“Well, about that…”
“Oh dear god. What do you mean ‘well, about that’?”
“You know what I mean. It’s why you’re backing away.”
I’m not, she wanted to say.
But when she looked down, sure enough. She was farther away from him than she had been before. And by the time she looked back, whatever was happening to him was definitely happening more. He had started sort of slowly curling over, until he was practically hunched in a ball on the floor. Like someone who had been stabbed and simply could not stay standing. He needed to hug his wound, even though in this case there wasn’t one.
There was just that nightmare thing he’d said.
The one that now seemed a hell of a lot more believable than it had before.
“Oh my god. Is this exploding spine thing seriously that bad?”
“I want to say no, but honestly this is only about one-tenth of it.”
It was thewayhe said the words that made her formulate her next move. It was barely a human language. She wasn’t even sure if she’d deciphered what he’d said correctly, in the middle of all the teeth-grinding and growling and drooling.
Really drooling, too. Like animals did when they had rabies.
So she just made the call, without thinking anything further about it.
“Okay, that’s it. I’m gonna get an ambulance here right now,” she said. And she turned to do it. But the panic in his reply stopped her. Hell, the fact that he managed to replyat allstopped her.
“No, you can’t. You can’t do that,” he choked out, even though his face was starting to turn purple. Almost like he was fighting something, she thought, then tried not to think about what thatsomethingmight be. Because whatever it was, it looked enormous. And horrible. And he was definitely losing the battle against it.
As she stood there—frozen in fear and dread and complicated feelings about her former friend—he finished curling all the way up. Now he was a tight ball on the floor, face pressed into his knees, arms around the back of his head.
And after a minute, she realized something else: he’d gone really quiet.
Spookily quiet. No more grunts, no more growls. Not even the sound of his breathing. Like he’d died, she thought, then couldn’t help taking a step forward. She got a little closer, just so she could find out for sure if he was breathing or not.
And when that still didn’t tell her anything, she leaned down. She reached out a hand. A shaking, hesitant hand. In fact, she almost touched him. She got within a hair’s breadth of him. She could actually feel the heat of his body.
Then his head suddenly snapped up.
And oh. Fuck. No.
Because holyfuckhisfacewhen he did.
She had never seen anything like it. She came close to scream ing over it. Because even though it was impossible, even though it was ridiculous,his face simply was not his face anymore.
Those caramel eyes she’d once known so well—they were suddenly near white. As if they’d somehow been drained of all their color. And the smooth brow that had once sat perfectly normally above them? It was suddenly thicker and heavier, in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.
Because, sure, eyes could sometimes shift shades.
But you couldn’t spontaneously grow bigger bones. That wasn’t a thing, it just wasn’t.
Yet it had happened nonetheless. And not just to his brow, either. Every part of his face was bigger—his jaw, his cheekbones, his nose. They all protruded now, in so significant a manner that his skin looked paper thin. Like it had been stretched to tearing point, by whatever this was.
All of which was bananas enough on its own.
But then there were his teeth. Those too-crooked incisors were now no longer crooked. They were perfectly curved, just beneath the rising snarl of his upper lip. And oh, they were bigger. They were bigger, and they were thicker, and they were sharp, god they were so sharp she wanted to call them razors, knives, broken glass. Anything that would slice you in two the second they made contact.
And if that low growl was anything to go on, they were about to, pretty soon.
It was the reason she took a step back. Why she held up her hands and said his name: Seth. Though truthfully, she didn’t know why she bothered. He hadn’t even been willing to listen to herbeforewhatever this was. There was no way he was going to listen to her now, in this state.
