end, the soles of my feet and the palm of my left hand thickened and bulged into paw pads. My nails lengthened and hardened into sharp claws.
But my stubborn right wrist remained mostly human. I was stalled there, and my fur would not come.
“Finish it, Faythe.…” Marc murmured, careful to keep his distance. I wasn’t much danger to him at the beginning of my Shift, but I now had canines and three sets of deadly claws. If I lost control and he got in the way, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. “Let it come. You can’t finish until you let your arm Shift.”
I know! I growled, but if he understood, he showed no sign.
“Do you really want to have to throw all your punches with your southpaw? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to throw some resisting son of a bitch’s head back with your right fist? You can’t do that until it heals. Let it heal, Faythe.”