Fictober, Prompt 19 – “I feel strange.”

Original fiction, fantasy-ish, horror-ish. If anyone is interested, this is the same world as this piece from Fictober19, but this piece stands alone just fine.

Warnings: non-graphic discussion of forced shapeshifting? Not much in this one.

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The sound of a shift happening on the bed brought my attention back to my patient. Born human, female, twenty-seven years old, worked at a car rental office at the airport in the big city two hours from here.

And, thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a worldmagic flare on her hiking trip with friends three days ago, now a shifter.

Hearing that the shift was complete, I turned to find a human woman on the hospital bed, rather than the housecat that had been there for the last three days. She was awake as well, staring at the ceiling with wide, terrified eyes.

“Jillian?” I asked softly, and her eyes snapped to me. I smiled sympathetically. “Can you understand me?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Good,” I said, staying seated by the computer but I finished turning the chair so that I was fully facing her. “Do you remember that you had gone hiking with friends?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and nodded again.

“Good, that’s a good sign,” I told her encouragingly. “Have you heard of magic before?”

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