By a Silver Thread

DFZ Changeling Book 1 Rachel Aaron Prologue Good Samaritan’s Children’s Hospital Long-Term-Care Facility Detroit Free Zone 65 years after the return of magic The nurses didn’t enter the monster’s room unless they had to. Every morning, they had a fight in the hall about whose turn it was to go in. The monster could hear them arguing through the vents in the steel door that separated her from the rest of the hospital. Eventually, someone would admit defeat and stomp over to the medicine cabinet. This was the monster’s signal to scramble into her bed and hide under the sheets, burying her furry head under the flat pillow in the hopes that her horns wouldn’t be so obvious. It always took the nurse at least five minutes to count the pills. No one seemed to know what they all did anymore. The doctors hadn’t come to see the monster in months, but their directions still had to be followed. When all the pills had been doled out into the little plastic cup, the nurse stomped to the monster’s room and unlocked the heavy door, calling out as she entered. “Lola?” That was the name on the chart taped to the wall: Lola Daniels, age seven. But the monster hadn’t been a little girl for a long time now, and she didn’t answer. She just hid silently under the sheets as the nurse bumped the heavy door open with her hip. “Med check.” The woman said it like a threat. Like all the nurses who braved the monster’s room these days, though, she didn’t actually check anything. She just dumped the medication tray with its plastic cups of water and pills on the counter by the sink and got to work. She gathered the dirty towels, returned the donated book of fairy tales to its place on the windowsill, wiped down the tiny, child-sized toilet, and mopped the linoleum floor, all without ever once glancing at the far-bigger-than-child-sized lump trembling under the bedsheets. The whole process took less time than the argument over whose turn it was to do the chores. Once the room met the minimum definition of clean, the nurse banged back out the door and locked it behind her. Even so, the monster waited for her slapping footsteps to fade all the way down the hall before emerging from her hiding place. She slid out of the bed like a lump of black hair pulled out of a drain. Her claws clicked on the freshly mopped floor as she shuffled over to the medication tray the nurse had left behind. Moving slowly so she wouldn’t knock anything over, she grabbed the plastic pill cup, turning it over so the tablets fell out onto the leathery pad of the massive paw that had once been her left hand. Her beady little eyes no longer saw in color, so the monster arranged the pills by size, moving the smaller, easier ones to the front while saving the bigger, harder ones for last. Then, using her claws like chopsticks, the monster picked up each pill and wedged it through the wall of her dagger-like fangs into her mouth to choke it down. It would have been easier with water. Picking up the soft plastic water cup was beyond her these days, though, and her square-shaped head no longer fit under the faucet. She supposed she could have skipped it altogether. It wasn’t as if the pills had ever helped, but the nurses still checked every night to make sure she’d taken her medicine. Their muttered “good job” was the only nice thing anyone said to the monster anymore, so even though it made her gag, she choked down every one, wedging pill after pill through the wall of her teeth until the plastic cup was empty. She’d just finished swallowing the last one when she saw something flashing in the fluorescent light. It was getting harder and harder to see these days, but the monster knew what it was. It was her thread. A beautiful, silver thread, thin as spider silk but stronger than steel and shiny as a new promise. One end of it was tied around the bulge of fur and scales that used to be the little girl’s left wrist. The other ran off toward nothing, vanishing into thin air just a few inches away from her body. The sight of it glittering made her forget about the choking pills. The monster didn’t know what the thread was, but for as long as she could remember, it had been tied around her wrist. Sometimes it danced like a fishing line with a big catch on the end. Other times, it lay still for weeks, but it was always there, shiny and beautiful. The monster loved that thread. She wished sometimes that other people could see it so she’d have something to show off. Most of the time, though, she was glad she didn’t have to share. The thread was her treasure, the one lovely thing she had left. She was running her claw down the bit she could see just for the pleasure of feeling how smooth it was when the lock on her door clicked again. The monster dove for her bed with a squeal, her scrambling claws leaving huge gouges in the linoleum floor. The nurses would yell at her for that later, but the monster was too frightened to care at the moment, because the person who stepped into her room wasn’t a nurse or a doctor. It was a man she’d never seen before. The monster keened pitifully through the unruly forest of her teeth. She couldn’t let the man see her. The nurses had learned to ignore the thing under the blankets, but strangers always gawked, and it made her feel terrible. Not just the normal hurt of being stared at, either. This was real, physical pain, as if her whole body were melting like ice cream in the sun. The monster didn’t