Dying to Live: The Shifter City Complete Series

by Liam Kingsley

  “What is it?” Pan gasped.

  “Breast and uterine tissues. They’re developing normally…as far as I can tell, we have a fairly small sample size for ‘normal’ around here…and your vitals are within the usual range for the second change. I just don’t understand why you are still awake. I’m going to take a sample.”

  “More blood? You’re the wrong monster, doc. You should have been a vampire.”

  “Ha-ha,” Snow said dryly. “Hold still.”

  A cramp began just as Snow slid the needle into Pan’s vein, and a yelp escaped his throat. Embarrassed, he glanced over at Killian. He felt a babble of explanation tickle his tongue, but he swallowed it when he saw Killian’s face. Guilt and worry warred for dominance over Killian’s sharp features, and Pan ached to put his fears to rest. He couldn’t, of course. He didn’t know what was happening any more than Killian did. But he did make an effort to keep silent through the next series of nausea-inducing waves of pain.

  Snow finished filling four vials, capped them, and turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Pan said in a panic. “Can you give me anything?”

  “Like?”

  “Food? Morphine? Elephant tranquilizer?”

  “Yes, no but I will order codeine, and no. You’re awake when you shouldn’t be, and I want to know why before I knock you out. Sit tight, I’ll send Maude in with those things.”

  Pan flopped back on his pillow with a groan, then glanced over at Killian, who was biting his nails.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” he said. “You’ll tear up your cuticles.”

  “They’ll heal,” Killian said carelessly. “You, on the other hand….”

  “Will be fine,” Pan interrupted. “Every male Omega with any kind of sex life goes through this. Granted, they generally sleep through it…but nobody’s died from it yet.”

  “Yes, but nobody else has gone through two changes at once, either,” Killian pointed out.

  “I always was a rebel,” Pan said, grinning weakly. “Relax. I’ll be fine.”

  Maude appeared shortly after with two heaping trays of food. It wasn’t Taco Bell, but it was fatty and full of carbohydrates and utterly sinful. She’d provided them with pancakes, bacon and eggs, hashed potatoes, two giant double-chocolate muffins, tall coffees with cream and sugar, and bowls filled with strawberries drizzled with chocolate and topped with whipped cream. Pan’s eyes bulged out when he saw the smorgasbord, and he shot Maude a look which was half-question and half-worship.

  “I may be old, but I remember my menses. You can pay me back with a dye job.”

  “You’ll be my very first client when I get back,” Pan promised emphatically. “I’ll set the whole day aside just for you, you glorious woman.”

  She smiled briefly and scurried off to ready the desk for Bernadette’s arrival. Pan groaned orgasmically as he dug into his breakfast.

  “That woman is a goddess,” he sighed. “Wait, did she say menses?”

  “She did,” Killian laughed.

  “God…every month? They do this every month.”

  “Not quite this, I don’t think,” Killian said thoughtfully. “I think I remember someone saying that the second change was like three years of puberty packed into three days.”

  “Still,” Pan said, raising his eyebrows in admiration. “Women are beasts.”

  The sugar crash was nearly as delightful as the breakfast itself. It sent Pan off to sleep on a luxurious haze, compounded by the codeine which was now snaking through his veins. Unconsciousness came swiftly, and with his final thought he wished that it would last the whole of the second change.

  He wasn’t so lucky. Once the codeine was used up and metabolized, the cramps began again with a vengeance. He woke up with a groan and curled into a whimpering ball. Once the cramp subsided, he realized that he was starving again; only this time, it wasn’t food he wanted. A gnawing, hot ache wrapped around his tender torso and between his twitching legs; an ache he hadn’t felt since he was a lusty, boy-crazy teen. His senses undulated between craving sex and cramping, a swing which left him feeling confused and more than a little aggressive.

  Killian sat beside Pan and touched an icy hand to his shoulder.

  “You’re burning up,” Killian murmured.

  “No I’m not, you’re freezing,” Pan argued.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Feel like dying.”

  “Well that’s what you get for being awake when you aren’t supposed to be.”

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “Half a day. Plus the other half makes a whole. You’ve got two to go, so go the hell back to sleep.”

  “Can’t. Hurts.”

  Killian hit the call button then began to rub Pan’s arm, a soothing motion which was somehow more erotic for its platonic nature.

  “I’m sorry,” Killian said softly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That you were….”

  “An Omega virgin?” Pan said, trying to be flippant, but he only sounded pathetic in his own ears.

  “Well that, sure, but also real. I thought you were a dream.”

  “Bullshit,” Pan said through his teeth. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

  Killian fell silent and Pan turned his head slightly to look at his face. He looked heavily guilty and more than a little embarrassed, piquing Pan’s curiosity in spite of the pain.

  “What made you think it was a dream?”

  “You mean aside from the hallucinations?”

  “Don’t play that. I had those too, and unless you thought you were fucking a three-headed dragon, you knew it was real.”

  Killian shook his head and gave Pan a small, tentative smile. “It wouldn’t have been the first time I had that dream.”

  “Everybody has sex dreams,” Pan sighed. “They never feel like the real thing. Try again.”

  “It was better,” Killian admitted. “But it was familiar. So familiar. I…have that dream all the time.”

  “Really,” Pan teased, keeping himself distracted from the pain clawing through his abdomen. “Who’s the usual star?”

  Killian’s jaw tightened and the tips of his ears turned red. He looked away quickly and stood, walking over to the window wall.

  “Where the hell is Henry?” He asked forcefully.

  Pain gripped Pan just under his heart and he groaned, writhing on the bed. Killian was by his side in an instant.

  “What can I do?” He asked, desperate to help. A wicked thought struck Pan, surprising him. He decided to roll with it.

  “Tell me more,” he gasped, curling his pelvis up into the agony. “About your dreams.”

  “They aren’t important, they’re just dreams,” Killian said dismissively.

  “Distract me,” Pan begged. “Just until the doctor comes.”

  “Well….”

  The door flew open and Snow rushed in, followed by Bernadette and two other nurses. They took his vitals in a swarm of implements and gloved hands, poking and prodding and overwhelming him. He wished he’d stayed asleep.

  “Pain?” Snow asked.

  “Eleven.”

  “Bernadette, codeine, lidocaine, go now.”

  Bernadette rushed away, and Pan nearly passed out with the next wave of pain.

  Bernadette returned quickly, and moments later the taste of powerful medicine rose in the back of his throat. His head went fuzzy and his fingers went numb, but the pain cut through it all with vicious intensity. A growl escaped his throat and the nurses all took a step back. Snow was busy listening to his heart, and merely shot him an irritated look. Slowly the medicine trickled through his body, killing the pain wherever it touched, and Pan relaxed back against his pillow. Snow frowned down at him thoughtfully and stepped away to scribble on a clipboard.

  “Your skin is worse. Get out of those clothes,” he said briskly.

  Pan shed his uniform attire like a snake, enjoying the ability to move without pain. Across
the room, Killian’s eyes widened in shock. Every inch of skin from his collar bone to his toes was covered with the signature of the virus. Panic gripped Pan’s chest. He desperately wanted to crawl out of his body, to get away from the horror. Snow barked orders, but he didn’t hear what they were; the frantic buzzing in his brain wouldn’t let any information through, nothing beyond the terrifying condition of his body. He slowly became aware of the team of nurses slathering him with something cool and white. They wrapped him like a B-movie mummy in soft cotton, from his toes up over his chest. With every hidden inch, Pan calmed down.

  “Why is this happening?” He asked. “Did this happen to you?” He asked Killian.

  “No,” Killian said. “It got my arm, that’s all.”

  “And if you had both had the same experiences after your wounds were inflicted, that might be relevant,” Snow snapped. “I cannot predict anything now. Your metabolism may not be able to handle the strain of both changes at once, especially if you refuse to stay asleep. I have to call the lab. For the love of God, stay put.” Snow hustled out of the room without another word and disappeared down the hall. Killian started doing jumping jacks again, and Pan shot him a furious look.

  “Sorry,” Killian shrugged. “It’s either this or run out on you, and I’d rather not run.”

  “Thanks,” Pan said, sounding more bitter than he’d intended to. His body was sending confusing signals to his brain, telling him that he had to move, telling him that he was much too high on painkillers to move, telling him that the pain was still there, insistently throbbing beneath the drugged haze. Heat built beneath the bandages, compounding his discomfort exponentially.

  “Distract me,” he begged. “I can’t deal. I’m supposed to sleep through this.”

  “What does it feel like?” Killian asked.

  Pan shot him a glare. “That’s the opposite of distracting me,” he said.

  “Right, sorry. Well if it makes you feel better, I don’t think you’re dying.”

  “I do.”

  “Nah. If you were, you probably wouldn’t be conscious.”

  “If I wasn’t conscious, I would probably be healing,” Pan shot back.

  “Maybe,” Killian agreed hesitantly. “We need more information. We need to hear from the outside shifters.”

  “What would they know?” Pan groaned.

  “Shifters are changing all over the country. Wolves running around everywhere. I think this may just another natural phase of this excruciating life.”

  “It feels like dying.”

  Killian stopped jumping for a moment and turned to Pan. He walked over and sat down beside him, placing a hand on Pan’s hip. Pan shuddered as the touch sent white-hot sparks cascading through his body. If he didn’t do something soon, he was going to explode.

  “The first change felt like dying too. Worse, it frequently ended the life of someone we cared about. You’re going to make it, Pan. Trust me. You and I will both be fit and ready for action before you know it.”

  “What kind of action?” Pan asked with the ghost of a grin.

  “What did you have in mind?” Killian asked a little too innocently.

  “Oh, you know…gym…yoga…early morning walks…working the fifteenth of every month….”

  “Just the fifteenth?”

  “It’s the most important day.”

  “Oh, really? Why’s that?”

  “Because that’s when the cool kids get their hair cut.”

  “Damn. I thought it was because I get my hair cut on the fifteenth.”

  “You saying you aren’t cool?”

  “I might be cool, but I’m no kid.”

  “No,” Pan said, coughing a little laugh as the pain sliced through the haze. “You are most definitely a full-grown man.” He turned awkwardly, his body and the bandages making it difficult for him to function properly. “Tell me something, Killian. Whether I’m on the brink of death or not.”

  “What do you want to know?” Killian asked with a gleam in his eye.

  “You and I have been crossing paths for, oh, just about forever now.” He paused, wincing, as another wave of agony swept over him. He sucked in a breath, and continued. “Accidental meetings. Accidental on purpose. Always looking, almost never talking. Why?”

  Killian looked away quickly and stood up, then started doing lunges. Pan watched, wriggling uncomfortably as electricity trickled like spiders down his legs.

  “Do you remember what it was like before?” Killian asked suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Before the first change? I try to. It feels like a dream these days.”

  “Do you remember what it was like for teachers?”

  Pan shrugged, then immediately regretted it. His spine felt as if it were growing spurs into his gut. “I never paid much attention. Wasn’t the best student. Why?”

  Killian frowned and switched to push-ups. “I was brought here two years after I started teaching elementary school. In those two years, I was fired three times. Fired isn’t the word they used, but that’s what it was. I was encouraged to resign from three different schools in a two-year period.”

  “Paying for a wild youth?” Pan asked, gasping. The spurs seemed to reach his groin, and felt as if they were splaying outward, forging a hole in his center.

  “I wish,” Killian sighed. He pushed off the floor and spun to sit on his own bed. “But no. This had nothing to do with my behavior, my teaching, my attendance, nothing to do with anything that made me a teacher. This was all about what made me…me.”

  Pan wanted to answer, but the twitching nerves and fiery agony made it impossible.

  “I grew up in Oregon,” Killian continued. “There wasn’t a whole lot of buzz around ‘coming out’ as gay. Nobody cared. Everybody was out and proud, it was the straight people who were rebels. Then I went to college in Mississippi, of all places. Don’t ask me why. I learned to tone it down pretty quickly. I saved it all for the internet, then spewed rainbows across my social media. Kept it locked down, all settings on private, but you know how those things go. Within two months at my first school, some kid dug up something I’d written three years before. He showed his brother, who showed their parents, who showed the dean, who showed me the door.”

  Red washed over Pan’s eyes with every heartbeat, and Killian’s voice faded in and out.

  “I was even more careful after that, but my reputation caught up with me at the second school. The third…well, that one was kind of on me, though I’ll be damned if they weren’t in the wrong. I’d found myself a boyfriend a couple towns over. Far enough away to be safe from the prying eyes of anxious parents. I thought it was, anyway. But a fellow teacher decided to eat at the same restaurant. I still thought I was safe, because the man she was with was definitely not her husband, so I made the mistake of thinking that we would keep each other’s secrets.” Killian shook his head, a furious glint in his eye. “That…woman…told everyone she’d been out with her brother when she spotted me with my lover. Let me tell you, if that man was her brother then she needs to work on her boundaries. You ever seen a woman tie a cherry stem in her brother’s mouth? Yeah, me neither.”

  Pan struggled to make the connections, but he was missing every third word. He couldn’t follow a single train of thought from one second to the next. As Killian talked on and on, telling Pan about himself and his life, all the things that Pan had longed to know, Pan succumbed to the misfiring nerves in his body. Twitching, kicking, leaping, flailing, he catapulted out of bed. The world turned red and black, then red again. Green and grey and yellow, as if each color wanted a turn. He didn’t know where he was or where he was going, and he couldn’t have told you his name. Glass shattered around him, and with it, his world.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Killian hit the wall with such force that he blacked out for a split second. Pan had shifted and was thrashing, attacking everything around like shifters did during their first change. When he jumped through the glass wall, shattering it
, he landed on four paws. Killian struggled to his feet and slammed the nurse call button, but it was a redundant gesture. Pan was already tearing through the lobby, trashing everything in his way, tossing people aside with his newly massive shoulders as if they were rag dolls. They couldn’t stop him, he was too fast, too feral.

  With a growl of pain and worry, Killian shifted into his beast form (an act which had become second nature by now), and then concentrated on shifting fully into a wolf. The process only took a few minutes, but it felt like a lifetime as chaos whipped around him. Phones rang, people shouted and ran, doctors shifted and snarled. It felt like forcing a sneeze, and it was nearly as impossible, but eventually Killian made it happen. He stretched into his wolf form with a rippling crack and a yelp of pain, then bolted from the hospital, chasing Pan down at triple his usual speed. His blurry vision gradually sharpened until he could clearly see Pan’s snowy white, canine form making for the wall. If he collided with it at this speed, no amount of shifter healing would save him. Killian forced every fiber to move faster, impossibly fast, but Pan had a head start.

  Ten feet from the wall, Pan leapt. He hit the wall twenty feet up, dug his claws in, and pushed himself higher and higher. Killian watched in awe as Pan made it to the spikes at the top of the thirty-foot wall and disappeared over the top. His heart thudded in his chest, vibrating his eardrums. He made his decision in a split second, followed in Pan’s footsteps, and launched himself at the wall, trusting his body to know what to do. Panic tried to set in as his feet touched the stone and he shoved it away, running as if he were on flat ground, but he was too heavy. He slid back, colliding with the ground, and was on his feet again in an instant.

  People surrounded him, trying to stop him, shouting words he couldn’t understand. He leapt over them and ran along the wall to the massive steel gates, stood on his hind legs and smashed the button to open them. He danced impatiently as the gates creaked to life, complaining at the sudden use after their year-long rest, then sprinted through as soon as they were wide enough to accommodate his frame. Pan was long out of sight, but sight wasn’t his primary sense any longer. He sniffed the air and caught Pan’s scent immediately, then raced off after him. He was a mile behind by now, but he just needed to keep up long enough for Pan to tire out or hurt himself enough to slow. With that in mind, Killian settled into an easy lope, conserving his energy for a marathon.