Chapter 23
23
ELLIOT CRANE
How are you doing?
SETH MAYS
Everything hurts.
It’s all so loud.
And it stinks.
The bed stinks. I stink. Everything stinks.
You’ll get used to it.
I don’t want to stink.
I’ll send you some links for shifter-friendly deodorant.
Why didn’t you or Noah tell me how much I stink?
We’re used to it.
You don’t stink in a bad way.
I do.
So bad.
You don’t.
I like your stink.
You’re not here.
But I remember.
You don’t smell any different now.
You can just smell it, is all.
I hate it.
I know.
I stopped complaining, because what was he going to do? Elliot had been incredibly tolerant. Noah had been even more tolerant. I was not even remotely being tolerant of anything, especially myself.
I was faking it as best I could for the doctors and nurses, and they were starting to talk about letting me go home. I was actually terrified to go home, but I hadn’t shifted in the last two and a half days, and apparently day three was when they packed you off and wished you and your family luck.
And gave you a set of epipens loaded with heavy-dose tranquilizers just in case you lost control so you didn’t eat your spouse or kids. Honestly, it was horrifying. I’d seen what I was capable of doing to a variety of pillows and pillow-like objects, blankets, and multiple sets of scrubs. The idea that they sent you home after only three days of not shifting with the ostensible promise that you were “better” was awful.
I wondered how many people intentionally tried to shift to put off their return home because they were afraid of what they would do to their families. And how many people accepted the word of the doctors and then did end up mauling their loved ones.
In my case, I wasn’t worried about that, because Noah would just kick my ass.
Everybody else seemed really pleased with my recovery.
They weren’t inside my head.
Or my body.
Being a shifter hadn’t helped at all with the joint pain or the insomnia. Staying mostly immobile while my immune system recovered from being brutalized by Arcana and my digestive system re-figured out how to eat food after too many days of not eating hadn’t helped.
Most people think that if your joints hurt, you need to rest them. Unfortunately, when you have early-onset Lyme-induced arthritis damage, that just means you get locked up and stiff, so even more things hurt than usual. And turning myself inside out multiple times hadn’t helped.
Going to the bathroom was a sad, pathetic, limping affair. I had started forcing myself to get up at least every two hours to walk around the room just to make sure my hips didn’t seize and drop me on my face—especially because I was pretty sure that would trigger a shift. Or it would try to, anyway.
I hadn’t mentioned the pain to any of the nurses or doctors. I had no intention of actually shifting ever again if I could help it. For the last almost-three days I’d kept myself fully human-form, and I didn’t intend to break that streak. Ever.
Was this a good choice? Honestly, probably not. I knew that. If it had been Noah who was in pain, I’d have told him to tell a doctor. If it had been Quincy or Elliot or anyone else, I’d have given the same advice that Elliot had given me. But I wasn’t going to follow it because I was me.
If it had been Noah or someone else, they wouldn’t have a history of chronic pain. I was used to being in pain—everything else was painful, so it made sense to me that shifting would also be painful. Since I didn’t intend to shift ever again, it wasn’t relevant.
The fundamental problem with this plan, of course, was that, realistically, I barely had control over my shifting. I’d made it two-and-a-half days, but I’d only made it two-and-a-half days. I didn’t want to shift ever again, but I had no way of knowing if I was actually going to be able to meet that goal.
I was going to try anyway.
Climbing the stairs to get into Noah’s apartment was one of the hardest things it felt like I had ever done. I was sweaty, exhausted, and aching by the time I staggered through the front door and half-collapsed on the couch because it was closer than my bed.
Noah, making small noises of distress, went and fetched me some blankets and a pillow rather than suggesting I move. I wondered if that was because he could read the exhaustion on my features or because he remembered how godawful this was.
“Can I get you something?” he asked me, worry clear in his voice.
I grunted. I wasn’t nauseous, but I didn’t know if I would become nauseous if I ate anything. My body felt like it wasn’t mine anymore—it moved differently, felt differently, did pretty much everything differently, so I couldn’t trust it not to rebel on me for no reason. It was like getting alpha-gal all over again, except with alpha-gal, they’d been able to tell me exactly what I could and couldn’t eat if I wanted to keep breathing.
This was a constant game of roulette.
“7Up?” Noah asked.
I changed the timbre of my grunt so that he would understand it as a yes. 7Up seemed a safe enough choice. And if I kept that down, then we could explore something more exciting. Like peanut butter and jelly toast. Or maybe peanut butter and banana. If Noah had bananas.
My stomach growled a little, but Noah was already in the kitchen. Hopefully he hadn’t heard. Even if my body was hungry, I wanted to see how it handled 7Up before I tried anything more substantial.
Noah must not have noticed—or was politely ignoring it if he had—because he reappeared with a big travel mug of the clear soda, a metal straw stuffed through the hole.
“You need to sit up, Sethy,” he said gently.
I made a grumbling noise, but let him help me sit up. I held the cup as he arranged pillows so that I could lean back against them. Then he went and fetched a fleece blanket, which he put over my legs.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, the first few sips of 7Up having helped to clear my throat.
“Anything else?”
I shook my head.
“Movies?” There was an almost-hopeful note to his voice.
“Sure,” I answered. I didn’t actually care, but if Noah wanted to watch something, then that was fine. Or maybe he just wanted something to seem normal—although whether that was for my sake or his, I didn’t know.
The whole thing was absurd to me. Three weeks ago, I’d been normal. Well, normal for me, anyway. A six-three, 220-odd pound human guy who went to work, liked hiking, and had a propensity for getting bit by ticks.
I’d dropped almost thirty pounds in those three weeks, and it wasn’t a good look. I knew, biologically speaking, that my new body required more calories than my old one had. I knew I needed more protein, more carbs, more food in general. The grocery bill was going to skyrocket.
And I was going to be harder to deal with as a shifter than Noah, for instance, because I was limited in terms of what I could eat. I was already getting sick of chicken, turkey was only marginally different—or maybe it would be more different to my new palette, I didn’t know—and fish was expensive if you weren’t eating tuna from a can. I didn’t mind canned tuna, but I was going to get sick of that quickly, too.
Becoming a shifter might not have been so bad if it had gotten rid of the alpha-gal, but they’d taken blood to check, since nobody at the hospital knew how Arcana would interact with alpha-gal. Not at all, apparently, which was good in the sense that I at least wasn’t now allergic to myself, but bad in that I now had both. Well, okay. I have alpha-gal and I am an Arcanid.
Shit.
It was the first time I’d actually thought it to myself. I am an Arcanid.
It was different than the Lyme. Different than the alpha-gal. Those were things that I had, not things that I was . I didn’t have Arcanavirus anymore. I’d had it, and it changed me. And yeah, okay, the alpha-gal was a change—I’d been bitten by a tick, and then stuck with the alpha-gal. Ditto with Lyme. But they were still somehow different.
Sure, you could consider Arcanism a disease—and there were people who did. The Cure Arcanism Society, for one, who were only marginally less bigoted and annoying than the Magic-Free Movement. At that precise moment, I kind of understood why someone might want a cure—if some injection or course of medications would have cured me in that moment, I absolutely would have taken them.
But would I have wanted to eliminate all Arcanids? To tell Noah or Elliot or Hart that they shouldn’t be what they were? Of course not. I wondered if any of them would have cured their Arcanism if they had the choice. If Taavi, who had been born a shifter, would choose to not be one, even though he’d never known any other existence.
I was a little afraid to ask. Because either I would find out just how much they hated being Nids, or I’d horribly offend them. Or both.
But despite the questionable scientific research of the CAS and the less-questionable research of several actual medical organizations researching Arcanavirus and Arcanism, there was no cure. The Arcanavirus altered your DNA, changing the essence of who and what you were. Not enough to technically make you a different species altogether, but enough to make you a different breed—like a German Shepherd instead of a Golden Retriever. Homo sapiens arcanicus, instead of Homo sapiens sapiens.
My stomach growled again, more loudly this time.
Noah looked up from where he was crouched next to his rather impressive collection of movies. Noah’s the sort of person who likes to have hard copies of everything, ‘just in case.’ ‘Just in case’ what, I wasn’t sure. Most things we could also stream, but I had the feeling Noah needed a comfort movie—or, at least, he thought I did, which at the moment amounted to the same thing.
“You need to eat, Sethy,” he said seriously.
I nodded. “Probably,” I agreed.
He pushed himself to his feet. “What do you want? I can order Thai or Chinese or run out to get ramen or pho or Indian?—”
“Toast?” I suggested. Clearly Noah’s ambitions for my dietary readiness far exceeded mine.
“Toast,” he repeated, both disappointed and incredulous.
“With peanut butter?”
He just looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.
“Do you have bananas?” I asked.
“You want toast with peanut butter and banana,” he repeated.
I nodded.
“Seth, you need food . And protein.”
“Peanut butter has protein,” I pointed out. “And those are food.”
Noah sighed. “Seth, you need calories. A lot of them.” I knew he was worried because he almost never used my actual name.
“Peanut butter is incredibly calorie-dense.”
“Are you going to eat five of them?” he asked me.
“Do we have five bananas?” I countered.
“No. We have three. But that’s not the point.”
I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck, exhaustion hitting me hard and fast for no good reason. “Noah, please just make me toast?”
He was crouched at my side immediately, fingers warm against my forehead. “Are you okay? Do you feel?— ”
“I’m just tired, Nono,” I told him. My stomach growled again. “And hungry.”
He frowned down at me, but took his hand away and stood, nodding. “Okay. Toast with peanut butter and bananas.”
He went to the kitchen, where I heard him moving around.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. It took me far longer than it should have to sit up and dig it out.
Are you home? How are you feeling? It was Elliot.
I also had an earlier one from Quincy. Did they let you out today?
And one from Hart. Let me know if you need anything. Especially bakery.
I started with Quincy.
They did. Tired, but glad to be home. Are you all better yet?
Yes! came back almost immediately. Maza is back, too, but he’s not allowed back on the case because it’s now too personal. So it’s Maginot.
Did you run the viral on the last victim? I asked her, nodding to Noah as he delivered my toast. He’d made two slices, probably because that was one banana’s worth. He cocked his head at me.
“Quincy,” I told him, gesturing with the phone.
“Eat your toast,” he replied, but then went back to going through the movies, looking for something we could watch.
All three of them , Quincy replied to my question about DNA. All three matched.
Three?
The guy the killer turned into an Arcanabomb, a woman they found on a bench at Byrd Park, and a guy who was pulled out of the water treatment plant last week.
The WHAT? That last one was horrifying to imagine .
Yeah. That was almost really bad. The killer threw the body into one of the reservoir lakes. They have alarms for things like that, though, and nobody ended up with bad water. Caused a massive freakout at city hall.
I couldn’t even imagine. It would have been catastrophic if it had worked. Holy shit , I sent back, then took another bite of my toast. It tasted really good, and my stomach growled even as I ate it.
Right? They got him on camera, though.
They have an ID?
No. He wore a balaclava. But we have height, build, weight, etc.
It wasn’t as good as an ID, but it was better than the approximations we’d had to make based on shoe prints. Better than where we were, I sent back.
Maginot is hopeful. Especially since we haven’t had any since.
That we know about , I warned her.
Right.
The woman was just on a bench?
She was also rigged with a bomb, but it rained and nobody was there when she went. A neighbor heard, looked out, then called.
Lucky, I sent, then grimaced at the thought that a woman’s body exploding on a bench alone was ‘lucky’ in any sense of the word.
Yeah , Quincy agreed. I have a mountain of paperwork to catch up on—but I’m SO GLAD YOU’RE HOME. She left the question of when I’d be coming back unsaid. I hope to see you soon , she sent.
Ditto , I replied, although the idea of going back to work or even seeing anyone other than Noah was mildly terrifying. But I probably had to .
At least if I wanted to keep my job.
I’d deal with whatever the policy on that was in the morning.
I ate some more of my toast and tried to decide what to send back to Hart.
I will eat whatever dairy-free bakery you decide to give me , I texted him. But don’t feel obligated .
He didn’t reply immediately, so I switched over to the now surprisingly long thread I had going with Elliot.
I am home. I’m okay.
Unlike Hart, he replied almost immediately.
Are you?
Shit. Everybody else seemed to take me at my word—even Noah, although it was possible that Noah was just ignoring the lies. That would explain why he kept pushing at me.
Not really. But I’m alive.
You need to be eating. A lot.
Jesus. Him and Noah both. Given they were both shifters, that was probably for good reason.
Noah is making me eat.
Good. You need a lot more than you think. Especially now.
I know.
Noah had said so. The doctors and nurses at St. Cyprian’s had said so. Now Elliot was saying so. I took another bite of my toast.
Noah made me peanut butter banana toast.
You need meat.
I’m really sick of chicken. And I can’t eat beef or pork.
Your tick thing?
Yeah.
You should still eat more meat than you’re used to. Chicken, turkey. Duck.
Do you know how expensive duck is?
I trade bar stool repair for like a half-dozen every fall.
I snorted.
“What?” Noah asked from where he’d made two small piles of movies.
“Elliot suggested I eat duck,” I told him.
“Duck? Where would we even get duck?” Noah wanted to know.
“He apparently trades fixing bar stools for it,” I replied. “So, uh, make bar stools?”
It was Noah’s turn to snort. “Right. I’ll get on that.”
“Exactly,” I replied. I went back to my conversation with Elliot.
I lack your skills with wood.
I seem to remember you had pretty good wood-handling skills .
This time I swallowed back my amusement, not wanting to share that particular part of my not-really-relationship with Elliot with Noah.
You think I can trade those for duck?
If you want to be a duck-whore.
That one was really hard to keep to myself. I succeeded by stuffing the rest of my first toast into my mouth.
I’ll have to keep that in mind as a career option now.
Seriously, though. You need meat.
Yeah, that’s what they tell me.
Noah stood up, then, holding a stack of movies. “Okay,” he said in his bossiest voice. “We’re going to marathon all of Star Wars .”
“All of it?” I asked incredulously.
“All of it. We just might take a break for sleep.”
“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t actually care.
“Release order, or story order?”
“Story,” I told him. He always preferred story order, anyway.
“Excellent.” Then he rounded on me. “You have to eat more than peanut butter toast, though. So what do you want? And no,” he continued before I could suggest it, “duck isn’t a choice.”
I sighed. “Pad thai,” I answered.
“And?”
I looked up at him. “We usually get appetizers and stuff. That’s still fine.”
“You have to eat at least two entrées,” he informed me .
“Two?”
“Yep. So what else?”
“Panang curry?”
“Okay.” He started tapping at his phone, presumably ordering food.
I texted Elliot.
Noah is making me eat enough Thai food for at least two people.
Good. And ice cream. Make sure you eat ice cream. Can you eat ice cream?
Cashew milk or soy, yeah.
Cashew would be better. More protein.
Okay, mom.
You’re my baby shifter. I have to make sure you’re eating your meat and fake dairy.
I snorted again, which I got away with because Noah had left the room.
I get it. Eat my bodyweight in food.
Good.
I put my phone down, leaning my head back and letting my eyes close. I was still exhausted. Then it buzzed again.
Still Elliot.
Take care of yourself.
Noah will make sure I do.
Promise?
Promise.