She grasped it in both hands, her knees weak and watery. “Looks funny. Everything looks funny. Gonna be sick.” She fell to her knees and proceeded to disgorge more than a whole stomach’s worth of partially digested reef crab.

Bitterlich knelt and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She shuddered with sheer exhaustion.

After a long moment she asked, “Did we win?”

Bitterlich looked around. The hold was no longer filled with fumes and the deck was nearly level. Sometime during her long, terrible ordeal, the ship’s buoyancy had been restored. Isabelle had saved it.

“We lives,” Djordji said. His face was pale and red flakes covered his sleeve from his coughing.

Rebecca stood up, only slowly becoming aware of her surroundings, trying to catch her balance in this still-cockeyed cabin. She caught sight of her hands and arms. Her skin rippled through pale blues and greens as she moved through the light. Her eyes had lost their pupils and resembled smooth-cut sapphires. Her hair had gone silver. Two mother-of-pearl horn buds had sprouted from her forehead just ahead of her temples.

What would she think of this new arrangement? Every Seelenjäger he’d ever met preferred their erstepelz to their clay skin. It marked their coming of age and was an outward symbol of their burgeoning power.

But Rebecca had not been raised as a Seelenjäger and had no such expectations. Bitterlich had her draw out the finest possible thread, which let her keep the maximum proportion of her human characteristics, not like the wild blood cult who adopted a deliberately hybrid appearance, or the ferals who lost control of the transformation and ended up in beast bodies with only a few visible vestiges of their humanity.

Rebecca looked up at him, her eyes round with astonishment. “You turned me into a snake thing!”

“Half a snake thing,” Bitterlich said. “You undertook the Wild Hunt, took the spirit skin of a ghostfire wyrm, and it became part of you.”

“You tricked me! You said grab the card, but there was no card, just this thread.” She poked herself in the chest. Her sapphire eyes were full of a shock that seemed ready to collapse into horror or despair.

“I showed you how to turn yourself into a ghostfire wyrm,” Bitterlich said. “In time, I can show you how to turn into all manner of things, a bird, a bear, a fox.” Was this the right approach to take? Rebecca wasn’t panicking yet.

Rebecca reached up and touched her horn buds with the same fascination as an infant touching its toes.

Bitterlich remembered that sensation himself: This is me? This is me!

“Strange as hen’s teeth,” she said.

“Wait until you actually change shape.”

“Show me,” Rebecca said, curiosity overriding every other emotion.