I like wolves.

I’m writing that down first because it’s the hardest thing for me to say. You know how it is with some things. They mean so much to you that even if no one would think them odd to say, you feel like you’re exposing yourself just by saying them.

You’re probably scratching your head right now, wondering what’s got me so worked up. Okay, let’s back up and try this again …

I love wolves. Not in that way, you. I’m in awe of them. And I’m … I …

Oh, man. I can’t say that part yet. I’m sorry.

It wasn’t like this when I was little. When I was little wolves were just fun. I liked them a lot, but that’s all they were, was fun. My parents took me to the zoo and I’d read the whole plaque in front of the wolf exhibit. And I’d howl at them and they’d howl right back, and I’d grin to myself.

It wasn’t until life got hard that wolves started to mean more to me. The things I was going through, in high school and with my parents, were so taxing that I had to come up with a whole new way of coping with them. I didn’t have any human role models, because I didn’t know any humans like me … none that I wanted to be, anyway. So when I imagined something surviving what I was going through, it was a wolf.

They’re survivors, you know. Not bloodthirsty killers, survivors. And you could say that that takes away from their beauty … that they’re not mystic fairy-creatures, either. Just animals struggling to stay alive. But at the time, I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than a creature that could live through anything, without losing sight of the goal of survival. Without losing — or needing — hope, because it just kept going no matter what.

Wolves are beautiful because of the stress nature puts on them. And I knew I wasn’t … I couldn’t be as awe-inspiring as they were. But I could try. And in my best moments, I saw myself as one. I didn’t draw or write or roleplay online, but I invented my own separate life where I was a wolf on the inside, who just happened to have a human appearance and human reasoning powers. And my wolf-self didn’t understand why all these things were happening to me, or why people were so cruel to each other. But I forced myself to accept that I was this world’s omega, or punching bag. And that someday I’d get through it, and find my own pack.

That’s how much wolves meant to me … how much they still do. So whenever I find a wolf plushie in stores, or hear people talking about wolves on TV, or see anything else about wolves, I have to hide how interested I am. I don’t wear wolf t-shirts or accessories, and I don’t ever talk about wolves in casual conversation. Not because they’re not important to me, but because they’re so important I’m afraid of embarrassing myself. At best I’d get tongue-tied, and at worst I’d be making myself vulnerable to someone who could use that to hurt me. It’d be like a real wolf baring her throat to a wild dog.

That may seem surprising to you. But high school’s just as dangerous as any natural environment. Except that there’s nothing natural about it, and there’s no beauty or reason to it.

Wolves are shaped by their circumstances, and I was shaped by mine. That’s why they’re all majestic beings, and I was an unhealthy young human female, with a bad sleep schedule and a lousy chemical-filled diet. And that’s why I knew, deep down, that no matter how hard I tried I could never be like one of them.

So when I actually became one, I freaked right out.

There. I said it. I became a wolf.

As near as I can tell, I am one right now, in exactly the sense that I imagined it to help me to get through high school. I look like a human, and I’m pretty sure I think like I always have too. But I physically changed into a wolf, a real flesh-and-blood one that walks on four legs. Also some kind of two-legged hybrid. And whatever let me do that, I still have it inside of me. I’m a wolf inside right now, and I was outside just a few hours ago.

Does that make me a were-wolf? Or a skin-changer, or some kind of anime nature spirit? I don’t know, and I’m scared right now and I’m sweating a lot and I’m trying to write this all down really fast before I can lose my nerve. And I’ve got wolf ears and a tail right now, so maybe I am an anime character. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I’m grateful beyond words and terrified at the same time, and it makes my throat seize up and I start whimpering just to think about it.

Can’t write, I’m too scared …

Deep breaths. Deep, shuddering breaths … letting myself calm down. Swallowing, and gasping for breath afterward, still trying to settle down.

Settling … settling …

Okay … as you can see, I’m kind of a wreck right now. Hopefully, by writing this down I’ll be able to think clearly about it.

Let’s start with what happened last week …

It started last Sunday. I made the mistake of deciding not to go to church with my parents, and that set them off. We’ve been having these “discussions” about religion lately, and I really don’t want to describe this one except to say it was bad. They had a lot to say to me when they got back, and because I’m … er, because I was still living with them, I had to sit there and listen.

I should’ve known better than to protest. I should’ve known better than to do anything other than what they wanted me to. That’s what omegas do, they’re punching bags and they just take what they’re given …

Okay, that sounds really self-pitying on paper. But I’ve never been much of a rebel. I just happened to disagree with my parents, on religion, politics … just about everything. But I didn’t want to pick fights, I just wanted to ask honest questions. First so I could understand what was going on, and then later, when I’d made up my mind, to try to get my parents to consider a viewpoint besides their own.

That got them really upset, and every single time I’d be kicking myself afterwards. I’d tell myself how stupid I was for opening my mouth to them, or for being / believing differently from them. But no matter how many times I did this to myself, I couldn’t make myself not be different. I was stuck with my feelings and conscience just like I was with my hair or my legs, and in the house where I lived they were disabilities.

You could ask why I didn’t leave sooner. The fact that I was in high school and did not have a job helped. But that night, while they were watching TV, I put my boots and coat on and slipped out the back door. I had to get out and be by myself, and I was hoping not to come back until they had both gone to bed.

It was cold and wet out in the sticks where we lived. Fog shrouded the trees and obscured the road, dark grey in the dim evening light. I did not have a flashlight, but I knew where to go. I’d gone out like this many times.

Do you know what it’s like, out in the woods in upstate New York in midwinter? I mean when it’s not snowy. Inside it’s all warm, sickly smells, and angry guys talking on TV. But outside it’s just … quiet. You’re the noisiest thing out there, crashing through brush and crunching on fallen leaves, and every time you stand still you can hear lots of nothing. Your own breath is the loudest thing out there, and it freezes your lungs just like your fingers and toe-tips are already becoming cold. So you start moving and making noise again, and thinking about where you’re headed.

There’s a tiny clearing I like to spend time in. I mean tiny as in “about the size of your living room.” There’s a big rock in the center of it, like the size of a sofa or love seat, and there are pine needles all over the ground. The trees are so close together you can only see bits of the sky even when standing on top of the rock, which you shouldn’t do when it’s wet and dark out or you might fall and hit your head on something. But I sat on it and pulled my knees to my chest, and rocked back and forth just a bit.

It looked weird, but there was no one around and it helped me to destress. So I sat there awhile, rocking on top of my rock. And I’m trying to think of more ways to use “rock” in that sentence, but you’re groaning at me so I’ll just continue.

Anyway, that’s where it happened. Not a werewolf attack … nothing bit me, as far as I can remember. I just got started thinking about what it’d be like to be a wolf. Even a lone wolf, without a pack. This place would be my reality, I thought … this cold outside would be my daily experience. Not the noise inside. Not my parents.

I had no illusions about it. I spend lots of time outdoors. I’ve even been camping before, and not in a motorhome. I knew it’d be cold, and wet, and windy, and if I found some kind of shelter I’d have to defend it. I’d have to struggle for food and kill things to get it, and deal with things that wanted to kill me. I might even have to deal with humans, and they’d fear me worse and hate me more than they already do in real life.

I probably wouldn’t have lived as long as I already had, if I’d been a wolf. But somehow, it seemed more real to imagine myself as one, out here. It wasn’t “communing with nature” so much as reminding myself that wildness still existed, and it was out here all around us. And our little soap bubble of civilization, of organized cruelty, would be gone someday … whether because it popped or I left.

Someday I would live where it’s quiet, I thought. Someday I’d be myself, and do things that mattered, and actually live like the things out here do. Instead of living this fake high school life.

Like a wolf, maybe? came the thought. And I nodded, and unfolded and crouched up there on the rock, as if surveying the darkness for prey. I felt so alert out there, so alive and aware. So un-sheltered. And young things ought to be sheltered … but then, my parents’ lives seemed as fake as mine. I knew I didn’t want to end up like them.

What do you want to end up like? It’s like I imagined the words. So the next thing I imagined was myself as a wolf, standing there on the rock.

“Okay.”

This time I heard it. Not out loud, but so clear in my mind that I had to check, to see if someone was near me. I was slightly creeped out …

… but not so much as I was just a second or two later.

It started with a strange feeling in my stomach, and an itching on top of my head and in the small of my back. I reached up and around to scratch, and one hand brushed pointed, furry ears on top of my head, while the other took hold of a tail. It pulled, and felt it attached to my spine.

I froze. My brain took long seconds to process this. And before my conscious mind even knew what was happening, I became uncomfortably warm, and started sweating all over.

After that the real changes came, slow enough that I felt them happening but fast enough that they all blended together. And my mind underwent a change, too. It was called a nervous breakdown.

My thoughts were like “No … no, please! I don’t want this! I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry … help! Please help me!” And I started screaming and crying, but I don’t know what I said, or if any words even came out. I was scared to death, because this felt as bad as dying, if not worse.

I don’t remember everything that happened. I don’t even know where my clothes went. I just remember that my screams ended with a howl. And then I choked up and covered my head with my front-paws, crying and shaking and whimpering.

The feelings did not go away. My four-legged body was still there, and I was still in it, and nothing was changing or undoing itself. I screamed in anguish, and it came out as another, long howl. Then I started pacing the top of the rock, back and forth, bare paw-pads feeling the rough stone and lichen.

It’s over, I thought. Everything’s over. My dreams are shot, my life is … is … I tried to look back at myself, and saw only black, fluffy fur, and a nervously-wagging tail. I whimpered again.

This is not me, I thought. It can’t be! I mean, it’s something I like, but … how? Why? What happened? I’d planned to spend that evening outside in the cold, and then go back inside to dream about living this way. Not to actually be a … a …

It was too much. I broke down and started shaking and whimpering again, huddling there on top of the rock. The awe of seeing, of being this animal, just made what was happening all the more cruel. I could no longer use the thought of creatures like this to inspire me to face my challenges. Instead I had to face its challenges, and would probably die in less than a year. And everything I had looked forward to was gone.

Wolves in the wild can be playful and happy, and live what seem to be fulfilling lives. But if you’d told me that right then, I would’ve bitten your throat out.

I’m not sure how long I was there. Long enough to get cold, I know … long enough to feel the freezing cold wind start to blow around me, and fill my cupped ears and chill me through my fur. I flattened my ears and huddled there, paws and neck pressed down to the rock, tail twitching and freezing off out in the cold. (At least, that’s what it felt like. You know how your fingers and toes always turn into lumps of pain in the cold, even when you’ve got gloves and boots on? With tails, it’s worse.)

I knew I needed to take shelter. Even being just beside the rock, instead of on top of it, would have helped. But I was so scared that I didn’t want to move. It was like my brain had locked up.

It didn’t help that the whole world seemed alien now. I could see farther into the darkness, because it didn’t seem as dark anymore … more like a muted gray. But that only made me more conscious of how alone I was, and how there could be anything out there. I could see a dim glow through the trees — the light from a streetlamp, I eventually realized, way down by the road — and I could hear the car engines, whenever anything drove by off at the edge of our land. They hadn’t used to bother me, but now they sounded different; louder, more menacing. Angrier. At first I thought I was imagining things, but then I realized I was hearing frequencies humans did not. No one had bothered to make things appeal to a wolf’s senses, so even the familiar seemed jarring to me.

Don’t get me started on the smells.

I could only imagine what it’d be like to try to go home. I remembered when Eustace got turned into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and how he’d spelled things out in the sand. Some of the people I knew could get away with that, I thought. They had friends, parents, or siblings who would listen to them, even then. But I knew my parents wouldn’t. Everything they listened to, from their TV shows to their religious leader, taught them that things that weren’t normal ought to be hated and feared. They already didn’t like me that much, and I could only imagine how they’d react to this … if I even got the chance to explain.

So what options did I have left? Wolves had hard lives, and they needed years of practice to be able to live them. Even then, they didn’t live as long, and they rarely died of natural causes. I seemed to be healthy, but for how long? Was I seventeen in wolf years or human years?

I knew what I’d have to do to survive, if I couldn’t turn human again. I’d watched enough documentaries. And I was pretty sure I could live off of raw meat, if it was that or starve to death. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to do all those things, though. And beyond that was a bigger problem: I didn’t belong here.

There haven’t been wolves in New York in forever. So how long until some human saw me and decided to get rid of me, I wondered? It didn’t help that I looked distinctive — curse my fantasies of having a glossy black coat! And even if I stayed far away from humans, and managed not to get shot during hunting season, I’d still have to deal with packs of wild dogs and other dangerous animals. Animals that I wasn’t equipped to deal with, physically or mentally … any more than I was equipped to deal with what had just happened.

I say this because I also felt like I didn’t belong there, in that body. I was trying my best to ignore every feeling I got from it, because I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be having them. The sights and the sounds and the smells were inescapable, because they were part of the nightmare that I’d gotten into. But the feel of my pawpads and claws on the rock, of the shivers that ran down my spine to my tail, of breathing and swallowing inside my muzzle … these were all things that I tried to block out. I just couldn’t handle them.

That was another big part of the reason that I did not want to move. It was like acknowledging that this wolf body was there. And I knew that I had to, but I was so scared that I couldn’t make myself.

I finally had to disassociate. I was like “Okay, there’s this wolf here, and I need to move her down out of the cold.” Then I took a deep breath, and jumped down without looking, the wind rushing fast through my ears.

I nearly twisted my paw. As it was, I landed on it the wrong way. So I hobbled into the lee of the rock, walk-jumping over cold ground and feeling sharp pain that I tried to ignore.

It didn’t work. I whined, and flattened my ears, and pressed my feet, neck and stomach to the icy ground, trying to warm it up. I felt cold wind blowing across my nose, so I kind of scooted backwards a bit. Then I felt it on the tip of my tail, and I tried to move it out of the way but it just didn’t want to stay still. It was so cold that it had to keep twitching.

I whined again. Why couldn’t I be inside?

There wasn’t anything else I could do, so I waited. I waited for the ground to warm up … I waited for the wind to stop blowing. I waited for this wolf form I didn’t deserve (in a bad or good sense) to go away, and be replaced by my old one.

All that happened was the ground warmed a little, even as the moisture on the tip of my muzzle turned into ice. Despite that, I started to drift off, and I didn’t know if it was because I was sleepy or freezing to death. Would I be able to tell? I wondered.

In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter. Nothing made any sense anymore, and I didn’t have any better ideas for where to go to find shelter anyway. I let myself drift, and I welcomed oblivion, because it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with this any longer …

… or so I thought.

I was still a wolf in my dreams. I can’t tell you how much that disappointed me.

I was in a huge clearing, the trees packed close in around it. The air was still, and the moon was full, and there were howls in the very near distance. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled around me, and I turned every way, trying to see where they were. But I only caught fleeting shadows.

I eventually heard crashing footsteps, but they were all headed away from me. The howls went into the distance. I sat there on my back legs, looking in the direction they’d gone, and feeling awful self-doubt. What was that? Who were they? Was I supposed to be going with them or not? I felt like I’d made the wrong decision, and I didn’t even know I was supposed to be deciding something.

The air all around me was quiet. I finally got up and paced towards the moonlight, towards a glint of it on the ground.

It was a lake. Either that, or a really big pond. I could see the treetops across it, but just barely, because the light on the surface was so bright. It would’ve been mesmerizing if it wasn’t so painful to look at.

I looked beneath it and saw my reflection, and my breath just stopped in my throat. It was black and fluffy and beautiful, with bright green eyes and a moist, healthy muzzle. It was me … the way that I’d always imagined myself. And its eyes were wide open with shock.

I stood there, frozen, not moving or taking a breath. And slowly, those eyes began to water.

I broke down and cried. And it felt weird and sounded unearthly, but I had to do it anyway. I wasn’t in a panic from what was happening to me, like last time. Instead, I knew what had happened, and I was tortured by it.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t always wanted this. If I hadn’t spent half my childhood pretending, and dreaming that I was a wolf. If I hadn’t read books and played games and watched TV shows about wolves, and lurked on online forums where people pretended to be wolves and kicked myself for not having the courage to join in. It wouldn’t have been as bad if they weren’t so beautiful that I knew I could never be anything like them.

And yet, here I was. It was too much for me. I cried my eyes out, and wished that I knew what I was or what’d happened or what I was supposed to do.

That’s when I heard the voice.

It was speaking in words, real words that I could hear with my ears. I just couldn’t hear them well enough to make them out distinctly. But it sounded like the one that’d spoken in my mind just before I had changed, soft and patient and kind.

Try as I might, I couldn’t tell what it was saying to me. But somehow, it didn’t matter. I stopped crying and sat there and listened, perfectly still from my ears to my tail. And it was like my whole insides melted, and became pure peace and contentment.

After all the fights I’d had with my parents, I didn’t know if God existed, what he was like, or even if he was a he. But it felt like I was sitting on his lap. And everything that I’d been worried about did not seem to matter anymore.

You could’ve told me right then that I was a wolf from now on, and I’d never be human again, and I would’ve been okay with that. As it was, I just knew that everything was going to be alright. It was okay for me to be this way, I was supposed to be this way, and I had always been this way inside … I think. That last part was a bit fuzzy, perhaps because it was so hard to accept. But I felt like I had been given a gift, and I was grateful enough to accept it. Sublimely grateful, and flattered.

I don’t know how long I sat there.

When the howls started again, my ears perked. Then I looked up and caught sight of them, in the distance. Eyes and ears and noses, and tufts of fur and wagging tails. I gave a happy bark and got up and ran towards them, and they ran off and I followed this time, followed them into …

Something tickled my nose. I woke up.

I was human again, and was huddled up next to the rock, with my clothes and my coat all in place. The wind had stopped, and the air was barely moving. And the ground was all covered in snow, at least a half-inch of it.

Another huge puff of it drifted right into my face, and started to melt. I reached up to brush it aside, but my mittened hand was all covered in snow, too.

I jumped up and shook myself off. There was a tiny brown patch of grass where I’d been sitting, and a lot of snow came off my back, my arms, the cap on my head. How long had I been there? It was still dark, but the sky seemed brighter somehow. Was it because of the snow?

The snow kept falling around me, quiet and drifty and wet. And I remembered my dream, and what’d come before it.

There was a poignant sense of loss, like I’d been handed a beautiful Christmas present and dropped it. But then I wondered if that all hadn’t been the present … if I hadn’t been meant to feel what it was like. If I hadn’t needed to, after those past few weeks.

I wondered who or what that voice had been, and what had really just happened to me. Then I started walking back towards the house.

A few minutes later, laying back in my warm, fuzzy bed, I couldn’t help but grin to myself. I tried to forget the transformation, and the feelings of terror and shock, because they’d been so traumatic that I didn’t want to relive them. They’d felt real, on a level that I didn’t want to acknowledge just yet. So instead I thought of the feeling of being a wolf.

I knew what it was like. If it hadn’t just been a hallucination, I’d physically been one. It was the greatest gift I could ever have asked for. I just never would have, because I’d known it couldn’t have been. And yet it had.

The feeling of peace I’d had afterwards overrode my desire to figure out what had happened … or rather, the nagging worries that I would’ve otherwise had, since there was no way I could figure it out. I didn’t know what had happened, and I was okay with that. I was just extremely grateful for it. And I knew that I’d always treasure it.

That night, when I fell back asleep, I thought that it’d been just a one-shot occurrence … like seeing a UFO, or being visited by a dead relative. The kind of thing that’s once in a lifetime, if that, and would never happen again.

I was wrong.

You know how mortifying it is when you get to school, and you find out you had your shirt on backwards and the tag’s sticking out? Okay … now imagine you had real wolf ears and a tail, and you didn’t know it.

I was in tears in the girls’ bathroom. I thought for sure that my life was over. And I was glad there was no one there to see me, not only because I kept tearing off more paper towels and blowing my nose onto them but because they were still there, and I didn’t know how to make them go away. I concentrated on them and tried to make them go away, and they finally did, but then they came back a minute later when I wasn’t paying attention. I had to consciously hold them in, while I was walking through public areas, then finally get outside the building.

I got so many absences that day.

For the rest of the week, I wore a cap and a long, baggy jacket into class. I looked like a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia or something. The only reason I got away with it was because the heating was flaky and everyone else was dressing warm too … they were just doing it in a way that made them less likely to get picked on. I still got odd looks and smirks and pointed comments and things, but at least now I knew why. I was just glad that apparently no one had realized what they had seen, and called in spacesuited government agents to take me away.

If that Sunday night had been the high point of my life, then the following week was one of the lowest. I still spent it the same way, trying not to be noticed at school and then trying not to be noticed at home. But I was more afraid than ever, and persistently depressed. And I didn’t dare go outside.

You’d think that after what I went through, I wouldn’t be like that anymore. But that’s the thing about … for lack of a better word, spiritual experiences. When you have them they’re amazing, and you feel like you’re on top of the world. And you are. But then you have to go back down into the world, and get slowly taken apart by the futility and despair. High school and what I went through in that clearing may as well have been in separate universes.

Okay … it did help me once. I was at school, and I was stressed out and scared, and I needed to be by myself but I had to stay there in class. And I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, because all I could think was how unbearable life was going to be if it was always going to be this pointless and cruel, and I was always going to have to hide these wolf ears and tail.

I started imagining some really creative ways of killing myself, because I hated it all and I was scared and tired and sick of it. But then I thought Why don’t I just run off and become a wolf instead? And, I mean, I didn’t know for sure if I could … but after that night, the world seemed just magical enough that I could believe it could happen.

Obviously, I didn’t do that. But just the thought that I could, that it was even an option, made me feel so much better. I just barely got through the rest of that Friday, and stayed up late that night researching wolves online.

(Did you know that the whole thing about pack organization, with alphas and betas and constant fighting for dominance, and omegas as Acceptable Targets and all … it’s never been seen in the wild? It only exists in captive wolves, when they’ve been thrown together against their will from all different families and backgrounds and made to stay there for no apparent reason. Then the assertive ones start jockeying for position, and the most passive ones get picked on cruelly. Remind you of anything?)

Anyway, I slept in late that Saturday, and when I got up my family was out of the house. Which meant I got to play my music really loud, and bake cookies and watch whatever I wanted on TV (which was usually nothing). Except this time, I drew all the curtains and let my wolf ears and tail show the whole time. It felt daring, but the longer I went that way the more comfortable I felt with it … I actually thought they looked nice, when I saw them in the mirror.

Of course I about had a heart attack when my family showed up, and had to pack up and clear out really fast. But that’s just par for the course.

I stayed up late again that night. This time I actually posted on one of those role-playing forums, and created a character and everything. I wanted to put what I’d learned to good use, and maybe become a bit more comfortable with myself and what’d happened to me. I was still living from day to day, and had only the faintest idea of what I had become. But I thought that this was a step in the right direction … and that at any rate, I’d have a while to figure things out.

As it turned out, I had only a few hours left.

I woke up to pounding on my door. My brain was still half-asleep, and it took me a long second to realize I was not still in my dream. The inside of my muzzle was completely dry, and it hurt when I tried to swallow.

Then I realized I had a muzzle.

“Rebecca!” More pounding. My dad’s voice. “Get up. You’re coming to church with us.”

I sat up with a start and looked down at myself. There was a muzzle in front of my field of vision, just like when I was a wolf. And my hands and my arms were covered in fur, the same black fur that I’d had then. My fingers looked gnarled and had dull claws at their tips, and they and my hands had thick pawpads.

The sensible thing to do would have been to try to change myself back, the way that I’d made my ears and my tail retract. The intelligent thing to do would have been to tell my parents I was sick, or come up with some other excuse.

Instead, I started to hyperventilate.

“Rebecca?” The pounding stopped. “What are you doing in there?”

I couldn’t control my breathing. I didn’t even have the strength to sit up, and just barely managed to scoot backwards and lean up against the headboard. I was having a panic attack, and there was nothing that I could do about it.

“Do you have someone in there with you?” He was stern.

I wanted to try to communicate, but I was so scared that I didn’t know what to say. And I was taking such deep breaths so fast that I couldn’t have made words come out, muzzle or no. Instead I whined like a dog, loudly, then stopped and held my breath because I realized what I’d just done.

“She’s got a dog in there,” my mom said. “Get the keys.”

I heard his footsteps go fast down the hall, and the jangle of keys on a keyring. The whole time, my breath was still caught in my throat, and my lungs convulsed and tried to draw air but it was like I was underwater. Then I heard the footsteps on their way back, and finally I took a deep breath before screaming “Don’t come in!”

It was the worst thing I could have done. Not that I had many options.

When they opened the door and saw me, they screamed. I screamed, and started to cry. Then my dad dragged my mom down the hall, and I got up and followed them all the way to their bedroom, trying to say something, anything coherent. Begging them to listen, to understand.

When I saw my dad loading the shotgun, I ran. I tripped and fell all the way down the stairs, got up without even feeling the pain, then wrenched the front door open and took off.

I almost made it to the end of the driveway.

I lay in a writhing heap in the snow. It felt like my whole back was torn open, raw skin and flesh exposed to the cold. I screamed and convulsed, as my blood stained the snow and my heat escaped into the air. Snow got into the wounds on my back. My pawpads were sticky and red.

My dad could have finished me off. I don’t know why he didn’t. I’m not sure what he was thinking. Did he realize what he’d done? Did he regret it? I may never know.

All I could think of was how hurt I was, physically and emotionally. My whole life, everything around me had made me feel that I was not welcome. That I was an aberration which shouldn’t exist. Now I knew that the world had finally killed me, and the fact that the blow had been dealt by my family just made it even worse. I wanted to die, to just make this awful thing that I was go away. And I was so furious at myself for still living, and for still feeling this pain, that I did the impossible.

I got up, on hands and knees. Then just my knees, arms wrapped tight around myself, claws pressed into my shoulders so hard that I drew blood. I shook, with fury and self-hatred. And I could feel something happening, but I didn’t know what it was until I finally stood up and screamed; at myself, at the whole world, at everything.

I wanted to make it all die.

For as long as I’ve lived at my parents’ house, there’s been this huge rock at the end of our driveway. I mean huge like the size of a coffee table. Except that it seemed smaller now.

I walked over and picked it up in both hands, and I flung it back towards the house.

My parents ducked, but my aim was off. It clipped the corner of the house, sending splinters flying, and demolished the swing set that had sat there broken since I was little. I screamed again, filled with hatred, and looked for more things to throw. But the only thing I could see that wasn’t attached to the ground was the old station wagon, and it was up too close to the house.

From the wagon my gaze went up to the porch, and my parents. And our eyes met.

I could have killed them. I wanted to kill them. But the fear in their eyes stopped me. They were helpless and terrified, and that made me hate myself even more.

I screamed at them, but it came out as a roar, awful and pained. If I could’ve translated it, it would’ve been something like “See what you did to me!?” And I couldn’t have, but I think they got the message.

After that I took off on all fours, down the road and into the brush.

I’m sweating and uncomfortable right now, just thinking about what I did and what must have happened to me. But I’m going to try to finish this, before I … do anything else.

I’m sitting in my “friend” Laurel’s house. And I used quotation marks there because I really don’t know her that well. She’s one of the popular girls, and we’ve barely spoken to each other. But she’s shared her lunch with me before, and she’s told her friends to stop teasing me. More importantly, she invited me to a party once, which is how I knew her address.

I showed up there naked and injured, completely in human form, and when she answered the door I begged her for help. She got a blanket for me and took me inside, and her mom checked on my wounds. My arms were still bleeding from where I had gripped them, but my back had completely healed over.

This was just a few hours ago. I’m staying here with her mom right now, writing this on their dining room table while she’s doing something in the kitchen. I’m pretty sure that she’s cooking, because something smells good. Anyway, she volunteered to stay here and look after me while Laurel and her brothers and dad are at church. My wolf ears and tail are out, because I can’t keep them in all the time … she hasn’t seen them yet, but I’m not going to try to hide them from her. I just don’t have the energy.

Laurel said that she’d try to find help for me while she’s at church. She goes to a different one than my parents do, so I believe her. I don’t know what she’s going to do; maybe they’ve got a battered women’s shelter or something. I told her my dad had fired a shotgun at me. I didn’t say what else happened.

They’ve been gone for a long time now. Long enough for me to finish all this. What kind of church is this they go to?

I hope she’s not talking to the police.

*sigh*

*deep breath*

*struggle to hold back tears*

I’m not going to be here when she gets back. And I don’t mean I’m going to run away. I wanted to, when I was at school, but I can’t anymore because now I know that I’m dangerous. I’m not just a wolf, I’m a wolf who’s not afraid of people, not as much as she ought to be. Who tried to kill them, and could do so again.

I’m scared that I’ll hurt someone. I’m scared that the rest of my life will be short and violent, and end with somebody showing me why I ought to be scared of humans. And I’m cursing myself for not learning that to begin with. For not accepting my place and the scraps I was given, and for begging and being uncooperative instead of thanking them for it. I should have done that. I should have learned. And now I won’t have the chance.

I’m not giving myself the chance.

I’m going to

Hello, Rebecca.

Thank you for listening.

I cut off there because they got back from church. Then we ate, and played on their Wii, and I spent the whole day at their house. I was tired and depressed at first, but somewhere along the line I forgot what I was planning to do. I’m sitting in bed now, in their guest room, huddled up next to the nightlight.

I don’t know who wrote that last part in here. It’s not my handwriting. And somehow I was able to keep my wolf ears from showing to Laurel’s family, so they can’t have known what I am.

My heart tells me it’s the same voice that spoke in my dream, only it’s taken me this long to make out the words. I believe it.

I don’t know if I’ll talk to my parents again. Or go back to school, or their church, or anything. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’m going to keep on living. Whatever that voice is, it gave me a beautiful gift, twice. The least I can do is to do what it asks.

I’m sorry for what I wrote earlier, and for the damage I caused. But I’m not sorry for being myself, right now. Maybe I will be again, later on, but I’ll try not to be. I’ll try.

If that voice is listening, thank you. I’ll wait until I hear from the person like me to decide what I’m going to do. And I hope that I hear from you again soon.

Good night.

Stephanie desperately wants to be a mage, just like her brothers and the rest of the world around her. Unfortunately, a rare disorder has robbed her of the ability to do so. So when a mysterious stranger comes along to offer her what she’s always dreamed of, she’s hard-pressed to refuse. But all decisions have their consequences, intended or otherwise…

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A light rain misted onto Carol’s glasses, as she removed her helmet and put down the motorcycle’s kickstand. What she could see of the sky was gray, and all around her was the sound of water showering on thick forest leaves.

Gravel crunched under her feet, as she walked around the ranger’s jeep and past the sign that said “WILDLIFE RESCUE.” She took a moment to steel her nerves, before walking up to the front porch and knocking on the old metal screen door.

Footsteps, from inside the building. Then the ranger came up to the door. She didn’t look much older than Carol, but she was a lot taller, and her khaki uniform made her seem much more professional.

Her voice sounded like it had on the telephone. “You’re Leslie, right?”

Carol nodded, a little too quickly, and looked away.

“Well, c’mon in!” The screen door pushed open with a creak, and Carol held it open before stepping in. It was not much warmer inside.

“Let’s see about getting you set up.” The ranger went deeper into the building. Carol adjusted her glasses and looked around. It was an old building, dusty but with lots of natural light, and it smelled like zoo animals …

Oh. That was why. The imported Egyptian Fruit Bat hung silently inside its floor-to-ceiling cage, which took up about a third of the room. Toys dotted the floor, covered in newspaper clippings, and pieces of oranges and shards of rind hung on a string made the room smell faintly like air freshener.

Carol’s gaze, though, was fixed on the bat itself. All she could see was its softly-furred backside, and its brown wings wrapped tightly around it. It was only about half a foot long, and there was a metal mesh cage in the way. But Carol thought it was beautiful.

Footsteps came up from behind her, and stopped. “You like the Rousette, huh?”

Carol blinked and turned around, broken out of her reverie. “Huh?”

“The Egyptian Rousette. The bat.” The ranger was carrying an armful of medical paraphenalia, including a syringe.

“Oh. Um, yeah … ” Carol was looking at what she was carrying.

“You know they’re the only large bats that use echolocation.” The ranger tore open a package, and affixed a needle to the syringe.

“Yes.” Carol couldn’t help but watch.

“You like bats?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I think they’re cute.”

Carol just nodded, and swallowed.

The ranger finished what she was doing, and started wrapping a long elastic cord around Carol’s arm to cut off the blood flow. “Okay, Leslie, now hold still. This is going to sting a little, so we only want to have to do this once.”

Carol felt the pressure build up uncomfortably, and watched as the ranger got the needle ready. She closed her eyes and clenched one fist as it pierced her arm; then it got pulled out, and immediately a cloth bandage was pressed over it. “Hold that while I get you a Band-Aid.”

Carol held it in place, and let out her breath. While the ranger’s back was turned, she pulled the gauze away and stole a glance at her arm. A drop of blood had soaked into the gauze, but her arm had already healed.

She hurriedly replaced it as the ranger came back, and put an adhesive bandage over the gauze. Then the ranger untied the cord holding back her blood flow, and put it back in the first aid kit before holding up the syringe, partway full with Carol’s blood.

“It’ll take us a day or two to get the test results back,” she said, squinting at it. “You can start volunteering before then, though, so no worries about that.”

The ranger went back down the hallway carrying the first aid kit and syringe, and Carol followed, stealing a glance over her shoulder back towards the bat as she went. A little ways down the hall was an infirmary, and the ranger put up her gear there, and set the vial of Carol’s blood inside a rack next to empty vials. Carol took note of that.

“So … what will I be doing, here?” she asked, struggling to find the words.

“Oh, it depends. See-”

The phone rang.

“Hold on one sec.” The ranger left the infirmary, and went down the hall into another room.

Carol’s eyes fell on the vials, and on the first aid gear right beside them.

* * *

Carol unlocked the bat cage, with the key that she’d found in the ranger’s desk, before quietly stepping inside. The ranger had a loud voice, and it carried all the way out here and drowned out what she was doing. It sounded like she was on the phone with a friend … or a relative. Or an ex-boyfriend, judging from her tone of voice.

The bat stayed sleeping and motionless as Carol tore open the wrapper in her mouth, and got out one of the long needles. Affixing it to an empty syringe, she approached the bat and held still for a second, conflicting thoughts in her head.

It’s so cute, all huddled and sleeping like that …

I wonder where I ought to stick it at.

Just a tiny bundle of fur and wings …

How much should I draw? Will I hurt the thing?

I want to pet it, right now.

I need to do this. But how?

Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward and took hold of the bat in one hand, then stuck the needle in it with the other and drew out a tiny amount of blood. It turned to look at her, eyes wide with shock, and she sweated as she withdrew the syringe and unclipped the needle from it.

Carol had almost gotten to the door when it started chirping at her, loud. Now she was really sweating. She tried to get the lock back in place-

“You can’t turn your back for one second these days, can you?”

Carol froze.

Heavy, booted footsteps came up the hall behind her. One hand grabbed her shoulder and turned her around, hard. “Alright,” the ranger said. “Let’s see it.”

Carol’s heart was beating so hard it felt like it would give out. Slowly, carefully, she reached into her pocket and withdrew a vial of blood, then handed it to the ranger.

The ranger snatched it up without looking. “I don’t know why I give people the benefit of the doubt anymore. I was just telling my friend the other day that we shouldn’t judge people like you. Now I’m not so sure.”

There was a long moment of silence. The ranger did not speak again until Carol looked up, and saw her hard, stern face.

“Get out.”

* * *

Carol hopped down the wet, wooden steps and out into the rain, filled with adrenaline and trying to keep from showing it. She was scared, and she didn’t think she would stop being scared until she’d gotten ten miles away. Her guilt barely registered, she was so scared.

But she was also excited, because she’d gotten what she came for.

After getting back on her motorcycle and pushing the kickstand back up, she checked in her pocket to make sure. The tiny vial of bat blood was still there. And the vial of her blood was not, anymore.

The screen door pushed open, and Carol hastily threw on her helmet. A second after she’d gotten it in place, a rodent-like snout pushed out the front beneath the visor.

“Hey! What do you think you-”

Carol took off, kicking gravel up from her tires, and sped back towards the main road, a whiplike tail trailing out behind her.

* * *

Carol knew she couldn’t go out the main gate, so she took a barely-marked dirt trail out through the west side. After making sure she was not being pursued, she unwrapped another needle and injected herself with the bat’s blood, wrapping the needle and syringe up afterwards and pocketing them to throw away later.

She forced herself into human form and got back on her motorcycle, at the edge of the park where the dirt trail just met the road. No cars were coming, and there were no traffic noises for as far as she could hear. Just water dripping off leaves.

Carol grinned to herself, inside her helmet, and noted the time on her watch. It’d been fewer than three hours since she’d set out. At this rate, she’d be home by dinner.

The drive to the wildlife rescue had taken two hours. The drive back took six.

She didn’t take the main roads, for fear of being spotted. But in under an hour Carol started to feel lethargic, as though she’d been running all day. At first she dismissed it as being the effects of stress, and tried to settle into her ride and enjoy herself. But after not too long, she realized that she could barely keep her eyes open. It was the middle of the day, and she was starting to fall asleep.

Carol pulled off the road at a fast food restaurant, somewhere on the edge of a town in the hills, and almost let her motorcycle fall over she was so tired. There wasn’t a line at this time of day, so she walked up and ordered something small just so she could sit down. While getting a straw she noticed they had a free newspaper sitting on one of the counters, so she grabbed it on the way to her seat.

She only managed a few bites of her snack before realizing that she was about to faceplant on top of it. Stretching out in her seat, she took off her rainjacket and used that as a pillow. Then she covered her face with the newspaper, half-sitting and half-laying down.

Carol only meant to rest for a few minutes. She was used to feeling drowsy in the middle of the day, and laying down for a half-hour or so and feeling much better afterwards. Besides, it wasn’t like it would be easy to fall asleep on a hard bench like this …

* * *

She tries to wrestle the gun away from him, but he is too strong. He slams her against the wall, scraping her knuckles across the brick. Then he kicks her away when she lets go, smacking her into the concrete.

She looks up through the haze and the ringing in her ears, up into the barrel, and he-

* * *

“Ma’am?”

Carol gasped for breath, her dream cut short.

There were sounds all around her. Sounds of sizzling, and beeping, and people talking and eating and walking around. And deeply interesting smells, of grease and dead things that were good to eat. Where was she, again?

“Ma’am.”

Something shook her shoulder and she recoiled, jumping to her feet up on the hard plastic seat and putting her hands against the windowblinds. The newspaper fell away, as she stared in fear … down at the middle-aged woman, with a restaurant uniform on and a cleaning rag in one hand.

If the woman was startled, she gave no sign of it. “Ma’am, we’ve let you sleep there for hours. People are coming in now, and you’re making noise and it’s scaring them.”

Carol’s heart was still beating fast. She could barely remember why she was there. The gunbarrel seemed more real, and she felt like it was still pointed at her.

“You need to order something if you’re going to stay here longer. And if you’re going to sleep, you need to get yourself home or to a motel. Okay?”

The words were starting to make sense. She realized that people were looking at her, and it would’ve scared her if she hadn’t just been afraid for her life.

“Okay?”

” … okay.”

Carol slid back down into her seat, as the cleaning lady went on and washed the next table. She took a deep breath to center herself, still ignoring the people looking at her. Then she looked down, and her eyes fell on the meal that she’d barely touched.

Putting her rainjacket over one arm with shaking hands, she got up and wadded up her trash and tossed it into the bin. Then she went into the ladies’ room to clean up, her face turning red as she tried to ignore the stares on her back.

There was no one in there. Which was good, because when Carol saw her reflection she jumped up and gasped, and dropped her coat on the floor. Her face was a hybrid of bat and opossum features, darkly furred with radar dish ears and a pink nose on a long snout. Her arms were covered with fur, and her tail was whipping against the wall in her panic.

She fought to control her breathing, as the reality of what had just happened struck her. They saw me! They all saw me! I must have scared them to death — I must have seemed crazy to them — they probably saw me flailing my arms and things and … and …

She took a deep, shuddering breath, and made herself hold it for a few seconds before letting it out. I’m going to be alright. Everyone knows that people like me exist. No one’s going to try to hurt me or anything … not here, not out in public. I’ll be okay … I’ll be okay.

Even so, she locked herself in there, until she was satisfied that everyone who’d been in the restaurant just then had left.

* * *

Carol didn’t eat anything else there. By the time she got home, she was famished.

She walked her motorcycle up to the driveway, after cutting the engine a couple of streets down. The streetlights were on outside, over the suburban lawns. A couple of dogs barked at her from inside their fences, but dogs were always barking at something.

The gravel driveway was empty, just like it had been since her parents had left on their cruise. Carol went around back and leaned her cycle against the outside wall, then unlocked the side door before stepping in. The house was dark, even though the moon shone in through curtained windows.

Now that she was inside, Carol let the changes come, and found it a lot easier to see afterwards. She tried clicking her tongue to echolocate, but nothing happened as far as she could tell.

She shut the door quietly and went into the kitchen, without turning any lights on. The refrigerator was whirring, and the noise made her ears flatten. She opened it, squinting inside, but the scent of old grease and leftovers no longer smelled as good as it once had.

Looking over at the table, her eyes fell on the fruit basket. She shut the refrigerator door and ate three bananas, before realizing that they were brown. Oh well, she thought. I would’ve just made banana bread with them anyway.

Washing an apple in the sink, she looked out the window at tree silhouettes. Things were moving between them, little flying things, and Carol knew what they were.

She turned off the water and opened the window a crack, listening through the screen, and her ears perked at the sounds of clicking and chirping. She could hear more of the bats’ calls now, the higher-pitched parts that human ears couldn’t detect. Her heart leaped at the sound, and she  held her breath in, listening and waiting for an epiphany. An understanding of what their calls meant.

After a minute or two of holding still and breathing quietly, she finally stopped and sighed and went to go get a knife for the apple. Something about their chirping did call to her. But she wasn’t sure if it was because of her nature, or just because of her bat ears. She felt like they were talking too fast and speaking a foreign language, one that sounded like one she knew but was too different for her to interpret. Maybe if I lived in Egypt, she thought.

Carol had a long dinner, plowing through most of the fruit basket (peels and all) and half of a jar of peanut butter. She finished with a tall glass of milk, not questioning her cravings but taking the time to satisfy them. She knew what was happening to her, and that it would take awhile to finish … awhile for her wings to grow in.

As it turned out, “awhile” was “about a week.”

It was slow and painful at times, and she was lethargic and sleepy for most of it. She slept for almost the whole time that the sun was up, and if she couldn’t get back to sleep around noon she read one of her manga until her eyes were too heavy again. The nights she spent eating and drinking almost constantly, gulping down gallons of milk and bringing a snack to eat on the way to the store. After a little while, she didn’t even try to hide the bony protrusions sticking out of her back, or to hold her animal features in. She just smiled at the cashier, and hoped that it didn’t look like she was snarling.

She took two multivitamin pills daily. Her shopping basket was filled with dense, nutrient-rich foods; avocados, a couple of pomegranates, and lots of citrus fruit. Meat was too expensive, so she stacked tubs of cold, wet tofu into her cart, and ate peanut butter and bananas while marinating it at home. It wasn’t half bad, although after a couple of tries she found that she liked it better when mixed into fruit-and-milk drinks than when fried up with soy sauce.

The few hours she didn’t spend eating, cooking and shopping, she spent surfing the ‘net on her laptop, with the lights off and brightness turned all the way down. (And the window open to listen for bats.) Mostly she looked for videos by other ‘morphs, and blogs with tutorials on how to deal with a changing body. Links to recipes started to fill up her favorites list.

Every now and then she browsed for news stories, about First Federal or her disappearance. They hadn’t talked about it for a while, in the town that she had been working in. And apparently, no one had caught the killer.

Carol did not like to think about that. She spent one day in a haze of half-awakeness just because her dreams were so terrible. The whole time she was asleep she spent trying to run, or to fight him off. And all she could think about while she was awake that day was the feel of the cold gunmetal, or the way her hands clawed at his until they were slammed into the wall.

She had been shot only once, but she’d relived it six times now, each one just as horrifying.

For all that, she found that revenge didn’t drive her. She tried to think about her death as little as possible, because all that she felt about it was fear. Likewise, her plan was not an obsession. It was just something that had to be done.

She wanted it to be over soon. Preferably before her family came back. Then she could reveal herself, to them and her friends online and her boyfriend. She missed every one of them, even the annoying ones. But she dared not call them, or pick up the phone, or log in to sites with her old accounts. She didn’t even surf the web without using a proxy server.

Soon this will be over, she thought, doing pushups while stretching her wings to their lengths and trying to feel their tips. And soon I’ll be able to fly.

* * *

Despite exercising whenever she could, Carol still put on a bit of weight, and it wasn’t just in her wings. She used a flashlight to look down at the scale, frowning to herself and being glad that she was sewing her stealth outfit with some give to it.

And that she was going to be getting a lot more exercise, soon enough.

That night was the first time she tried flying, as her wingspan was already greater than her height. There was a creek beside her house, behind the suburban neighborhood, and there was an open area in the trees behind it. After wading the creek, she ran as fast as she could into the clearing, then started flapping her wings wildly. But it only drove her to crash in a tumbling heap.

She rubbed her bruised elbow, the color not fading even as the pain did. Then she got up, took a deep breath and tried again. I don’t care how many times I’ve got to do this, she thought. Being shot didn’t stop me. This isn’t going to either.

Carol tried five more times to get up the speed to fly, and to hold her leathery wings at the right angle to produce lift. On her last try she almost did, and her heart leapt as she felt her wings carry her feet off the ground. But then they clipped a tree, and she rolled to a stop, instinctively curling her wings around her.

She looked up at the tree in dismay. Then she started climbing it.

It took her ten long, agonizing minutes to get up to the branch that she wanted. Her wings kept getting caught on things, and trying to get them out without being able to see behind herself brought her close to tears in frustration. But she closed her eyes and took a handful of deep breaths, then continued and finally freed herself.

Crouching on the thickest branch, twenty feet off the ground, she looked out at the creek and the clearing and at her house’s distant roof. Then she closed her eyes, and jumped.

Her wings caught the air, and she soared.

It was just like the first time she’d managed to ski. The same feel of gliding, over ground that she’d once had to tread. And the same feel of silent exhilaration, the only sound in her ears that of wind rushing past. It was hard to hold her wings out rigid, but she barely noticed she was so excited.

After a couple of seconds, she realized that she was dropping slowly and tried flapping her wings to compensate. But she underestimated how much force she would need to apply against the stiff cushion of air beneath her, and her wings folded up and she dropped like a rock, falling into the creek with a splash.

This is what she was thinking right afterwards.

Aghpttb-

I flew! I was flying! I …

AGH, there are rocks stuck in my knee and it stings!

I still remember what it felt like. I want to do it again …

Cold! Wet! Pain! Cold!

That was the awesomest thing EVER!

She finally stood up off of the slippery rocks, and finished brushing the pebbles off of her skinned knees, her hands moist with blood and water. Then she looked back up at the tree she’d jumped down from, and thrust her fist into the air, before shivering.

Hugging herself with both arms and wings, she managed a grin in spite of chattering teeth.

That was so worth it.

Carol wanted to try it again right away, but decided she’d better not. That turned out to be the right choice. She spent the rest of that night shivering and sniffling, and drinking a warm mug of lemon tea.

The next day (or next night, given her sleeping schedule) her back and her wings ached all over. She could barely even move her arms, which made sewing her stealth outfit hard. She had to rest that day, and the next, stretching her stiff wings when she could and making a couple of feeble attempts at doing stitches. It had only been a few seconds of flight, but she felt like she’d tried to lift a car.

The day of her parents’ return was approaching, and she still wasn’t ready. It looked like there was only one thing for it: She spent the whole last day packing and cleaning up, then got on her motorcycle and drove back to the city she’d worked at.

It was a long drive, especially with a sore back and wings, and she had to share the road with humans who couldn’t see as well as she could at night. Worse, the prices at the downtown hotel were sky-high. But as she flopped down onto the big, cushy bed in her room, she thought it’d been worth it for two reasons:

One, the generous fruit basket on the table.

And two, the lights of First Federal, right outside of her window.

* * *

Midnight. Still not as dark as she would’ve liked. The lights of the city shone red on the clouds behind her, as though sunset had never ended.

Carol finished hauling her bag up to the rooftop next to her, and looked out at the bank building as she got her things out. There weren’t too many lights on in it, and there weren’t any other large buildings nearby. The office that she was headed for was on the other side of the building, so she couldn’t see in it, but she’d made sure to check when she’d driven back with snack food and energy drinks. An hour ago, the light had been on.

Her fingers were unsteady as she strapped the gun to her hip. She wondered if it’d been a good idea to drink so much liquid sugar, or if she was just nervous. For a second, she thought of just climbing back inside. Then she shook her head and dismissed it, and finished strapping her gloves and her gear to her night-black stealth outfit.

There wasn’t a lot of gear to strap on, because she had to pack light to be able to fly. Stepping up to the edge of the roof, she looked out across the street at the lower ledge of the bank building … a flat platform with air vents and boxy things on top, to the side of the main part of the building.

Carol swallowed as she looked across at it. It seemed so far away now. And the lights of the streetlights seemed brighter, and the noise of distant traffic seemed louder. Every now and then a car drove past below, and she felt silly and conspicuous, like everybody could see her.

She clenched her fists, and told herself that if she did this right, nobody would.

Carol went to the center of the roof, walking lightly on bare paws, the noise of the central air conditioning getting louder in her ears. She stretched her arms, legs and wings, and did a basic warm-up routine. Then she looked out at the bank building and took a deep breath, before running towards it and leaping over the edge of the roof.

It was like doing a pullup while wearing a full-sized backpack. The first time she’d barely noticed, because the feeling of flight was so novel and she didn’t have any place she was flying to. But this time she immediately panicked, her breaths fast with fear and exertion, and as she looked up into the rushing air she realized that she was not going to make it.

Do I flap?

She couldn’t bring herself to, because she knew she would certainly plummet. So instead, as the roof of the building approached she put out her arms and

SMACK

One second she was flying, the next she was grappling with the ledge. She felt it beneath her arms, then her forearms, then only her hands were holding onto it as her footpaw-pads slipped on squeaking glass.

Heart racing, breaths rapid, brain telling her I am going to die, she fought to clamber on top. Her foot gained traction on scratchy concrete, and she just about tore its pad off getting the other one off the glass and pushing with all her might. One elbow got above the ledge, then the next, then she flung herself over the side and landed on top of the building.

Carol’s heartbeat was so rapid she thought she would die just from it, and trying to catch her breath felt like fighting to keep from drowning. Her tail and her wings were squashed underneath her, but she didn’t care. She could barely feel them.

She wasn’t there long before her ears perked. There was a squeak, of skin on the glass of the window she’d been kicking. Like someone had pressed his hands or his face up against it.

Carol jumped back to her feet, blood rushing to her head and making her stagger, as pins and needles crept into her wings and her tail. Then she shook her head, trying to clear it, and looked around for an entry point.

She had to rest up against the side of the door for a second, before taking out her glass cutter and carving a square through the inset window.

* * *

Carol crept through the dark hallway, towards the light spilling out from the open door.

A woman’s voice, laughing. “Are you kidding me? Those mortgage bonds are backed by the country’s top three lending institutions! Of course your money’s safe. It’s safer than it’d be in our vault.”

She got out her phone from its belt case, softly closing the magnetic cover before switching it on and turning on the Voice Memo feature. Carol pointed its microphone towards the door as she crept closer, quietly, holding her gun at the ready.

“Well, okay, maybe not that safe … ” Carol’s pointed ears heard a trace of the other voice on the phone. “But you know me, Ron. I’ve never let you down before, have I?”

She stopped outside the door, recording for a second.

More laughter. “And you’ll never let me forget that, will you?”

Carol let them finish their conversation, and waited for the phone to hang up. But a second later she heard it being lifted off the receiver again, and a number dialed into it. This time a man’s voice spoke, a deep one that sounded like plaid shirts and facial hair. “Hey, Mark. Remember those subprime mortgage bonds that I told you about?”

Carol’s ears perked.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” A chuckle. “Yeah, those’re the ones. Anyway, I think they’re going downhill.”

She holstered her gun, and crouched down low to hold a knife out around the corner. In its mirrored surface she saw feet under a rainforest wood desk, along with an energy bar wrapper on the floor next to a wastebasket. The feet moved, kicking the wrapper out of the way, as the chair swiveled to face away from the door.

“Heh, I know. Sorry for getting you into that mess. And First Federal has spent a ton on them, haven’t they? Listen, maybe we should … “

Carol’s pounding heart drowned out the man’s words as she stepped into his office, the scent of central heating and pretzels and peanut butter and wheat-oat bars all assaulting her nostrils. His desk was messy, his suit jacket was tossed over the guest chairs next to the plant, and there was a screensaver going on his PC as he twirled the phone cord in his finger.

She stepped closer, crouch-walking, holding her wings pressed to her sides. She crept around the side of his desk, closer and closer to his high-backed leather chair. Finally she stood up, between the chair and his desk, and put her gun to his head. “Don’t move!”

Carol had tried to make it sound forceful. Then she realized the person on the other end of the line must have heard. There was silence for a long moment, and then her heartbeat drowned out a question on the phone.

“I’m going to have to call you back,” the deep male voice said, cracking. He hung up the phone, slowly and carefully, without turning his head.

Carol waited another long, painful moment, sweat running down her sides, before he spoke. This time it was silky and young. “The voice sounds familiar, but I’m afraid I can’t place it. Can I at least look to see who is pointing a gun at me?”

“G-go ahead.” Agh, she thought, I stuttered!

She stepped aside a pace or two, holding both arms straight out to aim at him, trying to keep them from trembling. The white-shirted young man in the chair spun it slowly to turn and face her. When he saw her, he looked confused. “Carol?”

She nodded, too quickly.

An incredulous look, for a second. Then he burst out laughing, and she really began to sweat. “Carol, you- this-” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.

She said nothing, and couldn’t help but wonder just how dumb she looked.

He reached for a tissue, and wiped at his face. “Well, Carol, congrats on your rebirth! Welcome to the club.”

“I know what you are.” All of a sudden she wanted to cry, and she knew it came through in her voice.

“Yes, I know.” The man regained his composure and looked up at her. “And you’re lucky that you weren’t dumped in a creek. Did you know that?”

She said nothing, and he went on. “And now that you’ve got your life back, you’ve decided to … to dress up in a costume and come up here and kill me. For revenge, I guess. Is that it?”

She shook her head, unable to speak.

“What is it, then?”

“You’re going to tell everyone what you are.” She shook the cameraphone in her hand. “I’m going to take a video of you changing. Then you’re going to say how you cheated everyone. And killed me.” Carol tried her best to keep her voice level.

“You’re wasting your time,” he said.

“Y-you’re not going to talk?”

“No, I mean this is a waste of your time.” He gestured at her. “Just look at yourself. You risked your life getting in here, and for what? To put some small-time corporate con artist away?”

“Murderer.” She growled at him.

“Yes, well, there was a reason for that. And as you can see, you’re not dead, now are you?” He clasped his hands underneath his chin, leaning his elbows on the arms of his chair, and smiled at her.

“I didn’t come here just to put you in jail,” she snarled, anger taking over where fear left off. “I want you behind bars so that I can go back to living my life, without having to worry about you killing me again.”

He shook his head, sadly. “Rule number one of rebirthing. You don’t get to have your old life back.”

“I will if you’re out of the way!”

“No, you won’t,” he said. “Think about it. What are you going to tell your family? Your life with them will never go back to normal.”

“They know I’m a ‘morph. They just don’t know all what that entails yet. And they already think I’m weird.”

“Do you really think you’ll get your old job back?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you really think I want it?”

He leaned back in his chair, and put his hands behind his head. “You have all the answers, don’t you?”

“And now, I want answers from you.” Carefully, without taking her eyes off of him, she thumbed the controls on her phone and set it to record video.

“Ask me how I survived the last person who tried to kill me,” he said, smiling.

“H-” She coughed. “How did you survive?”

“I didn’t,” he said, and spun his chair around slowly.

“Don’t move!” she said, and waved her gun helplessly at the back of his chair.

When he came back around, he had the face of a cat, with glossy black fur and emerald green eyes. His hands pressed together beneath his chin, and sharp claws came out from them and tapped each other. “I didn’t survive,” he repeated. “But I have nine lives.”

“Wh-”

He screamed as he sprang at her.

* * *

Carol had seen her cats get into fights before. They were so fast she couldn’t even tell who was winning until one broke off and ran. There was just an explosion of fur, and then two cats would run out of it, one of them chasing the other.

Those cats meant business. So did this one. One second she had a gun trained on him, the next it went off and she was rolling around on the floor, crashing into furniture, trying to get this whirlwind of blades off of her. It was like being attacked by a million pairs of scissors, and it was all she could do to keep them from cutting her open. Fur went everywhere, and so did pieces of fabric and upholstery, and after only a few seconds the room was a cloud of flying debris.

If someone had watched it in slow motion, they might have seen her grabbing his arms, and then him pulling his hind claws up to her stomach, and then her pulling away while still holding onto him and the both of them crashing into the plant. But Carol couldn’t watch in slow motion, and so she could barely tell what was going on. Except that everything in the room was being destroyed, and she wanted to keep this from happening to her.

Hadn’t she been holding a gun at one point? There it was, on the floor. She grabbed it in one hand, and he grabbed her arm, and she swung the gun into the side of his head and it went off as she did so. Plaster and insulation clouded the room from the new hole in the ceiling, followed by potting soil as she grabbed a handful of it off the floor and flung it in his face.

Clutching his face, blinking dust out of his eyes, he dropped to one hand and swung his legs in a clawed spin-kick. Carol dove towards the door, but he caught her tail and it stung and threw her off-balance.

There was a pause of about one second as she stood there leaning against the doorway in pain, looking into the clouded room and then down the hallway, as two men in security outfits rounded the corner. Then he pounced her again, and they were in the hall tumbling and kicking holes in the wall. And people were shouting at them, but she couldn’t hear, because he was screaming. (Or was she?)

Then a gun went off again, and she didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s, but blood sprayed across her as he recoiled and let go. She didn’t stop to think but took off, down the hall, stumbling and staggering but running as fast as she could. There was another gunshot as she rounded the corner, and she couldn’t feel anything but didn’t know if it was because they had missed or because she was so high on adrenalin.

All Carol knew was that she had to get away, right now. And that running footsteps were chasing her.

* * *

He approaches the man from behind, unable to see his face in this light. Or his tail.

“Sir! Are you alright?”

The man just stands there clutching his chest, taking deep shuddering breaths and coughing. It looks like he’s bleeding.

“Sir!”

He comes up next to the man, and something taps his leg. He looks down, and it’s a swishing tail. He looks up just as something hits him in the side of his face, and he loses consciousness.

A cat in a tattered, stained shirt leans against the wall and grits his teeth for a second, before something tiny and metallic PLINKs from his chest to the floor. He wipes at his muzzle with the back of his hand, then lurches forward, unsteady at first but soon settling into a run.

* * *

Carol turned sideways to slam into the crossbar on the door, going through without losing momentum, then stopped at the head of the winding staircase. Stairs! was all she could think.

Running footsteps, rounding the corner behind her. For a second, she had a vision of herself jumping over the railing and floating down dramatically, wings outstretched. Then she had another vision, of herself smacking into the concrete. She winced.

Carol jumped, as a shot bounced off the door, and took off running again.

It occurred to her, in between smacking into the wall at each landing and scrambling to take off down the next flight, that this had been a long night and she really wanted to go home. Hey, maybe I’ll get to go home now! she thought. Having to be with her family seemed downright happy compared to that cat fight.

She grabbed the rail of the last flight, trying to round it without smacking into the wall, when a gunshot from above bounced off of it right next to her hand. She fell backwards, landing on her wings and tail in a heap and so filled with adrenalin that all she could do was flail and kick her legs, not sure which way was up.

While she was doing that, a cat was knocking a person out several stories above her. Then she got back on her feet, just as a dark-colored blur dropped down between all the stairs. It rolled to a stop as she ran down the last flight, then came up at the end of it while she was about halfway down. A shaft of light from the window behind her shone on his fur, and his glowing eyes.

And on the gun in her hands.

Oh right, I’m still carrying this! She held it pointed at him, the stairwell silent except for their echoing breaths.

Carol remembered their last standoff, and how badly it’d ended for her. But whatever had happened between then and now, it looked like he’d gotten the worst of it. She felt exhausted, but he looked even moreso. And as she watched, he dropped to one knee, gasping for breath and not even looking at her.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she ventured, “haven’t you?”

He just nodded.

She wanted to lean up against the wall herself, but she was afraid to show weakness. They stood there for a couple of moments, long enough for Carol to feel dizzy as the adrenalin started to wear off.

“Bet you can’t … ” The cat gasped for breath. ” … finish me.”

“Huh?” Carol blinked.

“Got to do what it takes … ” He took several breaths. ” … to stop me. From going after you.”

“Y-you’re going to go after me?”

“Didn’t you?” He glared at her.

As she watched, he rose to his feet, a murderous look in his eyes. And then he began to climb the stairs towards her.

“Stop,” she said.

He went on.

“I mean it!”

The next few seconds would have ended badly for Carol, no matter what she had decided to do. But just then, she heard cars screeching and pulling up outside. Sirens wailed, and colored lights shone in through the windows.

The cat turned to look, and his ears flattened.

Carol looked between him and the door, her brain frozen. Then somebody pulled the door open, and without thinking she turned around and shot out the window on the landing above her.

“Don’t move!” someone shouted. But she wasn’t listening.

Pounding footsteps, gunshots, screams and noises of fighting echoed off of the walls behind her … as Carol ran through the window, jumped off the ledge, and flew.

* * *

The next day, the phone rang at her parents’ house. On the other end was a voice that sounded like their daughter’s, or like hers would if she were in massive pain. It wanted them to come get her, at a certain motel in a town in the next state, and to get her motorcycle at another motel in the same town.

They got there around noon. Carol had been up the entire day, unable to fall asleep because of muscle pains in her arms, legs, back, side, wings … pretty much everywhere. And she hadn’t taken anything for it, because she didn’t have anything to take.

She was still part-bat and part-possum, and was still wearing her torn stealth outfit. At least the color helps hide the bloodstains, she thought, gritting her teeth against the pain as they helped her into the car. A couple of tablets of painkiller and a pillow bought from the motel helped her fall asleep on the drive back, and the last thing she thought was I hope it isn’t too hard on them when the police catch up with me.

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried.

Carol woke up that evening when her mom walked into the living room and turned on the TV, after letting her crash the entire day. The lights were off and the volume was low, but it was loud enough for her to hear.

She winced, still wrapped up in blankets, and tried to shut her ears to it. But then she heard something about First Federal … and slowly, trying not to move her neck too much, she looked back over at the TV set.

She expected to see footage of the place where they’d fought. Of the torn-up office, and the stairwell where she’d flown off. But instead they were interviewing people, about how the bank had gone belly-up. Apparently they’d bought too many worthless loans from other banks, all so a ‘morph with ties to the others could profit from it. The police had him in custody now, on charges of fraud and assaulting a police officer, and the bank was closing down.

Carol’s heart sank as she watched, because she remembered that she’d left her phone there. It had everything on it … but was it even still working? Were her fingerprints recognizable? She didn’t know. And over the next few days as she recovered, nobody called them or showed up asking about her. Eventually, she forgot. And to all appearances, so did her parents. They never asked her any questions, and she never told them anything.

* * *

Halloween was that weekend. Carol spend the late afternoon giving out candy at the door, and the evening talking with her boyfriend and friends online. She didn’t have any proof of what she’d just been through, and it seemed almost like a dream. But somehow, it was one that she kept reliving.

It had been scary at times, but it had also been exhilarating. And she kept coming back to the fact that she’d done it, that she’d made her plan and carried it out and kept from being killed again or captured. She’d never known that she had it in her. And it made her wonder if maybe she shouldn’t be looking for a new line of work.

The next weekend, she heard how another ‘morph somewhere in New York had brought down the gang that had “killed” him and his family. And when she looked, she read similar stories from all over the world, of ‘morphs and people with other abilities. Everyone was suspicious of them, but they were doing things that no one else could.

People like her were making a difference.

The next evening she said goodbye to her parents, and rode off into the night. Somewhere, somebody needed her help, and she wanted to be there for him or her.

And maybe get a pet dog …

Anomie: The Will to Power (Part 2)

When I came to, there was something very different.

I don’t just mean in the sense that I was now covered in fur, or had a tail that felt strangely in-place and “right,” just like the rest of the new me did. Everything was sharper and stronger and harder to ignore. And it all smelled. Not in the sense of smelling bad, but everything smelled like something, and you have no idea how weird that is until you actually experience it. It’s like the olfactory equivalent of holding your face against a wall covered from top to bottom in neon signs. It was giving me a headache, though I’m sure the fact I’d been bludgeoned in the head by a thing about twice my size and three times my weight wasn’t helping.

And that was about when I realized the thing was probably still around, and there were probably a lot of other things with it. And now I was a thing. I wasn’t sure what kind of thing, but I wasn’t human anymore. Strange. I wasn’t thinking differently. I guess I was an animal all along. And now it was too late to cure me. I almost hoped the skinchangers would kill me, but they must have done something to change me. And with my luck, that probably meant I was too valuable to kill.

One of the skinchangers (I knew it was one because it smelled like a…well, like a me, but bigger and more dangerous, with a faint coppery tint I knew was blood) kicked me in the back. I froze, making myself as still as possible. If they thought I wasn’t moving, they might think I was dead, and then they’d leave me alone.

Yes, I do realize how stupid this sounds in retrospect. In case you’re wondering, it didn’t work. The skinchanger grabbed me by the back of my neck, which would have hurt more if I wasn’t possessed of what had to be an incredibly thick hide. It still managed to force me to my feet, more or less. I was having some trouble standing.

Then it burst into howls of laughter (no, they were literally howls. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense.) If I wasn’t covered in fur, I’m sure my skin would have been glowing red. I growled involuntarily and turned around, only to find a wolf about a foot taller than me.

Actually, everything was taller than me. The forest was lit only by dim campfires, but I could clearly make out one thing– there were no humans left. I might have felt threatened before, but it didn’t even compare to the growing feeling of dread I had now. The fear was back, and I couldn’t blame it. But there was something different this time, and I couldn’t place what because I wasn’t in much shape to think at the time.

I should note people like me often develop a very keen sense of when they’re being watched. Everyone there was staring at me. Most of them had claws and all of them had extremely sharp teeth. And they were tall. Most people have no idea what tall really is until everyone around them is suddenly three to four feet taller than them, or what it’s like to stare up into a predator’s eyes. So, one last time: everything was really tall.

I didn’t have too much time to dwell on this. One of the things lunged at me from the crowd, shoving me against a tree. He only had me by the shoulder. The logical side of me said it was almost playful in a very warped way, the way a schoolkid might punch a friend in the shoulder. The logical side of me had been shoved into a distant corner of my mind. The fact the monster pinning me was the lion didn’t help.

It was grinning at me. When you have a mouth full of very sharp teeth, this is a threatening gesture. I was frozen in place. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I was surrounded by monsters and the extent of my wilderness experience was camping out in a holographic simulation. Once.

“What is it?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the wolf’s muzzle move, and somehow managing to form relatively comprehensible words. I will admit it hadn’t quite occured to me that skinchangers could speak in their real forms. They never did in the movies.

“It looks like prey.” The lion’s grin widened, punctuating his statement with a throaty, growling laugh.

Something snapped inside me, something built up from year after year of being taunted, laughed at, and treated as sub-human. I then figured out what I’d been feeling before, somewhere entangled underneath all that fear, something I hadn’t acknowledged or wanted to notice for ages. Rage. Not just simple anger, rage, the kind that’s tinged with fear for your own life and blights out all rational thought and all you can think about is ripping into something, anything, even yourself if need be.

I’d lost my temper like this a few times, mostly at school. I had been in a few fights, which ended in me being suspended. I had started out thinking the “vacation” from school might be nice. I spent most of the time being tested for mental illness and being yelled at by my parents and being afraid of what I was apparently capable of.

Much like my previous fights, I didn’t remember much from my attempts to break away. I remembered biting the lion’s arm and tasting blood and raw meat, and idly thinking he’d taste better with some aging, and then wondering where the heck that came from. And then he let me go and I was free and I ran and ran and bit and clawed everyone who tried to get in my way and ran some more until I couldn’t hear their yelling and screaming and rioting, and then a bit more just for good measure because I could still smell blood and I wasn’t sure if it was just what had gotten on my claws and muzzle or if whoever I’d attacked was still going after me.

I finally worked up the courage to look behind me. There was nobody there. Therefore, I calmed down just enough for the reality of my situation to sink in, and cause me to panic again.

I was in the middle of nowhere. I’d been turned into a monster, and I didn’t even know what kind of monster I was. Nobody knew I was gone, so nobody was going to come and save me. Even if they could, who’d want to help me now? I had no food, and with how much I knew about survivalism, I’d probably kill myself if I tried to gather my own food. The skinchangers were probably going to come after me soon and I probably hadn’t done a very good job of covering my tracks. I wanted to be tired but I couldn’t because I was still terrified and angry, and I’d probably be killed in my sleep by skinchangers or soldiers or evil spirits anyway. And now I’d never be able to go back to a town or a city because my fur was matted with blood, my clothes barely fit, and I was sure I generally looked like I’d just killed a person or two, and even if I could clean up I’d still look like the stuff of nightmares. And as a more immediate problem, I was really hungry and thirsty.

Well, starvation was not high on my list of “ways I wouldn’t mind going out.” I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to eat (all of the movies and books indicated the flesh of young children, though I now had a feeling that was sensationalized) but just about anything would taste good now.

The problem was still getting it. I was trudging along aimlessly without any clue where I was supposed to head. They told us in school that there were settlements out here (I believe the word “backwater” was used to describe them) but they neglected to mention where. The cities were better places to live, and there was almost never any reason to leave them. And in anticipation of not ever having refugees (except those who come by train from other cities) and attacks from skinchangers and evil spirits who serve them, they built up impenetrable walls around them.

Oh yeah, I was in trouble. I never should have left the skinchangers, the worst they could have done was eat me. There were supposed to be smaller, un-fortified settlements, but the people there were all savages and they’d probably chase me off with torches and pitchforks. Or burn me at the stake, everyone told me they were religious nutcases. Not that I could blame them for trying to kill me or run me off.  A lot of people and things were trying to do that lately.

My self-loathing thoughts were driven away by the sound of running water. Sure, I was sheltered, but I knew a stream when I heard one. I was so parched, and dying of thirst was not high on my list of “ways to go out” either. So I made my way down to the stream, but stopped dead when I saw my reflection at the mouth of the stream.

It took me a moment to realize what I was supposed to be. I hadn’t looked at a biology textbook in a few years, so at first I thought I was some kind of rat, just because of the way my face looked and my tail. But it just didn’t quite match up, until I remembered a few pictures I’d seen. I was probably a possum. They used to be considered vermin and carriers for disease. I had to laugh, because it was the kind of thing you had to either laugh or cry at. But I still managed to do both. It was fitting, after all. Now I just looked like what I really was on the inside– useless, bottom-feeding trash, better off dead so I couldn’t hurt anyone.

Despite nobody being around, the fact I was crying made me embarrassed, and that just made me cry harder. I splashed some water on my face to try and calm myself down and make it not so obvious I was crying, just in case anyone showed up who really cared. Still, it was surprisingly soothing and cooled my burning skin. I’d probably been sweating bullets underneath there. I was beginning to realize fur retained heat way too well.

I took off my shoes (wearing them with paws had been really uncomfortable anyway) and waded into the water. It was cold but soothing. Brought back memories of trips to the park and playing in the creek, times of blissful ignorance. What I wouldn’t give to go back…even a few hours ago seemed better than this. I blinked back more tears and tried to wash the blood out of my fur and clothes. I already was starting to feel like I weighed an extra five or ten pounds just from having wet fur. It reminded me of trying to wash my hair when it was long. Except this was worse because there was more of it.

I took a few handfuls– well, pawfuls of water and drank, trying to not think about what kind of diseases must be in the water. It at least took the taste of blood out of my mouth. And it had another benefit, I could smell considerably better now, because everything didn’t have a coppery tang to it.

Now I could smell something on the distance. Grease. Frying food. Probably some kind of meat, it was too faint for me to tell exactly what. Cooked food almost certainly meant civilization of some kind. Human civilization. I guess skinchangers could cook food, but they were more likely to be the kind of things who’d eat their food while it was still living.

This must have made me an exception. Every other skinchanger I’d seen had been some huge predator animal. I wasn’t. I didn’t know why, I’d never even seen a non-predator skinchanger on the news or anything. Then again, they probably just showed the scary ones.

I almost wondered what that guy on the train (what was his name? Leander?) had become. He hadn’t seemed dangerous. Then again, most people with eidolic toxicosis didn’t, unless their animal took over. The skinchangers had hurt us before they turned us, but I wasn’t sure if they’d bothered to do any damage after the fact. I’d probably done more to them then they did to me.

My stomach growled and I felt the first twinges of hunger pangs. I craned my head up towards the night sky. Surely enough, I could see the glow of artificial lighting. There had to be a human settlement up ahead. I could just go up and…

…And probably be chased off by a pitchfork-wielding mob. I needed to be a human again. That’s how things always were in the movies, the skinchangers could just blend seamlessly into a crowd. Then they’d usually rip into someone and run off, but I was really hoping not to do that. They wouldn’t give me food if I did.

They probably wouldn’t give me food as-is either. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to change back, or if it was even possible. I was stuck like this, and I hated it, and there was nothing I could do, but I was still starving and I needed to eat something. It was late at night. Maybe I could just sneak in. And then break into someone’s house to raid their fridge. or whatever it was outlanders used to store their food. And then have them call whatever passed for a military force there and get shot, or stabbed, or burned at the stake.

Okay, that wasn’t such a great idea. That left eating from the trash. Just thinking about that made me cringe. But I trudged on to the city and the scent of food, hoping I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d find someone with narcolepsy and terrible home security to take from. Maybe I could pretend to be someone’s extremely large dog. Maybe something passably edible would fall out of the sky.

Maybe they even tolerated skinchangers. Like that would ever happen.

The forest was less thick now, and I could see the beginnings of the town. It was more modern than I expected, like a picture from the days before they started using fusion reactors to power cities. They had to use electrical generators. Nobody in their right mind would have a fusion reactor that wasn’t well-fortified. From what I could see at the top of my hill, it was dotted with little houses, nothing big enough to be a military barrack. No stakes, gallows, guillotines, or anything like that either. So far, so good.

I sniffed the air. It still smelled like fried meat, though it had become staler now. And I was getting a whiff of something that smelled even better, though I couldn’t place what. It was some kind of fruit, I could tell that much, but it smelled like it was rich and sweet. My mouth started watering. I carefully followed the trail of the scent, trying to stay away from open areas. I didn’t see any people moving around, but now was a bad time to be careless.

I tracked it down to a garden in the back of someone’s house. Well, it was better than a trash can. Still, it looked barren, except for a few bushes poking out of the ground that were bearing a few strawberries. I shoved them into my muzzle as fast as I could pick them. It took me a few seconds to realize they were oddly squishy, and then a few more to realize that even in the dim light, their coloration seemed a little off. And that was about when I realized I was eating over-ripe strawberries. And they tasted good. My stomach lurched, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw up what little I’d eaten.

Then I smelled something else on the air. Something dangerous, something that reminded me of the skinchanger’s camp. I spun around, only to see a human.

“What are you doing here?” She demanded.

I hissed at her.

And then in the blink of an eye, she was three feet taller than me and was staring down at me with a very canine face.

Virmir was having a great week.

That wasn’t the name he’d been born with, of course. It was the name that he’d chosen, to represent himself online. His “real” name had hardly anything to do with who he was, but Virmir was an Urocyon cinereoargenteus; a gray fox, that walked on its hind legs and talked and grinned and wore clothes (when it felt like it). A cartoon drawing, a personal brand and an identity that felt more real than the human one he’d been born with. Or at the very least, more fun.

Some days he felt kind of silly about that. Like his first few days on the job. Maybe it’d been the gray cubicles, without so much as a potted plant. Maybe it’d been his manager’s clean haircut and firm handshake, and the way he’d gone on about “fostering world-class infrastructure” and “meeting customer-centered goals.” Or maybe it’d just been the fluorescent lighting. Either way, his first few days working there had taken a lot out of him. He’d gone home and flopped on the couch, and had barely felt like a human being, let alone Kendo Virmir the fox mage.

After he’d been there awhile, though, he’d noticed something, and it hadn’t just been that the meeting room donuts were always stale. Maybe it’d been the view out the window that’d clued him into it … the row upon row of identical offices that he saw in the skyscraper across the street. Or maybe it’d been after a few minutes of hearing his boss and his boss’ boss chatting with each other, and then turning his swivel chair to look and realizing he couldn’t tell them apart.

Here’s what the-person-who-was-Virmir realized: The people he worked for talked, groomed, and dressed that way not because they were actually like that, but because the people they worked for were like that! And so on, for as far as he could see.

Somewhere at the top, Virmir imagined, was a happy, fulfilled man, who used “infrastructure” and “customer-centered” in his daily conversation. And he had a whole lot of people working for him who were trying their best to be him, even if they didn’t have a clue what those words they kept using meant.

In other words, they were all creating their own identities too. They just weren’t being very original, and they weren’t having nearly as much fun with it as Virmir was.

He felt a lot better about imagining himself as a cartoon fox after that.

Anyway, Virmir was having a great week, and it wasn’t because the PHP web app that his team had been building was almost complete. No, it was because last night he’d put the finishing touches on his latest art project, live on streaming video. On top of that, he was expecting the commission he’d ordered to come in the mail any day now.

On days like these, he wasn’t a “team member,” or a “human resource,” or a white shirt and a tie. He was Virmir, just as much as he was when he was at home in his den. And it was not just a sense of confidence, or an amused smirk at things that would have annoyed him. It was an entire way of seeing the world.

He coded faster, because server-side scripting was simple compared to runic equations and magic. He spoke up more often in meetings, because the silly humans kept digging themselves into messes and it was up to him to help them get out. And when he looked out the windows at the end of the day, at the city of concrete and windowlight, he didn’t see a vast and impersonal maze. He saw a wondrous landscape, as fantastic as any that he had imagined. And it was a bit grittier, perhaps, but it was still just as magical.

Anything can happen here, he thought, as he turned off his monitors and put on his coat.

He had no idea how right he was.

* * *

On the fourth day of this great week, something unusual happened. You see, instead of just imagining himself as the self that he drew, Virmir actually became a cartoon gray fox.

That’s not the unusual thing, though, as surprising as it seemed to Virmir. After all, anything could — and did — happen in this magical world that he lived in, including transformations. Every day, caterpillars curled up to sleep, not knowing they’d wake up as butterflies. And people became cartoons all the time, too. How else could they ever get made?

What was unusual was that he didn’t notice. He was just going about his workday as usual, a confident anthro gray fox mage, his cape and his tail tucked behind him as he typed away on the keyboard. His legs kicked the air underneath him, and his brow furrowed as he looked up at the dual monitors, trying to make sense of his coworkers’ code. It was another day in the life of Virmir, and after these last few days he’d become so used to feeling this way that he didn’t even realize he was a couple of feet shorter, until his neck finally got a cramp in it.

“Blast,” he muttered. He reached around to massage the kinks out of his neck, wincing. Then he looked up at the screens on top of his desk in dismay, and hopped down from his chair to get something to sit on.

Reaching up towards the telephone book at the edge of his desk, he saw his fox hand and thought That’s some nice shading. Then he froze.

Two hundred lines of PHP code poured right out of Virmir’s brain.

“Hey,” his coworker said, from past the partition behind Virmir’s monitor.

I love those dynamic lighting effects, said the part of Virmir’s brain that was still working right. And look at the texturing!

“Hey,” his coworker said again, and knocked on the partition. “In line 248, what did you mean by blah blah mumble subroutine blah?”

That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but Virmir’s brain still wasn’t working. In fact, he was more in shock than he would’ve been if he’d just walked away from a train wreck. The social part of his brain said that he needed to reply, though, and so he tried. Only to find that he’d forgotten how to make words come out. “Uhhhm … “

Silence.

Slowly, Virmir ran his long tongue across his vulpine chops, and tried to talk naturally like he’d done just a minute ago. “I … don’t … know, uh … ” He blinked, shook his head, and unfroze from the position he’d been in when he was reaching up to the telephone book. “What was that, again?”

” … are you okay?”

“Oh! Uh, yes, uh … ” Virmir’s cape flared out and his tail swished as he looked about himself quickly, trying to find a hiding place and a clear escape route to the stairs. Had anyone already seen him? What about in the building across from his cubicle? He had to somehow-

“No, I’m serious.” His coworker’s freckled face came up over the edge of the partition, and looked down at him.

“AGH!” Virmir fell on his tail, and backed away several feet on his hands and legs before getting caught in his cape. He stared up at his coworker, and a drop of sweat the size of a golf ball formed on the side of his head.

His coworker gave him a bewildered look. “Dude, you look wired.”

Virmir misheard him. “Weird … in what way?”

“No, wired. You look like you stayed up all night and hit Starbuck’s before coming here.” He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “Chill, okay? Go take a walk or something. I’ll figure it out on my own.”

He ducked back down behind the partition, and Virmir just sat there, unable to move, his heart pounding so hard it drowned out the printer down the hall. Someone walked past behind him, and while his ears automatically pivoted he could not turn his head to look. He could only sit there, and catch his breath.

What on earth just happened?

Slowly, the sweatdrop vanished and Virmir’s breathing steadied. He climbed back up to his seat, turned off the dual screens and looked into them. They weren’t glossy, so the reflection was imperfect, but even with the light from the windows in the corner of his eye he could tell. He looked just like the gray fox from his drawings. A three-dimensional, cel-shaded, hundred frames-per-second rendered gray fox, but a cartoon gray fox nonetheless. He wasn’t even wearing anything besides his cape.

Then where did … Acting on instinct, Virmir reached around behind himself and pulled out his wallet and Palm Pilot, and looked to make sure they were okay before putting them back. Then he turned around in his seat and looked. They were nowhere to be seen.

How … ?

Phones rang in the distance, and the sounds of typing and clicking and shuffling paperwork reached Virmir’s fox ears. The absurdity of his situation was not lost on him.

Now what?

After a minute’s thought, he hopped back down from his seat and walked around the side of the cubicle farm. Another sweatdrop started to form on the side of his face, as he realized he was out in public walking past people and banks of windows like this. But if he was right, then …

“Tom?” Virmir looked in at his coworker, the one who’d just talked to him. He was munching cheese puffs out of a bag while glowering at his own monitors, but he turned to look as Virmir addressed him.

“Do I, uh … ” Virmir spent a moment thinking about how to phrase himself. “Do you notice anything different about me?”

Tom squinted at him for a moment, before a look of recognition lit up his face, and he nodded. “Nice haircut,” he said. “Totally doesn’t look like you slept on it the wrong way.” He then turned back to his monitors, and wiped his hands off on a napkin before typing something in.

Virmir’s tail stopped in mid-swish, and his face turned red. “Thanks,” he said, before ducking back out, and standing there for a moment next to the Dilbert cartoons Tom had taped to the side of his wall.

Okay, he thought. So I’m myself. I mean, Virmir, I mean … blast, this is so frustrating! How did this even happen? And is it just me, or am I really …

His thoughts trailed off as he looked behind him, at a sudden, unusual sensation. His tail had been swishing with agitation, and he could feel it thump into the cubicle wall next to him.

Maybe this is a dream? Virmir pinched his arm, and it hurt. Not only that, he could feel how furry is was, past the claws on the ends of his fingertips. And if he looked closely, he could see each individual cel-shaded hair, despite the black borders at the edges of his arms. His fur rippled as he breathed out while looking at it.

Maybe splashing my face with cold water will help …

* * *

Virmir knelt on the edge of the sink in the men’s room, the one that had been up to his neck while he’d been standing next to it, and turned the cold water tap all the way to the right. Then he scooped up a good double-handful of it, and smacked it into his face.

“Aghptbb-” He fell over on his back, on the wet sink, and sputtered and slipped as he tried to get up. His cape and his back fur got soaked through, and his foot got stuck in the sink for second before he finally slipped off and landed on the floor on his arms and knees, wincing.

A couple minutes under the blow dryer helped, although they didn’t do anything about his smarting elbows and knees. He looked over at the mirror as the warm air rustled his cape, and gave his fox face a disgusted look. “If you’re a hallucination, you’re a very persistent one.”

Someone else came in just then, and Virmir quickly walked out and got his tail out of the way before the door shut behind him. He dried off his hands the rest of the way on his fur, and looked out the full-length windows, arms folded. His foxy reflection looked back at him, stern and upset on the other side of the glass.

I don’t take anything weird, he thought. So if this is my mind playing tricks on me, either I’m going crazy or somebody drugged my cereal.

Someone walked past behind him, and brushed his tail without noticing.

But my mind playing tricks on me wouldn’t account for my having a tail. Or needing a telephone book to sit on while I’m coding. Maybe I really did change, and I’m just the only one who noticed?

It seemed so obvious, and yet it was hard for Virmir to accept, just because it was so unexpected. Even if he was remarkably good-looking this way, he thought, striking a pose to see his reflection.

Hm, maybe if I downloaded Blender I could do something like this. I’d have to learn it, of course …

He stuck out his tongue, and then tried a couple of other faces.

What if I just uploaded a video, and then didn’t tell anyone how I did it? It’d have to use real-life backgrounds, of course, but still. It’d be a hit!

He struck another pose, tossing his cape out dramatically behind him.

Hmm … but would anyone be able to see me? Would whatever is keeping other people from seeing me like this work online?

Virmir furrowed his brow and put a hand to his chin, lost in thought. Maybe that can be my first experiment, then. To find out if it’s just me, or if I really did change and no one else can see it. I could do things like take pictures of myself standing under things I’d be too tall for normally, and trying to reach for things that my human self wouldn’t need a ladder for. Then I can show them to other people, and ask them to tell me what they see.

Virmir sideyed another coworker as he walked past, and it occurred to him that he was taking this pretty well. He felt a little light-headed, but on the whole he felt comfortable as his fox self, even out here in public. It helped that he’d gotten in practice, he thought … a lot of practice. Maybe that’s what caused this?

He shook his head. Nah.

Virmir’s tail swished happily as he returned to his cubicle, and stacked a couple of manuals on top of his seat before climbing back on. Then he stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles and got back to work.

* * *

That would be a convenient end for this story. Fortunately, life is rarely convenient.

What happened next started a couple of hours later. Virmir had been coding for awhile, and his throat was feeling dry. His fox ears could hear Tom munching on salty snacks in the cubicle past his, buttered popcorn and puffs with dry cheese powder on them, and the sounds and the smells were the last straw.

He hopped down and went over to the water cooler, only to find that he wasn’t tall enough to reach the disposable cups stacked on top. If Virmir had been the kind of mage who could levitate objects by casting a spell on them, he might’ve tried it; the instincts that let you do things like that are the same kind that made him become his fox self in the first place. But Virmir’s fox-self was a fire mage, and the only thing his spells could have done to the cups was make them set off the smoke alarm.

Which is why he came back a minute later, pushing his swivel chair in front of him and muttering under his breath. It got stuck on a corner, so he turned around and carefully pulled it the rest of the way …

… only to bump into a man who was standing there already, wearing a striking black suitcoat and tie and filling a huge plastic Big Gulp cup from the water cooler.

The man smiled down at him, a plastic sort of smile, his hands not leaving the controls. “Hello, Mister Robinson.”

Virmir squinted up at the man, immediately distrusting him. Maybe it was the fact that he knew Virmir’s name, when Virmir had never seen him before. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never known anyone who wore an Italian suitcoat to shop at the 7/11. Or maybe it was the black sunglasses the man was wearing … and the fact that Virmir saw in them not his cartoon self’s reflection, but the one that he’d seen in the mirror that morning.

“Having fun imagining yourself as a fox, are you?” The sound of water pouring into his cup almost drowned out the man’s words.

Virmir gave the man an amused smirk. “Yep. You should try it sometime.”

“I don’t think you understand, Mister Robinson.” That plastic smile had not left the man’s face. “You don’t understand just how dangerous it is, to imagine something that’s not wanted.”

“Oh, I totally agree.” Virmir leaned up against his chair, and winked.

The man went on like he hadn’t heard him. “Millions of people, all imagining themselves living happy, normal, productive lives … and one maladjusted person, who tries to imagine himself as a cartoon. That sort of imagination is like a disease … a cancer, in our society. And we … ” He took a long swig from his Big Gulp, and licked at his face afterwards. ” … are the cure.”

As he was talking, two more nearly identical-looking men in black suitcoats stepped into view, one behind him and one behind Virmir. Virmir was feeling quite threatened now, so he did what a fox fire mage does when he feels threatened: He fluffed out his fur, threw out his cape, and ignited a huge fireball in his hand. “I’d like to see you try!” he snarled.

The man doused him with the rest of the water from his cup. Virmir gasped and spluttered, dripping wet, and tried to ignite another fireball in his hand. A wisp of smoke came up through his fingers. ” … blast,” he said.

The three men stepped towards him.

Virmir tensed, and got ready to spring as they advanced. Then he turned and bolted, diving around the man behind him and running past banks of windows, trying to put as much distance between him and them as possible.

Without a word, the men in black suitcoats took off after him. Virmir ducked into a hallway, sprinting towards the door to the stairwell at the far end. He looked over his shoulder, past his flapping cape, and saw the three men chasing him. But when he looked back where he was heading, all he could see was a long row of doors, and a hazy mirage at the end that receded into the distance.

Virmir blinked, looked away for a second and looked back up, but he still couldn’t make his eyes focus. “What the heck?” he snarled. There was no way that this was-

Oh. Oh. Now he knew what was going on. He’d seen this a million times in cartoons, whenever they did chase scenes indoors! Only one thing to do, then. Virmir jumped at a door shoulder-first and ran through someone’s office, ignoring the startled shouts and taking the next door he saw.

He opened it and saw another hallway … or was it the same one? He could see the men in black suitcoats pausing and fanning out to check doorways. With only a moment’s thought, Virmir dashed for the next open door that he saw, ignoring the footsteps that he heard behind him. It was like an indoor obstacle course … dodge past the furniture, run through any open door and wait for an opportunity to escape.

Which came when Virmir reached the end of the hallway. Except that there was no more door to the stairwell, unless it was cleverly hidden. There was only a windowsill.

Virmir reached up and clawed at the window, trying to pry it open, as the men saw where he was and ran towards him. Then he stopped, breathing hard with exertion, and ignited a fireball in his now-dry hands and hurled it up at the window. It shattered, the air shimmering around the empty frame in a heat distortion, and Virmir hauled himself up to the sill and scrambled through just as the men caught up and lunged at him.

The sounds of traffic and of wind rushing through skyscrapers reached Virmir’s fox ears, and the breeze rustled his fur as he edged sideways along the outside of the building. One of the men stuck his head through the window and looked out at Virmir, the light glinting off of his sunglasses. “Come back, Mister Robinson,” he said. “We want to help you.”

“Interesting way … ” Virmir gasped for breath. ” … you’ve got of showing it!” His muscles were all trying to tighten up, after the way that he’d run full-tilt, and he did not need that now when he was ten stories off the ground. He tried to control his breathing, and to move steadily towards the next window.

“Mister Robinson,” the man said, “look down.”

“Why? What’s … ” Virmir’s voice trailed off, as he looked down at his feet. There was nothing below them but thin air.

The man grinned.

Virmir flailed wildly for a second, claws scraping the outside of the building, then fell like a rock. “Blaaaaast … “

He smacked into something, and the world went dark.

* * *

Smells crept into Virmir’s nose, of rotting fruit and decaying garbage. Car horns and engines, the sounds of city traffic, came at him from the side. Virmir cocked one fox ear towards them, and felt something on his face. He reached up and removed it. It was a banana peel.

The three men were standing around him.

“Gah!” Virmir scrambled to his feet and tried to back up, but slipped and fell. He was sitting on his tail on top of a heap of garbage bags piled up next to a dumpster, and the one behind him had split open where he’d landed on it. His left hand was deep in a pile of unpleasant things, and he removed it and brushed it off on his fur before looking up at the men in black suitcoats. They were still just standing there, watching him.

“What do you want?” Virmir asked.

“What do you want, Mister Robinson?” It was the one in the middle who spoke.

“Do you want to go your whole life looking and acting like this?” The one on the left.

“A cartoon fox, in a world designed for human beings?” The one on Virmir’s right.

“You can’t go on like this forever.” All three of them spoke at once, now.

“I’ve done a good job of it so far … ” Virmir tried to stand, and had to lean up against the dumpster for a second and wince. He had a headache so bad that it made him dizzy, and on top of that he felt exhausted.

“Because nobody else sees you as a fox,” the one in the middle said.

“Exactly,” Virmir said, rubbing his forehead, then looked up and squinted at him. “Are you saying that some people can?”

“It’s a rare person who sees himself for who he is,” the one in the middle went on, as a skeptical young human’s face reflected back at Virmir from his sunglasses. “It’s an even rarer person who sees others for who they are … Mister Robinson.”

“Instead they see … discrepancies,” the one on his left said. “Things that don’t add up. Things that contradict the person they ‘know’ that you are. Things that contradict the way that their world works. They won’t see you any differently, but they’ll know that you live in a different world than they do.”

“People don’t like their world to be threatened,” the one on Virmir’s right said, as though he knew right where the other would leave off. “They don’t like it when someone else doesn’t play by the same rules they have to. They’ll react. Violently, if necessary.”

Trying to look back and forth between them was making Virmir notice his neck ached as well. He clutched at his forehead and winced, closing his eyes and trying to put as much weight on the dumpster as possible. “So some people will notice me and attack, or something?”

“‘Attack’ is such a harsh word, Mister Robinson … ” The voice from in front of him. “More like ‘deny privileges to.’”

“Privileges like friendship.” The voice to his left.

“Money.” The voice on his right.

“A home.”

“A job.”

“A life.”

“A mate.”

Virmir’s ears pricked back and forth, trying to follow which one was speaking. When they were silent for a second, he looked up. The man in the middle was smiling that plastic smile again, and holding out one of his hands to Virmir. In his palm was a large blue pill.

Virmir took it with his clean(er) hand, and gave it a weird look. The man to his left handed him a full paper cup from the water cooler, and he took it without thinking about it. “So wait. You want me to just take something that’ll make me forget about all this?”

“Oh, no, Mister Robinson.”

The one to his left spoke up. “We have other ways to make people forget things they need not see, and places they need not be.”

Virmir gave them a droll look. “Then what’s this?”

“A choice, Mister Robinson.” The man grinned. “To have things return to the way they were-”

Virmir shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“-when you want them to be that way.“

Virmir gave the man a bewildered look. He went on. “You don’t even know what’s happened, do you? You just know that things are different now. And different is not safe.”

“This will allow you to be different when you want to … ” the man to his left said.

” … in the comfort of your own den,” the man to his right finished.

“And then to be the person that others expect, when it would be dangerous not to do so.” The man in front of him smiled.

“And that’s all it will do?” Virmir asked.

“Of course.”

Virmir had half a mind to just tell the man what he could do with that pill. But something made him hesitate. Maybe it was the fact that he really did not know what had happened, not on an intellectual level, and his instinct was hazy right now. Maybe it was the splitting headache he had, that was keeping him from thinking clearly. Or maybe it was the way the third man had said “den” … as though he were acknowledging that Virmir really was a gray fox.

Virmir saw, in the polished shoe of the man in front of him, a warped, fishbowl view of his cartoon self. And behind him, his human self in shirt and tie, waiting with arms folded to get back to work. The self that his coworkers saw … that’d he’d tried to be, every day, before he’d remembered to be his real self.

That’s when Virmir knew what he had to do.

First, he drank all the water, and tossed the cup away. Then, smiling, he placed the blue pill on the street in front of him. The men around him raised their eyebrows, and frowned. “What are you-”

WHAM.

From the same place that Virmir was storing his wallet and Palm Pilot, he produced an enormous mallet and brought it down on the pill, smashing it. Then he stood the mallet upright and leaned on the handle, and grinned. “Thanks for the help,” he said. “I feel a lot better now.”

The three men sideyed each other.

“Anything else you need?” Virmir asked.

The one in the middle coughed, and straightened his tie. “Mister Robinson,” he said. “If you’ll recall, we mentioned that some people might react … “

“Violently?”

The men nodded.

Virmir ignited a flame in one hand, and smiled up at them. “Bring it.”

* * *

“YAAAH!”

A fireball flew past as three men in suitcoats piled unto the back seat of an unmarked black sedan, their sunglasses crooked and smashed and their faces black with soot. The last one in hastily doffed his burning jacket and slammed the door shut, just in time for a mallet-shaped indentation to appear in it.

Tires squealed and exhaust spewed as the car took off. Virmir smashed one of the taillights with his hammer before coughing, and moving out of the way of the gray cloud left behind. “Fun times,” he said, smiling weakly and coughing again. “Fun times.”

His ears perked towards the sounds of horns honking and more tires screeching in the distance. Then they faded into the background of city traffic, and Virmir was alone in the alley.

He looked up at the side of the skyscraper he worked in, leaning on his mallet and trying to catch his breath. Then, finally, he put the mallet away and walked down the alley, heading back toward the building’s front entrance.

The guard raised an eyebrow at him, as he slid his card. Inside, people waited to take the next elevator rather than share one with someone who smelled like garbage. Alone in the elevator, Virmir examined his cape and sniffed at himself, and his nose wrinkled.

The sun was beginning to set past the buildings outside the window as Virmir walked back to his workstation, in the now-empty cubicle farm. Without sitting back down, he reached up and woke his computer from sleep mode, then saved the project he was working on and logged out. One eye fell on the books stacked up on top of his chair, as he did so, and he looked at them for a long moment. Then he walked out.

The train ride home seemed to take forever. People refused to sit next to him, which was just as well since he needed someplace for his tail to go now. But they also kept glancing in his direction. A child pointed at him and whispered to her mother, and her mother whispered something back, but she continued to stare at him afterwards.

Virmir didn’t know if the attention he was getting was because he looked beat up and smelled bad, or if it was because they could tell something was different about him. Either way, after a couple of minutes he felt awkward and uncomfortable, and wished that he could just blend into the background and wait for his aches to subside.

Virmir reached around behind himself, and spend a few seconds pawing at the folds of his cape before coming back with his Palm Pilot. He turned it on and tapped on the book reader app with his claw, but then he couldn’t make himself read anything. Instead he could only look at his hand and his claws, tapping them against each other and drumming them on his leg.

Virmir fumbled with the stylus for a moment, trying to pull it out of its slot, before finally just pressing the “Home” key and then tapping the picture viewer with his claw. A list of thumbnails came up, and he tapped on one of the drawings he’d done of his cartoon self not too long ago. He looked between it and his reflection, comparing the two with an artist’s eye and not sure which one he was checking for discrepancies.

Then it hit him. His coloring had become flat, as though he’d been colored in a vector graphics program. The drawing he’d done had better shading than he himself did.

Virmir ran one hand along his arm and could feel individual furs, but he couldn’t see them anymore. He turned off his Palm Pilot and looked between himself and his reflection, scared all of a sudden and wondering if he was just going to fade away. Then he slumped back in his seat, worn out and disgusted and not even caring that he was squishing his tail. He just wanted this day to end.

* * *

It was cold and quiet outside Virmir’s house. Dried leaves crunched under his feet, and puffs of white came from his vulpine snout. His long ears heard the songs of crickets chirping, but also that blasted dog that kept coming by and barking at Terra, his German Shepherd. His ears flattened, as he spent a whole minute listening to it louder than ever before, and fumbling with the folds of his cape and the fur on his back trying to pick out his house key.

He finally got it out and walked up the driveway to the front door. The outside light came on as the motion detector “saw” him, and in it he saw that there was a package leaning against the doorstep.

Virmir’s ears perked.

He hurried up to the front door and started using the jagged edge of his house key to cut the boxing tape. Then he looked at his hands, and just tore it open with his claws. His ears were starting to freeze by the time he pulled it out of the box: His commission, just like he’d asked for, of his gray fox character looking confident and adventurous. And it was drawn even better than he could’ve done it himself.

His tail started to swish happily as he looked at it, running his thumb over the cardstock and feeling the actual materials used. His cartoon fur fluffed out and became visible again, and his cape straightened out and became shiny. By the time he got to the note that said “Keep being awesome!” his dynamic lighting effects had returned, and he noted them with approval, looking down at himself and at his reflection in the glass on the screen door. He grinned, and his eyes and fangs shone.

An hour later he was cleaned up and wrapped up in warm, fluffy towels, his tail beside him on the couch. He set his plate with the scraps on it on the floor, and patted Terra on the head as she scarfed them. Then he stretched, and woke the notebook computer on the tray in front of him from sleep mode by tapping the external keyboard.

In a chat room attached to Virmir’s website, his online self posed dramatically, spotlights shining on him as he entered.

“Hey!” someone said. “How was your day?”

“Great,” Virmir said, and winked.

The Will to Power: Part One

My parents weren’t there to see me off. There hadn’t been any time after the test had been done. I’d only had a few minutes to grab my belongings, and no one else had been in the house. Besides that, it was a military train station, not a light rail depot. My parents probably didn’t have clearance. No one else’s families seemed to be there, either.

Guards stood around us as we boarded, wearing thick ceramic plates and carrying the kind of rifles that shot your soul, not your body. Between them and the steel-armored maglev, huge and intimidating up close like a dinosaur’s flank, I nearly had a panic attack just getting on the train. It felt like stepping into a cage … or being shoved in, as the case may be.

Still, once I was inside I felt safer. It was cold with air conditioning, and echoey with the metal clanks of walking, but it reminded me of a subway car without any advertisements. Even better, it looked like the kind of train where you got your own compartment. An unarmored soldier showed me to mine, and I sat down on the thin cushion fidgeting nervously.

Now that I knew it was there, I could feel the animal inside my heart, frightened and begging for someplace to hide. I knew it was alien — it was the problem — but for now I didn’t protest. I let it be scared, and I drew my knees up to my chin and hugged them, closing my eyes and blocking the world out. And when the door shut, and left me alone in there, I let out a sigh of relief.

I looked out the bulletproof glass at the concrete side of the station, and thought of what lay beyond … what lay outside the city. But if this was a cage, it was keeping me safe inside it. And from now on, whatever happened to me was out of my hands.

Somehow, I found that prospect both relieving and frustrating. It meant that I was just a passive observer. No guilt, no reason for people to claim that this whole deal was my fault. I didn’t ask to be tainted with an animal spirit, it just happened. I didn’t ask for treatment, I just needed it. And I didn’t want to go outside, but that was the only place I could be treated.

I wouldn’t have minded actually having some power over all this. But I didn’t. That seemed to be how things went in my life — always being dragged around by something or another. I was getting used to it, just like how I was starting to get used to the constant nagging fear that came with having an animal eating away at your human soul.

Well, at least one of those things would be going away.

I tried to turn my thoughts towards more pleasant matters by looking around at the scenery. But military trains are not the most visually stimulating places around, unless you really like looking at shades of gunmetal grey. On to plan B then — a nap, or as close as I could come to getting one.

Of course, the moment I closed my eyes, the door slid open. I opened my eyes and tilted my head towards the door, fully expecting a soldier. What I saw was a young man about my age (I wasn’t sure; I was never a good judge of these things) in civilian clothing. He smiled a forced sort of smile, and waved at me.

I bit my lip and looked out the window again. “Please don’t let him sit next to me. Please don’t … ”

He sat next to me. Of course. My heart lodged itself somewhere in my throat, and I did my best to ignore him lest it fall right out of my mouth. I might not have been keen on the idea of going on living at the time, but that seemed like an awful way to die.

“Um. Hi,” he said. His voice was quiet and subdued, like it was for most people with eidolic toxicosis. Spirit poisoning. “M-my name’s Leander. Everyone just calls me Lee though.”

Cue awkward but inevitable pause between the two of us, while my animal side screamed at me that he was extremely dangerous and I needed to run and hide. Just like it did for every other person I met. It was worse than usual now, maybe because I was cornered. After all, he was between me and the door, I didn’t think the guards would take well to me fleeing through the hallways in a blind terror anyway.

“So … what’s yours?” I heard him shifting in his seat.

I sighed and looked in his general direction, more at the fabric patterns on the seat than his face. Maybe if I played along for a little while he’d leave me alone, and I could go back to pretending he wasn’t there. “It’s Corrine.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you.” He didn’t sound like he meant it. I couldn’t blame him; it’s not like these were great circumstances to be meeting anyone. “So, do you live here?”

It was a ridiculous question, and he realized it if his frantic backpedaling was any sign. “Um, I mean, it’s just I haven’t seen you around. Did you, uh, move here recently or something?”

“No. Lived here all my life.” And good riddance.

“What school do you go to?” Ugh, small talk. He sounded about as excited about it as I did, more like he was reading lines off a page than putting anything into a conversation.

“I don’t.”

He stared at me, confused. I saw his face contort and twitch for a moment.

“Long story,” I offered, in the way of explanation. It was the most anyone would ever get out of me.

“I didn’t do too well in school either. Not with grades, but … you know.” His voice dropped into the near-inaudible range. “It’s why they, ah, had me tested. And now I’m here.”

I winced. Was I really that obvious? “Yeah. They never got me tested at school, though.”

“Then how … ?”

“Work. It’s required by law now.”

“Oh.” He looked down again, his gaze flitting back and forth like he couldn’t bear to look up at me for more than a second. “Sorry.”

Huh. ‘Sorry.’ Well, what else could you say to someone who had a spiritual tumor growing in them? “We’re all in the same boat here,” I said, the terror inside me quieting as I willed myself to believe it. “Er, train, sorry. Anyway, they’ll find a cure soon.” I was being hopelessly optimistic, if not outright lying. It wasn’t going to be soon, if the military was overseeing this like they seemed to be. They tended to be busy with other things, like the skinchangers. As long as we weren’t p-shifting and ripping their throats out, we weren’t high priority. Which meant we were probably getting shoved off to the outer world where they could forget about us.

“Right.” Sincere voice, suspicious body language. He could probably see right through me, even if I could read people I never was a complicated read. “So…have they told you where we’re going?”

“Outside.”

“I know that.” He crossed his arms. “But didn’t anyone tell you where?”

“I know about as much as you do.” I shrugged. “Which isn’t much. It’s the military, what were you expecting?”

He flinched again. “Could you keep it down? They can probably hear us.”

In retrospect, implying the guys with guns were anything short of open, heroic, and competent was probably a bad idea. “Sorry.” I mumbled and did a double-take towards the door. Still closed, and they weren’t beating the door in. So far, so good. Maybe I’d even get through the ride there alive, if the train ever left the station.

It wasn’t long before I was drumming my fingers against the armrest and scowling, quite against my own will.

“Nervous?” And here I was almost willing him out of existence. Drat.

“Yeah.” My rhythmic cadence had turned into a rapid-fire solo from one of my favorite metal songs. Blast beats for the win. “I just don’t like enclosed spaces.”

He laughed nervously. “Me neither.” He stood up, reaching into a shelf above us for his luggage. “Here, I’ve got something that can help…”

Naturally at this movement, the maglev lurched into movement, and he fell to the floor along with his bag. I’ll be honest, I laughed, but more of a reflex than out of it being any kind of funny. I much more carefully got to my feet, and picked his bag up from on top of him. “You alright?”

“I’m fine.” He said far too quickly. “Sorry, I’m not that coordinated.” He braced himself against the windowsill and placed himself back into his seat.

“No need to apologize.” His bag was a bloody mess. I could see notebook papers poking out the sides of it with illegible scribblings just about everywhere, including the margins. But then again, I wasn’t one to criticize organizational skills. But I wasn’t this bad…was I?

He stared at his bag. “Could you…”

My brain took a few moments to process through what he could possibly be asking for. And then the proverbial lightbulb went off. “Oh.” I dropped the bag in front of him.

He gave me a bewildered look in exchange, and picked it up. “I always carry around at least a few of these with me.” I heard papers rustling around, and from the debris he produced a stuffed animal of some kind of dog.

“It’s cute.” I said, not really sure what else he was expecting.

“She’s a jackal. Only one I’ve ever seen.” He smiled fondly at the stuffed animal. “She can keep you company. If you want, I mean.”

“Sure.” Why not? Maybe this would get him to leave me alone. And at least it seemed to brighten his day, his face sure did light up. He did an underhand toss and the jackal landed right in my lap.

“I’ve got a lot of these. I collect them. I even have a virus plushie, want to see?”

“No.” I did have a nagging curiosity about how that was even possible (what with viruses being a microscopic entity and all) but I was sure the results couldn’t be pretty. Assuming they were visible to the naked eye.

As I tucked her under my arms, I had to admit, she was soft, and fuzzy, and strangely comforting. I leaned up against the seat and stared out the window, the pine forests obscured by a shimmering eidolic hedge. Still, it at least seemed less claustrophobic. Maybe now I could get my nap. The animal in me seemed to be somewhat satisfied, at least.

Everything turned very dark– we were heading into a tunnel. Perfect for my nap. I stretched out as far as I could without kicking Leander. And then the train lurched to a stop again.

He blinked, looking out the window along with me. “That can’t good…”

In my personal experience, a situation is never so bad that it can’t somehow get worse. And I was proven right once again when the eidolic hedge powered down. Any feeling of security I had withered away and died. What was going to protect us now from all the skinchangers and raiders and Lord-only-knows-what-else lurking outside?

Safety lights flickered on in the hallways and the intercom crackled to life. “Attention passengers. There has been a mechanical malfunction on the maglev. Please remain seated until the problem is resolved.”

This was less than reassuring, but the howls coming closer and closer were a greater concern of mine. It meant one of two things– wild animals or skinchangers. I was praying for animals.

Leander didn’t seem to be doing much better. All the color drained from his face. “Did you hear that?”

I was finding it impossible to speak or make a sound, and merely nodded in response.

Outside I could hear feet shuffling around and eidolic bullets loading into gun chambers, the soldiers otherwise eerily silent. Their movements stopped. I could hear a dull click, click, click, like metal against metal. Then, the shattering of glass and screams. Some might have been my own, I wasn’t even sure at this point. My mind had placed itself somewhere far away and safe, where there wasn’t shouting and gunfire and more screaming.

I had only the vaguest perception of someone grabbing my arm. A few moments and I realized it was Leander, and he was yelling at me too and I wasn’t sure what he was saying. Somewhere in all the haze I realized he was pulling me towards the door and trying to open it. I guess it wasn’t working, because we weren’t going much of anywhere.

But it didn’t really matter now, because there wasn’t a door to speak of. The soldiers were literally up in arms and screaming. They were also being flung across the hallways as if of their own will. Then I thought I heard one saying “Protect the civilians!” but it was hard to hear over the gunfire. And I was so far away already.

Something– I wasn’t sure what, because I couldn’t see anything except a strange shimmer in the air like heat off the pavement in summer– caused Leander to lift straight off the floor. His hand was yanked from my grip, and I stumbled onto the ground. I got off better than Leander did. He was thrown against a wall, and stopped moving.

I felt another something brush up against my collarbone. And then a flash of light, and a yowl of pain, and the something became very clear. It towered over me, and had to hunch over to fit in the compartment. Its golden fur contrasted starkly against the grey of everything else around it, and its feline face had a savage look in its eyes. It was unmistakably a lion skinchanger. And I should have been terrified of it, but I wasn’t. The animal in me was silent for once. And something about it was morbidly fascinating, like how a flame must be beautiful to a moth.

Of course this thing probably wouldn’t burn me to death. I’d just get my head knocked off. It’d at least be faster.

The thing backhanded the last soldier standing, and turned back to me. One of my aunts had a cat before they became illegal, and that animal was an unrepentant mouser before everyone went into a mass panic and started exterminating mice. The way that skinchanger looked at me was exactly the same as how her cat would look at mice before it killed them, except it had a very human grin on its face. One with more very sharp teeth than I cared to think about.

It must have had some mercy in it, or it just got bored of tormenting me. I didn’t even see him move his paw to strike me, and it only hurt for a second before I fell unconscious.

Click here to read the next chapter …

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