“Oh.” I glanced again at the terrible scars on Chris’s body. How many enforcers died during such battles? Someone Peter loved. Was that why he lived alone?
“Wulfan mate for life,” Chris said, and for a second, the pain showed in his expression and his voice. He scrubbed a hand through his shaggy black hair and his face changed. “Peter tells me you’re quite the artist.”
The sudden change in topic caught me off guard. “I draw. Peter likes my work and has a few pieces on his wall.”
Chris’s eyebrows rose. “Those are yours? You’re good.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering when Chris had seen them. I didn’t think Peter had visitors, but it seemed Peter had an entire life I knew nothing about.
“Your understanding of anatomy will help you shift,” Chris said. “One of the main reasons wulfleng fail during the change is they panic. They can’t go in either direction, so they get stuck in a cycle of agony. Their heart can’t take it.” He changed his stance, turning sideways. “To stop that from happening, it’s best if you visualize every step of the change to wulf form and back. This should be easier for you, since you’ll understand what’s occurring beneath the skin. I need you to observe closely.”
I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to watch this, let alone closely, but I got the gist of how important this would be. “How can you know I will change?”
“I don’t,” he said. “We won’t know for sure until the night of the full moon. But you need to prepare, just in case. For the record, I have a good sense for these things, and I think you’ll transform.” He shook his arms and rolled his shoulders. “Okay. The first thing to remember is to keep your muscles as relaxed as possible. Much of the manipulation that occurs is soft tissue, if you tense against the change, it will be more painful, and you can tear your muscles and ligaments.”
Muscle tears. Pain. Right. Relax.
“Now, the transformation usually starts with the extremities: the head, hands and feet. Although the better you get at it, the more control you have over it.” He held up a hand for me to see. As I watched, his fingers curled—the fingernails lengthening and thickening, and the skin and soft tissue beneath reforming into long, hard pads. His fingers had also thickened, and I realized the tendons holding the bones together had grown stronger, preparing them to bear weight rather than just hang from the ends of his arms.
After the initial clenching of my stomach, the artist in me slipped into the driver’s seat. I became fascinated with the alterations to Chris’s body. He waited until he seemed satisfied that I wouldn’t faint, and allowed the change to take him.
The only thing that made me queasy was when his skull transformed, primarily his jaw. The remainder of the skull barely did anything; it was all soft tissue changes, like the ear cartilage. But the upper and lower jaw made pretty strange noises as they elongated. I understood now why the wulfan possessed a shorter jaw than a real wolf—the bone itself had to grow to form the carnivore snout. And when the sharp wulf canines pushed through, his gums bled. Rather than altering the existing ones, the wulf teeth dropped from above the regular dental arcade. The human teeth stayed human, inside and around the others.
Other things happened behind the skull, where the muscles that held the human skull upright expanded to form an arched neck capable of holding a head out from the body. A popping sound made Chris grunt. His chest changed as the collarbone gave way—permitting his shoulders to drop forward and his shoulder blades to hang more vertically like a wolf’s. I knew the collarbone to be rudimentary in many animals, especially those that required flexibility of the shoulder girdle for running.
Chris crouched, bringing his curled fingers to the ground. The change compromised between the human and true wolf anatomy: his shoulders much wider than a wolf’s and articulated differently. His arm, from shoulder to elbow, hung free from his body. Unlike most running animals, wulves could swing their arms in a circle and outward. I had a brief mental image of a wulfan swinging in the trees and snorted.
My sound caught his attention, and he looked at me with his dark, all-too-human eyes. Long hair sprouted in a thick mane around his head and chased the changes down his spine. Another weird, wet noise announced the tail, at first naked like a rat’s, then bushing out. His pelvis did not appear to alter shape, except to rotate, and his legs grew thicker rather than shorter—the muscles bulked up along the thigh and calf, and the tendons became stronger, suspending his foot with the heel in the air and leaving only his toes on the ground.
In a surprisingly short time, Chris stood before me in his wulfan form. Not counting the gray streaks in his mane, he was as black as Dillon, but my trained eye noted the differences in his build. Dillon’s extra height as a human translated into longer legs as a wulfleng. Chris’s musculature made him wide everywhere, and his hind legs—being shorter—were not as angulated as Dillon’s but were more in balance with his front legs.
I found the differences more fascinating than the similarities. Does that mean Dillon can jump higher, but Chris can run faster? How do the variances in human form translate to abilities as a wulf?
As soon as the change completed, Chris began to reverse it. In moments he stood naked in front of me as a human, surrounded by a cloud of dark hair that drifted to the barn floor.
“I had no idea it could be that fast,” I said, amazed. My gaze dropped to the tufts of hair surrounding him. “Or that messy.”
Chris seemed pleased at my ready acceptance of the morphing process. “I slowed it for you.
