66

You move toward where you think the door is, expecting to have to **** it down to get through due to your size. However, by the time you find it, your body appears to have reverted to human proportions and attributes. You can’t feel your tail, your feet feel soft and skinny, and you’re standing up straight. You open the door and let your eyes adjust to the moonlight.

Elia lies just outside the wall of the shed amidst the wreckage of the window. One of her legs looks bent in a way it shouldn’t, and where her skin is exposed and catches the pale light there are dark streaks of blood from the glass cutting her open.

“You’re naked.” she says. You look down, and she’s right. Your clothes must have been destroyed during your transformation. It would make sense for them to have fallen off you during the fight, but you have no injuries left to show as evidence.

“I killed the beast. What more do you want?”

“You’re going to use up all my brother’s clothes at this rate. If another monster pays us a visit shan’t have anything to remember him by...”

“You don’t intend to linger down here, do you? Not after this.”

“Oh, just help me now. I need to lie down on something that won’t cut me to shreds. Then maybe I can think straight.”

She doesn’t protest when you pick her up off the ground, trying not to react to the surprise of being able to do so. She weighs nearly nothing to you in your arms.

“Are you always this warm?” she asks.

You shake your head just as you enter the house again, and chastise yourself. It’s too dark in here, so she can’t have seen your answer. You take her continued silence to mean she doesn’t mind.

You climb upstairs and she begins to direct you toward her bedroom, only to find that part of the house completely destroyed, the walls, ceilings and even parts of the roof blown to pieces, leaving a massive opening to the sky. Elia sighs.

“Maybe yours is intact. I’ll use you as a blanket if you don’t mind.”

“Really?”

You can see her clearly again. She looks at you like you’ve asked her to count to two. “Don’t get any funny ideas, it’s only because you’re really warm and I don’t like the chill. Come on.”

Turn to 290.