“No,” I breathed. “Fuck?—”
His body seized.
His transformation began with violence.
His back arched violently as his spine bowed, muscles bunching and twisting under his skin. He screamed, the sound ripping itself free of him in an animalistic wail that reverberated off the walls.
The room filled with the smell of adrenaline and sweat and something feral and wrong, a scent that set every instinct I had screaming at once.
I backed away as quickly as I could.
He came at me fast.
Faster than anything human had a right to be.
I turned to run, but my body was already too slow. I didn’t make it three steps before he hit me, weight slamming into my side and driving me hard into the floor. Pain exploded through my shoulder as his teeth sank in, tearing flesh and muscle. I screamed as we crashed together, his jaws snapping inches from my throat, hot breath washing over my face.
This is how it ends, I thought distantly.Eaten alive by the thing I’ve spent years trying to save.
Acting on pure instinct, I jammed my thumb into his eye with everything I had.
He howled, recoiling just long enough for me to scramble back, blood pouring down my arm, the world tilting violently as shock and pain threatened to pull me under.
The feral wolf staggered, confused, half-shifted and fully lost, claws scraping uselessly against the tile.
I grabbed the nearest heavy object, an examination lamp, and swung.
The impact jolted up my arms. Bone crunched, a sickening sound that echoed far too loud in the small room.
He collapsed.
Didn’t get back up.
Silence rushed in to fill the space he left behind.
It roared in my ears.
I sat there on the floor, back against the cabinet, shaking uncontrollably as I stared at the body of a man who had been human when he’d walked through my door. My breath came in short, panicked bursts. My hands were slick with blood, both his and mine, and the metallic smell coated the back of my tongue.
I pressed shaking fingers to the bite in my shoulder and felt the heat there, pulsing, spreading. I didn’t need tests. I didn’t need time.
I knew exactly what was coming.
There was no hiding this. No lying my way out. No delaying the inevitable with paperwork and careful omissions.
I had been bitten.
I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled to the sink, vomiting until there was nothing left but bile and pain. My reflection stared back at me from the mirror above the basin, pale, hollow-eyed, with blood smeared down my shirt and across my face like war paint.
I laughed weakly, the sound breaking apart halfway through.
“Of course,” I whispered. “Of course this is how it happens.”
I cleaned the wound as best I could, teeth clenched against the pain, then wrapped it tight with shaking hands that gradually, disturbingly, steadied. My body was already adapting. Already changing.
That scared me more than anything else.
I went to the comm unit and activated the channel I had memorized but never truly believed I would need.
