I had enough time to take all this in before everything changed into a snake’s vision of shades of black and white and gray. As usual, my eyes had shifted first.
In an ordinary shift, my hearing would change next, sounds muffling as I moved to my serpentine shape.
But this was no ordinary shift.
I felt it when that fabric of reality gave way, heard it as a sound so deep inside me that my shifting bones rattled with it, a ripping that seemed to come from all around and within me, so that my very cells seemed to give way with it.
The blast that followed poured glittering light into the world, like a thousand exploding disco-balls filled with glass shards of pure power, all slicing into me.
I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out—or if it did, I couldn’t hear it over the deafening roar of my own shift. I couldn’t see anything other than the blinding glow of white-hot power, either, and for a long moment, I wasn’t aware of anything other than pure, jagged pain throughout every part of me in an eternal second that I was sure would never end.
As the noise and light faded away, I realized that no one else had experienced it.
But from the way everyone had frozen, staring at me, they all realized that I had shifted.
I sat with my lower half coiled into a circle on the floor, my upper half reared up, as if I had been preparing to strike, even mid-shift.
And from how small they all looked, I was every bit as big as I had hoped to be.
Chapter 8
KADE RECOVERED HIS wits first, reaching out to one side to grab that large piece of medical equipment he had deemed too expensive to risk only moments ago, and slinging it with all his shifter might into the Kodiak’s stomach. The bear whoofed out air as it bent double and Kade took that opportunity to draw the machine back and ram it into the bear’s head. Even with my diminished serpentine sense of hearing, there was a noticeable sound of crunching glass and screeching metal, along with the scraping vibrations running through the ground and air and into my skin.
I swayed once as I turned my head to survey the room completely. The werewolf that had been preparing to pounce on me was moving backward, and the nurse had managed to slide away from the other one as it stared at me.
Uncoiling one lower loop, I skimmed the top part of my body over the closest wolf and twirled myself around him. I could feel my fangs preparing to pump poison, even as the muscles of my body tightened around the wolf’s body. Apparently I had managed to re-create the battle form I had used before, a hybrid snake that was both venomous viper and constrictor. The wolf yelped once before I squeezed hard enough to cut off his breath.
I stopped for an instant to consider what I should do. If I killed him, I would have yet another death on my conscience. My parents had worked hard to raise me with human ethics and morals, and my training as a children’s counselor had only amplified that training.
Then I glanced down and saw the nurse, whose name I hadn’t ever even asked, struggling to stand up next to the incubator. Her hand slapped once against the side, then slid down, leaving a bloody handprint behind. The werewolf must have slashed her when I wasn’t looking. The copper smell of blood—that scent that did taste like food on my tongue—wafted up to me.
Without a second thought, I contracted sharply around the wolf, snapping its spine. Then I dropped it on the floor and whipped my tail out to knock the other wolf off its feet. The nurse, only a few feet away, froze in her attempt to stand, her eyes wide and frightened.
Deliberately, I turned my face away from her, telling her as clearly as I could that I would not hurt her. I felt, more than heard, as she continued to pull herself to her feet to check on the infant.
The wolf, too, was attempting to scrabble to his feet. His paws skidded a little on the white tile floor, and I reveled for a moment in how easily my scales slipped along to bring me closer. Really, though, it was dropping my upper half down next to him that underscored exactly how huge I had grown in this shift. My head alone was almost as big as the wolf.
When I opened my mouth and unhinged my jaws, the werewolf peed itself.
With one fang, I pierced him through the neck as he turned to run. I didn’t even bother to pump out additional venom. The fang itself almost beheaded the wolf, and he was dead by the time I withdrew it.
The nurse was standing and had managed to wrap one arm in a bandage before beginning to check the machinery attached to the baby, so I assumed she was doing well enough for the moment.
My view of Kade, however, was obscured by the bear, who had my mongoose-shifter backed into a corner. I didn’t think he had had time to shift—and even if he had, I knew that his ability to shift into larger forms was limited, so he was almost certainly, at best, a human-sized half-mongoose, or a mongoose-sized mongoose, either one with shifter strength that far outstripped an average human, but nothing compared to a giant bear-shifter.
As I reared up higher, rising to balance on the last third of my body, I got a better look around the bear. Kade had managed to barricade himself behind several other medical machines and had some sort of machine on a pole that he was swinging in an arc in front of himself—either to actually attempt to hit the bear or to at least keep the bear from reaching in and swiping at him. Some kind of tubing slung around from it and slapped the bear across the nose, causing it to jerk back a little.
Kade redoubled his grip and swung the machine like a baseball bat, just as I recognized it for what it was: a breast-pump. This time, he managed to whack the bear across the snout with the boxy machine end of the pump, and the Kodiak took several steps backward.
I used the bear’s distraction to whip my tail around its feet and tug backward. I was hoping to knock it over completely, but it managed to land on its front paws so that I held its back paws up in a sort of wheelbarrow pose. Still, I was able to drag it backward several feet as it scrabbled against the tile and fought its way loose of my constricting coils, and the scuffle gave Kade a chance to dart out of the corner and around to my side.
That left us facing one really pissed-off Kodiak-shifter, though. I was bigger than it was, but I hadn’t been training to fight very long. Apparently, the bear had. It circled around us in a way that I recognized as being part of my own Shield training.
Glancing back at the nurse, I saw that she had the baby out of the incubator, swaddled in a blanket, and tucked inside her own shirt. I had no idea how safe it really was for the baby to be out of its bassinet—Kade had told me I couldn’t even hold her yet—but getting her out of the room was a definite priority. With a nod at me, the nurse began sliding along the wall, headed in the general direction of the demolished door. Kade, catching the direction of my stare, moved around behind me in order to guard the nurse’s retreat.
I swung my head back around to face the bear, determined to divert its attention from the nurse’s escape. In my momentary distraction, though, it had moved closer, and now it lunged out and wrapped its heavy arms around my torso in a literal bear-hug. His enormous claws dug into my back, and pain shot up along the sides of my spine. With a roar, the bear ripped his front paws away from me, taking chunks of scales and flesh with them.
Ignore the pain. Protect the child. Ignore the pain. Protect the child.
The mantra pounded through my mind in time to the beat of my pulse. Flicking my tongue out, I could taste my own blood as the molecules flowed across the Jacobson’s organ in my mouth.