Waking from her first shift felt like waking with the worst hangover of her life.

The first thing Harper noticed were the songbirds, which sounded as though they were singing directly into her ear canals. She moved to put her hands over her ears, her muscles burning as she did so. If felt as if her flesh had been stretched too tightly over her bones. She hoped it was just dehydration and she wasn't going to find that she'd grown taller than she already was.

With her hands over her ears, the pounding in her head seemed to be magnified. It was the sort of throbbing headache that she could feel from the back of her head to the space between her eyes, and it was made worse by the knowledge that there would be no extra-strength Tylenol to take the edge off.

As she took stock of her condition, her stomach began to churn ominously. If the awful taste in her mouth was any indication, she didn't want to see what would come up if she puked.

Shan's arm was like a lead weight wrapped around her middle. Apparently, shifting hadn't given her super strength, as she wasn't able to pry him loose. After a half-hearted attempt at waking him, she managed to squirm free by wriggling her upper body through his hold. 

It probably helped that she'd lost a good ten pounds. She eyed her torso in dismay, taking in the concave curve of her belly and the outline of her ribcage. As she ran her fingers across her ribs, she remembered how they'd sounded like microwaved popcorn as they'd snapped.

She nearly threw up, but managed to choke it down.

Trying to distract herself, she peered at her surroundings, none of which looked familiar. The area around them was sparsely populated by birch trees and not much else. There was no shelter to speak of. Even the canopy was bare, the autumn leaves having fallen to blanket the forest floor. The sky was blue and she could tell from the position of the sun that it was late morning. How many mornings had passed since she'd shifted, Harper could only guess at.

The leaves around her appeared especially vivid in color. When she went to pick one up, she saw her arm was smooth and unblemished. After doing a double take, she looked to her other arm, certain she must have mixed up which arm had been injured, once by Harruth, and then again by Caim's pack mate. Both arms were free of injury.

Harper had only a few seconds to marvel over the miraculous healing before her hand flew to her neck. Her heart sank as she felt along the juncture of her neck and shoulders, finding it to be equally smooth and unblemished. 

She looked at Shan again. When she'd crawled from his hold, he'd had nothing left to support him and had slumped onto his belly, his head lying gracelessly on the ground. He was laying so still that she might have thought he was dead, had she not been able to hear his heartbeat.

"Whoa. Shan." Her voice was raw, but still her own. "Shan, I can hear your insides."

Her revelation was not enough to compel a response from him, so she began to nudge his shoulders. On the fourth nudge he groaned and turned his head so that his face was in the dirt. He muttered something unintelligible and then went quiet and still once more.

Harper couldn't help but smile at him. Her touch turned affectionate as she ran her hand across his bare shoulders and down his broad back. The feel of his skin on hers was inexplicably soothing, and she could almost forget about her headache and the incessant cries of the songbirds.

"My poor mate," she said, half joking and half testing the new title. "You must be so exhausted."

His head turned in her direction, one green eye cracking open. At first, he regarded her with an unfocused gaze. Then recognition set in and he sat up. He still looked dazed as he pulled her into his arms.

"You're awake," he murmured against her hair.

Her hair.

She scooped up a handful of it, again feeling on the verge of puking. It was no longer blue, or even her natural black.

"No," she moaned. "White? Why white?"

Shan did not share her distress. He stretched his back and answered her through a yawn. "Doesn't the color run in your family?"

"Not this pale," she said. "This is like, printer paper white. I'm going to look like an old lady."

Shan resumed nuzzling the top of her head. "You're beautiful."

Harper was still upset about her hair, but as long as Shan was still attracted to her, she thought it might not be so bad. She leaned forward, resting fully against his hard chest. His heartbeat, usually so soothing, was like a drum being banged against the side of her face.

"Everything is so loud," she said.

"It's your hearing." He traced the shell of her ear with his thumb. "It's better now."

"This doesn't seem like an improvement. I can barely hear myself think."

"You'll learn to tune out the unimportant," he assured her.

"I think my sense of smell is better, too. And there's my arm. Look." She lifted it up for display. "Did you know that would happen?"

Shan took her arm in his hand, his brows drawing together as he inspected it. He seemed to have finally shaken his sleep inertia and his eyes were sharp and alert.

"I didn't," he said. "Maybe it was because it was your first shift. Don't expect to heal in the future. In fact, you have to be careful not to shift when you're injured. It can make things worse."

She knew that already, but she didn't cut him off. His hand had moved to her neck, his thumb brushing over the place where his mark had been. She moved to cover her hand with his.

"It's gone," she said, stating the obvious.

"I'll give you another tonight."

Harper shivered at the thought.

"So my hearing and my sense of smell are better. I've lost my battle wounds, but gained granny hair. Anything else I'm not noticing?" 

When he didn't respond, she looked up at him. His lips were parted, but he remained silent.

"What? I didn't grow a tail, did I?"

His mouth slanted into a smile. "No tail. Do you remember anything from when you shifted?"

She shook her head. "The last thing I remember was being in a lot of pain. Then, it felt like being asleep. I don't remember doing anything."

There had been dreams, or more precisely, one long dream. In it, she was floating in a vast expanse of colors and felt nothing except for a sense of peace.

"It won't hurt next time."

He pulled something around her and her skin tingled with awareness. It was a pelt, but not his. She lifted her head and brought her hands up to pull the glossy white fur around her torso.

"This is...mine?"

Shan nodded.

She looked up at him through her lashes. "How do I use it?"

"Right now, you won't be able to," he said, running his hands down her sides. "You need to have sufficient food and rest before you can attempt to shift. It's very important that you remember that."

"So, I couldn't do it now, even if I tried?" she asked.

It sure felt like she could. The hairs on her body pricked up wherever the inside of the pelt touched, and she was sure that if she just let her mind drift back to the new mental pathway, she could call her wolf forth as easily as lifting a limb.

"It's possible, but not advisable, unless it's an emergency, and even then you shouldn't do it if you're already feeling fatigued or overtaxed. If you force a shift when your body isn't ready, it could kill you."

"How do you know that?"

"It's how my mother died."

Her gut tightened. "Oh. I'm sorry."

It struck her then, how little she knew about Shan's past. He'd spoken of his parents only a handful of times, and never in any depth. It felt unfair, given how much he knew about her, but now wasn't the time to press the issue.

"You don't have to apologize," he said. "I want you to ask me questions, anything you can think of. I'll always answer you to the best of my ability."

At the moment, most of her questions orbited around the personal details of his past, so she just shrugged.

"It's all still overwhelming," she said. "I guess I'll just ask things as they come to me. There is one thing. How long was I...furry?"

Shan glanced up at the sky, taking in the time of day just as Harper had not long earlier.

"Two nights, one day," he finally said.

The answer could have been worse, so Harper was able to remain calm, even as she contemplated losing two whole nights of her life.

"What did I do?"

"You gave me gray hairs," he said, smiling. "You wandered around, mostly. You were particularly fond of climbing. Your wolf also shares your fondness for fish. You nearly drowned trying to catch one for yourself."

"Geez," she mumbled, rubbing her arms. "That's scary to think of."

"You don't have to worry. You'll be more present next time and better able to guide your wolf. And I'll be there with you every time."

He went to kiss her and she almost let him. Then, she remembered her breath and her hand shot up between them.

"My breath is awful. What did I eat?"

Shan looked amused as he slowly shook his head. "Anything you thought might be food. You really don't want me to go into detail."

Torn between laughing and freaking out, she gave a weak chuckle. "So, what happens now?"

Shan was looking around again, his brow furrowed.

"We're not far from home. We could eat, shift, and be at The Steppes in a couple of hours."

"We're that close?" 

The news was not entirely welcome. While she was looking forward to seeing Shan's den--especially his bed, being at The Steppes meant seeing Ian and Jo again. She'd barely had time to process that she'd become a shifter, or that she'd always been one, she still hadn't even figured that part out yet. She was definitely not ready to explain herself to her friends, or to tell them that she wouldn't be able to return with them. Just the thought of doing so made a thick lump form in her throat.

Shan must have sensed her growing anxiety, because he ran his hands through her hair and pressed a kiss to her forehead. 

"How about we eat, and then we'll see how you feel?"

* * *

"What happens if I cut it?"

"Don't do that."

Harper glanced at him over her shoulder, giving him a cheeky grin. "I'm not gonna. I'm only curious."

She had just finished washing up in the river. Her pelt was stretched across a large river rock, drying in the afternoon sunlight. The water was up to her ankles where she stood a few feet from her pelt, idly rubbing her chin as she admired the gleaming fur. From his place on the river bank, Shan admired the view of her backside.

"If you cut it, it'll hurt," he said. "And you'll have to stitch it before you shift again. Then, you'll have to remain in your wolf form long enough for it to heal, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on the severity of the wound."

"Wait, it'll hurt, as in, I'll feel it even in my human form?"

"It's part of your body," he explained. "You need to treat it as such and take care of it."

They'd caught fish for breakfast, and then again for lunch, not leaving their spot by the river. He hadn't yet pressed the issue of returning home, though he knew they'd have to leave soon if they were going to make it there by nightfall. If they ran in a straight shot, they could be back in under two hours, but her wolf didn't understand time constraints or linear travel yet, so he calculated that it would take at least half the day, provided he didn't just carry her. When they'd arrived at Gareth's pack, Shan had issued a perfunctory goodbye before running off to find his friends. 

She probably thought she was stalling him with her decision to bathe and her steady stream of questions. The truth of it was, he had little interest in returning home, or doing much of anything that didn't involve fucking her. Because that was the one thing he couldn't do, he'd remained sedentary, allowing her to drag the time out while he contemplated the impending storm.

The change in her scent was almost imperceptible, yet once he'd become aware of it, it was all he could smell. Whatever contraception she'd been using, its effect had been purged with her first shift and her body had wasted no time in resuming its natural cycle.

Shan hadn't been prepared for this. He'd spent the morning trying to calculate how long they'd have before she was fertile, but kept running into gaps in his knowledge and mental dead ends. Having a mate of his own kind had been so far out of the realm of possibility for him that he had never considered such things.

In most matters of their kind, physiological differences seemed to fall somewhere between human and animal. Human cycles moved swiftly, and the change in her scent would indicate that he had only a day, or perhaps two, before she'd be fertile. If she'd been a wolf, he could have as much as two weeks before she was ready to conceive. Two days to two weeks was such a broad range of time, and far too imprecise for his sensibilities. 

The only female of his own kind that he'd known had been his mother. To his memory, she'd had only one pregnancy after him, but it was difficult to base much off of it. Though he'd never been implicitly told as much, he now recognized that his mother had struggled with infertility. 

He'd been twelve the first and only time he'd noticed the change in his mother's scent. It had taken them all by surprise. Shan had been so excited by the possibility of having a sibling that he'd spent the next few days engrossed in fantasies of what it would be like to be a brother. At the time, he and his family had been living near to Gareth's pack, and he'd been prone to envying Gareth's many siblings.

Though he hadn't paid much attention to the passage of time, his mind kept coming back to the thought that it had been eight days. 

They had been good days; he remembered that as well. His parents had been together constantly, not missing an opportunity to touch one another. They hadn't fought once, or even bickered. 

They'd both changed, his mother more in the beginning, his father more towards the end. His mother had laughed more, and had become soft and doting, not only with her mate, but with Shan as well. By contrast, as the days progressed, his father's easy smile and congenial nature had given way to bouts of irritability and aggression, particularly around other males. It was the night after the first time he'd snapped at Shan that his parents had decided it was best they send him away for a few days.

His father had gone with him on the short trek to Gareth's pack. He'd apologized to Shan and explained that he wasn't in his right mind, but that everything would go back to normal in a few days. Shan had bitten his tongue and nodded, though inwardly he'd wished things would stay as they were. He could deal with his father's occasional irritability if it meant that his mother wouldn't be constantly berating him.

It had been only six days later when his mother's scent had changed again, indicating that she was pregnant. He remembered that very clearly. By that time, his father had been dead for two nights, and it had been three nights later that his mother and her unborn pup had followed him.

"How do I wear it?"

Shan had watched for a while as Harper experimented with her damp pelt, first wrapping it around herself like a towel, and then wearing it as a cape. She was now trying to fit it over one shoulder and wrap it like a primitive dress.

She went on, "When you wear yours, it looks like it's part of your body, almost like an outfit."

"It is part of my body," he said, pushing himself up from the ground. 

Walking over to the water's edge, he held up his arm and then lifted his pelt. He had to show her twice before she noticed the subtle peeling, which he sometimes likened to removing a bandage, only painless.

"Whoa! It sticks to you!"

He smiled at her. "You'll learn how to do it soon enough. But don't bother trying until you've shifted a few times. Making the pelt bind to your skin is like performing a partial shift, and until you're accustomed with the process, you're going to overshoot it every time."

He'd been teaching her things all morning and afternoon, but he'd barely scratched the surface of what she'd have to learn. It would take months, perhaps longer, before she would be both accustomed to shifting and familiar with the nuances that would keep her safe. At the moment, everything seemed new and exciting to her, but he knew that she would face many frustrations and challenges. And now, they would all be magnified by a pregnancy.

It was too much to put on her at once. He knew that, but at the same time, he knew that it wouldn't stop him from consumating their mating.

"Check it out!"

She was beaming as she held up her arm, displaying where she'd managed to make her pelt bind to her skin, curling around her wrist.

"Harper," he groaned, taking several steps back. "I'll see you tonight."

She looked confused for all of two seconds, and then she let out a yelp as the fur began binding to the rest of her skin. Shan managed to clear the area just in time as her wolf form exploded onto the river bank.

Looking both excited and confused, the leggy white wolf staggered around the area until she got her bearings. 

Shan approached her carefully, expecting that in her confusion she might not recognize him. She stilled the instant she noticed him, and then sank to the ground to roll on her back. Whining and whimpering, she beckoned him to join her.

He indulged in running his hand along her muzzle, and scratching behind her ear. Her fur was soft and pristine, with a newness that seemed out of place on such a large being. He could have lost the rest of the afternoon in petting her, had his wolf let him. 

His skin grew hot everywhere that the inside of his pelt touched and in the back of his mind he could feel the wolf growing restless. He was still firmly in control and could have blocked the shift if he wanted to, but he wouldn't dare. Just as Harper's human side belonged to him, this aspect of her belonged to his wolf, and Shan would never deny him his mate.