Chapter One: Unfamiliar Skin

  Pain comes first. Not the sharp bite of a wound or the deep throb of a bruise, but a wrongness radiating from my core outward, as if my entire existence has been pulled through a space too small and reconstructed incorrectly. Every nerve screams that something fundamental has been broken.

  I try to open my eyes. The command travels down pathways that do not make sense, firing neurons in patterns that feel incorrect. My eyelids flutter, resist, finally peel apart. Too bright. The light stabs through my pupils like needles, and I squeeze them shut again. The afterimage burns orange behind my closed lids.

  I try to lift my hand to shield my face. My hand does not respond. Panic surges and I send the signal again, demanding movement, but something twitches in the wrong place entirely. Not my hand. Not my arm. Somewhere else. The disconnect between intention and execution makes my stomach lurch, bile rising in my throat.

  When I try to sit up, my center of gravity lurches wrong, pulls from somewhere too low and too far back. The world tilts sickeningly. I gasp and the sound that emerges is higher, softer, carrying an undertone that purrs and hitches. The vibration resonates in my chest like there is a second set of vocal cords I never asked for. That is not my voice. That cannot be my voice.

  My hands fly to my throat. Small fingers with too many joints press against a neck too slender, too delicate. I feel my own pulse hammering beneath skin covered in something soft. The texture under my fingertips is all wrong, not smooth human skin but something finer, denser. There is fur on my skin.

  I look down and the scream builds in my chest but emerges as a choked whimper. This body is small and slight. The proportions are all wrong. Legs that bend differently, joints hinged at angles that should not exist. Arms that end in hands with pads on the palms and claws, sharp white curves protruding from beneath the skin of my fingertips. I have claws.

  They extend as I watch, white curves sliding from beneath the skin with a soft schick sound. Sharp and real and deadly. The extension is involuntary, triggered by stress, by panic, by something deep in this body's instincts that I have no conscious control over. I can feel the sheath they retract into, the muscles that control them, sensations that should be impossible, that cannot be real. Not mine. This cannot be mine.

  I try to remember who I was before this, what my hands looked like, what my voice sounded like. There should be memories there, a lifetime of them. But they slip away like water through cupped palms. There is something there, just beyond reach. A face. A life. A name. But the harder I chase them, the faster they flee, leaving only gaps and the sick certainty that something that should be there is gone.

  A sound from somewhere to my right makes my head snap toward it with frightening speed. Too fast. And something on top of my head moved with me, pivoted, swiveled, tracked the sound. I reach up slowly, dreading what I will find, my fingers trembling. My fingers encounter fur covering ears. Triangle-shaped ears. There are ears on top of my head. Not where human ears should be, those are gone or covered or never existed. These new ears sit high on my skull, mobile, already swiveling to catch every tiny sound in the room.

  The room tilts. My stomach heaves and I lean over the side of the bed and retch. Nothing comes up but bile and the sick certainty that I am trapped in something that cannot possibly be real. My body convulses, trying to expel something that is not there, trying to reject reality itself. The spasms hurt, pulling at muscles that are arranged differently than they should be, connected in unfamiliar patterns.

  But it is real. Every sensation screaming through this alien nervous system confirms it. The way the fabric beneath me feels against skin covered in fine fur, each thread distinct, each texture amplified. The way my weight distributes differently, too light, centered wrong, balanced on a frame that weighs far less than I remember weighing. The way something behind me is moving, swishing with my distress, responding to emotions I am not consciously choosing to express. I twist to look and the world lurches again.

  I have a tail.

  Long, furred, white with black rosettes creating patterns across the fur. Moving on its own, expressing emotions I am not consciously choosing, panic and horror and confusion all broadcast by this appendage that should not exist. It lashes against the bedding and I can feel it, nerve endings extending beyond where my body should end, sensation continuing past the base of my spine into this impossible extension.

  I reach back and touch it, wrapping my fingers around the base where it connects to my spine. The sensation is indescribable, like touching a part of myself that should not exist, feeling my own grip through nerves that have no right to be there. The tail twitches in my hand, responding to the contact with a startled jerk that I did not consciously command. It is sensitive, I realize. More sensitive than I expected. The fur is soft under my fingers, the muscles beneath it strong and flexible, designed for movement and expression and balance.

  Letting go and it swishes back into motion, curling and uncurling with agitation that perfectly mirrors my internal state. This thing, this appendage, it knows what I am feeling. It broadcasts my emotions to anyone watching whether I want it to or not. I have no privacy in my own body anymore. Every fear, every anger, every moment of vulnerability will be visible to the world through the movement of this tail.

  "No," I whisper to the empty room, my voice breaking on the word, cracking with fear and grief. The denial means nothing. Nothing I say will change what I am seeing, what I am feeling, what I have somehow become.

  Standing proves difficult and my legs buckle. The joints bend wrong, my feet landing on something between toes and paws, digitigrade like an animal's hindlegs. Every instinct I have about how to distribute weight is suddenly, catastrophically incorrect. I hit the floor hard. The impact jolts through bones that are lighter than they should be, a frame that weighs far less than I remember weighing. My hands slap against wooden floorboards, and I feel it through the pads on my palms, another wrong sensation, another reminder that this body is not mine.

  What did I feel like? There was a face. My face. I had seen it in mirrors every day of my life and now that face is gone and I cannot even remember what it looked like. Were my eyes brown? Blue? Did I have freckles? Scars? The void where those memories should be is terrifying, more frightening than the physical changes because it means I am losing more than just my body. I am losing myself.

  The door opens and a woman bustles into the room carrying a tray. Older and heavy-set, with a face creased by years of hard work and weathered by sun and wind.

  I scramble backward on instinct. The panic response is visceral, overwhelming, bypassing conscious thought entirely. My claws extend fully, my ears flatten against my skull, and a sound emerges from my throat, not quite a hiss, not quite a growl, but something primal and defensive.

  The woman stops, her expression shifting from cheerful to concerned. She sets the tray on a small table and crouches down slowly, like approaching a frightened animal. Which is exactly what I am to her, I realize with a sickening jolt. That is what I am now.

  "Easy now, easy. You're safe." Her voice is warm and concerned and achingly normal. "My name's Marta. This is my inn, The Crossroads. You're in a town called Millhaven." She keeps her hands visible, palms open, the way you might approach a cornered animal. "A merchant named Tallen brought you in three days ago. Found you collapsed on the eastern road."

  Three days. I have been unconscious for three days.

  I open my mouth to speak but no words come. Only a small, broken sound that makes her face crease with sympathy, her expression softening further.

  "Can you understand me, love?"

  I force myself to nod. The movement makes my ears twitch and swivel, tracking her voice automatically. I feel them move, feel the muscles in my skull shifting them, orienting them toward the source of sound without any conscious input from me. Another system functioning without my permission, another reminder that this body has instincts and responses I do not control.

  Marta straightens, her knees creaking slightly. She gestures toward the basin by the window. "There's water if you want to freshen up. I'll bring you breakfast. You must be starving after three days."

  She leaves and I am alone again with this body, this wrong body that moves and functions according to rules I do not understand. I force myself onto hands and knees, then slowly, carefully, to my feet. The balance is wrong but my body knows what to do even if I do not, weight forward on the balls of my feet, tail extended for counterbalance, knees bent at that impossible digitigrade angle.

  The basin sits on a small table by the window. I stumble toward it, each step an exercise in recalibrating everything I thought I knew about movement. My feet hit the floor differently, my arms swing at different angles, and my tail swishes behind me with each movement, adjusting my center of gravity automatically. When I reach the basin, I grip its edge with both hands and force myself to look at the water's surface.

  The face looking back is not mine. Cannot be mine. This is someone else's face, some creature's face, something from a story or a nightmare. But those emerald eyes blink when I blink. That small mouth opens when mine does. The ears on top of that head twitch when I concentrate on them.

  Delicate features covered in white fur with black rosettes creating patterns across skin that should be smooth and bare. A small, feline nose. Larger eyes than any human should have, taking up too much of the face, designed for seeing in darkness. Slit pupils that expand and contract with the light, narrowing to vertical lines when the sunlight hits them directly.

  Nekojin. That is what Marta called me. Cat person. Something out of a storybook, a myth, a child's tale. Monsters that steal children. Beasts that prey on travelers. Creatures that are not quite human, not quite animal, but something in between. But I am looking at one right now and it is looking back at me with my own horror reflected in those too-large eyes.

  I touch my face with trembling hands. The reflection does the same, perfectly synchronized, confirming that this impossible image is real. I pull my lips back and find canines longer than they should be, sharper, curved inward slightly. Designed for tearing meat. Predator's teeth in a body that weighs maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, that barely comes up to an adult human's chest.

  My hands drop to the basin's edge and I grip it hard enough that my claws extend, scraping against the ceramic with a sound that makes my ears flatten. This is real. This is my body now. And I have no idea how it happened or why or what I am supposed to do about it. No memory of a transformation, no explanation, no understanding of what force or magic or curse did this to me.

  The pendant around my neck catches my attention in the water's reflection. I lift it, examining the carved wooden symbol. A crescent moon embracing a star. Simple and clean and worn smooth with age. The only thing I apparently own besides the body I am trapped in and the simple shift I am wearing. Someone made this. Someone wore it. Was that someone me, before whatever happened? Or did someone else place it around my neck while I was unconscious?

  The wood is warm against my palm, the carving familiar in a way I cannot explain, as if my hands remember touching it even though my mind does not. I run my thumb across the surface, feeling the grooves where the moon curves, the points where the star radiates outward. The craftsmanship is fine, careful, the work of someone who cared about creating something beautiful as well as meaningful.

  It means something. This symbol, this pendant, it has significance that I can sense but cannot grasp. The merchant who found me, this Tallen that Marta mentioned, he must have seen it around my neck when he discovered me on the road. He could have taken it, sold it, no one would have known or cared. But he left it with me. Either out of kindness or superstition or something else entirely.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I tuck the pendant back beneath the collar of my shift, feeling it settle against my chest, a small weight that is somehow comforting. Whatever else I have lost, I have this. A connection to something, even if I do not know what.

  Marta returns with a tray and the scent hits me before she is through the door. Food. My stomach cramps with sudden, desperate hunger. Not the normal empty feeling of missing a meal, but something more urgent, more demanding, more visceral. This body burns through energy fast, I realize. Three days without food. This metabolism needs fuel constantly.

  She sets the tray on the small table. "Sit. Eat. You'll feel better with something in your belly." The stool is too tall. I have to climb onto it, pulling myself up with hands that shake, using my claws for purchase on the wooden legs. The motion is humiliating, a grown adult climbing onto furniture like a child, but Marta does not comment. She settles onto the bench across from me, her weight making it creak, as I look at the bowl of porridge, thick and steaming, with chunks of meat and vegetables floating in it.

  I pick up the spoon. It is oversized for my smaller hands, designed for human proportions. I have to adjust my grip, hold it differently than I remember holding utensils. I force myself to take a bite and the flavor explodes across my tongue, more intense than anything I remember tasting. Salt, herbs, the gamey taste of meat, sweet root vegetables, all hitting my enhanced palate at once. Every ingredient is distinct, layered, overwhelming.

  And then my chest starts rumbling. The purr builds without my permission, vibrating through my ribs, audible enough that I see Marta smile. My face burns with shame. I clamp my jaw shut, trying to force the sound to stop, but it continues anyway, this animal response to food and warmth that I have no power over.

  "Don't be ashamed of that," Marta says, her smile gentle. "Just means you like the food."

  But I am ashamed. I should be able to control my own body. This is my body now, mine, and I should be able to choose whether or not I make these animal sounds, whether or not my ears swivel, whether or not my tail moves. But I cannot. The purr continues as I eat, rumbling embarrassingly loud in the quiet room.

  I eat anyway. Because I am starving. Because survival matters more than dignity. Because I do not have a choice. The porridge disappears faster than I intend, my body demanding fuel with desperate urgency. Each bite threatens to bring the purr back stronger. I fight it, force it down, but the rumble keeps escaping despite my efforts.

  Marta watches me with sympathetic eyes. "You're handling this better than most," she says quietly. "Most nekojin I've seen freshly changed don't have words yet. Just sounds." She pauses. "The fact that you're talking, thinking, being you—that's good."

  The words hit me like a blow. Freshly changed. This happens to people.

  "This has happened before?" I ask. "To others?"

  Her expression shifts to something cautious. "Sometimes. Not often, but yes. A curse, most say. Some god's punishment or a sorcerer's spite." She folds her hands in her lap. "You wake up like this and everything you were is gone."

  Gone. Because that is what it feels like. That person is gone. Whoever I was, whatever I was, it has been erased as thoroughly as if I had died.

  "I can't remember anything," I say, and my voice cracks on the words. "Not my name. Not my face. Not my life."

  Marta nods slowly, as if she expected this. "The transformation takes memories. Not all of them—the personal ones. Your identity." She says the word carefully, like she's said it before to others. "It's part of the curse, they say. You keep your language, your basic knowledge of the world, but everything that made you who you were is gone."

  I press her for more, desperate for anything that might help me understand what has happened.

  "Nobody knows for certain," she says. "The curse seems random. Strikes without warning or apparent reason." She shifts on the bench. "Some believe it's punishment from the gods for sins committed in past lives. Others say it's the work of powerful sorcerers who trap souls in animal bodies for amusement or revenge." She pauses. "Still others claim the nekojin have always existed, a separate race born of magic rather than nature, and that the transformation is simply a human soul awakening to its true form."

  None of these explanations satisfy me. None of them tell me why this happened to me, specifically, or what I did to deserve it, or how I might undo it.

  "Can it be reversed?"

  Marta's expression turns careful. "I've never heard of a transformation being undone. Once changed, you stay changed. Forever." She lets that word sit between us for a moment. "Some nekojin live long lives, carving out places for themselves in human society or disappearing into the wild places where their enhanced senses give them advantages. Others..." She trails off, then forces herself to finish. "Others don't last long at all. Broken by the trauma or hunted by those who view them as less than animals."

  The bluntness of her words hits me like a physical blow. Not all of us survive. She is warning me, I realize, preparing me for a world that may kill me simply for existing.

  The finality of it sits like lead in my stomach despite the warm food.

  "I'm sorry," Marta says quietly. "I wish I had better news. But you're alive. You can talk, you can think, you can learn." She meets my eyes. "That's more than nothing."

  Is it? Right now, alive does not feel like much of a victory. But I nod anyway because what else can I do?

  "Rest a bit more," she says, standing. "When you're ready, come downstairs. We'll figure out what comes next." She pauses at the door. "I can offer you work. Nothing fancy—serving, cleaning, kitchen help. But it'd be a start. A way to earn your keep while you figure out what to do with this new existence."

  She leaves and I sit there on the too-tall stool, my feet dangling above the floor, my tail curled around the stool's leg, feeling the wrongness of this body settle over me like a shroud. I am trapped. Cursed. Changed into something that is not human and can never be human again.

  My hand finds the pendant again. The crescent moon and star. I do not know what it means, but it is the only thing I have that might connect me to who I was before. I hold it tight, feeling the smooth wood against my palm, and try to decide what to do next.

  Eventually I stand, carefully, testing my balance, and make my way back to the basin. The water's surface shows me the same impossible face. White and black fur. Emerald eyes. Triangle ears. This is me now. This is what I am.

  I touch my reflection in the water, watching the ripples distort the image. When the surface stills again, the nekojin looks back at me with those too-large eyes filled with my own confusion and fear and desperate, fragile determination.

  There is a world outside this room. A world that apparently sees creatures like me as less than human, as strays, as problems to be avoided or exploited or discarded. Marta offered me work, offered me a chance to earn my keep. I do not know what that will look like, do not know what challenges wait for me in that common room below. But staying in this room forever is not an option. At some point I will have to open that door, walk down those stairs, and face whatever this new existence has in store for me.

  I move to the window and look out at the town below. Millhaven, Marta called it. A small town from the look of it, wooden buildings lining dirt streets, people going about their daily business. All of them human, as far as I can see. All of them larger than me, stronger than me, with every advantage of belonging to a world that was built for them and not for whatever I have become.

  I watch them for a long moment, these people who do not know I am here, who go about their lives without the slightest awareness that a creature is watching them from this upper window. A woman carries a basket of bread from the bakery, her arms strong and sure. Two men argue outside a shop, their voices carrying clearly to my enhanced ears even through the closed window, their disagreement about the price of nails seeming impossibly mundane. A group of children play some kind of chasing game in the square, their laughter bright and uncomplicated.

  Normal life. Simple life. The kind of life that consists of meals and work and friendships and sleep, repeated day after day without the fundamental nature of existence suddenly turning inside out.

  A child runs past below, chasing a dog through the street. The dog barks, a sound so loud to my new ears that I flinch involuntarily. The child laughs, a pure and uncomplicated sound that makes something in my chest ache. That kind of joy, that kind of freedom, I may never know it again. Whatever childhood I had, whatever simple pleasures I once experienced, they are locked away in memories I can no longer access.

  I turn away from the window and catch my reflection in a small mirror hanging on the wall. The nekojin stares back at me, ears perked forward, tail swishing slowly behind her. Behind me. The distinction feels important somehow, the difference between observing this creature and being this creature. I am not looking at something separate from myself. I am looking at myself. This body, these features, these alien proportions, they are mine now whether I wanted them or not.

  The fur on my face is soft when I touch it, the whiskers surprisingly sensitive. My ears rotate toward the sound of footsteps in the hall outside, then settle back when the steps pass my door. My tail curls around my leg, seeking comfort or warmth or connection, I am not sure which. All of these movements happen without my conscious control, the body acting on instincts that are older than my awareness of having them.

  I think about what Marta said. That I am handling this better than most. That some who wake up like this cannot even speak, cannot hold thoughts together. Something about that bothers me, picks at the edges of my missing memories. Why would the transformation affect people so differently? Why would some lose more than others? And why do I still have language, still have reasoning, still have enough of myself to recognize that I have lost myself?

  Questions without answers. One more thing to add to the endless list of things I do not understand about my situation.

  The afternoon sunlight shifts, casting long shadows across the wooden floor. I have been standing here for too long, lost in contemplation that changes nothing. Marta said to come downstairs when I am ready. The question is whether I will ever feel ready, whether readiness is even possible when facing something this overwhelming.

  But waiting will not make it easier. And my stomach is already growling again, that relentless metabolism demanding more fuel even though I ate less than an hour ago. If nothing else, hunger will eventually force me out of this room.

  I cross to the door and put my hand on the handle. The metal is cool against my palm, the texture distinct in ways my old hands would never have noticed. I can hear the sounds of the common room below, voices and footsteps and the clatter of dishes. The smell of cooking food rises through the floorboards, making my mouth water.

  I can do this. I have to do this. Whatever waits for me on the other side of this door, whatever challenges and cruelties and small kindnesses this world has in store for a nekojin with no memories and no identity, I will face them. Because the alternative is giving up, and I am apparently too stubborn or too desperate or too something to do that.

  I take a breath, feeling my chest expand, feeling the strange way this body processes air through lungs that are proportioned differently than I remember. I let the breath out slowly. My tail uncurls from my leg and extends behind me, ready to help balance whatever movements come next. My ears rotate forward, alert, listening for danger or opportunity or anything that might help me survive what comes next.

  Opening the door.

  The hallway stretches before me, narrow and dark compared to the sunlit room behind me. My enhanced vision adjusts immediately, picking out details in the shadows that would have been invisible to human eyes. The grain of the wooden walls. A spider web in the corner. Dust motes floating in the thin shaft of light from a window at the far end.

  This body has advantages. I have been so focused on everything wrong with it, everything frightening and alien and unwanted, that I have not stopped to consider what it can do. Enhanced senses. Heightened reflexes. The claws that extend from my fingertips without conscious thought. None of these are things I asked for, but they are things I have now. Tools, maybe, if I can learn to use them.

  The stairs are at the end of the hall. I can hear the common room more clearly now, the buzz of conversation, the clink of glasses, someone laughing at something I cannot quite make out. It sounds like a normal place, a normal afternoon, normal people going about normal lives.

  I am not normal. I will never be normal again. But maybe I can find some way to exist in a world that was not built for creatures like me. Maybe I can carve out some small space where I can survive, where I can figure out who I am now that I cannot remember who I was.

  The first step is getting down those stairs. The first step is always the hardest.

  I start walking toward them, my footsteps nearly silent on the wooden floor, my tail swishing behind me with each stride. The movement is becoming more natural already, the body's instincts starting to integrate with my conscious control. I am still learning how to exist in this form, but I am learning. That has to count for something.

  At the top of the stairs, I pause. The common room opens up below me, visible through the railing, larger and more crowded than I expected. So many people. So many giants, from my new perspective. Any one of them could hurt me without effort, could break me with their bare hands if they chose to. The vulnerability of my new size hits me again, a fresh wave of fear that makes my ears flatten and my claws extend.

  I count them. Eight patrons at the tables, plus Marta behind the counter, plus a serving woman I had not seen before carrying bowls of stew. Ten humans in total, each of them at least twice my height, their casual strength apparent in every movement. The man nearest the stairs has forearms as thick as my thighs. The woman by the fire could lift me with one hand without straining.

  I am prey. That is the truth of my existence now. In any physical confrontation with these creatures, I would lose. Badly. The claws that extend from my fingertips, the teeth that can tear meat, these are not weapons against beings so much larger and stronger than me. They are last resorts, defenses of desperation, options to be used only when all other options have failed.

  But fear will not help me. Fear will only make me weak, will only prove to everyone watching that I am exactly what they expect a stray nekojin to be. Pitiful. Helpless. Less than human.

  I straighten my spine. I force my ears to perk forward. I retract my claws with conscious effort, feeling them slide back into their sheaths. My tail still swishes nervously behind me, but that is something I cannot control yet, maybe something I will never fully control.

  I am going to walk down these stairs. I am going to find Marta. I am going to work, earn my keep, prove that I am more than just another stray to be pitied or exploited or discarded. I am going to survive this, whatever this is, whatever it takes.

  The first stair creaks under my weight as I begin my descent.