Chapter 22
22
ELLIOT CRANE
How do you feel today?
I hope you feel better soon.
Please let me know when you wake up.
Are you okay?
I hope you’re doing okay.
Please text me when you get this.
At least so I know you’re alive.
Please.
I didn’t see any of Elliot’s messages until they moved me into a real-ish room. Almost two weeks after he’d sent the first one. Almost a week after he’d sent the last one.
I’d made it a full twenty-four hours without a spontaneous shift, although I felt like I’d had the shit beaten out of me by a squad of elephants. I could hear everything . The sound of water in the pipes in the walls every time someone flushed a toilet. The sound of feet in the hallway and the sound of wind and trees outside. The occasional distant screams of terror and pain that were probably a lot like mine had been a few days ago.
After I hit the twenty-four hour mark, they moved me to a room with an actual bed, a nightstand, a window, a desk, and a chair.
The fact that I was now allowed furniture almost made me weep. It was also terrifying.
They’d brought me my glasses shortly after they moved me, and I was able to actually see more than a few feet in front of me, which told me that the reason my feet had looked funny was because they were scraped and bruised. I didn’t know if it was from shifting or from thrashing against the ground mid-shift. Not that it mattered.
Maybe I was done shifting, done ripping apart my own muscles and bones and skin and reforming them, only to stop halfway there and reverse. Reversing was the worst.
A few minutes ago, the elf nurse had come in with my phone and charger, then plugged it in for me.
I waited impatiently for it to turn on, then grabbed my phone and immediately dropped it on my own chest with a hiss of pain. My hands felt like they didn’t quite work, although they looked normal. “Normal.” Human. They looked human. Even if they no longer were.
It took four tries to unlock the phone.
Two to open the texting app.
I had the set from Elliot, a bunch from Quincy, and a few from Maza. I deliberately forced myself to read Elliot’s last, starting with Maza.
Hey Mays. I heard you got it bad. Ditto, although I’m on my way back out.
A few days later, he’d sent another one .
Maginot is working the case. I’ll update you if anything happens. Hope you feel better soon.
I wondered if anyone at the RPD or the lab knew that I’d shifted. The state of Virginia did, in fact, know, so it seemed likely that my new status had been communicated to my work, although whether they were sharing that with the people I worked with was a different question.
I wondered if Maza was still a normal human. Not that it was technically any of my business.
I sent him a message. Typing was a lot harder than I’d expected. Hi thanks for checking. Doing better. I wondered whether or not I should say anything.
Fuck it.
Shifted. Dont know how long itll be.
I sent it. Then I spent several minutes staring at the screen, wondering whether or not Dan Maza would ever speak to me again, which wasn’t fair of me at all, since he was friends with Hart, which suggested he wasn’t a bigoted asshole.
Dots appeared in the texting app.
You doing okay? Maza sent.
Better , I sent back. It was true—I was better . That didn’t mean I was okay .
No updates on the case, he told me.
I was trying to figure out what to say, when the dots appeared again.
You’re not the only one who came out of this changed, he sent, and my pulse escalated, which led to that horrible prickling all over my skin. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply, trying to force the shift back, push the fur back down, suck my own sharp teeth back into my jaw.
I’m sure that’s not at all how that actually worked, biologically speaking, but that’s how I visualized it .
When I had myself under control again, I opened my eyes to find another message.
I might look the same, Maza had sent. But I’m not. I know it isn’t exactly the same thing, but I feel you at least a little.
I let out a long breath. He was at least likely to be able to keep his job if he was an Arc. Whether I would be was a question I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about just yet.
Thanks , I sent back.
I’ll update you if I hear anything more.
I couldn’t quite make myself care about that. About the case. I knew I should, but I didn’t have the energy, not mentally, not physically, not emotionally.
I pulled up what Quincy had sent me.
You okay?
Seth, you’re making me worried.
Really worried now.
I’m back at the office, and you’re not here, and I’m scared for you.
By the way, it’s the same viral DNA. But I didn’t tell you that.
You should probably delete that last message when you get this.
I hope you get it soon.
They told us they didn’t know when you were coming back.
Are you coming back?
Please text me when you can.
Miss you.
The string of messages, all of them unanswered, made me feel warm and… no, not fuzzy. I was not going to use that expression in the same way ever again, since I now could literally make myself feel warm and fuzzy.
I hated this shit. I hated being a shifter .
I texted her back: Miss you too. Doing better but howling atteh moon.
I joked, but I didn’t mean it. There was no humor in it—just the understanding that I was expected to take this with good humor. That I was expected to still be the same old Seth Mays they’d always known, despite the fact that I’d literally spent a week turning inside out.
I wasn’t the same.
I didn’t want to be.
Maybe someday, I would. Maybe I’d get back to my ‘old self.’ But that wasn’t going to be today, and it probably wasn’t going to be anytime in the next month or maybe even year. Call it grief if you want, or self-loathing, or whatever psychological terminology makes it make sense. But I wasn’t the same person, even though I knew most people would expect me to be.
It’s just a bout of Arcana. No big deal.
Let me tell you, it’ll be a big deal when I bite your face off.
I put my face in my hands. I needed to get myself under control. I wasn’t this prone to wild emotions. This was the shifter part of me that was causing the mood swings, the hair-trigger temper.
I hated it.
I hated me.
My phone buzzed. It was Quincy, of course.
My throat was still incredibly sore—a combination of lingering Arcana symptoms and the fact that I screamed through most of my shifts. Talking was something I could do, but I didn’t particularly want to. But it was Quincy.
“’Lo,” I managed.
“Oh, shit, Mays. You’re—Are you okay?”
“No,” I rasped .
“You sound terrible,” she told me. “Is that because…”
“Still sick,” I croaked. “Getting better.”
She was quiet a moment. “Does talking hurt?” she asked, and I could hear the hope in her voice. But I didn’t have it in me.
“Yeah,” I told her.
“Oh, Seth, I’m sorry.” She used my first name, which meant she really did feel sorry for me. That made me feel worse.
“Me, too,” I managed.
“I’ll let you go—but I miss you, and I can’t wait for you to be well enough to come home. And back to work,” she rushed to continue, “but we’ll have to get coffee or ice cream or something even before they clear you to come back.”
“I’d like that,” I told her. The ice cream would feel good on my throat.
She said goodbye and hung up, then texted me a line of heart emojis. I sent her one back, then flipped to my conversations with Elliot and texted him, my fingers still not working very well.
SETH MAYS
Sorry
Took me in it was bad
ELLIOT CRANE
Are you okay now?
Dunno
Hurt everywhere
You shifted?
Yes
Wolf?
Yes
Is Noah there with you now?
No
Work
Do you want me to stop asking you questions?
No
Typings hard
Fingers are weird
Your dexterity will take a little while to recover. Your muscles are different now.
You’re also probably stronger, or you will be in a few days when you’ve eaten normally again.
Hard to think
That will come back, too.
Promise
Promise.
I let the phone fall back onto my chest, my hands and my soul oddly numb.
Do you want to talk?
Or should I let you sleep?
I wanted to talk to him. Or, rather, I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted to hear his rough voice, even filtered as it would be through the phone.
I dunno if I can talk but id like you to
If thats okay
The phone buzzed, and I tried to answer it, failing to make my fingers slide correctly before it stopped vibrating.
“Shit,” I hissed, then winced. My throat felt like someone had run over it with a metal rasp.
The phone started buzzing again. This time I got it on the third try.
“Hi,” I tried, and I knew I sounded awful. In fact, I’m not sure I actually managed to make either the H or the I sounds.
“It’ll get better,” he said, and his voice was like a strange symphony of sounds I had never heard—the roughness undercut by a deep bass note of gravel that mingled with a higher, almost nasal pitch that lifted his voice into the baritone range. There was a soft swallowed sound to his vowels, and a slight lilt.
I made a sound that was part frustration, part hysteria, part desperation.
“Seth?”
I let out a ragged hum.
“You’re going to be okay,” he told me. I so wanted to believe him, but I didn’t feel okay. I felt frayed, wrung out and tattered. Like I’d been skinned and re-skinned, my bones broken and newly-healed. Which was kind of what had happened.
“Don’t feel okay,” I forced myself to say. Speaking still felt weird. Like my throat wasn’t quite shaped right for the vibrations it was making.
“I know,” Elliot replied. “But you will be.”
He couldn’t know that. Couldn’t possibly know what this had done to me.
Except he can , some small, more rational part of my brain reminded me. He’s a shifter, too .
But while Elliot might be a shifter, he wasn’t me . He hadn’t experienced a transformation as me, in my skin and aching bones. Shifting hurt.
I said it out loud. “It hurts.”
“It gets better,” he told me.
“Does it hurt you?”
“No, but I’m used to it. It’s…” He paused, thinking. “It’s like pressure, like your joints need to crack, and then they do, one after another, some at the same time. Because everything is so sensitive at first, it hurts for a few weeks.”
“It’s been a few weeks,” I pointed out. “Feels like someone is stabbing me in the joints.”
He went quiet. “I—You should tell someone that,” he said, and his voice was low and serious. Possibly concerned. “I don’t remember it feeling like that .”
Even more proof that I was defective and broken. But I wasn’t going to say that to Elliot.
“Seth—are you okay?” he asked, then.
“No,” I answered honestly. I was a lot of things, but ‘okay’ wasn’t one of them.
“They have counselors,” he said, then, his strange-not-strange voice gentle. “People you can talk to.”
I grunted. I knew they did—Noah and every doctor and nurse I’d talked to had all mentioned them. But I didn’t want to talk to a non-shifter, because they wouldn’t actually understand what was happening, and I didn’t want to talk to a shifter, because then I’d feel terrible about admitting the fact that I wasn’t nearly as pro-Arcanid as I’d thought I was.
Not that I thought I shouldn’t have rights—or that I’d ever argued any Nid shouldn’t have rights—but I understood now why I was, in fact, more dangerous than the average person. Why a new shifter probably should be limited in terms of where they went and what they did. I didn’t think Noah was in any danger of spontaneously shifting and mauling someone—I feel like he would have said something or otherwise indicated that he was stressed or worried.
But I was both. All the time. Stressed about losing control. Worried that I was going to hurt someone. Or worse.
And on top of that, everything was still wrong .
The world smelled wrong. Like there were a thousand smells, sharp and pungent, an undercurrent of bleach to everything with a hint of death. Someone had died here—a while ago, I thought, but not so long that the smell of it didn’t linger.
It sounded wrong. Everything was too loud—my breath, my heart, the creak of the rubberized mattress, the rustle of the sheets, the scuff of shoes, and the noises of people in the hallways and other rooms. Sometimes I could hear screams, sometimes crying, often talking. Footsteps and squeaky wheels and doors. I wanted quiet. I wanted to be able to sleep without having fallen into unconsciousness or having been drugged into it, which is how I’d slept the last two days, although at least I was taking the meds by choice rather than having them shot into me.
It even looked wrong. Colors were a little more muted than they had been, but the edges of things seemed sharp, almost painful in the ways they stood out from the less-fuzzy background. Even when I had my glasses on.
And none of that even came close to the way my mind was working. Or, rather, how it wasn’t working. I had to think about everything. How to move a spoon to my mouth in order to feed myself. How to carefully get out of bed to make my way to the tiny bathroom with its sink cabinet and toilet and shower head on the wall.
Complex thought felt beyond me. I could think about the sounds I heard, the smells of things, and when I was going to next be given a meal. I could think about whether I was warm or cold. Which nurse walked into the room. Whether or not I was going to see Noah.
“Seth?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be,” he said quickly. “Do you—do you want me to tell you another legend? Or was there something else you wanted me to talk about?”
I could have asked him to tell me about himself. About his experience becoming a shifter. But that seemed awfully personal. “Tell me the same one again,” I said, finally. I’d been too drunk and had fallen asleep partway through, so I hadn’t really gotten it.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Back before the coming of the white man, in the time before the animals ceased to talk, there were four brothers. Manabush was the oldest and loved the humans the most of all his brothers…”
This time, I made it to the end of the story.