Page 87 of The Turning of the Tables

Except he can, some small, more rational part of my brain reminded me.He’s a shifter, too.

But while Elliot might be a shifter, he wasn’tme. He hadn’t experienced a transformation as me, in my skin and aching bones. Shiftinghurt.

I said it out loud. “It hurts.”

“It gets better,” he told me.

“Does it hurt you?”

“No, but I’m used to it. It’s…” He paused, thinking. “It’s like pressure, like your joints need to crack, and then they do, one after another, some at the same time. Because everything is so sensitive at first, it hurts for a few weeks.”

“It’sbeena few weeks,” I pointed out. “Feels like someone is stabbing me in the joints.”

He went quiet. “I—You should tell someone that,” he said, and his voice was low and serious. Possibly concerned. “I don’t remember it feeling likethat.”

Even more proof that I was defective and broken. But I wasn’t going to say that to Elliot.

“Seth—are you okay?” he asked, then.

“No,” I answered honestly. I was a lot of things, but ‘okay’ wasn’t one of them.

“They have counselors,” he said, then, his strange-not-strange voice gentle. “People you can talk to.”

I grunted. I knew they did—Noah and every doctor and nurse I’d talked to had all mentioned them. But I didn’t want to talk to a non-shifter, because they wouldn’t actually understand what was happening, and I didn’t want to talk toa shifter, because then I’d feel terrible about admitting the fact that I wasn’t nearly as pro-Arcanid as I’d thought I was.

Not that I thought I shouldn’t have rights—or that I’d ever arguedanyNid shouldn’t have rights—but I understood now why I was, in fact, more dangerous than the average person. Why a new shifter probably should be limited in terms of where they went and what they did. I didn’t think Noah was in any danger of spontaneously shifting and mauling someone—I feel like he would have said something or otherwise indicated that he was stressed or worried.

But I was both. All the time. Stressed about losing control. Worried that I was going to hurt someone. Or worse.

And on top of that, everything was stillwrong.

The world smelled wrong. Like there were a thousand smells, sharp and pungent, an undercurrent of bleach to everything with a hint of death. Someone had died here—a while ago, I thought, but not so long that the smell of it didn’t linger.

It sounded wrong. Everything was too loud—my breath, my heart, the creak of the rubberized mattress, the rustle of the sheets, the scuff of shoes, and the noises of people in the hallways and other rooms. Sometimes I could hear screams, sometimes crying, often talking. Footsteps and squeaky wheels and doors. I wanted quiet. I wanted to be able to sleep without having fallen into unconsciousness or having been drugged into it, which is how I’d slept the last two days, although at least I was taking the meds by choice rather than having them shot into me.

It even looked wrong. Colors were a little more muted than they had been, but the edges of things seemed sharp,almost painful in the ways they stood out from the less-fuzzy background. Even when I had my glasses on.

And none of that even came close to the way my mind was working. Or, rather, how itwasn’tworking. I had to think about everything. How to move a spoon to my mouth in order to feed myself. How to carefully get out of bed to make my way to the tiny bathroom with its sink cabinet and toilet and shower head on the wall.

Complex thought felt beyond me. I could think about the sounds I heard, the smells of things, and when I was going to next be given a meal. I could think about whether I was warm or cold. Which nurse walked into the room. Whether or not I was going to see Noah.

“Seth?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Don’t be,” he said quickly. “Do you—do you want me to tell you another legend? Or was there something else you wanted me to talk about?”

I could have asked him to tell me about himself. About his experience becoming a shifter. But that seemed awfully personal. “Tell me the same one again,” I said, finally. I’d been too drunk and had fallen asleep partway through, so I hadn’t really gotten it.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Back before the coming of the white man, in the time before the animals ceased to talk, there were four brothers. Manabush was the oldest and loved the humans the most of all his brothers…”

This time, I made it to the end of the story.

23

ELLIOT CRANE

How are you doing?