points out the flat ridge of Magnus’s teeth and the jagged roots. Then the second set of roots on top of them that are sharp and high and curving deep into the line of his upper jaw, a bare millimeter from a charcoal-gray cavity. I try to blink away the image, but I can’t.
“He’s always had toothaches,” I finally manage to say, knowing full well how inadequate it sounds.
“This is not a toothache,” the doctor says. “This is a face on the verge of disintegrating.” He closes the computer and opens one of the shallow drawers, dropping what looks like an oversize wire stripper on the paper-lined surface.
“What happened to his claws?”
“Claws? I told you. He’s never changed, so he has never had claws. He’s got some kind of genetic condition with his nails?” I can’t stop my voice from raising up in a question.
Tristan closes the drawer and holds it shut for a moment, then he turns around, arms crossed in front of him, assessing me.
“There’s nothing genetic about it. Someone wanted to stop him from changing, so they pulled out his claws until he did. Stop.”
He keeps looking at me expectantly, like he’s waiting for a denial but he knows all the facts are lined up on his side. I don’t bother. Somehow, I’ve always known. Not that his claws were pulled out, but that I’d been lying to myself, pretending that the troughs on the bare skin of his nails and the blood on that white pen I’d lent to the haunted boy in Burnaby could be explained away by a rare human ailment found on Google.
Everyone thinks—thought, they’re all dead now—that I must remember the day my mother changed. Who wouldn’t? One day, she’s the reserved, OCD but otherwise unexceptional Maxine Brody of Evergreen Terrace. Recording secretary for the baked goods committee of the Rainy River Elementary PTA. The next day, she’s a wolf the size of a VW.
I didn’t remember.
I remembered the smell of burning brownies, the homework on the floor around her, but nothing else. Nothing except for her thumbs. The way the nails grew and thickened and darkened, folding to a point. The way the digit migrated up her wrist.
Someone tore that claw out of Magnus’s living flesh.
“Tristan, give us time.”
The doctor looks at me warily, all smart-assery gone. He bolts away, his laptop clutched to his chest like a breastplate.
Something touches my hand, my skin. “Let it go.” Gentle and secure and strong. “See what you’re doing and let it go.” I don’t feel the blood itself dripping down the side of my hand or the bent and broken steel jammed into my palm.
“I didn’t do it.” I pull the long, sharp tweezers out and drop them to the tray, flexing my hand.
“I know you didn’t,” she says. “I’ve dealt with enough humans to know what a lie smells like.” She picks up the broken metal and wraps them in a paper towel.
“I didn’t even know he looked so…sick. He always wore thick clothes and… I don’t know.”
She heads over to a bin in the corner of the room. When she puts her foot on the pedal, the cover thumps against the wall, then the broken tweezers hit the bottom of the bin.
“It’s so weak,” she says, straightening out the blue paper liner on the cart. “The word ‘change.’ Makes it sound like putting on a costume.”
She rubs her shoulder.
“In the Old Tongue, the word is eftboren. It’s…” Across the room, metal scrapes on metal as Tristan draws the thin curtain around Magnus. “Again born? No, reborn. It’s why we live so long, because our bodies are constantly dying, and with each change, they are renewed. Reborn.
“Without the change, Magnus is not being reborn. Without the change, he is only dying.”
Chapter 7
Evie
I didn’t sleep much last night. I spent most of it in a desperate triangulation. How close was close enough for the Gray to get used to my scent? How close was too close? I didn’t know what might make her leave her mate’s side, the fur on her hackles high, her lips pulled back from sharp teeth.
Or worse, go Offland.
I’d immediately discounted Tristan’s suggestion that the Shifter had been responsible for what had been done to Magnus because I was the one watching him from the woods during the Iron Moon. I’d seen him stand—or rather sit—guard on the floor beside Magnus’s bed, his hands propped loose on his bent knees, staring ahead, unsure what to do with the fragile