Marc cringed. “Wrong approach?”

I shook my head, and my scalp scraped the carpet. “Nope, right on target.”

“Good. I have another one.” He was smiling now. “If you don’t Shift, you don’t get to kick any Appalachian Pride ass. How’s that?”

“Better…” I smiled. “Say it again.”

“Shift, and you get to kick the shit out of any of Malone’s boys who get in your way.”

My smile became a grimace of pain. The Shift had begun.

Marc backed away as the initial wave of agony rippled out from my spine and over my upper arms and legs. My limbs convulsed, and I lay on the floor in a paroxysm of pain, unable to speak. Barely able to think. I’d never Shifted on my side before, and was surprised by how much the process differed with no weight bearing down on my changing parts.

My legs retracted toward my stomach. My arms folded up to my chest, and an inarticulate, guttural sound of agony erupted from my throat.

That wasn’t just Shifting pain. That was rebuilding pain.

My body was tearing itself apart, joint by joint, ligament by ligament, and in the process of putting itself back together—albeit in a new form—it would heal much faster than it would have without the transition. But in addition to the typical pain of the process, my broken radius was being stretched and pulled. The bones in my arms and wrists narrowed and elongated as they reformed. The pain was like nothing I’d ever felt before, including the gash in my other arm.

Evidently ten days in a cast isn’t enough to heal a broken bone. Let’s hope half a dozen Shifts are.…

My teeth ground together until I forced my jaw to relax, afraid I might crack it. I tried to let the pain take over, to let the change choose its own course through me, as I’d learned to do more than a decade earlier. But the agony in my arms—particularly the right one—was unbearable, and I found myself resisting the transition in my broken wrist, while everything else went according to the usual plan.

My back arched. My ball joints cracked in and out of their sockets. I moaned as my pelvis contorted to accommodate a quadruped’s stance and posture. My mouth fell open out of habit when the Shift flowed over my head, creating new bulges and hollows in my face. Repositioning my eyes for a predator’s vision. I gasped as my jawbone undulated with the lengthening of my blunt human teeth into longer, deadly curved points. Hundred of tiny barbs sprouted in a wave across my tongue, arcing toward my throat, so that I could now lick a bone clean of all edible tissue.

For several minutes, my body pulled itself apart and reassembled the pieces in my new shape, but the familiar licks of pain from my joints and restructured musculature never eclipsed the acute agony in my right arm. Toward the end, the soles of my feet and the palm of my left hand thickened and bulged into paw pads. My nails lengthened and hardened into sharp claws.