I look down. Nothing but a torn stump below the elbow. Bits of sinew dangle, the flesh already beginning to regenerate as faint pulses of greenish-red light coil along the wound. A bear did this.A bearin downtown Fullerton. A huge mofo, too.
“Dammit,” I mutter, the word slurring around too many sharp teeth and a tongue not made for speech.
I shift, and the transition hurts, especially now. My body retracts, bones retreating, skin reshaping. My shirt is long gone, pants ripped all the way up my legs. I stand, naked from the waist up, blood smeared across my chest. My severed arm isalready forming the stump of a new forearm, bone rebuilding in real time.
I grit my teeth and pull on some clothing I’d stashed behind the dumpster. I find an empty paper bag and pull it over my arm, covering the gore as best I can. My car is parked two blocks over, hidden in a private lot. I’ll walk there and vanish for a day or two. Heal. Regroup.
But that woman… Samantha Moon.
She’s not what I thought. Not even close. I’d underestimated her. Badly. She hadn’t smelled like a bloodsucker. Didn’t move like a shifter. But she’ssomething. When I lunged, she didn’t flinch. When I snarled, she didn’t blink. She smiled. That ice sword was straight up magic. And her use of it... wow. A smooth, practiced motion, clearly trained. She’d fought before. Perhaps even killed.
I thought I’d be the apex predator in this city. But I see now how wrong I am, and holy shit... that bear? That young gal straight up shifted into a bear. But she hadn’t been a shifter, per se. No, her transformation was instant. More magic, obviously.
Damn, I need to accelerate the ritual. T-Rex isn’t a side project anymore. It’s my upgrade. My armor. No more subtlety. No more interviews and smiles. No more trying to charm my way past undead detectives. I’m going to finish the spell, and when I do… I’ll be untouchable.
Let’s see her smile then.
***
Detective Sherbet stands in the middle of my destroyed office, hands on his hips, gaze sweeping the wreckage like he’d walked into a war zone.
“Multiple reports of seeing a dinosaur running through downtown.”He looks at me pointedly. “I instantly thought of you. I see I wasn’t wrong.”
I bat my eyes. “You say the nicest things, Detective.”
“Something you want to tell me, Sammy?”
There are claw marks down the walls. Tammy’s desk is destroyed; my chair is half-eaten. The windows are shattered, and my glass door is gone. I knew that thing would never make it. There is blood smeared on the floor, and one of my filing cabinets looks like it tried to transform into an Autobot.
I take a long sip of coffee. “A raptor... and a bear.”
He turns to me, blinking. “A bear, huh? That’s a new one.”
I point to my daughter. “Meet the bear.”
“You?” says Sherbet, spinning around and staring down at her with hands on hip. “I thought you were the normal one.”
“I haven’t been normal in a long time, detective.”
“Oh, wait. You went to fairy school or something, right?”
“Close enough.”
“And fairies turn into bears?”
“They mostly turn into butterflies and grasshoppers. But humans who can perform fairy magic can. Like me.”
“I have a hard time believing you can be a bear. I still remember you as a ten-year-old goth girl.”
Tammy looks at me. “Should I show him, ma?”
I shrug, staring at my destroyed office. “Just don’t break anything else.”
She giggles. “There’s nothing else to break.”
She’s right about that, though I think our computers made it, though not the monitors.
Tammy closes her eyes, and the change hits fast. Her skin ripples as fur explodes outward in a wave of russet and gold. Her spine elongates, limbs thickening, hands curling into black-clawed paws the size of dinner plates. In seconds, my daughter is no longer a young lady but a Kodiak nightmare, big as a small car, fur brushing the ceiling tiles as she looms over Sherbet with a rumbling growl that vibrates the remaining glass in thewindow frames. Sherbet goes pale, stumbling back into what’s left of my chair, hand instinctively flying toward his sidearm that suddenly looks like a child’s toy.
