Jamie Gray's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

The patrol car smells like stale coffee and disinfectant. Jamie sits in the back seat, wrists cuffed behind her, watching the sun drop toward the tree line through the window. The officer drives slowly, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror every few seconds. A pressure builds in her chest as the light turns gold, then orange. The curse knows what time it is. Jamie focuses on the handcuffs, on the cold metal biting into her wrists, anything to keep the wolf down. But through the window she sees them—green vines crawling up a stop sign at the edge of the road, twisting and growing as the car passes. Fresh growth where there shouldn't be any. The hunter is close. The woman said it tracks the shift itself, and sunset is when Jamie's control slips. She can feel the wolf rising, her hands starting to shake against the cuffs. If she shifts here, the officer dies. If she fights it, the hunter catches her between forms. Jamie closes her eyes and does what the woman taught her. She stops fighting. The shift comes fast, bone and muscle rearranging in seconds instead of minutes, and the handcuffs snap apart as her wrists thicken. The officer slams the brakes and reaches for his radio, but Jamie is already shifting back, forcing herself human before he can see more than a blur of movement. She gasps, her wrists raw and free, torn metal on the seat beside her. The vines outside the window have stopped growing. The hunter lost the signal. The officer turns in his seat, staring at the broken handcuffs, then at Jamie. His hand hovers over his weapon. Jamie holds up her empty hands, her voice steady despite the trembling in her legs. "I'm still here," she says. "I didn't run." He doesn't speak for a long moment. Then he picks up his radio and calls in that the cuffs malfunctioned, that he needs a replacement set. He doesn't mention what he saw. Jamie leans back against the seat, her heart still racing. She shifted faster than the hunter could track, and she chose to stay human when she could have run. The curse didn't win. Not this time.