Page 82 of The Turning of the Tables

And I didn’t want any of them. It wasn’t that I wished they didn’t exist—I just… didn’t want people telling me they understood. Even though they did, to a degree, no one ever really understood what it was like to be in someone else’s body. And mine had already been pretty messed up.

I don’t know if it was ironic or paradoxical or just plain stupid, but my life had completely changed, and I didn’t just want to go back to it as though nothing was different.

I wasn’t going to get a lot of sympathy from anyone if I said so out loud, though.

Wyatt smiledat both Noah and I, collecting my empty bowl—I’d been given more chicken, this time with rice and beans, followed by ice cream for dessert. I didn’t feel hungry for the first time in days, and not feeling a gnawing pit in my stomach went a very long way toward making me feel more in control of my own body.

I still wasn’t happy about any of it.

I didn’t want to be a shifter, for one thing. Ireallydidn’t want to be a shifter. I hated the fact that my body felt prickly, that every time I had a surge of emotion, I had to worry about turning feral. I hated that I could smelleverything. I hated that I could hear every scuff of a shoe, every creak of a door. Every shriek and scream that they’d tried to muffle, but hadn’t quite managed to do.

“We’re going to move you tomorrow morning,” Wyatt said.

“Move me?” I asked, looking up at him from where I was sitting on the floor, Noah beside me.

Wyatt nodded. “Into a more typical hospital room.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

It was a ‘good’ sign, because it meant they thought I was recovering. I wasn’t feverish, although I felt weak and shaky, but I wasn’t entirely certain how much of that was illness, how much was me adjusting to my new body, and how much was because I had only had one decent meal in the last two weeks.

But I wasn’t certain that I was as in control as they seemed to think. Wyatt was my day nurse—there were two more who came in to check on me, feed me, and so on, but I didn’t know their names. One was a brusque and efficient elven woman, and the other a somewhat twitchy man whose animalistic smell told me he was also some kind of shifter. He was nice enough, but didn’t really engage much with me. That was fine. I kind of preferred the professional distance, to be honest.

Because any attempt to make this feel ‘okay’ felt horribly wrong. I hated it. I hated my body, I hated the trembling muscles, I hated the fact that the slightest thing felt like itcould send me into a physical spiral that ended with destroyed pillows and clothes.

I also hated that I hated it.

Because the part of me that wanted to support Noah—and all the shifters I knew and cared about—wanted to be able to treat this like a perfectly ‘normal’ thing. People become shifters all the time. Shifters are people, just like humans and orcs and fauns and Arcs and everybody else, regardless of Arcane status.

Ibelievedthat.

And I hated that I’d become a shifter.

How the fuck was I supposed to explain that to Noah? Or Hart? Or Elliot? Or any of the lovely mediums and shifters and orcs and everything else that I worked with?Hey, it’s cool that you’re an Arc or a Nid, but it isn’t cool with me that I am.

It made me sound like the world’s worst asshole.

And it wasn’t even because I knew that suddenly I had become a second-class citizen. I’m sure someone in St. Cyprian’s had already started the paperwork the second they knew what I was and that I wasn’t going to die. They’d probably catalogued my DNA, my fingerprints, and my bite impression, both human and wolf. I no longer had the luxury of being a private citizen—I was a registered shifter, with all the attendant bullshit that came along with it.

I was angry about that.

I was upset about the fact that I was even a shifter to begin with.

Wasn’t chronic Lyme and alpha-gal enough? Why did I also have to now be prone to what amounted to fits of psychosis accompanied by pain, blackouts, and claws and fangs. And since I couldn’t control myself, I could do damage to a lot more than furniture.

I hated that.

I also hated the fact that I suddenly felt a lot more sympathetic to the bigoted shitheads in the Magic Free Movement. From inside a new shifter’s body, Igotit in a way that I never had as the twin of a shifter. I’d watched Noah struggle with his new self for years—we were teenagers, and even thinking about the nightmare of going through puberty as a shifter made me shudder. I remembered him saying that he had a hard time keeping his temper and his emotions under control.

I thought I’d understood. I had clearly hadno ideajust how awful that had to have been for him.

So I hated that I was now undergoing that same struggle, albeit as an adult who—in theory, anyway—had learned how to control his emotional outbursts. And I hated that this experience had taught me just how clueless I’d been. I hated that I lacked control. And I hated that it made me feel like a terrible person all around—for being a clueless shithead, for being an asshole, and for wishing I didn’t know any of that.

22

ELLIOT CRANE

How do you feel today?