“My wolf brain said to hide, so I hid, and then just...loped off.Vanishing into the brush and going on a little adventure—”
“An adventure!You could have been killed!A bear could have taken you at that age, or you could have fallen down a ravine, or...or anything could have happened.Just anything!”
He laughed suddenly.“You should see the look on your face!”
I smacked his arm.“It isn’t funny!”
“That’s what Mom said when they finally dragged me back.It took two days, and they only found me because I’d brought down a deer, which Dad bragged about foryearsafterward—”
“Adeer?”
“It was old and on its last legs, and I’m not sure I took it down so much as finished it off, but they decided to count it.And that much blood was pungent enough to draw the attention of the search parties.I’d gorged myself and fallen asleep under a tree, and woke up to a bunch of huge wolves nuzzling me, and then my mother shaking me and hugging me and screaming at me.I’d transformed back in my sleep, but I had deer blood all around my mouth, and at first she thought I was dead...
“It’s one of my first clear memories, that and the frog.”
I just stared at him.
“My point is that I barely remember anything from the time I was transformed.Some very vague impressions here and there, but nothing concrete, nothing clear.I was in animal mind, something so different, so Other, from what we normally experience, that I had no way of even processing it.
“Like I didn’t with the Relic’s mind,” I said, starting to see where he was going with this.
“It takes time,” he told me soberly.“Just as it takes time to understand and be understood by your wolf.”
“Which I don’t yet!”
“Exactly.You’ve had barely a month with her, and now you’re being introduced, violently, to a totally new version of yourself.It’s a lot to take in.It would be for anyone—”
“But it hasn’t happened to you!To the boys!Not since that night at the Council.So whyme?”
Cyrus started to speak, and then hesitated, as if thinking.“I don’t know,” he said slowly.“But you’ve had three doses of Jenkins’ brew now: the first when you were dosed up by some of the people he had brewing the potion for him, at their grow farm.After which, you evidenced theÚlfheðinnability—”
“That was a while after,” I protested.
“You first used it a few days after, but may have had it before, but not had an occasion to need it,” he countered.“Then the second time you were exposed, after Jenkins dosed you in his lab, you broke through Neuri—that same night—and changed for the first time.And now—”
“Stop it!”
“Stop what?”he cocked his head at me.“Three doses, Lia.The last aerosolized in the air of that little grocery, and now—”
“Stop it!”I got up and walked off a few feet, only stopping because I had nowhere to go.
The moon was out, bathing me in pale, silvery light, the same that limned the small hills around us and that I knew would be highlighting Cyrus’s face if I turned toward him.
I didn’t.I didn’t want to hear any more.I didn’t want to be here, to be listening to this.
And he was wrong, because when I went after Jace in Tartarus, before I ever knew that wreck of a grocery store even existed, something had been up with me.My arm had transformed, but not into a wolf.Into something—
I cut off those thoughts, wanting to scream, or to run again, and just never stop!
This couldn’t be happening, whatever it was.
Why the hell was thishappening?
But Cyrus was relentless.Soft, gentle, but resolute.The words like fire branding my very soul.
“But it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, isn’t it?”he asked.“Jenkin’s potion doesn’t change us into something new.It just brings out what was already there.Shows us our true selves, or an aspect of them—”
“I’m not that thing!”And I did turn to him then, furious.
