He went to the clinic and got tested because he’d had a raw, nagging feeling that he’d done it all wrong and was paying a price for all that freedom. From one day to the next he’d gone from healthy to not. And now, Price was offering him a chance to do it again, to change himself in the space of a minute. To an animal, a creature that shouldn’t exist, with sharp teeth behind curling lips.
The wolf’s eyes, golden-brown, stared at him, gleaming, eager. The woman—still flirting with him.
He could face one horror, or the other. Those were his choices. That was what he had brought on himself.
But wouldn’t it be nice to be invincible, for once?
“It can’t be that easy,” T.J. whispered.
“No, it’s not. But that’s why we’re here,” Price said. “We’ll help you.”
If he asked for time to think about it, he would never come back. He stepped toward the cage.
It was going to hurt. He repeated to himself, invincible, and he glanced at the people gathered around him—werewolves, all of them. But none of them looked on him with anger or hate. Caution, maybe. Doubt, maybe. But he would be all right. It would be a like a shot, a needle in the arm, a vaccination against worse terrors.
Price stood behind him—to keep him from fleeing? The others gathered around, like they wanted to watch. All he had to do was reach. The wolf inside the cage whined and turned a fidgeting circle.
“You can still back out. No shame in walking out of here,” Price said, whispering behind him.
It didn’t look so monstrous. More like a big dog. All he had to do was reach in and scratch its ear. T.J. rested his hand on the top of the cage. The bars were smooth, cool, as if the steel had absorbed the chill from the concrete underneath.
Kneeling, T.J. slipped his hand down to the side, then pushed his arm inside. The wolf carefully put her jaws around his forearm. He clenched his hand into a fist, and by instinct he lunged away. The wolf closed her mouth on him, and her fangs broke skin.
He thrashed, pulling back, fighting against her. Bracing his feet against the bars, he pushed away. That only made his skin tear through her teeth, and she bit harder, digging in, putting her paws on him to hold him still so that her claws cut him as well as his teeth. Behind him Price grabbed hold, securing him in a bear hug, whispering.
The pain was total. He couldn’t feel his hand, his arm, the wolf’s gnawing, but he could feel his flesh ripping and the blood pouring off him, matting in the fur of her snout. All that infected, tainted blood.
He looked away and clamped his jaws shut, trapping air and screams behind tightly closed lips.
By the time Price pulled T.J. away from the cage, he’d passed out.
When he woke up, he was in a twin bed in what looked like a sunny guest room. The decorations—paisley bedspread, out-of-date furniture set—lacked personality. The woman who had been a wolf sat on a chair next to the bed, smiling.
He felt calm, and that seemed strange. He felt like he ought to be panicking. But he remembered days of being sick, sweating, swearing, fighting against blankets he’d been wrapped in, and cool hands holding him back, telling him he was going to be fine, everything was going to be fine. All the panic had burned out of him.
He pulled his hands out from under the sheets and looked at them. His right arm was whole, uninjured. Not even a scar. But he remembered the claws tearing, the skin parting.
He took a deep breath, pressing his head to the pillow, assaulted by smells. The sheets smelled of cotton, stabbed through with the acerbic tang of detergent—it made his eyes water. A hint of vegetation played in the air, as if a window was open and he could smell trees—not just trees, but the leaves, fruit ripening on boughs, the smell of summer. Something was cooking in another part of the house. He’d never smelled so much.
The woman, Jane, moved toward him and her scent covered him, smothered him. Her skin, the warmth of her hair, the ripeness of her clothes, a hint of sweat, a hint of breath—and more than that, something wild that he couldn’t identify. This—fur, was it fur?—both made him want to run and calmed him. Inside him, a feeling he couldn’t describe—an instinct, maybe—called to him. It’s her, she did this.
He breathed through his mouth to cut out the smells, to try to relax.
“Good morning,” she said, wearing a thin and sympathetic smile.
He tried to speak, but his dry tongue stuck. She reached to a bedside table to a glass of water, which she gave him. It helped.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said. “But that’s why we do it like this, so the choice has to be yours. Do you understand?”
He nodded because he did. He’d had the chance to walk away. He almost had. He wondered if he was going to regret not walking away.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“This is strange.”
She laughed. “If that’s all you have to say about it, you’re doing very well.”
Her laughter was comforting. With each breath he took, he felt himself grow stronger. It was like that moment just past being sick, when you still remembered the illness but had moved past it.
“I’m starving,” he said—the hunger felt amazing. He wanted to eat, to keep eating, rip into his food, tear with his claws—
And that was odd.
He winced.
“Oh, Alex was right bringing you in,” Jane said. “You’re going to do just fine.”
He hoped she was right.
On his first full moon, on a windswept plain in the hills of central California, he screamed and couldn’t stop as his body broke and changed, shifting from skin and reason to fur and instinct. The scream turned into a howl, and the dozen others of the pack joined in, and the howls turned into a song. They taught him to run on four legs, to smell and listen and sense, to hunt, and that if he didn’t fight the change didn’t hurt as much. In the morning, the wolves slept and returned to their human forms, but they remained a pack, sleeping together, skin to skin, family and invincible. They taught him how to keep the animal locked inside until the next full moon, despite the song that called to him, the euphoria of four legs on a moonlit night. He’d never felt so powerful, not even when he left home.
He’d called Mitch and told him that he’d been sick with the flu and was staying with a friend. When he returned, the track had changed.
It had become brilliant, textured, nuanced. The dust in the air was chalk, sand, earth, and rubber. The exhaust was oil, plastic, smoke and fire. And the crowd—a hundred different people and all their moods, scents, and noises. A dozen bikes were on the track; each engine had a slightly different sound. He sneezed at first, his nose on fire, before he learned to filter, and his ears burned before he figured out how to block the chaos. He didn’t need to take it all in, he only had to focus on what was in front of him. But he could take it all in, whenever he wanted.
The world had changed. Terrifying and brilliant, all of it.
Alex had given T.J. a ride. Before T.J. left the truck, Alex touched his arm, calming him. The animal inside him that had been ready to tuck his tail and run settled.
“You going to be okay?” Alex said.
“Yeah,” T.J. said, breathing slowly as he’d been taught, settling the creature down.
“I’m here if you need anything. Don’t wait until you get into trouble. Come find me first,” he said.
If the pack was a new family, then Alex was its father, leader, master. That was another thing T.J. hadn’t expected. He’d never really had a father-figure to turn to.
Over the last week he’d learned what the price for invincibility was: learning to pass. Moving among people, thinking all the time how easy it would be to rip into them and feast, imagining their blood on his tongue but never being able to taste. Because if he tried it—if any of them ever actually lost control—the others would rip his heart out. That was how they’d stayed secret for centuries: never let the humans know they were there.