The two guys on the couch nearest him stop talking. One draws his legs up, slow, pressing himself into the cushions. Across the room, another boy stands from where he was leaning on the wall and takes two steps toward the door. He doesn't run. He repositions. Like something just changed in the air and his body knew before his brain did.
Sven sees it. His jaw tightens. He takes one step away from the door, toward RJ, and says something low that I can't hear.
RJ doesn't respond. Doesn't blink. Doesn't look at Sven.
He's looking at me the way people look at things they thought they'd lost.
I should be scared. I've been in enough lockups, enough intake halls, enough rooms full of men who are bigger and meaner and less predictable than I am to know when I should be scared. This is that. This is every red flag my body has ever learned to read.
But my body isn't doing what it's supposed to.
The heat starts in my chest. Not panic — something deeper, lower, a slow pour that drops through my stomach and settles between my hips. My skin flushes when I should be cold with fear. My breath changes — shallow, quick, but not the way it goes during a panic attack. A different rhythm. One that has nothing to do with terror and everything to do with the fact that this manis staring at me from across the room and my body has decided that's more important than anything else.
What the fuck is wrong with me.
His eyes drop to my hands. My wrists. Something crosses his face — jaw tight, shoulders pulling forward — and the chain goes taut again. Harder.
He doesn't know me. I've never seen him before in my life. A glimpse through a window doesn't count.
But whatever just happened in his body when he looked at me — I felt it in mine.
My left wrist throbs. Right at the pulse point. I press my thumb into it without thinking and it flares once, hard, then settles into something steady.
The room is still tightening. I can feel it even though I don't understand it. The air has weight. The guys on the couches are shifting — bodies angling toward walls, hands gripping armrests, eyes cutting sideways. Something is happening that everyone in here understands except me.
Torres makes a sound.
Not a word. A whimper. Low, involuntary — the kind of sound you make when pain catches you by surprise. He's standing near the air hockey table and his hands are gripping the edge and his knuckles are white and then his knuckles are wrong.
His hand stretches. The joints swell. His nails thicken, darken, curve, and I am watching a human hand stop being a human hand.
No.
His body convulses. He drops. His back arches and something moves under his shirt and I hear his bones. I hear them. Not breaking. Reorganizing. Wet, dense sounds that shouldn't come from inside a person. His jaw stretches wider than a jaw goes. And then everything speeds up and he's furry.
I should look away. I should scream. I should do anything other than what I'm doing, which is sitting on this couch with my mouth open, completely frozen, watching a boy turn into an animal on the floor of a common room in the middle of nowhere, Alaska.
This isn't real.
And then it's done. And there's a wolf on the floor where Torres was standing.
Not a big dog. Not something that could be mistaken for anything domestic. A wolf — massive, dark-furred, sides heaving, blood on its muzzle where it bit through its own lip during the change. Its eyes are wild.
I can't breathe. My heart is doing something violent and my vision has gone tunnel-narrow and I can't feel my hands.
But underneath the panic — underneath the screaming white noise of that was a person thirty seconds ago — a part of me leaned toward it. Not away. Toward.
I don't understand that. I file it in the place I keep things I'm not ready to look at.
Sven moves. Not panicked. Not rushing. He moves the way someone moves when the smoke alarm goes off and they know where the extinguisher is. Crosses the room in four strides. Grabs the wolf by the scruff and hauls it toward a door at the back of the room.
Another staff member appears. They get the door open. Sven shoves the wolf through. It snarls — full-throated, a sound that vibrates in my rib cage — and then the door closes and the lock turns and it's just a door.
With a wolf behind it.
I stare at the door.
There is no file in my head labeled WHAT TO DO WHEN A PERSON BECOMES A WOLF. I've been in rooms where people were stabbed. I've seen shit that would make a social workerneed a social worker. But I have never seen anything that broke the basic rules of what a human body can do.
