Page 77 of The Turning of the Tables

Sweat.

Bleach.

Something sour and unfamiliar.

I was hot and cold and shaking with pain and fear.

I wanted it to stop.

I wanted everything to stop.

I hadthe vague impression of a floor, cold and hard.

I was naked, and my skin felt bruised and burned and raw.

Air rasped in my throat, and swallowing was so painful it made me whimper.

I smelled something thick and coppery, and it turned my stomach.

Licking my lips told me that it was my own blood, my lips cracked and chapped. The taste of it made me retch, but I didn’t have anything in my stomach to bring up, so I just curled in on myself.

My skin was hot and prickly.

I tried to draw a breath, but then the pain came back.

There were people,but they were strange.

So loud, voices harsh and garbled.

They smelled sour. The same sour I did not know.

They seemed too big, strangely lumpy. Brought food that tasted too much.

Put needles in me.

Drugs that made things slow and layered, like too many exposed negatives on top of one another.

Drugs that made me slow and stupid and put a bitter, bleak taste in my mouth.

Drugs that brought darkness.

I’d thoughtI understood pain. I’d had chronic joint pain since I was twelve. I had pain daily.

I now had a whole new definition of pain.

And I understood completely how it was that shifters—and orcs and fauns and vampires and elves—seemed impervious to the kind of physical damage that would incapacitate a human.

Nothing compared to what it felt like to have your body completely change its shape and makeup overnight.

Or about a dozen times in a single night, in my case.

Over the past few days, I’d been turned inside out at least a hundred times, every muscle, every bone, every tendon in my body fatigued and shaking, lactic acid soaking through me and oozing out in sweat that felt like it had to be half blood. The hand I could see, lying on the floor a few inches from my face, was pale and clammy, the knuckles bloody and scraped.

I could smell it. Coppery and salty.

The floor, up next to my nose, smelled stronger. Bleach and something sour, a chemical lemon that burned through my nasal passages and felt acrid on the back of my tongue. Underneath that, something slightly musty—the chalkysmell of the cement itself layered over with the smells of old urine and bile and blood that wasn’t mine.

It made my head hurt and my throat burn.