I’d never considered how necessary the actual desire to Shift is to the process itself, until I finally found myself faced with the lack of it. I sighed, frustrated.

“What’s wrong?” Marc asked, and I answered without looking at him, trying to keep the distractions at a minimum.

“I’m truly dreading the pain. Does that make me sound like a total wimp?”

He laughed. “It makes you sound like an enforcer. No one else would even consider Shifting with a broken wrist and thirty-seven stitches in a massive gash on her other arm.”

“I wish I weren’t considering it, either.”

“Okay, think about it like this…” Marc slid off the bed and sat beside me on the floor. He started rubbing my back, and I began to relax almost instantly. He always had that affect on me—when we weren’t yelling at each other. “If you don’t Shift, we can’t get to Lance, and Kaci’s going to die.”

I stared at him in horror, waiting for the punch line that never came. He wasn’t joking. “Yeah. No pressure.”

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.

But my stubborn right wrist remained mostly human. I was stalled there, and my fur would not come.

“Finish it, Faythe.…” Marc murmured, careful to keep his distance. I wasn’t much danger to him at the beginning of my Shift, but I now had canines and three sets of deadly claws. If I lost control and he got in the way, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. “Let it come. You can’t finish until you let your arm Shift.”

I know! I growled, but if he understood, he showed no sign.

“Do you really want to have to throw all your punches with your southpaw? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to throw some resisting son of a bitch’s head back with your right fist? You can’t do that until it heals. Let it heal, Faythe.”

“Rrrrrgggghhhh!” I closed my eyes, clenched my newly formed jaw, and mentally shoved the Shift into my arm.

Pain exploded in my wrist. Both halves of my bone wrenched themselves into place, and I screamed again, an inarticulate expression of sheer torture.

Distantly, I heard the door open, and a brief, thin line of sunlight slanted across my in-between form. “Shhh!” Jace whispered as he closed and locked the door. The scent of sausage washed over me, and my feline stomach growled. “Faythe, you have to hold it down, or someone’s going to call the cops. You sound like you’re giving birth!”

Insensitive bastard. He’d never hurt like this. He couldn’t have. He hadn’t Shifted until he’d had several weeks to recuperate from his broken bones.

Deep down, I knew Jace was right. Knew I was being irrational. But in that moment, I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted the pain to stop.