"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Look at your hand," she said. He did so. "There are claws recessed into your fingers. Make them come out."

Tarrin gave her a look, then looked at his hand. He tried to flex his hands to get them to come out, but all they did was shift inside their sheaths. Clawing his hands did make them come out a little, but they didn't actually extend. There was a muscle in there, he realized, muscles that he had to learn how to move. Kind of like people who could wiggle their ears, they always said it was a matter of knowing which muscles to flex. It was the same with this, but the problem was, these were muscles he didn't even have when he'd went to sleep. He furrowed his brow in concentration, relying on his enhanced sense of touch, and a strange, new feeling of just knowing his body. He could feel the claws in there. He seemed to sense that they were worked by certain muscles attached to the bases. He clenched his oversized hand into a fist, and then opened it and tried again, flexing inside rather than outside.

Silently, five claws, each one as long as Dolanna's little finger, slid out from the tips of his fingers. They were vicious, formidable looking weapons. He looked at them and wondered how that creature had managed not to kill him. They were hooked, like a cat's claws, sharp along the inside edges and at the tip. "Very good," she complemented, as he relaxed his hands, and the claws slid back up inside his fingers.

Tarrin's belly growled. "Think I could get something to eat?" he asked.

"Yes, I will have something sent up to you," she said, scrubbing her eyes with her hands. "Now that you are awake and seem to be well, I can get some sleep," she said.

"How long was I asleep?"

"Three days," she replied wearily. "The wounds you took in the fight were dreadful, and on top of that, this happened to you. Your body exhausted almost all of its energy in the transformation, which healed you as a side effect. You may not have survived had I not been here. And I wanted to be here when you awoke, to help calm the shock and fear of finding this waiting for you when you awoke."

"Three days," he said in wonder. It didn't feel like he'd been asleep for three days. "Do, do the others know?"

"Faalken does," she said. "I told Duke Arren what happened as well. Walten and Tiella only know that you were severely injured, but they do not know you have been changed. I will tell them now, so that they can adjust to it."

He couldn't help but ask. "What happened to her?" he asked.

"She escaped," she said grimly. "She killed twelve men while doing it. My spell wore off much faster than it should have, and she ripped the cell door off the hinges. She killed the cell guards, two other guards, a servant, and a stablehand. Arren tried to trap her inside the castle by raising the drawbridge, but she simply climbed up the wall and jumped off the top. If she would have simply waited, none of that would have been necessary."

"What do you mean?"

"She was wearing a collar," Dolanna said.

"I remember it," he interrupted, an image of her coming to his mind.

"It was controlling her," she continued. "She was being compelled by magic into doing what she was doing. It was not really her fault. She was being used. I think she was fighting the collar the entire time."

"She should have been able to kill me easily," Tarrin mused to himself, remembering more images of the fight between them. There was any number of places where she could have just put her hand across his neck and slit his throat. She had the speed to do it. If she'd been fighting the collar, it explained much. Why he was able to outmove her, and do the things he was doing. She was distracted. His mother had said many times, "in a fight, the man with his mind on two things usually ends up with his mind in two places." Mother's sayings were usually graphic, but they were very true.

Mother. How were his parents going to react to, to this? He was fairly certain that, after the initial shock, that they would adjust to it, even as he would. But it would be painful. His parents were intelligent, open-minded people. But if they rejected him, he didn't know if he could live through that.

He pushed it out of his mind for the moment. He wasn't even ready to start dwelling on things like that yet. His mind was tickled by something Dolanna has said, about the collar. About the Were-cat woman being controlled. Then someone had to be controlling her, and they ordered her to come up here and kill him.

"Who would go through all that trouble?" he mused.

"Excuse me?" Dolanna asked.

"Why would they send that woman to kill me?" he asked. "I'm not worth that much attention."

"It may not have been you," she said. "Her target may have been someone else, and she simply came into your room by mistake."

Tarrin looked at her, her smell filling his nose. "I don't know," he said simply, leaning back against the headboard. "If she can smell the same way I can, then if she knew my scent, she'd know who to come after. But maybe not. I guess we'll never know."

She stood and stretched, then leaned over the bed and put her hand on his cheek gently. "I must get used to those eyes," she said gently, "but in a way, looking like this, you are very handsome, Tarrin," she told him. "Almost as if this was what you were always meant to be."

"My eyes?"

"They are green," she said. "The same color as the woman's. They are a cat's eyes, with the vertically slitted pupils. They are very striking."

"Huh," he said in wonder.

"Well, you are hungry, and I need to sleep," she said. "I will bring you a meal and some books to read. For your own safety, I do not advise you to leave this room. After the deaths of their comrades, the castle's guards may not take kindly to you. You should take this time to get familiar with yourself. Learn how to move your tail, for example. I will have Faalken check in with you about once an hour, so that if you need something, there will be someone about to see that you get it."

"Alright," he said.

After she left, Tarrin tentatively threw back the covers, and looked down at himself. He was nude, and his tail was coming out from under him. His tail wasn't very thick, more for ornament than use, and covered with black fur. His legs looked mostly like they did, except they looked more muscled, and of course they had the fur on them that started at a ragged line just above his knees. He reached down and put his hand on the fur, feeling that it was both soft and rather thick, but not very long. He reckoned that from a distance it would almost look like black breeches. His feet were similarly oversized, wider through the ball of his foot, almost like a paw, with long, thick toes that were tipped with those nasty claws. There wasn't a pair of shoes out there that would fit those feet. He sat up and pulled a leg up, then grabbed the oversized foot in his hands and turned it so he could look at the bottom. He was surprised at how easily his foot rotated like that, and he saw that the bottom of his feet were covered with two thick pads, much like his hands were. One was at the ball of his foot, and the other at the heel, with smaller pads on the bottom of each toe. The claws on his feet were even larger than the ones on his fingers.

Swinging his legs over the bed, he shakily stood up on his new legs. He was very weak still from what had happened, but he could actually feel the muscles shift and play under his skin as they worked to put him on his feet. Despite the weakness, he realized at that moment that he had every bit of the inhuman strength and power that the woman had. Despite his weakness, he felt light as a feather, and it required almost no effort to move his own weight. On standing, his tail seemed to come to life of its own volition, and that was when he realized that it wasn't just for show. He nearly overbalanced forwards, but his tail swished deeply behind him and recentered himself on a stable balance. It began to move on its own, swishing back and forth in a rhythmic motion, and it had to be the oddest sensation he'd ever felt in his life. He almost instinctively stood only on the balls of his feet, heels off the floor, understanding why they were so wide. Stability. There was one other thing that got his attention, and that was the hair. His hair was extremely long, falling well down his back, and very, very thick. It was the same blond color it had been before. He wasn't used to the weight of it, nor the way it swayed and swished whenever he moved. It was an extremely disconcerting sensation.