Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“Anyway, my uncle had gone somewhere, probably off to get another beer, and left me holding the fishing line,” Cyrus continued.
“He was ripped a new one by Mom for that later, as I could have tumbled into the creek and drowned, but I think Uncle was a few sheets to the wind and wasn’t thinking. And I didn’t drown.
“I transformed instead; they found the remains of my outfit on the riverbank and freaked out. Because who Changes at four? I was too young to be taken on the trips they do for kids to wide-open spaces where they encourage a first Change under supervision. I had never even gotten the verbal instructions that preceded that by a year or so, to make it all sound like a fun adventure, something to be looked forward to.”
“None of it?” I asked, horrified.
“None. My father, indeed my whole paternal line, were late bloomers, so everyone just assumed I’d be the same.
Why does nobody ever remember that we have mothers, too?
And Mom’s line Changed early, although not that early.
She’d already been watching Sebastian, who was a year older, and giving him little hints here and there of what to expect. But me?
“Even she hadn’t begun yet with me. No one had. So there I was, barely four, watching a frog jump through the reeds by the shoreline, and then the next second...
“Everything changed.”
I heard the wonder in his voice, even now, all these years later. I didn’t understand how. I would have been terrified; anyone would.
“I wanted the frog, you see?” he asked, grinning slightly. “I wanted it so much that I went after it, only not in human form. Or in human mind.
“That’s why we prepare kids, and older adults, but especially kids. They say it’s to make the first Change less traumatizing, make them look at it as a positive thing, as a rite of passage to be looked forward to before it happens, and remembered fondly afterward. And that’s part of it.
“But there’s another part they don’t talk about, the one that had my mother screaming the forest down, looking for me, and so savagely ordering the clan to find me, to find me right now, that they were a little wary of her ever afterward.
But she knew what could happen if I wasn’t located quickly, knew the risk. ”
“You could fall into wolf-mind permanently,” I said, remembering stories I’d heard of Changes gone wrong.
“Yes. There’s a chance with anyone, but especially a child whose brain isn’t yet formed... It could have gone very badly. It almost did, because I was gone.
“It’s... hard to describe, but you just stop thinking with your higher brain.
You go off instinct, and instinct said to eat the frog, and then to eat a fish I found afterward, and then to hide in some tall grasses when the others came looking for me, because they came in human form, something I no longer was, and they didn’t smell quite right.
“My wolf brain said to hide, so I hid, and then just... loped off. Vanishing into the brush and going on a little adventure—”
“An adventure! You could have been killed! A bear could have taken you at that age, or you could have fallen down a ravine, or... or anything could have happened. Just anything!”
He laughed suddenly. “You should see the look on your face!”
I smacked his arm. “It isn’t funny!”
“That’s what Mom said when they finally dragged me back. It took two days, and they only found me because I’d brought down a deer, which Dad bragged about for years afterward—”
“A deer?”
“It was old and on its last legs, and I’m not sure I took it down so much as finished it off, but they decided to count it.
And that much blood was pungent enough to draw the attention of the search parties.
I’d gorged myself and fallen asleep under a tree, and woke up to a bunch of huge wolves nuzzling me, and then my mother shaking me and hugging me and screaming at me.
I’d transformed back in my sleep, but I had deer blood all around my mouth, and at first she thought I was dead. ..
“It’s one of my first clear memories, that and the frog.”
I just stared at him.
“My point is that I barely remember anything from the time I was transformed. Some very vague impressions here and there, but nothing concrete, nothing clear. I was in animal mind, something so different, so Other, from what we normally experience, that I had no way of even processing it.
“Like I didn’t with the Relic’s mind,” I said, starting to see where he was going with this.
“It takes time,” he told me soberly. “Just as it takes time to understand and be understood by your wolf.”
“Which I don’t yet!”
“Exactly. You’ve had barely a month with her, and now you’re being introduced, violently, to a totally new version of yourself. It’s a lot to take in. It would be for anyone—”
“But it hasn’t happened to you! To the boys! Not since that night at the Council. So why me?”
Cyrus started to speak, and then hesitated, as if thinking.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “But you’ve had three doses of Jenkins’ brew now: the first when you were dosed up by some of the people he had brewing the potion for him, at their grow farm.
After which, you evidenced the úlfheeinn ability—”
“That was a while after,” I protested.
“You first used it a few days after, but may have had it before, but not had an occasion to need it,” he countered. “Then the second time you were exposed, after Jenkins dosed you in his lab, you broke through Neuri—that same night—and changed for the first time. And now—”
“Stop it!”
“Stop what?” he cocked his head at me. “Three doses, Lia. The last aerosolized in the air of that little grocery, and now—”
“Stop it!” I got up and walked off a few feet, only stopping because I had nowhere to go.
The moon was out, bathing me in pale, silvery light, the same that limned the small hills around us and that I knew would be highlighting Cyrus’s face if I turned toward him.
I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to be here, to be listening to this.
And he was wrong, because when I went after Jace in Tartarus, before I ever knew that wreck of a grocery store even existed, something had been up with me. My arm had transformed, but not into a wolf. Into something—
I cut off those thoughts, wanting to scream, or to run again, and just never stop!
This couldn’t be happening, whatever it was.
Why the hell was this happening?
But Cyrus was relentless. Soft, gentle, but resolute. The words like fire branding my very soul.
“But it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, isn’t it?” he asked. “Jenkin’s potion doesn’t change us into something new. It just brings out what was already there. Shows us our true selves, or an aspect of them—”
“I’m not that thing!” And I did turn to him then, furious.
Only to meet a gaze that didn’t challenge me, but also never wavered. “That’s what the humans say about us. ‘That thing,’ ‘those beasts,’ ‘that brute.’ I’ve heard the names all my life; so have you. About our wolves—”
“That’s different—”
“Is it?” He got up and walked over to hug me. Touch, so soothing to our kind, especially from a mate. But not enough; not tonight. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“But it will wear off,” I said, clutching his arm. “I’ll go back to normal, so will Sophie. It hasn’t even been a day yet! And she could have misunderstood her Cat—”
“She could.”
I stopped, my heart in my throat, because that had been Cyrus’s noncommittal voice. He wasn’t a guy who liked hedging, and he did it badly. And once more, I felt fear grip me.
And then he confirmed it.
“Lia... There’s one more thing.”