Chapter Three

I GROANED, curling into the fetal position on my narrow bed. After years of being sick, I was finally dying. And if death wasn’t imminent, someone owed me a serious explanation. It had started the day before with mild, if sporadic, discomfort. Stiff joints, sore muscles, and a bone-deep ache that grew with every hour.

Tearing pain ripped through me as I dragged myself from my bed to dig through the plastic tub of random first aid and medical supplies. There had to be something. Even an aspirin. At this point an aspirin would mostly be useless, but anything—anything—would be better than this. My head throbbed, huge and hollow, with every beat of my heart. Pressure built, like someone was blowing up a balloon that was encased in an eggshell. My brain was the balloon, my skull the shell. For a while the outer casing would hold, but eventually the balloon would grow too big and the shell would burst. God, I wanted the shell to burst.

The light in my small room burned my eyes, and I squinted at the adhesive bandages and antibiotic ointment in my first aid kit. Useless. It was all completely useless.

I needed to call 911—

Agony swept through me on a wave of misery. My whole body clenched and my spine bowed. I swore I could hear my bones cracking under the viselike pressure. I choked back a sob as the box of useless medical supplies crashed to the floor.

The narrow white walls pressed in all around me. Overwhelming. Suffocating. It was too much. Too much. Too much.

I scrambled to my feet and grappled with the door handle. Out. I had to get out. Out of this room. Out of this building. Outside. Just… out.

God, I hurt. It felt like someone was tugging on my muscles. Pulling, stretching, dragging. Never in all my years in the hospital, facing one mysterious symptom after another, had I felt anything like this. My body was fighting itself, turning inside out. This had to be what being drawn and quartered felt like.

I didn’t know exactly what I was doing or where I was going. Everything around me looked like I was seeing it through green glass, likely a sign the pressure in my head was reaching critical. A small part of me, one that held itself back a bit, one that observed rather than experienced life, wondered if I was having a stroke. Or an aneurysm. The rest of me was driven by pure instinct, a primal drive chanting outside outside outside.

I stumbled down the hall to the stairs. The slap of my bare feet on the polished gray concrete bounced off the walls and echoed in the dark chute above me. Everything was so loud. Too loud. My ears rang and vibrated like someone had flicked a tuning fork directly on my eardrum. The stairwell, usually dimly lit, seemed excruciatingly bright. I squinted against the retina-piercing neon-bright beams lasering out the little glass windows in the steel doors.

I somehow descended the two flights of stairs between my room and the ground floor without falling and breaking my neck. I charged past the empty study lounge, my feet carrying me faster and faster to the exit. I needed fresh air. The moon. Green grass.

I burst through the side exit and sucked in a deep breath of fragrant mountain air. And something deep inside eased.

The balloon in my head was still inflating, and my muscles were still being pulled in a dozen directions, but my vision started to clear and I could breathe. And I could think.

I was in trouble. I’d told myself when I escaped from my parents’ care that I could and would deal with any of my health problems on my own, but the first time I was confronted with something new, I panicked.

But this wasn’t an iron deficiency or some autoimmune reaction. It wasn’t fatigue or fever or vomiting.

This was worse. Bigger. All-consuming.

Owen. Owen had said there was an urgent care clinic on campus. I had to find it. Or find Owen.

The wind shifted, and chills racked my body. I broke into a cold sweat, and I realized I wasn’t wearing a shirt; only flannel pajama bottoms covered any part of me. I crossed my arms over my chest as an attempt to keep my body warm in the temperate evening air, but also because I felt oddly exposed standing in the dormitory’s courtyard.

Owen. I needed to find….

It seemed to take forever, but I finally stumbled my way to the front of Matthison Hall. I pressed my nose against the thick glass, trying to make my uncooperative eyes focus. A silhouette of a man shifted. The shadow morphed, distorted, first tall, then wide, then wobbly along the edges before it snapped back into its solid form. A form taller and thinner than Owen.

Damn it, I needed it to be Owen at the desk tonight. He’d know what to do, who to call.

I stumbled back, catching my heel on the edge of the sidewalk crossing in front of the dormitory. I windmilled my arms, but it felt like I was trying to move them through a rushing tide of water. Gravity grabbed hold of me and dragged me down. I didn’t feel the landing, neither the scrape of concrete against my bare feet nor the pitted asphalt beneath my head. Everything—sound, touch, scent—was muffled, like I really was submerged in an ocean’s worth of water.

Above me, a platinum nimbus formed around the outer edges of slate-gray clouds. They parted, revealing the full moon in all her opalescent glory. Broad and clear, it dominated the skyscape.

I caught my breath in awe. Never had I seen the moon so big or so clear.

Then I caught my breath for another reason altogether. The balloon in my head finally reached its limit. The shell holding everything—the pressure, the hollowness—shattered, and everything snapped off.

“HOLY shit. Who is that?”

“Is he dead?”

Voices. Unfamiliar voices surrounded me.

I tried to force open my eyes, but they didn’t want to move. In fact, my whole body seemed to be stuck. I struggled, trying to break through the paralysis gripping me. No. No. No. I refused to accept that my body would betray me in such a way. Not now. Not after everything else it had already put me through.

“Of course he’s not dead.”

I knew that voice. Didn’t I?

Something warm and firm pressed against my wrist in a way that felt familiar. Routine. I tried to think past the fear gripping me. If I could understand what was happening, I could actually do something about it.

“He’s got a pulse,” the voice I could almost place said. Pulse. Right. That’s what felt so familiar. Someone taking my pulse.

Did that mean I was back in the hospital? No. No, I didn’t want to go back. The alarm I’d managed to push away came creeping back. I tried to shake my head, but the effort caused lighting to shoot from my skull to my toes. Shit. Was I broken?

“Careful,” the deep voice soothed. “Don’t move yet.”

“Owen, what happened?” This voice was female and anxious. “There’s not blood, is there? You know I can’t handle—”

“You know, I don’t get it.” A male—young, cocky—snorted from somewhere near the anxious girl. “How can you be squeamish? You hunt every month—”

“I’m not squeamish. I just don’t like—”

I tuned out the conversation; it wasn’t a difficult thing to do with the sound of blood rushing in my head. Besides, the speakers, their words, didn’t mean anything to me. I focused instead on the hands—I could feel the broad palms and strong fingers—cupping my face.

Those hands felt very capable as they traced around the back of my head, down my neck, across my shoulders. I wanted to nuzzle into those touches, to increase the pressure of the contact. When the hands moved away, I heard a soft whimpering. In some distant part of my foggy brain, I recognized the sound as having come from me.

“Jesus, Owen, are you seriously copping a feel right now?” Cocky Boy again.

“Don’t be an idiot. I’m checking for blood or broken bones.”

That was enough to penetrate the fog in my brain. My breathing sped up until I was panting, each abbreviated inhalation doing nothing to bring oxygen to my starving lungs. I felt a tear slip from the corner of my eye.

“Oh, hey. Shhh. It’s okay. Relax.” Those hands—Owen’s hands—were back, brushing away the tear. “You’ll be fine.”

I had no reason to believe him, but… I did.

“Should we call 911?” Anxious Girl asked, sounding even more anxious.

“No. Human doctors wouldn’t know what to do with him.”

Human… excuse me? I renewed my efforts to move, to open my eyes, to talk. Maybe I was in a coma? Stuck in my own twisted dreams? Because… human? Since when did we differentiate between human doctors and doctors?

“You mean he’s not human?” Cocky Boy.

Stop saying human. This had to be a dream. It was last week’s pizza at three in the morning that did this. Or the crazy Italian sandwich with potato chips Owen had forced me to try the other day. It had to be. Otherwise my twisted psyche owed me one hell of an explanation.

“Of course not. He’s a shifter. Cat of some kind.”

“How can you tell?” Anxious Girl.

“Tapetum lucidum,” Owen explained.

Huh?

Cocky Boy was as confused as I was. “Huh? What does that mean?”

I felt Owen push gently at my left eyelid. My eyes were rolling uncontrollably, as though they were desperately trying to investigate my brainstem from the inside, so I wasn’t sure what he was looking for. “Tapetum lucidum,” he said, moving to my right eye. “It’s the reflective membrane in the eye that causes some animals’ eyes to reflect light in the dark. For crying out loud, you should know this. It’s one of the easiest ways to identify most shifters.”

There was that word again. Shifter.

“Fine. So he’s got the taciturn lidocaine whosiwhatsit. But if we can’t call an ambulance, what should we do? I mean, we can’t leave him lying in the middle of the walkway like this. Can we?”

I needed to move. Maybe I was trying to do too much at once. Maybe if I started smaller…. I concentrated on my fingers. If I could move one finger, I could move two. And on and on until I could sit up and demand Owen and his band of misfit coeds stop spouting nonsense.

Owen let out an impatient huff. I could feel the moist puff of his breath against my face. “Of course we’re not going to leave him here. It’s the full moon. Who knows what would happen to him.” I could tell he pulled away from me, and the loss of the connection—the loss of his touch—distracted me from my futile game of anatomical concentration. “I’m going to call my dad, and we’re going to take him to the clinic.”

Forget the fingers. I changed my focus to my mouth. And my vocal cords. Enough was enough. I needed to tell them to knock it off. It wasn’t funny anymore. And I needed to wake up immediately. Clinic meant doctors. Doctors meant tests and medical history forms. It didn’t matter to me that earlier I’d been in so much pain I’d have willingly walked miles for an aspirin. I wasn’t in pain now, and if I could only get my fucking eyes or mouth to work, I could tell someone so.

Owen murmured in the background, and Anxious Girl and Cocky Boy whispered to each other. I was so absorbed with my own internal dialogue, I didn’t have the capacity to worry about what anyone else was saying. Move, damn it. Do something. Anything.

At first I thought it was wishful thinking. The little tingles started at my toes and the tips of my fingers. Little shocks, like synapses firing again. Then a rushing current enveloping me.

“Um, Owen? He’s moving.” Anxious Girl’s voice quavered.

“What—oh, shit!”

Finally. My body was doing… something. Pressure. It went on forever, this inexorable pressure. Building, tightening, straining. Then, for the second time that night, I shattered.

I roared. In pain. In ecstasy. In terror. In relief.

“Holy shit.” Cocky Boy’s hushed voice quavered. “Is that… is that a lion?”