“Try to relax.”
The frown gave way easily to a smile, and Lydia suspected that was always the case with him. She liked it. She’d grown up in a family that took everything seriously, like it was always life or death, but Case seemed to know what actually mattered and what could be shrugged off. Learning how to use his new senses properly mattered to him, but his momentary irritation at not getting it right the first time out didn’t.
“I feel like I’m in a superhero movie, figuring out my powers,” he said.
He would look good in an old-fashioned Superman cape and some spandex. Lydia decided to file that thought away for later.
She watched as he closed his eyes and breathed in again. His dark eyelashes were longer than she’d realized before, and they made a delicate fringe of shadow. She hadn’t had the chance to really see him asleep and relaxed, and it was nice to have this glimpse of him like this. He was so open and unguarded.
What do you really want?Lydia wondered, looking at him.Do you want to stay with me? Could you really be happy here,or would you just agree to it because you know how much I want you to?
“I think I’m getting it,” Case said. He opened his eyes, and Lydia did her best to school her face back to some kind of normal expression. “It smells sort of crystalline, doesn’t it? Really fresh and bright.”
“That’s it. Delicious, right? If I’m not paying attention to where I’m going and sort of wandering around, my wolf will always wind up leading me to running water. Want to try to lead the way?”
“As long as you tell me if I’m about to take us off the edge of a cliff,” he said dryly.
It only took a minute or two for Lydia to see that he was in no danger of doing that. Case’s instincts were good, even if he was still finding and honing them. He paused a few times to reorient himself with grounding sniffs, but otherwise, he mostly seemed content to trust his wolf. Lydia suspected the two of them would get along well, which was lucky. That wasn’t always the case. Even though an inner animal was more of an expression of your subconscious than a completely separate creature, people could and did wind up at odds with theirs. Freud would have a field day with shifters.
But now that she thought about it, it made sense that Case would connect well with his wolf. Case might practice restraint, but he was probably the least repressed person she’d ever met. She was pretty sure he knew exactly who he was and what he wanted, and she admired that about him.
That did remind her of something she really should ask him about, though.
“When I turned you,” Lydia said—after a quick look around and a thorough sniff of the area had confirmed they were as alone as she thought, “I really thought your body was going to reject the transformation.”
“So did I.” He pressed his lips together for a second, his face turning a little ashen even from thinking about it. “That part hurt.”
From the look on his face, Lydia was going to guess it had been a whole lot worse than he would ever admit. Even as a bystander, what he’d been going through had seemed hellish. And she’d always heard it was agonizing. She certainly hadn’t hesitated to run and get some of Ruth’s morphine for him, because even if he wanted to downplay it now, he’d sure needed it then.
“I don’t know what else would’ve been happening, if it wasn’t that,” Lydia said.
“I think itwasthat,” Case said to her surprise. “I could sense my wolf for a while, but he was fading away.”
The few accounts Lydia had read of failed transformations had mentioned people sensing their animals on the horizon and then losing them as their bodies fought to get the strange new shifter “virus” out of their system. It had haunted her a little to think of a silhouette of her wolf slowly dissipating into the mist. If you already had a connection to your animal, losing it sounded like the worst fate imaginable. Luckily, the people who’d survived their bodies’ rejection of the bites never had much chance to get to know what they were missing. They were mostly just grateful to be alive and on the other side of all that pain.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Before I bit you, I read all the accounts on turnings that I could find. I asked everyone about it. And I couldn’t find any record of a failed transformation that somehow reversed itself at the last minute. What was it like?”
Case’s face went still as he thought back and Lydia watched the shadows of wind-rustled leaves move across it.
He wasn’t just gorgeous. He was beautiful. He belonged out here, in the natural world, with other wild and free things, and if she chained him to one small and dying town ....
Don’t think about it, she told herself.Not right now.
“It hurt,” he said—that same understatement all over again. “And like I said, I could see my wolf, but it was fading away. And I could hear that you were in trouble outside. My wolf could sense it too, and that had it on edge. I asked it ....” He drew his hands into fists. “I asked it to go help you, if it could. I was pretty out of it, and I thought maybe it could manifest somewhere else like a friendly ghost. Don’t laugh at me.”
“You were in agony, and you were trying to think about how to save my life,” Lydia said bluntly. “I’m not going to laugh at you for not knowing how inner animals work.”
“It told me it couldn’t go anywhere without me. So I asked it to finish the job and—leap into me, I guess.”
Lydia’s breath caught in her throat. “To force the transformation to take?”
“I guess. I didn’t know if it would stick forever, but I thought it might work long enough for me to help you with whatever was happening outside.” He half-laughed. “Not that I even knew what that was. But I knew you’d been gone too long.”
“But it must have—Case, Iknowyou were already in a lot of pain. Overriding all your body’s natural precautions like that to brute-force yourself to turn ... your nervous system would have gone haywire. No one’s equipped to take that.”
Case shrugged, like he hadn’t accomplished something no one else in the world ever had. Something no one else in the world would everwantto accomplish, for that matter.
“It hurt, yeah.”
