"You must choose," Doolittle said.
"I can't." Meredith shrunk back.
"Don't make her pick." How the hell could you choose one child over the other?
"Split it," Curran said.
Doolittle shook his head. "My lord, we have a chance to save one of them . . ."
"I said split it." Curran growled. His eyes flashed gold. I was right. Something bad had happened, and it wasn't just Maddie and Margo.
Doolittle clamped his mouth shut.
Curran moved back and leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.
The paste was split into two equal portions. Tony mixed each into a pound of ground beef and dropped it into the cells. The children pounced on the meat, licking it off the floor. Seconds crawled by, towing minutes in their wake.
Margo jerked. The fur on her body melted. Her bones folded on themselves, shrank, realigned . . . She cried out, and a human girl, naked and bloody, fell to the floor.
Thank you. Thank you, whoever you are upstairs.
"Margo!" Meredith called. "Margo, honey, answer me. Answer me, baby."
"Mom?" Margo whispered.
"My baby!"
Maddie's body shuddered. Her limbs twisted. The distortion in her body shrank, but the signs of animal remained. My heart sank. It didn't work.
"She's down to two," Doolittle said.
The shift coefficient, the measure of how much a body had shifted from one form to the other. "What does that mean?"
"It's progress," he said. "If we had more of the panacea, I would be optimistic."
But we didn't. Tony hadn't just emptied the bag, he had cut it and rubbed the inside of the plastic on the meat and then scraped it clean with the back of the knife. Maddie was still going loup. We had to get more panacea. We had to save her.
"You can't kill her!" Julie's voice shot into high pitch. "You can't!"
"How long can you keep the child under?" Curran asked.
"How long is necessary?" Doolittle asked.
"Three months," Curran said.
Doolittle frowned. "You're asking me to induce a coma."
"Can you do it?"
"Yes," Doolittle said. "The alternative is termination."
Curran's voice was clipped. "Effective immediately, all loupism-related terminations of children are suspended. Sedate them instead." He turned and walked out.
I paused for half a second to tell Julie that it would be okay and chased after him.
The hallway was empty. The Beast Lord was gone.
Chapter 2