“Don’t fight it!” Taylor was yelling. “Please. Don’t fight it!”
Angelica was buried in pure pain. She was in a blanket of agony tightly wrapped around her, suffocating, burning. She prayed for the pain of the shattered hand, the broken arm. She wept and screamed, and still the white-hot daggers tore through her body. The floor and walls and ceiling all blended together in an endless white glare that lanced through her eyes and exploded in the back of her head.
Fracture of the tibia, ulna, spinal stenosis, shattered femur, tibia, fibula... There were too many to name. 206 bones in the human body... 206... 205... 204... 207... 200... Organ damage, facial lacerations, healed, skin pull, fingernails rounding, hardening...
For the first time since medical school when she developed her tattle-tale memory, it failed her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t breathe. The memory stuttered and fell silent and choked and writhed. She was dying, and then she was dying some more. The breath left her and came back stronger. She arched her back and screamed when the back wasn’t there anymore to arch, and she could still hear Taylor from a thousand miles away and his muted cries as she fell and kept falling.
She lay in a state of emptiness.
Then she breathed once, a sharp inhale that left her gasping and choking, and floundered and opened her eyes. She was on the floor, still in her cell. Taylor was screaming her name, but it was far away and it was only a sound from a raw throat that meant something because she had already known it.
That made no sense.
Nothing made sense. She held on tightly to his words. Accept. Accept. Share the burden. She blinked. She looked at her hand—the shattered, broken hand. It was larger. Furry. There were razor-sharp points jutting from it. She tried to extend the claws. They popped out so fast she nearly jumped.
She was breathing. Her heart was beating—hell, it was pounding.
Autonomic functions, parasympathetic and sympathetic systems functional. Breath, heart rate, digestion, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. Maybe later for those last two, but it was good to hear the medical memory again. A piece of normalcy in a sea of insanity.
She wanted to throw up but had no idea how. She searched for some clue, some hint how to operate a body like this, but nothing in all her schooling and during her practice had prepared her for learning to live in the body of a lioness.
What was it Taylor had said? Accept the cat? He was speaking as if there were two of them, two personalities, like one didn’t interact with the other until today. She tried to find the cat persona.
Hello? Is there anyone in here with me? I accept you!
There was only silence.
Anxiety symptoms and the resulting disorders are believed to be due to disrupted modulation within the central nervous system. A symptom of such a disruption can include talking to one’s self, hearing voices. Possible causes are an imbalance of the serotoninergic system and the noradrenergic system when one is over-used and the other is under-used.
Yeah, that was helpful.
Meaning I’m going crazy. Why the hell not? I’m a fucking LION! How do I move? How do I control any of the—how do I change back? Can I change back? Oh, fuck... I have to pee.
Pressure on the bladder can create feelings of...
STOP, DAMN IT! She tried to calm her breath. Tried to swallow through a dry throat. Don’t tell me about it, just DO IT!
For the first time since medical school, a silence echoed in her head. Her hand twitched. It didn’t matter that it was five times as big, covered in fur, and shaped differently with retractable daggers. It was still her hand. It responded as a hand would.
She moved the arm. Experimentally, she moved the other. Taking a chance, she pushed herself up on her arms and turned her head to regard the madwoman who was saying something to her. She didn’t really care to hear her. Angelica’s interest was only in him. Taylor. He was calling to her, assuring her that everything would be all right. As though transforming suddenly into a lioness of gigantic proportions was anywhere near normal. She brought the rear legs under her. She was shaking, but she managed. It felt like she should have a sway back, like her rear legs should be longer than the front, as if she were on all fours playing with her nephew.
But at the same time, it felt natural. She stretched and immediately fell on her face. She got her legs back under her and blinked owlishly at them. That smell, that sickly sweet smell was dissipating. Some part of her mind understood that Melinda had turned off the gas. She tried walking, fell against the glass wall and slid to the floor, but she stood again and managed to keep the floor under her paws. The second attempt went better.
I accept you. It wasn’t a personality she needed to accept. It was the way the body moved, the way it conformed; the feel of four legs, not two. She rolled her neck, stretching, feeling the POP of her spine as the vertebrae slid comfortably in place.
“Angelica!” Taylor called. “Focus.”
She turned to look at him. Whiskers twitched.
I have whiskers. And I can feel them move.
A sort of strange wonder came over her.
“Imagine you’re about to rise, to stretch in your human form. You’ve done it for more than twenty years; just imagine it the way it always works and stand up.”
Angelica thought for a moment. How do you think about not thinking about something that you can’t think about? Internally, she shrugged and stood.
The pain returned, the sound of bones realigning and reshaping returned, but she was more prepared for it this time. The shock wasn’t so bad. She found herself bent over, not standing, her arm—flesh, not fur, extended in front of her.
She was able to rise, though she lost her balance once or twice, and thankfully put on the gown Melinda had shoved through a similar slot to Taylor’s.
She was absolutely exhausted.
“Remarkable, Doctor!” Melinda clapped in excitement. “Wonderful! I knew you were special! The first successful transformation from a DNA alteration ever. You’re the first one to live through it!” She beamed with the excitement of a little girl who successfully made cookies for the first time.
Angelica could only stare. She had no idea what to say, or even how to say it. Her tongue felt strange and thick in her mouth, like she needed to get used to living in a human skin again when she’d only left it for a few minutes.
“I’m proud of you both.” Melinda couldn’t seem to keep from talking. Her pen danced wildly across the pages of the clipboard. “I cannot wait for the final results. This will push my research ahead by years!” Melinda’s watch beeped. “Damn! I’m sorry, my darlings, but I’m due for my damn shift at the clinic. You know what an ass Manchester can be if you’re late.”
“What ‘final results’?” Taylor yelled.
“The autopsies.” Melinda said it as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “Ta, darlings!” She flitted out of the room with a backward hand flutter and disappeared. Angelica fell back against the metal table and closed her eyes against a sudden surge of nausea.
Autopsies?
***
ANGELICA SLID DOWN the wall that separated her from Taylor. It was a muffled sound but she could hear him on the other side. He sat down heavily against the wall.
“You all right?” he asked.
“That really should be a stupid question,” Angelica said, and smiled because she knew it was his way of expressing concern. “But, yeah, I think I am. I just... I didn’t know how to operate my body. It felt... it felt like a cage, like a trap, and I started to panic. Then I heard you. Acceptance. I found that the body would reply to my desires and I began to be able to move it.”
“There wasn’t an inner cat?”
“No. Just the same mixed up brain I’ve always had. When I went to med school, I started using triggers to help me remember things. So if I saw someone with, say, the flu—” Symptoms include fatigue, body aches, headache, cough, sometimes fever... “I get the list of symptoms and causalities and so forth. It’s how I cope when I’m stressed. I found that part of me could actually understand the driving. I don’t know if that makes sense...”
“You impress the hell out of me,” Taylor said quietly. “Our children have years of preparation and careful monitoring long before their first change.”
Angelica smiled, oddly pleased that he’d already claimed her as one of his own. Would others of his kind be as accepting, she wondered. “Our children, huh?”
Taylor’s voice took on a lighter tone. “The children of my people,” he amended somewhat awkwardly, which sort of answered her question.
She wasn’t really one of them. Maybe she never would be. So, where did that leave her? And them? She bit her lip and dared herself to ask. “Do tigers and lions...” she said, plucking at her gown. “Do they... crossbreed?” It was a crude term, but there was no better way to say it. Tigers, and lions, and bears, oh my!
The silence following the question indicated that he was taking the question seriously. His voice was softer, more tender when he replied. “Yes. They’re called ligers.”
“Ligers? Really?” She swallowed a laugh. “Does that...” She looked around the room, not really seeing it. The light from the flickering fluorescents, high above reach and surrounded by a steel cage, cast the ceiling in shadow, but there was nothing there but duct work and pipes. “Does that work with shifters, too? Crossbreeding, I mean?”
Something was bothering her. Something she hadn’t noticed before, or something she’d maybe noticed in lion form that she hadn’t articulated just yet. She looked again at the table. It shone and gleamed in the reflected light. It looked so clean, so cold.
“I don’t know,” Taylor admitted. “I never knew any other kind.”
“How do you keep from inbreeding, then?” she asked, because asking questions helped to keep her from screaming. Her mind wanted to shut down. The changes to her body, to her psyche, were too enormous to accept so quickly. She was losing sense of who she was. Angelica leaned her head back against the wall. She imagined him on the other side, leaning against her, heads together. She closed her eyes and tried to place herself back in the bathtub, lying against him. The slick, soapy water sloshing over the side of the tub as they played. The gentle relaxation of the heat against her aching muscles. But the faint hiss of cold air from the vent and the feeling of a breeze on her cheek pulled her back to the room, to the barrier between them.
“The gene stays pretty dominant,” he was saying, answering just to give her something to focus on. “So, even when one parent isn’t a shifter, the child usually is.”
The researched in her stirred, interested despite herself. “‘Usually’?”
“Usually. There are exceptions.”
“So you don’t intermarry?” she asked, giving the damn vent the evil eye. Melinda had turned off the pheromone gas. What the hell was that thing doing on?
“We’re not that close, genetically,” he said, his voice calm. Steadying. He knew that she needed him to speak right now, to keep her distracted. She loved him for keeping on like this, as though this conversation were the most important thing in the world, even though there were other, more important, things that needed saying.
She loved him for many reasons.
“We do keep strict marriage and birth records, just to be sure. Besides, there are more in the... old country.”
Angelica snorted. Old country. “What, now I’m in a Godfather movie?” she teased. There was a long silence where the only sounds were the hiss of the air as it came through the vent and a slight rattle she couldn’t place. It was quiet enough that she’d not noticed it before.
“I’m sorry that you got caught up in this,” he said after a moment.
“I’m not.” Angelica smiled. Now that the rattle was heard, she couldn’t unhear it. “I think what we’ve done here is probably more important than all the work I ever did with Meadowlark, or Doctors International. Taylor, we had a chance to save hundreds of lives, to catch the bad guys. And we got to do it together. I felt like part of team, with you.”
“You are.”
She took a breath to speak. The rattle stopped. Thank goodness. “Taylor... I...” Wait, why did the rattle stop? She put a hand to her cheek. The breeze wasn’t blowing on her face.
“What?” Taylor asked.
“Wait a minute.” Angelica stood and walked over the vent. She looked carefully at the grate. She pushed against it. The rattle was coming from it. She shook it. It was loose.
“Taylor, do you have a vent in your room?”
“A vent?” She could hear him stand. “Not sure what you mean. There’s a...a metal tube coming from the wall. It’s where she dosed me before.”
“No. I have an actual vent, a heating/cooling vent in my room. It’s like... I don’t know, three feet square.” She threaded her fingers through the grate and pulled. “Ouch!”
“What happened?”
She looked up at the dark ceiling overhead. “The grate is loose,” she answered, “but I’m not strong enough to pull it out.”
There was a long silence. “Yes, you are.” Taylor’s voice was quiet. Patient. Letting her work it out.
I have to learn how to think like the lion.
She turned to the wall as if she could see him through it. She looked back to the grate. “How? How do I change without the pheromone?”
“The same way you did the first time. The pheromone only made you want to. You did the rest yourself. Picture yourself as the cat. Start to bend over like you’re on all fours; pretend, like when you were little.”
Angelica sighed and looked through the glass wall. Empty room. Apparently, Akisha had left when Melinda did, seeing no reason to wait around. She slipped off the gown and curled up into a ball.
Clavicle fracture, ribs cracking, reforming... Frankly, she would have preferred to not have a full narration of each pain that stabbed and prodded her, but this was the part of her that figured out how to, well, how to cat. She let it alone.
Moments later she blinked and stretched. The view was different. She was seeing the room from about what would have been waist-level when she was human. She looked down, examining her paw. For testing, she raised the paw and extended the claws. She stood, stretched, and rose on her rear legs. The extended claws slipped through the openings in the grate.
She pressed her other hand—no—paw against the wall and pulled as hard as she could. The tough material of her nails kept her from injury, where her fingers would have been deeply sliced. The vent cover bowed and pulled. With a crash it gave way, and she fell backward, slamming into the table. With a roar she righted herself and turned to look. The grate was free of the hole, but there was no way she was going to fit into that as big as she was now. She licked her lips.
“Angelica? Are you all right?”
She walked to the glass wall and let him see her. She held eye contact as she shifted. It was still painful, but her body was beginning to understand its new state. The change went quicker, and the resultant nausea went away almost immediately.
“It’s too small for me as a cat,” she called back to him. “I’m not entirely sure it’s big enough for me as a human.” She looked dubiously at the opening. “I can’t exactly wear the gown, either.” She bit her lower lip. “Taylor, I have to crawl through the ductwork naked. What if she knows what I’m doing? If she’s got a monitor on us?”
“She’d have been back by now. Maybe she can’t come because she’s working at the hospital. This might be our only chance,” he said softly. “You can do this. I’ll find us something to wear when we get out of here.”
Oh, that is sooo not the point. I... ew... Experimentally, she pulled the table. It moved slightly. She arched back and convinced the stubborn metal to give almost six inches. It would have to be enough. She took a deep breath and stepped onto the table and shimmied into the hole.
This is where I start quoting lines from Die Hard, right? Something about coming out to the coast? I can’t remember it right now...
She pushed herself along. The going was hard. She’d thought a duct would be more of a smooth tunnel, but the joints in the pieces of metal scraped and clawed at her skin. Little pieces of flesh stayed behind, and though she couldn’t see she knew she was bleeding from a hundred different places. And there’s so much lovely dust to rub into those little cuts...
Before she could run through all the high points of septicemia, she paused to look around. The area she was in let in light in spots. The ductwork was shabbily made; whoever built this place had scrimped on materials. Whatever breeze this was supposed to convey from room to room was lost in a hundred holes. In front of her the path ended. There were two options, as the ducts formed a ‘T’. Left, or right?
As far as she could tell, Taylor’s cell and the nurses’ station were to the left. She wriggled until she turned and slid her shoulders into the new junction.
Where she promptly got stuck.