Chapter 24
24
ELLIOT CRANE
Feeling any better, baby shifter?
SETH MAYS
Tired.
Achy.
My brain is fuzzy.
That’s normal.
It’ll get better.
But I have to go back to work.
Why?
If I don’t, I don’t keep my job.
That’s bullshit.
You should be able to go back when you’re ready.
I have to go back tomorrow.
I’m sorry.
Can I help?
No.
But thanks.
I’d looked up the post-Arcana policies at work, which stated that I had forty-eight hours from being ‘cleared’ to go back to work, request unpaid medical leave, or give notice. That was tomorrow, and I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to manage even five minutes of sleep.
It had been six days since I’d last shifted. It felt like I had a better understanding of the things the made my skin prickle and my fingertips ache, my pulse pounding in my ears and squeezing at my lungs. Things that caused me stress or anxiety. Things that triggered emotional responses, whether anger or sadness.
It did not help at all that going back to work made me stressed, anxious, and angry all at the same time. And also terrified. And that was also a big trigger—fear. The last thing I wanted was to risk shifting at work and hurting the people there I liked, respected, and cared about. The most horrifying part about it was that the more I worried about it happening, the more likely it was to happen.
“Seth, you don’t have to go back,” Noah had told me for at least the tenth time.
I shot him a look that told him to drop it. We’d been through this. Multiple times. I love my job. I find meaning in my job. I wanted to keep my job. And that meant I had to go to my job, even though I wasn’t even remotely ready—physically or psychologically—to go back to work.
I also looked very different. I was a lot thinner, for one thing, and I hadn’t dared try to shave since I’d gotten sick. My hands were too shaky, even with a safety razor. Noah had offered to either buy me an electric or do it for me, but I’d told him not to bother. I figured I’d put the weight back on now that I was eating enough, but I wanted something to reflect the change I’d been through.
Even though I’d always shaved, I could actually grow a full Appalachian mountain-man beard, and it made me look a little bit like a wolfman, so it seemed appropriate. At least in my Arcana-addled brain. I was too tired to bother with personal hygiene beyond showering and putting on deodorant, anyway.
Noah was driving me in, because I was already completely exhausted from walking down the stairs to my car. I’d come down myself, then texted him to come down to drive me. He also tried arguing with me again as we’d gotten into the car, and once more as I dragged my aching bones out of the car on the curb in front of work.
I let out a deep breath, trying desperately to keep myself from breaking—either into tears or into fur and fangs. At that precise moment, either seemed equally likely. My eyes burned with unshed tears—or maybe because they were trying to change shape. Or possibly both. My throat was tight, my skin prickly, my lungs incapable of drawing a full breath, my heart pounding as though it were a trapped rabbit.
I pulled out my phone and sent a message to Elliot as I slowly made my way up to the doors.
Tell me I’m going to be okay.
You’re going to be fine, baby.
Thanks .
I didn’t really believe him, but I was going to take what little I could. He’d answered me immediately, despite the fact that I was sure he had a whole life that didn’t revolve around me and, in fact, probably was mostly disconnected from my existence except for the occasional messages he exchanged with me. Nothing at all like the way that I thought about him at least once every few hours.
The emotions from Elliot’s supportive text were mixing with my anxiety and fear, and that was also not helping to tame the literal beast. I swallowed a couple of times, forcing my feet to carry me forward as I gulped in air. If I stopped, Noah would undoubtedly come get me, and then I would be jobless in addition to being an absolute mess.
I told myself that if I could just get into the office, I could ask Quincy to let me sit quietly in a corner to catch my breath and reign in my anxiety and the wolf that came with it. I just had to get into my tiny office.
One step at a time.
ELLIOT CRANE
How did it go?
SETH MAYS
Awful.
Do you want to talk about it?
No.
But thanks.
You know how to reach me if you do.
Get some rest .
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to follow his admittedly very good advice. I was exhausted, but the kind of over-tired and freaked out that meant I wouldn’t be able to sleep until at least midnight if not one or two in the morning.
As awful as work had been, it could have been so, so very much worse.
Quincy liked my beard. I’d taken the mask off once I’d gotten into our shared office, because I couldn’t pass on Arcana—although at the moment she was still in the three-month bubble of immunity from her own bout with it. In epidemiological terms, I didn’t need to wear one at all, but I really didn’t feel like running around the lab advertising the fact that I was a shifter—and since I wasn’t any of the obvious types of Nid, if I hadn’t worn one, people would have either decided I was a dick or realized I was now a shifter.
I didn’t think I was in the headspace to handle that yet.
I’d kept myself in my human skin—sometimes barely—and had only cried once. Alone. In my office, after begging Quincy to go to a meeting without me and make up some reason why I couldn’t be there. I actually couldn’t be there, but not because of anything dramatic, just… You don’t go to work meetings with bloodshot eyes and a snotty nose because your only choices are to cry at work or shift into a wolf and possibly maul or eat your best-work-friend.
And you definitely don’t go when you’re riding an emotional knife’s edge that would likely lead to you shifting in said meeting and then mauling and/or eating the rest of your team, too.
This whole shifter thing was absolute shit.
Quincy was my current personal hero, because all she did was slide a box of Kleenex through the cracked door where I was huddled with the lights off, go to the meeting and make something up that had apparently been believable, and then bring me a package of Unreal coconut bars, which was about the only chocolate-esque candy I could actually eat. Stupid alpha-gal.
Which had led to more crying, because I’d become a complete emotional wreck.
Quincy understood that this was probably one of the most awkward and humiliating things that had ever happened to me—and definitely the most awkward and humiliating thing that had ever happened to me at work—and didn’t ask any questions or mention a thing when I finally emerged. At least I’d managed to get a little bit of paperwork done and push a few buttons on some machines, even if Quincy had been the one to actually pull the final results.
I didn’t die and I hadn’t eaten anyone, so I suppose I had to count that as a win, at least. It didn’t feel very much like one.
Noah had picked me up about five minutes after my shift ended and had a turkey and mustard sandwich with pickles waiting for me in the car. Which had almost set me off again, but the idea of having to explain myself to Noah helped me hold it together.
You would think that Noah would have been my first confidante. We were twins. He was a shifter, I was now a shifter… But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him how horrible I felt about being what he was. How much I hated this body and everything it saw and felt and smelled and heard. And I didn’t know how to tell Noah without hurting him—and that was something I couldn’t do.
I’d told Elliot that I hated ‘it’—without being specific about what exactly ‘it’ was. It was easy to pretend that it was the newness of it—that what I hated was having to adjust to a new body, not the new body itself. Not myself inside of it.
The minute we’d gotten back home, I’d pleaded exhaustion and curled up in bed, expecting a night of misery.
Noah woke me up almost three hours later, bringing me a plate with two chicken pot pies—the kind you get out of the freezer, not that I was complaining. They’re surprisingly good, given how much processed weirdness goes into them.
“You need to eat, Sethy,” he said—a refrain that was getting very old, very fast.
But as soon as he’d shaken me from sleep, I’d smelled them, and that had awakened my appetite, if not my brain. I grunted, but pushed myself up to sitting, and Noah set the plate on the night-stand so that he could help by propping my pillow up behind me. Once I was settled, he passed me the plate, a fork sitting on it beside the two pies in their little oven-safe paper trays.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, my hands awkward as I lifted the fork.
This had been the principal source of frustration at work. I’m a scientist—I have to be able to have steady hands to use pipettes, to pour, to carry, to work with the glass slides that went into the microscopes… and my fingers didn’t work quite right.
I’d dropped and broken about four different things—fortunately nothing irreplaceable, like evidence, thank God—before Quincy had gently suggested that maybe I should confine myself to computers and paper for the time being. She hadn’t been wrong, but I hadn’t been prepared to get to work and find that I couldn’t actually do my job anymore.