everafter

by Nell Stark; Trinity Tam

  “It has been described many ways by many people: ‘out of sorts,’

  ‘not myself,’ ‘like being watched all the time.’” Karma tapped a pink folder in the pile. “Testimonials. For me, it feels like dreaming when you are awake. It’s like being aware of two realities at the same time. It is very disconcerting and distracting until you get used to it.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “It will be practically unbearable for the first lunar cycle, and probably longer. You may need to get medication for it. Valium and Klonopin work well to quell your anxiety. But you need to remember that it will get better. You just have to wait it out a few months, possibly a year.”

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  everafter

  Val nodded. “Whatever medication you need, you’ll have. That much, I can do.”

  “And,” I mused, “doing this now means that I’ll have the rest of winter break to adjust.” School didn’t start up again until mid January, which gave me almost three weeks to assimilate to the virus. It wouldn’t be easy, but I’d find a way.

  “While in human form, your animal self will be subordinate,”

  Karma continued, “but she’ll still be there lurking. You will be in control but will have access to her instincts. You’ll begin to see things like animals do, sensing social power structures and reading minute body language. If you listen to your panther, Alexa, she can teach you marvelous things you never noticed before.” Karma’s last sentence was whispered in reverence.

  “And in animal form?” Part of me was scared to hear her answer, but the academic in me thrilled to the unknown.

  “At first you will feel imprisoned. You will feel trapped and incapable of anything except observation. Paralysis in and of itself is frightening, but now imagine someone else moving you, controlling all of your actions.” Val tensed at Karma’s words and I wondered if that was what her thirst felt like. “You will begin to despair that you will ever regain control. Do not lose hope. Treat it like you would watching a movie. That helps, sometimes.”

  “A movie. That doesn’t sound too bad.” I smiled weakly when Val squeezed my hand in encouragement. “I’ll just do that until it feels more familiar.”

  Karma nodded but didn’t smile back. “That’s when it gets hard. As you adjust to the panther’s presence in your life, she will be adjusting to your presence in hers. Eventually, she’s going to try to insert herself and her needs while you are in human form. For many young Weres, this phase is make or break. Animals are hierarchical. By nature, they jockey for domination. If your beast gets the best of you, you may lose yourself forever.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “On a minor scale, it usually involves personality changes. A shortness of temper or a tendency to gluttony.” Karma caught my gaze and held it, unwavering. “In the worst cases, the animal takes over and the Shifter goes feral, unable to change back into human form again.”

  I sat back in surprise, my mind whirling as it tried to process what

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  that would feel like. Feral. God. Val squeezed my hand again, and when she spoke, her voice was steady. She was being my rock, just as I had been hers after the mugging.

  “How do we prevent that from happening?”

  “You must fight it,” Karma told me. “Through the fear, through the confusion, through the hopelessness, you fight it. You master your beast by not backing down and by waiting for her to flinch. And when she does, you subjugate her to your will.”

  I nodded in understanding. It seemed so logical when she laid it out like that. Practice was destined to be more difficult than theory, I knew that. But months ago, I hadn’t even known that this world existed, and now I was in love with a vampire and sitting across my dinner table from a Wereshifter. “Your animal, what is it?”

  “A jackal. I was bitten over three years ago while on an archeological dig in Egypt.” Karma’s lips quirked into a sarcastic grin.

  “We were unearthing a tomb, but it would have been poetic justice if I’d been at a temple to Anubis instead.”

  I remembered Val asking Helen about my bestial half. Did it matter? Did the woman choose the beast or did the beast choose the woman? I would never know the natural order of things because my transformation would be planned. I wondered if the panther would suit me. “Three years,” I mused. “It seems like a long time from where I stand, but that’s probably not true for you, is it?”

  Karma closed her eyes as a shudder passed through her body. Moments passed before she opened them again. “It’s still a struggle for me, I won’t sugarcoat it. Every Were’s battle is unique. And each one is epic.”

  She pushed her chair back and stood. We rose with her, Val wrapping one arm around my waist as we walked Karma to the door.

  “You have my number if you think of any more questions. Darren will be a good teacher to you. I know he has helped several others through their first transformations.”

  “Thank you.” I shook Karma’s hand gratefully.

  Her golden eyes flicked to Val and then me. “Good luck.”

  v

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  everafter

  Friday night at the Consortium’s hunting facility on the West Side was a dead zone. Darren was waiting for us in the lobby and waved us in past the armed guard sitting at the check-in desk. He maneuvered us to the freight elevator and after a hand scan and key code entry, we were on our way to the sub-basement. The elevator doors opened to a large, cavernous space that resembled the inside of an airplane hangar decked out like a zoo habitat. A narrow bubbling stream ran through the center of the room and dense vegetation and small trees filled out the space. On the far wall opposite the elevator, a heavy metal door swung open and Helen emerged, prim, proper, and slightly dangerous in her tailored black silk pantsuit. She beckoned for us to follow her. Behind the metal door lay a sterile white hallway that led to a set of stairs. We walked up four flights to a catwalk that ended in a small room. The room featured a full wall of windows that overlooked the hangar area we had just been in. There were some chairs and a phone in the room but little else. An observation room, I realized.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Helen picked up the phone and punched in a few numbers. “We are ready when you are.” She hung up the phone without waiting for acknowledgment.

  Val and I pushed two chairs close together and sat. She immediately engulfed my left hand into both of hers. We peered into the hangar below and watched as Darren carefully stripped off all his clothes and set them aside. He was palming something in his right hand when he finally stood, naked. He tilted his head to the right and left, stretching the thick muscles of his neck before jumping up and down a few times like a sprinter preparing to take to his blocks. Then he flicked his right hand out, revealing a four-inch long switchblade. Before we could register what was happening, he jammed the blade into his thigh all the way to the hilt and roared out with a primal scream.

  “Shit!” I jumped up and pressed both palms against the viewing window, staring in horror as blood began to flow copiously down Darren’s right leg. Gently, Val drew me back down into my chair. Her gaze was full of concern, but thirst lurked in the tense set of her mouth. Even as she turned her attention back to the spectacle below, her tongue flickered over the sharp tip of each canine.

  I turned back to the violent spectacle below as Darren fell to his side, pulled the blade from his leg, and flung it across the room. Then a series of seizures racked his large frame, sending him skittering

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  sideways across the hangar floor. Like the time in the conference room all those months ago, his body began to shake faster and faster until it appeared to blur at the edges, like a science fiction hologram flickering into transmission. He vibrated like this for a few minutes until suddenly, he was no longer a man but a wolf rolling over and onto his paws.

  “Unbe
lievable,” I whispered. Despite having seen Darren do this before, it still defied all logic. The wolf had circled back and was now sniffing the pool of Darren’s blood on the ground. With a harsh grating sound, a small set of double doors in the back of the room swung open and a flash of tan and white streaked across the room. The wolf was on the chase immediately, loping effortlessly through the brush and foliage of the room. Everything was happening at such a frenetic pace that it took me a couple minutes before I realized they had released a small deer into the room as Darren’s prey. The wolf would stop every once in a while, reassess the deer’s location, and then adjust his angle of approach. Each time he did this, he drove his target closer to one of the corners of the room. It wouldn’t be long before the deer either ran out of steam or got itself trapped. I leaned forward to catch as much of the action as I could.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? This dance of death.” I couldn’t tell whom Helen was speaking to; her attention was riveted on the scene below.

  “It’s a delicate game: studying your target, predicting their next move, then goading them into your trap. It takes time to set up and patience to execute.”

  Below, the wolf had finally cornered his prey and cut off all escape routes. The deer, wild-eyed and foaming with fear, stumbled over its own legs trying to back away. In an instant, the wolf was on its neck, and with a sickening snap that we could hear all the way up in the viewing room, the deer went down in a boneless heap. I forced myself to watch as the wolf triumphantly gorged himself on his kill. Helen turned to me then with a shrewd and calculating glance.

  “Are you sure, Alexa, that this is the life for you?”

  I looked over at Val. She was more relaxed now, her thirst having eased, I supposed, once Darren had shifted. Her head was cocked slightly, and she squinted at the scene before her with the same concentration that she gave her medical textbooks. She was the love of my life, and we could have forever. I wasn’t going to let Helen’s doubts, or even

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  Karma’s much more benevolent admonitions, stand in my way. I would find control, even if the fight was bitter and long.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  v

  The cab ride back to our apartment was quiet. I spent the whole ride absorbed in my own thoughts, replaying every aspect of the hunt in my mind. The exhilaration of the chase warred with the violence and brutality of it. I was glad that in animal form, my panther’s instincts would take over because I surely did not have it in me to go for the kill. Val didn’t speak either—her thumb made rhythmic circles against the back of my hand, but she seemed distracted. Almost as though she were having an internal debate with herself.

  We crossed the threshold of our apartment together, and I immediately headed for the bedroom. I didn’t want to think anymore—I just wanted to find reassurance in Val’s embrace. When I had stripped myself bare, I turned to find that she was still standing in the doorway, fully clothed. I made my way to her. “Here, sweetheart, let me help.”

  She pushed my hands away from her gently. “Wait. There’s something…something I…” She dropped on one knee and looked up at me, her eyes bright but her jaw set in determination. “Alexa, my love, I know this doesn’t feel like the right time and Lord, I imagined this moment happening so differently…”

  “Val—”

  She held up one hand, cutting me off. “I know I was against you becoming a Were at first. But I can see that it’s what you want, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. And grateful.”

  She looked down briefly and cleared her throat, and I could see the moisture rising on her palms. “Alexa, I want to marry you. I want you to be mine and me to be yours. Forever. I promise that I will love, honor, and follow you wherever our lives take us. I want our time together to be full of love, laughter, and happily ever after. I am asking you to be my wife.”

  My heart melted open in my chest. Blood pulsed through my arteries and veins like magma, setting fire to all my nerve endings. I blinked and found my sight blurred with tears. I looked at Valentine,

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  her beautiful, fragile soul bared before me in all its loving glory. And when my heart relinquished its hold on my tongue, I uttered the only response that I could.

  “I can’t.”

  v

  The treatment room in the Consortium medical facility was reminiscent of the sterile guest room that Val had stayed in during her recuperation. There was an adjustable bed, an IV stand, some monitoring equipment, and little else. I sat in the bed wearing a thin hospital-issue cotton gown. I didn’t know where Val was; they wouldn’t allow her in the room for fear of contamination. I was exhausted. Val and I had stayed up all night talking after I had turned down her proposal. She had been understandably confused and hurt, too, though she’d tried not to show it. I tried my best to explain to her that the timing wasn’t right: she had just undergone a life-altering change and I was about to undertake my own.

  “When we do get married,” I told her, “it will be because we both have all of us to give to the relationship. Right now, everything is just too uncertain. I can’t let your fear of losing me be the foundation of our future.” We’d reached an understanding by the time we finally fell asleep at 5:30 in the morning, but as I sat alone in the treatment room, I questioned whether I had done the right thing by spurning Val’s offer. I could see myself with her forever. Was that enough? Had I been foolish to question her timing, or wise to hold out until both her proposal and my acceptance could be offered out of strength, rather than desperation?

  A sterile-garbed technician came in and informed me that they would be slowly dripping the virus—separated from the donor’s blood by centrifuge and introduced into a bag of my own blood type—into my bloodstream via the IV. The bag of blood would be slowly transfused into my system over the course of twenty-four hours to minimize the trauma typically associated with rapid infection. I was warned that the process would be very painful, but that they couldn’t sedate or anesthetize me for fear of upsetting the virus before it took. I was glad that Val had been out of the room when I heard that bit of news. The technician hung the bag of blood on the stand and slid the tube

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  over the rails of my bed and attached it to the IV port in the crook of my left elbow. He fidgeted with a few of the monitoring machines by my bed and then turned to face me fully. “Are you ready, Ms. Newland?”

  “Yes. Please proceed.”

  He adjusted a valve at the base of the bag and blood snaked its way through the tube and disappeared into my arm. When he had gotten the flow rate just right, he jotted a note in the chart at the foot of my bed. “If the discomfort becomes too great, just push that red button by your head.”

  I nodded and he turned to go. He was almost out the door when I thought of one last request. “Can you please tell Valentine that I love her?”

  He grunted his assent and the door clicked closed behind him. v

  Light, hot and sharp. Everywhere. I was trying to hide but couldn’t move. The light held me, pinning me in place, stabbing me everywhere it touched my skin. I cried out but the scream ripped a burning gash in my throat and I tasted blood. A ripple in the air, the waft of a familiar scent. Food? I strained my body toward the source and the pain engulfed me like a tornado, shredding my skin and pulling me apart. A groan wrenched itself free from the bottom of my vivisected bowels, rising like bile through my esophagus and exploding in fire across my lips. My eyes began to adjust. The light was still everywhere but I slowly realized that it wasn’t binding me at all. I looked down at myself: arms, legs, breasts, abdomen, all familiar and yet strangely heavy. A tremor and my skin started to crawl, stretching impossibly tight across my flesh and bones while threatening to burst open and spill my guts all over the light.

  The scent came stronger—smoky and smooth, like an Islay malt. Spicy and
sweet like chai on an early autumn morning. Valentine. Another tremor and I was flayed open, burning wetness seeping from me like acid tears. Valentine. The memory of fingers moving inside me as warmth pulsed from my neck in time to a secret symphony that only we could hear. Valentine. I threw myself in her direction, only to break into a thousand screaming pieces.

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  I woke up screaming and Val was there. She was lying next to me on the bed, back pressed uncomfortably against the rail, trying her best to give me space. My scream sparked her to action, faster than reason could override, and then she was holding me, soothing me, crooning her love into my ear. It hurt everywhere—everywhere except where Valentine was touching me. I leaned into her and soaked in the comfort that she provided, letting her soft, loving murmurs lull me into the sleep I so desperately needed.

  The next time I woke, it felt like surfacing from a dark pool. The pain was still there, but oddly muted—fire flickering around the corners of my consciousness. The acrid smell of disinfectant prickled my nose, but beneath the sharpness, I caught a tantalizing scent that flooded my stomach with warmth. I could hear low-pitched voices conversing nearby, and somehow I knew that there were precisely three people besides myself in the room. The steady beeps of a monitor punctuated their dialogue like a metronome.

  “There haven’t been any leads on the rogue vamp for weeks. The Circuit is the only possible lead I have.” My heart beat faster as I recognized Valentine’s distinctive alto. I wanted to soothe away her frustration.

  “I want to help you,” Kyle said. “But it infuriated Helen that I went on the Circuit without her permission.” I could hear the fear that stained his voice.

  “So there’s no way you—or Monique—can get me back in there.”

  Now she just sounded resigned. And exhausted. My fingers twitched. I needed to hold her. Everything would be all right if I could just be touching her.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. And Monique isn’t even in—”

  “Wait a moment.” Karma’s accent was more pronounced than I remembered. “She’s waking up.”