Page 103 of The Turning of the Tables

The fries were good, too. Thick, cross-cut. More potato taste than fried-taste.

And I was starving. Perhaps not literally, but my stomach had been nibbling at my insides for several hours, and I strongly suspected that I should have managed to eat something—which Noah had tried to insist on—before going to work. Shifting used a lot of energy, kick-started the metabolism. In biological terms, I understood this. I’d done research into shifter biology as soon as I’d gotten my hands on the books, visiting every library branch that would let me in to learn about what had happened to my brother.

I knew I needed more food, more protein, especially after a shift. And yet I’d ignored that when it was me. Maybe it was denial, maybe it was because it felt like if I didn’t take care of this new shifter body, then it would stop being a shifter. Which of course wasn’t how it worked at all. If I didn’t eat enough or the right things, I would sicken and eventually die. It was one way to stop being a shifter. One way to stop the pain.

It was a way I wasn’t yet willing to take.

I’d been willing once, but I had been dragged back. Not in the way I had wished, or by people who understood me, but it had led me here. And even with as much pain as I felt, and the dissatisfaction with my body and my conditions, I wasn’t there yet.

I took another bite of my second sandwich, chicken, honey, lettuce, tomato, and pickles. The honey was spicy, and the heat of it rolled through my mouth, making the salt and tang of the other flavors that much stronger. There was joy in the flavors of the food still—in the sound of Quincy’s laughter as she reacted to something Noah said, in the smile on his face as he let go of worrying about me for a little while.

I had cost them both a lot—I knew this.

Quincy was working harder than she should have been to cover for my failures—mistakes, clumsiness, slips of memory that I hoped would eventually stop and return to my pre-Arcana normal. Noah had taken off work—mostly. He was trying to do some work from home, put in a few hours while I was at work, all so that he could keep making money to support both of us.

I, meanwhile, was contributing loads of stress, extra work, and an increased food bill. And medical bills that no doubt the state would not completely cover, despite the factthat I had contracted Arcana on the job, at a crime scene, as the result of criminal activity for which I was not at fault, in the course of my duties, while wearing overkill PPE.

“Seth?” Quincy asked me, and I shook myself, swallowing a mouthful of sandwich.

“Sorry, what?” I was also struggling to focus. On anything. Case in point.

Quincy and Noah exchanged a look.

I sighed. “What?” I repeated.

Quincy fidgeted a little. “I asked if you felt like things were coming back. Because my first few weeks back were hard. I was tired, slow, my mind in kind of a fog. I asked how it was for you.”

I snorted. “No,” I answered her honestly. “I don’t feel like it’s coming back.”

“It has only been three days,” she said, clearly forcing optimism. “It took me two weeks, and I didn’t have it as…”

“Bad as I did?” I finished for her.

She nodded.

“No,” I agreed. Even by the most basic metric—number of days spent sick, days spent in the hospital—mine had been worse. Nevermind the fact that my body, my DNA, had been reshaped. Of course I was exhausted, weak, clumsy.

It made sense. But the world I lived in did not care whether body, mind, or soul were healed. The state of Virginia cared only that the cogs of its machinery continued to turn, regardless of the people crushed between them, only to be replaced, then crushed again. I did not have the time to make myself whole again. I had only scattered pieces barely held together with weak glue and tape.

I was afraid it would not be enough.

27

SETH MAYS

WHEN does it get better?

ELLIOT CRANE

Bit by bit.

How long?

Tomorrow will be better than today.

But it takes TIME.

I think I’m out of time.