“Do what?”
“Teach anymore.I’m a danger to these kids, to everyone, until we figure this out.Until we get rid of thisthing.”
And once again, I had the almost overpowering desire to rip chunks out of my arm, to get under the skin and drag out the thing that lurked inside my flesh, to make it fight me and kill it, kill it, kill it!Before it killed anyone else.But I didn’t know how.
“If anyone can protect themselves,” Cyrus said dryly.“It’s those kids—”
“They couldn’t today!”
“—and didn’t Jenkins tell you that his formula was supposed to be one you can think through?”
“Jenkins said a lot of things!”
Right up until I silenced him forever.
I felt my fists curl, remembering the terror of that night, and how smug he’d been, so self-satisfied, so proud of his creation!So sure that he’d saved the world—by creating an army of monsters to rip it apart!An army he’d expected to lead, after stealing theUlfheðnarstrain from my blood.
God, he was dead, and Istillhated him!
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I changed?”Cyrus asked.
“What?”
“Most people have some tale about a wobbly cub stalking—and usually failing—to catch a rabbit, before falling on its little behind and howling at the injustice of it all.It makes for cute dinner-table conversation, an amusing story to embarrass the kid with later, or to bring up in a wedding speech.I didn’t get that.”
I looked at him, not understanding the change in topic.
“Sebastian and I both turned early,” he added.“Wolf-born, like you, only with no Neuri Syndrome to hold us back.Instead, I Changed for the first time so early that nobody had been expecting it.I was barely four and had been fishing down by a creek with my uncle.We were on a family trip in the Appalachians—cookouts, white water rafting for the older kids, fishing for the younger ones, and hunting for the dads who didn’t need rifles when there was nothing but forested hills for as far as anyone could see.You know the drill.”
I nodded.Weres loved to be in nature.Plenty of them lived far off the beaten path, if they could financially swing it.One of the advantages of my house was that it was at the end of the little subdivision, allowing me to look out my kitchen window and see only scrub and mountains.
It healed the soul.
“Anyway, my uncle had gone somewhere, probably off to get another beer, and left me holding the fishing line,” Cyrus continued.“He was ripped a new one by Mom for that later, as I could have tumbled into the creek and drowned, but I think Uncle was a few sheets to the wind and wasn’t thinking.And I didn’t drown.
“I transformed instead; they found the remains of my outfit on the riverbank and freaked out.Because who Changes at four?I was too young to be taken on the trips they do for kids to wide-open spaces where they encourage a first Change under supervision.I had never even gotten the verbal instructions that preceded that by a year or so, to make it all sound like a fun adventure, something to be looked forward to.”
“None of it?”I asked, horrified.
“None.My father, indeed my whole paternal line, were late bloomers, so everyone just assumed I’d be the same.Why does nobody ever remember that we have mothers, too?And Mom’s line Changed early, although not that early.She’d already been watching Sebastian, who was a year older, and giving him little hints here and there of what to expect.But me?
“Even she hadn’t begun yet with me.No one had.So there I was, barely four, watching a frog jump through the reeds by the shoreline, and then the next second...
“Everything changed.”
I heard the wonder in his voice, even now, all these years later.I didn’t understand how.I would have been terrified; anyone would.
“I wanted the frog, you see?”he asked, grinning slightly.“I wanted it so much that I went after it, only not in human form.Or in human mind.
“That’s why we prepare kids, and older adults, but especially kids.They say it’s to make the first Change less traumatizing, make them look at it as a positive thing, as a rite of passage to be looked forward to before it happens, and remembered fondly afterward.And that’s part of it.
“But there’s another part they don’t talk about, the one that had my mother screaming the forest down, looking for me, and so savagely ordering the clan to find me, to find meright now, that they were a little wary of her ever afterward.But she knew what could happen if I wasn’t located quickly, knew the risk.”
“You could fall into wolf-mind permanently,” I said, remembering stories I’d heard of Changes gone wrong.
“Yes.There’s a chance with anyone, but especially a child whose brain isn’t yet formed...It could have gone very badly.It almost did, because I wasgone.
“It’s...hard to describe, but you just stop thinking with your higher brain.You go off instinct, and instinct said to eat the frog, and then to eat a fish I found afterward, and then to hide in some tall grasses when the others came looking for me, because they came in human form, something I no longer was, and they didn’t smell quite right.
