Silvery mist swirls around my body, thick and shimmering in the weak light filtering through the frosted windows. The shift happens fast. Too fast, the corruption accelerating what should take seconds into a heartbeat. When the mist clears, I'm pure grizzly. 800 pounds of muscle and fury and protective instinct that screamsourswhen I look at Maren. My paws hit the floor with enough force to crack the old wood. My senses sharpen until I can smell each individual shadow creature, taste their hunger on the air, feel the subtle vibrations of their movement through the floorboards.
But something's wrong. The shift flickers.
My form destabilizes for a heartbeat—mist swirling again as I'm caught between bear and human, neither form holding—before snapping back to grizzly. The corruption is interfering with my control. Making the transformation unpredictable. Dangerous.
No time to worry about that. The shadows are flowing through the walls like smoke through cracks, their forms solidifying as they enter the cabin's warmer air.
I roar. The sound rattles the cabin windows, shakes dust from the rafters, probably wakes every living thing within a quarter mile. Primal and thunderous. A warning and a promise: touch her and die.
The first shadow lunges for Maren with shocking speed. She doesn't freeze. The metal flashlight in her hand blazes to life, and she swings the beam directly into the shadow's path. It recoils with that bone-deep shriek, but keeps coming from another angle.
I intercept it mid-strike, moving faster than anything my size should be able to move. My claws rake through vapor that suddenly has substance when I hit it. Cold and dense and wrong. The creature shrieks again, that bone-deep vibration that triggers human flight instinct, but I'm not human right now.
I'm an apex predator, and these things are threatening my mate.
Maren's camera flash explodes behind me. Light floods the cabin, harsh and white and blinding. The shadows scatter like smoke in a windstorm—but they reform faster than before, splitting up to attack from multiple angles now that there are two of us fighting. Learning. Adapting. Dangerous.
Two more rush from opposite sides, trying to flank us. She pivots, keeping her back to mine instinctively, and hits one with the flashlight beam while I spin to catch the other. Pack tactics. They've hunted together before. I spin, my bulk crashing into a table that splinters under the impact, and catch one shadow in my jaws. It tastes like rot and wrongness and the grey nothing of that realm I escaped. Like biting into spoiled meat wrapped in static electricity. But it has substance here in the real world.
I shake my head violently, the way I'd shake a salmon, and the shadow dissolves into wisps that smell like ozone and corruption.
Three left. No—four. Another one slipped through while I was focused on the others, manifesting from the darkest corner near the door. They're coordinating now, moving with purpose and intelligence that makes my hackles rise.
The fourth one is reaching for Maren, tendrils extending like grasping fingers toward her throat.
Protective fury whites out everything else. I launch across the cabin, slamming into the shadow with my full weight. The floorboards crack under the impact. Splinters drive into my paws but I barely feel them. The shadow tries to flow around me, escape toward her, but I don't let it. I pin it down with one massive paw and tear it apart.
Claws. Teeth. Brute force and alpha will. The shadow shrieks and writhes beneath me, its form destabilizing, and I keep tearing until it dissolves into nothing but a frost stain on the cabin floor.
The remaining three retreat through the walls, their forms flickering and fading. Not destroyed. Just driven back. But they won't stay gone long. They never do.
The silvery mist swirls again and I shake my paws to dislodge the splinters as I shift back to human, gasping. Completely naked now, what remained of my drysuit destroyed by the transformation. The shift flickered twice during the fight. Destabilized between forms in ways that should be impossible. My legs nearly give out. I catch myself against the wall, breathing hard, each inhale feeling like I'm pulling air through water.
The corruption has spread. I can see it without looking down. Feel it like ice water in my veins. Black lines creeping further up my arms, across my chest, branching up my neck in geometric patterns that pulse with each heartbeat. My hands shake. Notfrom fear. From the effort of maintaining human form when the grizzly wants to surge forward again, wants to shift and patrol and protect.
I'm getting worse. Deteriorating faster than I thought I would.
Maren stands in the center of the cabin, flashlight still raised, camera ready in her other hand. She's breathing hard, eyes wide, but she didn't run. Didn't freeze. She fought alongside me like we'd been doing this for years instead of minutes.
"You okay?" Her voice only shakes slightly. She sets down her camera carefully, deliberately, and crosses to where I'm propped against the wall.
"Been better." I push off the wall, forcing myself to stand straighter despite the tremor in my muscles. "You've got good instincts. The way you kept your back to mine, called out the fourth one—you fight smart."
"I photograph wildlife for a living. You learn to be aware of your surroundings." She lowers the flashlight but doesn't turn it off. Smart. "But you're not okay. The corruption spread during the fight. I watched it crawl up your neck."
She's observant. That's going to be useful.
She crosses to me, studying the black lines with the same intensity she probably uses when framing photographs.
"Does it hurt?" she asks quietly.
"Feels like ice and fire at the same time. Like my blood is turning to glass." I test my balance, making sure my legs will hold. "I need to move. Staying still makes it worse."
"You shifted." Her voice is steady despite everything she just witnessed. "You turned into a bear. An actual bear."
"Grizzly." I force myself to stand straighter, ignoring the tremor in my muscles. "The corruption destabilizes the shift. I'm losing control over the transformation. The more I shift, the worse it gets."
"Then we need to fix it." She stands, sets down her camera, and meets my eyes with absolute certainty. "You said your family guards the ley lines. That means they know how to deal with this kind of thing, right?"
