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“That’s the closet,” he said.
Why me?
I made a small adjustment to my course, arrived at the bathroom door, got inside, and let out a breath.
That was entirely too close for comfort.
“You okay in there?” he asked. “You need me to come and hold your hand or something?”
I locked the door and heard him laughing. Bastard.
I found a white bathrobe in the bathroom, which permitted me to emerge with some small shred of dignity intact. Curran raised his eyebrows at the robe but didn’t say anything.
I made it to the bed, crawled in, and hugged Slayer. While I was in the bathroom, somebody had taken away the soup. I had still had a little bit left in my last bowl.
Outside the window was dark. “What time is it?”
“Early morning. You’ve been out for about six hours.” He fixed me with a hard stare. “What do you want?”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
He spoke slowly, carefully shaping the words as if I was slow or hard of hearing. “What do you want for the maps?”
I wanted to hit him in the mouth really hard. “One of the Pack members came to me for help. If I tell you, will you promise not to punish the persons involved?”
“I can’t promise that. I don’t know what you’ll say. You should tell me anyway. I’m curious now and I don’t like being out of the loop.”
“And have you embark on a bloody rampage?”
“I grow tired of your mouth.” Bones shifted under Curran’s skin. The nose widened, the jaws grew, the top lip split, displaying enormous teeth. I was staring into the face of a nightmare, a horrible meld of human and lion. If a thing that weighed over six hundred pounds in beast-form could be called a lion. His eyes never changed. The rest of him—the body, the arms, the legs, even his hair and skin remained human. The shapeshifters had three forms: beast, human, and half. They could shift into any of the three, but they always changed shape completely. Most had to strain to maintain the half-form and to be able to speak in it was a great achievement. Only Curran could do this: turn part of his body into one shape while keeping the rest in another.
Normally I had no trouble with Curran’s face in half-form. It was well-proportioned, even—many shapeshifters suffered the “my jaws are way too big and don’t fit together” syndrome—but I was used to that half-form face being sheathed in gray fur. Having human skin stretched over it was nausea inducing.
He noticed my heroic efforts not to barf. “What is it now?”