Feral (25 page)

“I
bet you are.”

“Please.”  His thumb circled my wrist in an appeal for understanding.  His blue eyes glazed with longing.
  “I truly am sorry.”

“You could’ve stopped this
.  Yet, you did nothing!”

“
I know I’ve made mistakes.  I’m trying to make up for them.”

“
Making up for them?” I scoffed.  “You’re making the most of them.”  Dates.  Dinners.  Midnight encounters.  Sultry kisses.  He might as well get something for his troubles.

Icarus’s eyes hardened defensively. 
“That’s not true.”

“I’d like to leave now.”  Icarus’s hand tightened on my arm.

“Please.  Hear me out.”

“Let go of me!”
  Wrestling to liberate my arm, I set my feet into the floor.  “I’m leaving, damn it!  I don’t want to hear your stupid excuses!”

“If you leave the room like this, you’re going to make a scene,” Icarus warned, pulling me tight and close.  Enraging me further, he used his alpha voice.  “Now calm down.”

Pinpoints of light blurred my vision.  I’d experienced them once before during a migraine, but this was worse, by far.  Pain blossomed in my head.  My ears began to ring.

I could barely hear Icarus’ voice, a faint murmur behind the resonance.  His words faded in and out with the cadenced humming in my ears, akin to the
aftereffects of a shell blast.

A swift slash of heat pierced my gums, and I felt a warm trickle of copper and salt roll over my tongue
, along with something small and jagged. Gasping at the pain, I bent and spit into my hand. There were two of them.  Two elongated cuspid teeth resting in my palm.

Wide eyed, Icarus shoved a napkin in my hand and ushered me from the room, toward the doors.  People stared at our hasty exit, glancing up from their meals for a little evening gossip. 
I stumbled when my lower cuspids uprooted themselves and tumbled into the napkin.

Without missing a stride, Icarus
slipped his arm beneath my shoulders and pushed through the restaurant, ignoring the stares around us.  “Hang in there, Thaleia, stay calm.”

“My coat,” I murmured, half in shock.  I
t came out in a lisp around the four shiny new canines extending from my gums.  I whimpered, my tongue dabbing at the roots.  Another tooth came out.  This time an incisor, leaving a gaping space in the front of my mouth.

“One of the boys will come back for it.  You’re doing great, Thaleia.  Just a little while longer. 
You’ll be ok.  I’m right here with you.”

He hadn’t warned me of this happening. 
On the other hand, I hadn’t asked.  I had avoided it, in fact, at all costs.  I hadn’t wanted to know the dreadfulness that awaited me.  There was no point in confirming my fears.  Inevitably, I would suffer the change soon enough.

“Is everything ok
, Icarus?” asked the hostess.  Pushing the door open, she stepped back so that we could pass.

“Bloody nose,” Icarus explained,
fishing in his pocket for our ticket.  “Rush it,” he told the valet, pushing a twenty into his hand along with the small blue stub.

“Is there anything I can do
?” the hostess pressed, overly polite.

Icarus mumbled something under his breath and turned with a
feigned smile.  “We forgot her coat at the table.  Do you mind getting it while we’re waiting for the car?”

“Oh, sure!” she beamed,
relieved to help in some way.

I started to drop the napkin to survey the damage, but Icarus pressed it back to my face.  “Not yet,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the restaurant.  Inside, the onlookers with window seats were still watching the drama with rapt attention.
  I didn’t want to see anyhow.

“Don’t fight this,” Icarus
cautioned.  “The more you fight the change, the harder it’ll be.  I know you’re afraid, but this is all natural.  Do you understand me?”

“I’m not
dense, fuckhead,” I hissed, though the lager part of my attention was focused on my fingers, which folded involuntarily beneath my palm.  They began to meld together, forming a paw-like set of smaller digits.  The pain was unfathomable.  My thumb snapped and shrank, all but the distal phalange vanishing beneath my flesh.  Hard ridges developed along my knuckles and split the skin at the tips of my proximal joints.  Claws burst forth with brutal agony.

My panicked cry disclosed my inattention to Icarus’s demands.
  He grasped my shoulders, shaking me firmly to gather my attention.  “Please, Thale, by fighting me, you’re only hurting yourself.  I need you to obey me.  Without submitting, I’ll have no power to help you.”

Coming to, I glared.  “I’ll
suffer before submitting to you!”

The Porsche pulled up, jerking to a stop.  Icarus yanked the door open
and helped me in, slamming the door closed once I was seated.  He was around the driver’s side before the valet had a chance to fix the seat.  When he slid behind the wheel, his knees were bumping the steering column.  Cursing under his breath, he adjusted his seat and sped from the parking lot, leaving a cloud of burnt rubber billowing to the sky, and a bunch of stunned onlookers gaping.

“Stubbo
rn!” he growled.  “Refusing what’s for your own damn good!”

He slammed into second and third in quick succession.  I heard the engine of the Porsche rocket.  We surged forward, my back flattening to the seat.  Fourth, fifth, was there a sixth gear?  I’d lost count
.  My stomach was left behind in the valet’s tent in the parking lot of the Inn.

Another
cry escaped me as my feet began their transformation.  I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced foot pain before, but I can promise you death is more preferable.  You’d never realize the vast number of nerve endings your feet contain.  The pain is immobilizing.

Now, men
have this code of silence that—even when in unbearable pain—must never be broken.  I know this from living with my dad and my brother Bennie.  And from watching movies like ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ ‘The Great Escape,’ and ‘The Guns of Navarone.’  When men get shot, they grit their teeth and bear it while someone excavates some small slug of lead from their flesh with nothing but a pocketknife and a flask of whiskey.  If they scream during the course, their masculinity will have been tainted forever, branded cowards and yellowbellies.

Women have no such code.  ‘Scream,’ they tell us when we
’re in labor.  ‘There’s no shame in crying,’ ‘Go ahead.  Let it out.’  Women are a completely different species. I claim no falsities.  We can’t handle pain any better than a man.  Pain is pain.  It’s all how your parents raised you to handle it.  Naturally, being female, I screamed.  A lot.  No exaggeration.

My legs contracted, tapering and shortening
into the slender legs of a canine.  I felt like a tube of toothpaste in its final days.  Everything felt like it was being squeezed upward into my torso, including my bones.

From witnessing Marcus’s transformation, I was fully aware it was going to be all kinds of awful.  Nevertheless, nothing could’ve prepared me for the degree of pain I experienced.  The human body wasn’t made to deconstruct and reconstruct like a set of k’nex.  We weren’t toys.

My pigheadedness didn’t help either.  I ignored Icarus’s alpha voice as he shouted at me until blue in the face.  Because of alpha female status, he had little to no effect.  And boy, let me tell you, did it piss him off.  (Good for me, because I was angry too.)  My anger for him was the only thing holding me together.  I used it as my focus against the pain.  It kept me lucid, sane.

It kept me from
surrendering to him.

Perhaps I had learned something from all those old war flicks after all.

Downshifting, Icarus cursed, swerving.  The wheels squealed.  We fishtailed for a split second before he gained control again.  Behind us, horns blared.  Someone shouted a profanity.

“Sonuvabitch!”

Icarus barked a laugh to himself.  “I suppose I am.”

“
How cliché,” I grumbled through my teeth.  What was left of them.  My pearly whites were now in a cluster on the floor between my transmogrifying feet.  Both hands, now deficient of opposable thumbs were incapable of holding a napkin. My new—much pointier—teeth began to puncture their way through my gums, free of the encumbering, omnivore variations.

“Isn’t it?” Icarus agreed.  “You’d think they could be more creative.”

“I meant…you,” I panted.  I was beginning to see a pattern in my torture.  It came in waves.  Pain.  Rest.  Pain.  Rest.  It was like mother nature was forcing me to appreciate every stage of my transformation; she was reveling in my suffering.  I always picture her sewing seeds and nurturing the change of seasons in some magical gossamer dress.  But now, I could see she was a vindictive bitch who was punishing me for the freak of nature I had become.  I was an abomination.  I had a strong suspicion that she was hinting around that my immortality wasn’t welcome here in this earthy realm, and this was her way of telling me to fuck off.

“
Bad dog puns…They’ve all been…done beforrrrreeeeeeee AaahhhHHHhhhhhh!” I trailed off as my torso began to mutate, the furthest extremities having completed their alteration.

The air rushed from my lungs, leaving me gasping like a fish out of water.  My ribs compressed, my chest jutting out in a grotesque steeple of
flesh and bones.

Beneath me, my tailbone extended
, following the curve of the bucket seat.  Now I know where my femur and tibia went.  Nothing went to waste.  It went to use elsewhere.  Efficient, I know.  Right?  Go green!  Don’t get too excited.  It hurt.  A whole fucking hell of a lot.

In my own opinion, my nervous system should’ve
obliged me by shutting down.  Every single nerve ending in my body was firing at rapid pulse sequence.  It was highly unnecessary.

I had my eyes closed at this point, bracing myself against the pain, but I knew we had reached
the house because the Porsche slowed minutely.  We hit the lip of the driveway with a force that should’ve shattered the motor mounts and deflated the tires.  Icarus skidded to a stop, throwing the door open without shutting the engine down.  And he was gone.

Yes, gone.  He abandoned me while I suffered my last lucid moments as a human.
  I shouldn’t have been surprised.  His abandoning me was the reason I was here in the first place.

Alone, I sat in the car with only the purr of the engine to
console me.

With my torso in its
radically defined shape, my arms rolled downward.  Comparatively, they now protruded where my breasts once were.  Where my breasts went was a mystery to me.

I dared not wonder.

“Thale!”

I opened my eyes enough to see Bacchus bounding out the back door.  Icarus was close behind, fighting with Caius, Max and Lucius who were restraining him.  At one point, all four limbs had left the ground, his eyes
rolling wildly as he fought with all his might to break free.

“Me, Thale,” Bacchus ordered.  “Look at me.”

Stalled in a state of rest, I was powerless to take my eyes off Icarus.  I couldn’t rationalize the tortured look in his eyes.  Had I made him lose control over my refusal to submit?  Was he such a control-freak that my obstinacy sent him over the edge?  What a total freakin’ spaz.

Looking on, his transformation took less than a minute.  In his struggle to break free of his cousins, he let out a frustrated snarl, realizing his escape was in vain.  A tremor racked his body
from head to toe.  His muscles seized and quivered beneath his cousin’s hands.  His shoulder blades thrust back into two sharp points jutting from his back.  His chest rippled and compressed, his head dropping down as his face contorted.  His legs contracted.  His tail extended.  Black fur elongated ubiquitously over his body as he resumed his fight.

Caius clutched him in a chokehold, pinning him to the ground and sliding his knee up over his ribs to immobilize him.
  Still, Icarus fought, growling furiously, his legs and feet shredding his clothes and kicking dust into the air from the gravel driveway beneath him.

“Thale!” Bacchus shouted, demanding my attention.  My eyes met his, a gurgle escaping my throat.  The cycle of rest had passed.  Pain was again beginning to take hold.  “We don’t have much time, so listen to me. 
LISTEN TO ME!”  He shouted, knowing he was losing my attention.  “You’re focusing on the transformation, the pain that you’re feeling.  In doing that, you’re slowing your progress, and prolonging your suffering.  I need you to focus on the end goal, embrace the outcome.  It’ll be much easier on you.”

Embrace the outcome.  How the hell was I supposed to d
o that?  I wasn’t the Yin, Yang or Zen kind of girl.  I never understood any of that breathing yoga, pilates crap.  I laughed at believers of meditation and hypnotism.  They were for eccentrics and the weak minded.

I was neither of those.

Pain wrung my organs like a damp cloth, renewing Icarus’s fight.  Helpless, Bacchus retreated a few steps, tormented by the sounds of my distress.  I tried to bite it back, to keep from crying out, but it was wasted.  The only relief was when my face and neck began to transmogrify, it muffled my screams until they faded into a faint gurgle.  I didn’t fool anyone.  I could see by their faces, they were aware of my suffering.  They knew what I was enduring.  I hated myself for being a girl just then, for not having the strength to remain silent.