The changes came in stages, which was the only mercy of it.
The first week after the fever, it was just the senses. The hearing, the smell, the way she could track the source of sounds the way a compass tracks north. She dropped a pencil in the school hallway and caught it before it hit the floor, an impossible reflex, and stood looking at it in her hand while people streamed around her. She got a migraine from the fluorescent lights. She had to switch to contacts because her glasses — her prescription, which hadn't changed in two years — were suddenly blurry at the edges, her vision sharpening past their correction.
The second week, her body began to be strange in the more specific way she would come to understand as the change asserting itself.
She was lying on her bed on a Wednesday afternoon, ostensibly doing homework, when it happened for the first time: a ripple. That was the only word for it. Under the surface of her skin, a ripple, like something trying to resolve into a different shape. It lasted two seconds and left her breathless and sweating, and she sat up and looked at her arms and they were just her arms — the same arms, the same olive skin, the fine dark hair on her forearms — but there was something different about the way she was in them. Something more crowded.
She pulled up her sleeve and looked at the mark on her hand. The two small scars from the wolf's teeth. They had faded to nearly nothing, but under the right light she could still see them, and she pressed her thumb over them and felt a faint pulse that was not her heartbeat, something slower and older.
She typed "werewolf symptoms" into her phone and then immediately deleted the search and lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
"Be normal," she said aloud to herself. "Just be normal."
Her body didn't appear to care.
The third week, her body began to change in ways she could not dismiss or rationalize. She was not imagining it. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door and looked honestly and took inventory, something she generally avoided because the inventory generally left her feeling like she was filling out the wrong form.
She had always been on the smaller side, five foot four, slight everywhere her curves weren't. Now she was five foot five and a half — she measured three times, certain she was doing it wrong. Her hands were slightly larger. Not dramatically, not monstrously, just... by a fraction, the kind of fraction you'd have to measure. Her jaw felt different when she moved it. She pressed her hands to her face and felt the geometry of it with her fingertips, the way you read braille.
Her voice, she noticed later, had dropped about a half-step.
She stood in the bathroom after brushing her teeth and ran that sound — the sound of her own speaking voice — back through her memory, and it was not her voice. It was close to her voice. It was recognizably her. But it was lower, and it had a roughness in the middle of it, and when she said her own name in the mirror the name sounded right for the first time in a long time and she did not know what to do with that.
She closed the medicine cabinet, and her reflection blinked back at her, and she pressed both palms flat against the cool glass and looked herself directly in the eye.
Her eyes, she noticed, had changed. They had always been dark brown, almost black. They were still dark. But in certain light there was something in them that caught the light the way an animal's eye catches light — a faint, pale gleam in the dark, there and gone.
"Okay," she said again.
Her voice, even lower than before, said the word back at her, and in it she heard something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite relief. Something that had no name yet.