Page 79 of The Turning of the Tables

I wasn’t sure how they brought me things, fed me, or cleaned me or the room, since I would have assumed that I should have been much more filthy… It had been days—how many, I didn’t know—but while I could smell stale urine and feces and blood and sweat, the only fresh scents were sweat, a little blood, and cleaners.

The blood came from scrapes on my knuckles, knees, and elbows. They were scraped and bruised, and my left knee was badly swollen—moreso than usual. Well, than my old usual. I had no idea what my new usual was going to be.

In some of my more lucid moments, I’d wondered whether becoming a shifter might help my Lyme. If the state of my knee was any indication, the answer was no. I guess it was too much to hope that I’d be able to offload one physical problem for another one.

If you could call having two bodies a physical problem.

Noah didn’t seem to have any issues with it anymore, so I suppose I could at least look forward to that.

If I lived through this part.

I was still lying face-down on the floor, my head turned to the side, when I heard a sound that I didn’t recognize—a metallic grinding, followed by the sound of a bolt slamming loudly home. Then the creak of metal hinges as the heavy reinforced door swung open.

Feet scuffed loudly on the cement floor.

I tried to push myself up, turn my head, anything. I failed.

The shoes—multi-colored clog-like shoes that basically screamednurse—moved into my field of view. The person in them smelled soft, a little dusty, and warm. Like sun on sand, undercut with something spicy that I didn’t recognize.

I heard the sound of rustling fabric, and then Wyatt’s familiar face—light brown skin, gold-brown eyes, almost delicate features—appeared as he crouched down and turned his head to look at my face. His was partially obscured by a hospital-standard mask.

“How are you today, Seth?” he asked me.

I wondered how many times he’d talked to me and I’d had no clue. I tried to answer him, failed, but did at least manage a half-grunt, half-whine.

It must have been a milestone, because his face split into a grin. “Feel like trying something solid to eat?”

The next noise I made was a little less horrific and, I hoped, a little more positive. Because something I could actually chew sounded amazing.

“How do you feel about eggs and chicken?” Wyatt asked me.

I made a half-squeak that hopefully sounded positive. Chicken and eggs wasn’t really something I’d have asked for,but at that exact moment, I probably would have agreed to a bacon cheeseburger, terrible idea as that would have been.

“Okay, I’m going to help you sit up, yeah?”

I made a noise, and Wyatt took it for agreement, fortunately.

He was stronger than he looked, by quite a bit. He was thin and shorter than me, maybe an inch or so taller than Noah. There was a faint… animalistic scent to his skin that made me frown as he brought over a reading pillow, then helped me to sit up into it.

My mouth immediately started watering when he went out into the hall, then opened some containers that held hot chicken and scrambled eggs, which he put together in a bowl, then brought me another toddler-spoon. And then he had to hold both my hands—the one holding the bowl and the one with the spoon—to help me feed myself.

He was watching me like a hawk as he helped me eat.

I didn’t understand why… until I did.

As my body rebelled against my control, skin stretching painfully, needles—fur—ripping through, bones stretching, muscles rolling, tendons stretching, jaw aching as my teeth grew and shifted in my changing jawbone.

Wyatt movedfast.

He was out the door in seconds, the door itself bolted before I finished thrashing my way to the floor, clawed hand-paws already digging into the soft material of the reading pillow. Everything around me became sharper, harsher, sounds assaulted my ears, my skin screamed—or maybe that was just me.

I couldn’t tell where I ended and the pain began.

I lay on the floor,again, this time on my side, staring over at the mostly-shredded remains of the reading pillow. It had lost most of its definition, although there was still enough of it clinging together that you could tell that it had probably started life as some sort of pillow.

I wasn’t sure if my ability to not completely render it into its constituent parts was a good sign or a bad one—good, because I hadn’t gone so thoroughly savage that I’d obliterated it, or bad because I hadn’t had the strength to do so.

I still had exactly zero control over myself in wolf form—I assumed it was wolf form. For all I knew, I was turning into a bear. Europe doesn’t have a lot of apex predators, so my choices were rather limited, not that I got to actually choose.