Strange Eyes
Eighteen

It happened so slowly, and then all at once. I hardly had time to keep up.

The night was heavy around me. I was awake. It was too early to be awake. But I was. Staring up at the ceiling, there was a heaviness to the air. A thickness. It whistled through my lips, deep down in my lungs. My hands were folded along the hollowness of my stomach. The curve of my hip bones. The silver darkness with subdued with brightness, the night making sounds around me that I couldn’t decipher. Like its own language.

Then came the swelter.

It was in a single moment. The heaviness of the heat, the absolute weight of it as it came down around me, slowly and then all at once, pumping in my boiling blood and shining in the sweat that collected along my weary skin. I gasped. Taking a breath in. One heavy, single breath.

And I knew that it was happening. The Change.

I was quick. My feet alive with animation, with the swiftness of panic. I felt my throat tighten, the heat like a wall surrounding me as I pressed against it with all of my might, begging to be released from the pain. The pain. I felt the pounding in my head with my feet along Halona’s floor, the darkness of the house all that I could decipher. The moon shone in through the windows as I gasped for air, pushing open the back door to the outside. The night surrounded me to no relief. My knees touched my ground, my hands along my head as I let out a cry that was hardly human. My brain was splitting, my muscles expanding and contracting with a wildness that I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

I was losing control.

I pictured Sam in my mind, closing my eyes with salty tears spilling out of them and steaming along my skin as my knees touched the earth, my body closing in on itself as the pain overwhelmed me. There was nothing and no one to help me. Not even Halona. There were no footsteps, no comforting hands and comforting voices. I was alone. I writhed against the earth, my cries piercing the darkness. Sam’s dark gaze was all that I saw. Within a split second, Adonis’ golden irises flashed in my mind, startling in the blinding pain. His voice rang in my ears with a deep tenor.

“Don’t fight.” His voice whispered to me in a language that I didn’t understand yet somehow I did. It was like he was there, but not there at the same time. I cried out once more in the overwhelming agony, the heat radiating off of every fiber of my being as my body expanded and contracted, closed in around itself and pushed outward at the same time in angles that it wasn’t supposed to bend in. The snap of bones, the tightening of muscles, the widening of eyes among gasping, haggard breaths. I could feel myself moving, something rising up inside of me. I could taste copper in the back of my throat. The fire lapped against my skin, the burning rising in my blood, rushing through me at rapid pace along with my aching brain. My voice was hollow. I couldn’t scream anymore. I succumbed to the pain, Sam’s eyes the last thing that I saw before the final burst of newness surged through me, my atoms splitting, my being tearing apart as the magic overcame me.