Chapter 1 - The First Shift**
The first time I turned into a bear, I was twenty-two years old, six weeks pregnant, and screaming at the man I was not supposed to love.
One second, I was standing barefoot in my cramped college apartment kitchen with a glass of ice water shaking so violently in my hand that the cubes clinked like wind chimes against the rim. The next second, the glass slipped from my nerveless fingers and shattered into a thousand jagged crystal pieces across the linoleum floor.
My bones suddenly seemed to catch fire. It wasn't the slow, creeping heat of a fever; it felt like white-hot liquid iron being pumped directly into my marrow, rewriting my DNA from the inside out. My skin tightened, my spine cracked with the force of a falling branch, and a blinding wave of dizziness forced me to my knees.
My roommate Mia backed away in sheer terror until her spine hit the side of the refrigerator, her eyes wide as dinner plates. She whispered, “Chloe? Oh my God, Chloe, what is happening to you?”
I tried to answer her, to form words, to tell her to call an ambulance.
Instead, a deafening roar tore its way out of my throat.
It wasn't a human scream. It wasn't even a sound I recognized as my own. It was a primal, thunderous roar powerful enough to rattle the cheap apartment cabinet doors right off their hinges and make the dishes dance on their shelves.
Then the gravity beneath me completely dissolved.
My hands slammed hard against the kitchen floor, except they were no longer hands. They were massive, powerful paws the size of heavy dinner plates, tipped with long, curved claws that clicked against the shattered glass without piercing my thick pads. Coarse, dark brown fur instantly erupted across my arms, back, and shoulders. My favorite cotton pajamas tore down the seams with a sharp ripping sound as my body expanded, doubling in mass, morphing into something enormous, terrified, and utterly impossible.
Mia slid slowly down the side of the refrigerator until she was sitting on the floor, clutching her head with both hands clamped tightly over her mouth to muffled her screams.
For three terrifying seconds, neither of us moved a muscle. The apartment was dead silent except for my own heavy, ragged breathing, which now sounded like a bellows.
Then Mia looked up at my massive, furry snout, blinked twice, and said very carefully, “Okay. You know what? I would like to formally apologize for every single time I called your mountain stepbrother weird.”
If I had still possessed a human mouth and vocal cords, I probably would have laughed until I cried.
Instead, somewhere deep beneath the dizzying panic of my animal instincts, one horrifying thought flashed through my mind with the clarity of a lightning strike: Rowan had always warned me that loving him could change everything.
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He had just never explicitly mentioned that he meant it quite so literally.
And he definitely, absolutely had never told me there might be a baby involved.
