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Ten: Awakening

Marc never thought he would miss the empty void, where sight, sound, and all sensations were absent, leaving his thoughts completely isolated. The place he found himself now seemed like the opposite of that emptiness. Dull red light swirled through his vision, making patterns that his muddled thoughts were never quite able to decipher before each shape merged into the next. His ears buzzed with unintelligible noises that grew louder and softer at random intervals, smothering any coherent concept his mind might otherwise have been able to summon. Both inconstant light and sound only came to him in his brief intervals of semi-consciousness, those moments when he could feel his heart thumping slowly in his chest and his lungs filling slightly and expelling their small breaths, before his mind abandoned him again to a confused, restless sleep.

A barely noticed irritation grew closer to the forefront of his attention each time the fog around his consciousness cleared, like spiders crawling all over his body. He tried to brush them off once in an instant of unusual clarity, but found that he couldn't move his arms or legs. Indeed, aside from that growing pins-and-needles annoyance, he couldn't feel anything below his waist or past his shoulders. He would have panicked, but was swept back to unconsciousness before his concern had a chance to fully form.

The next time he climbed out of his dreamless sleep, he was awake enough to wonder where he was, and what had happened to Brandon and him on the plane. Surely enough time had passed while he had slept for them to have landed, but he had a strange sense of a rocking motion beneath him, even though he was still mostly numb. It was oddly comforting, like he was once again an infant being rocked in a cradle.

He still couldn't feel anything in his legs except the swarm of insects crawling over and pinching them, but that irritating paralysis had receded down his arms to just past his wrists, his fingers still tingling as intensely as his legs while tendrils of sensation tickled up and down his forearms. His face was a mask of fire, as though a mad acupuncturist had tried to turn everything above his neck into a porcupine. When he tried to open his eyes, nothing happened, but he was able to lift his arm slightly from where it rested against his chest.

Immediately, he felt a pressure deep within the hand he'd lifted as it was caught by something, a more reassuring warmth slowly seeping into his already burning fingers. The buzzing in his ears grew louder as something above him made a sound, and he flinched inwardly, the noise echoing strangely through the top of his head while the pins and needles grew almost painful in the sides of his scalp.

Unbidden, his eyelids shot open, and he was blinded by an intensely bright white light that silhouetted a blurry, indecipherable black shadow. The shadow grew in his vision in the instant before he winced his eyes shut again, the object above him lowering closer to his face. The buzzing in his ears grew louder still, until it changed into a sharp, high pitched monotone that rang through his skull as if a bomb had just exploded nearby and injured his eardrums. Then the ringing sound and his persistent, numb tingling spun away from him as his mind collapsed inward on itself in exhaustion, and he plummeted back into dreamless, timeless sleep.

When he awoke again, someone had set his tail bone on fire.

Most of his legs were feeling a little better then, much of the itching irritation having abandoned his upper legs to gather below his ankles. Something still felt wrong with them, but whatever was out of place was pushed to the back of Marc's mind by the sharp discomfort at the bottom of his spine. He squirmed where he lay, and could hear himself moan in a strange, unfamiliar voice through the perpetual buzzing that had finally begun to grow quieter in his ears.

A hand grasped his shoulder, though it felt like it was touching him through a thin blanket, and he heard a muffled voice speaking beside him, sounding distant and metallic, too distorted still for him to understand.

With a great deal of effort, he was able to open his eyes, careful this time to part his eyelids slowly so that he wouldn't blind himself again. The light seemed gentler than before, a warm golden glow coming from beyond his feet rather than the piercing white from earlier. The objects around him were still no more than vague, colorless shadows, disappearing completely for a moment after he glanced down toward the light's source and seared his eyes, but when they came back, the shadows around him were enough for him to guess that he was in a small room.

The silhouette kneeling next to him and holding his shoulder said something else, and for once, he thought he was able to make out a word or two from its muffled, tinny voice. "...All right? Can you..." The blaze of pinpricks on top of his head flared up again to match the intensity of whatever was burning his tailbone, and he had to fight off a sudden, overwhelming vertigo that made his stomach lurch threateningly. The dizziness receded eventually, but the pins and needles on his scalp and below the small of his back burned as aggravatingly as ever.

The figure beside him was talking again, and surprisingly, he was able to understand everything this time. "It's okay, Tolinom. I'm here. Please, just tell me how I can help." The voice sounded feminine, and indeed, the triangle shapes framed on the top of the silhouette's head by the room's soft light looked like two halves of a strange bow. She leaned over him so that he wouldn't have to twist his neck to see her, her body blocking the source of the orange glow. There was a tremor in her still muffled voice when she said, "Don't just stare at me, say something. You've been sleeping for three days, so you can at least stay awake long enough this time to tell me that you're going to be all right."

Marc opened his mouth and tried to do as he'd been asked and speak, though he intended to ask for water instead of assuring her of his well-being, but as soon as he moved his lips, that incessant, prickly fire swarmed down his face from the top of his head and paralyzed his mouth. He had trouble even moving his tongue.

Seeing his awkward distress, the woman leaning over him tensed. "Tolinom, what's wrong?"

This time when she said the strange name, a flood of memory washed through him all at once: "Tolinom, come on, get up. We have to go while they're distracted." Tolinom was the name from his vision, the name of the destroyer of worlds that someone else in that hallucination had spoken of, and distorted though it was, Marc could still recognize the woman's voice as belonging to one of the people who had been trying to free that destroyer.

"Don't," he croaked, trying to tell her not to call him by that name, but that one word was all he was able to force his fire-numbed mouth to form.

"Don't move, I'll get Rias," she said, pushing away from him and standing. She turned and opened a door behind her, and Marc flinched away from it, expecting a hospital hallway's bright light. Instead, he glimpsed a starry night sky glowing a faint, dark blue above unrecognizable shadows before the door swung shut with a thud.

He could hear noises from the other side of the door, but it was all just more of that wordless buzzing in his ears. When he struggled to sit up, Marc could get no farther than propping himself up on his elbows before he collapsed, his movements for some reason fanning the blaze of discomfort that tormented the last disk of his spine. The woman had told him he'd been asleep for three days. That might account for his weakness, but it didn't explain why random parts of his body were suffering the worst cases of pins and needles he'd ever felt.

Marc managed to lift his hand over his face, but no matter how much he squinted at it, it appeared as no more than a pale, blurry shape among the room's shadows. Somehow, though, he could tell there was something wrong with it, the way it blurred around the edges, maybe. He lowered it toward his eyes to look at it more closely, then grunted in surprise when it bumped against his nose three inches before it should have, igniting a fresh area of prickles in the middle of his face.

He could feel most of his hand by now, though his fingers still tingled at their tips. Bracing himself for the irritation he knew it would cause, he reached back toward his face, and once again met his upper lip before he expected to, but this time he didn't jerk his hand away in surprise. Marc barely noticed the door swinging open and the woman returning with two others while he felt his face, bringing his other hand up to explore the side of his head. His shock and confusion overrode the fiery tingling that radiated out from his fingertips.

What he felt didn't belong on any human body, let alone Marc's.

"He's woken up!" said one of the newcomers, a man, in an accent Marc couldn't quite place. "I thought you said there was a problem."

There was a problem. Marc had the head of a big cat sitting on his shoulders. His fingers trailed through the fur--fur!--up the side of his face, and he realized that the annoying tingling on the sides of the top of his head was his ears, rounded and tufted triangles sticking up out of his scalp and twitching involuntarily at his touch.

"He was having trouble speaking." Now that he was listening for it, Marc could hear a similar accent in the woman's voice.

And no wonder he wasn't able to speak properly. Human speech shouldn't have been possible coming from the feline muzzle Marc's other hand was prodding disbelievingly. He pushed the side of his lip up with two fingers and felt along the fronts of pointed teeth.

"Did you think to give him some water?" The man moved to the foot of Marc's bed and squatted to pick something up from the floor. When he stood, Marc could see the shadows of a pitcher and cup in his hands.

When the man knelt next to his shoulders, Marc lowered his arms to his sides, wondering why he wasn't screaming. He wondered why they weren't screaming, with a half human creature lying in front of them, but the man just poured water from the pitcher to the cup and held the cup to Marc's lips, waiting for Marc to open up.

Unable to think beyond his shock, Marc opened his mouth without a conscious decision. Lying with his head on the stiff bed, though, he choked on the water almost as soon as it was poured past his lips. He grabbed the man's heavily muscled arm, needing his help to sit up while coughing water down over his chest. He realized then that the man wasn't wearing a shirt, but the dress code for the local medical staff was far down his list of concerns at that moment.

Once Marc recovered from his coughing fit, the man brought the cup of water back to his face. To his muzzle. "Try again."

The woman stepped closer to the bed, crouching beside the kneeling man, and when Marc looked at her again out of the corner of his eye, it slowly dawned on him that she wasn't wearing a bow on her head at all. Those were ears. "I'm not sure it's water he needs," the cat creature--the other cat creature--said.

Afraid the man would pull the water away at her suggestion, Marc opened his mouth and leaned forward, bumping the cup with his chin before he remembered how far his muzzle jutted from his face. Taking the hint, the man poured into Marc's mouth again, and though he felt like an invalid, he managed to swallow at least half of the cup while the rest spilled over his chin. At least he could control the muscles in his throat enough to swallow.

"There, see?" the man said, setting down the pitcher so that he could prop Marc up with an arm behind his shoulders. "No one can sleep that long without building up a thirst." He turned from the other cat person back to Marc. "Better?"

Not trusting himself to control his bestial face enough to talk, Marc just nodded in reply, slumping wearily as the man lowered him back to the bed.

"Now, then," the man went on, "aside from groggy and parched, how are you feeling?"

Marc tried to say, "Confused," but those infuriating pins and needles struck his face as soon as he moved his lips, and the noise that came out of his muzzle sounded like "cornflued" more than any real word. Taking a deep, frustrated breath and closing his eyes, he tried again, and somehow forced the word out of his mouth slowly enough to be coherent. He still thought he sounded mentally handicapped, though.

The man just grunted a crisp laugh. "Well, you're not alone in that sentiment. We never learned what that crazy sorcerer was after before he dropped dead."

"You sound like you bit your tongue, Tolinom," the cat person said. Marc's eyes must have been adjusting to the faint light; he could see the pale flashes of her teeth as she spoke. "Are you sure you're all right?"

He didn't bother trying to answer, instead prodding the backs of his own sharp fangs with his tongue, worrying at first that if he ever did accidentally bite his tongue, he would sever it completely. As his tongue glided across the backs of his teeth, though, he found they weren't all that much sharper than human teeth. The ones toward the back of his muzzle were quite a bit more pointy than human molars, though...

"I told you something was wrong," the cat girl said, turning to the bare-chested man. "Why is he in such a daze?"

"And I've told you more than once that I've never treated an Oncan before. Even with the crew, the worst I have to deal with is a sprained ankle or a bout of motion sickness." Marc tensed when the man's fingers nudged the side of his throat at the base of his jaw, checking his pulse. "Near as I can tell, he's healthy as can be." His hand moved down Marc's chest, checking each rib before resting over his heart, which Marc could feel beating steadily against the medic's palm. "He's even breathing fine. Surprising, as soaked through as he was after that storm, but then, I guess you came through without catching cold, too. His pupils might be a little dilated, but the truth is, I'm not sure how to tell with slitted eyes." Marc shivered when the calloused palm smoothed down the fur it had disordered on his chest, realizing fur must be covering his entire body. "Like as not, we just need to give him a chance to wake up."

"So you don't think a hex was put on him when the sorcerer died, like your brother?"

The medic shook his head. "I'm no expert on hexes, but if Tolinom here was cursed, it was a different spell than what got hold of Herald. He broke into hysterics as soon as he woke up, with all that talk about him not supposed to be here and us all being a bad dream."

Marc's ears perked up at that, and not just figuratively. He could feel the ear closest to the two people kneeling beside his bed swivel toward the man briefly of its own volition, but as soon as he noticed it, both ears began twitching uncontrollably on top of his head, the pin pricks flaring up again. He ignored the irritation, though, focusing instead on what the medic had said.

The invisible presence back on the Boeing jet had made Marc give his consent to travel, but it had never said where Marc would be traveling to. It had also told him that others would be traveling with him, but the only other person who'd been trapped with him in the plane when time had frozen had been Brandon. Now Marc was in someone else's body, someone not even human. Could Brandon have been transported in the same way into the body of the medic's brother, this Herald?

"Maybe he was affected, after all," the medic said. Both he and the feline person were staring at Marc's ears, still trembling on his head.

"Just...still thirsty," Marc said slowly. Other than a slight lisp, all the words came out clearly.

The medic propped him up again so that the other feline could refill the cup from the pitcher the man had set aside and hold it to Marc's lips. This time, only a trickle of water spilled down his chin from one corner of his mouth. He surprised himself by draining the entire cup again, but then, he really had been thirsty.

When he finished and nodded his thanks, the other cat person asked, "More?"

Marc shook his head.

"Is there anything else you need, then?" the other feline pressed. "They have bread, or salted pork, if you're hungry."

"Though not much," the medic added under his breath.

Marc's stomach rumbled audibly at the sound of food, but instead he said, "Mirror." Or at least he tried to. He had trouble pronouncing a coherent "M" sound, and his "R"s lingered, sounding almost like a deep growl. "A mirror," he tried again, but closed his eyes and clenched his teeth in frustration, having as little success with his second attempt. "Can I have," he forced out deliberately, nearly slicing his lower lip with his upper teeth on the last word, "a mirror." There! Finally, the stupid word came out the way he wanted it to.

The medic and the feline shared a concerned look, and Marc realized that his vision had cleared enough to make out their worried expressions. "I'm afraid we don't have any proper mirrors on board," the man began, but even as Marc was letting out a halfhearted sigh, the fourth person in the cramped room, silent until now, stepped forward and pulled something metal from a loop in her belt. She was another human, Marc was relieved to see.

"He can use this," the woman said in a confident voice, handing the slender dagger handle first to the medic.

"Don't you have something else?" the black furred feline protested with a shudder.

"There are some other knives on board," the woman answered, "but none of them can catch the light like that one. It's the best mirror we've got."

"It's just a dagger," the medic reassured the cat girl, holding the knife's blade out in front of Marc's face. "Can't say I know how you can be worried about your looks after what we went through, Oncan. You'll have plenty of time to groom before we get back to the mainland."

Marc made no effort to respond. He barely even heard the man's words, as hard as he was concentrating on the white face staring back at him from the dagger's narrow strip of metal. Even if his eyes had been working properly, it would have been difficult to see every detail of his features in the room's dim light with the dagger held between him and the room's lantern, but he could make out the shape of his white furred face, at least. It looked much like the black furred cat person's face, though where her fur conformed to the contours of her head to make her look almost exactly like a sleek panther, Marc's fur tufted out at his cheeks, almost like a tiger's, and the longer fur on his chin looked almost like a short goatee, matted down by spilled water. Wide, green cat eyes stared back at him, their diamond pupils stretched nearly to circles in the room's glow. He squinted, barely able to make out thin whiskers sticking out of the sides of his muzzle, each as long as his hand. Whiskers!

Marc sighed, closing his eyes and shaking his head. This was all too overwhelming. Far too many questions swirled through his thoughts for him to be able to pick only one at a time to ask, so he found himself asking a single question that summarized them all. "What happened?"

"You know almost as much as we do," the medic said with a shrug of his shoulders, pulling the reflective dagger out of Marc's view and handing it back to the woman who had supplied it. Marc sighed again as the man lowered him back to the bed, the disk of irritation at the bottom of his spine becoming less inflamed while he was lying flat. A blanket covered his legs up to his waist, but he suspected he knew now what was causing the sharp prickling over his tail bone.

The black feline picked up his hand where it lay at his side, holding it between both of her own. "We all thought Jiam had gotten whatever he was after and fought off the dragon, but after he threw the dragon into the ocean, he started talking to himself about being granted passage to somewhere. Then he just collapsed, dead. That's when you and Rias's brother passed out, too."

"We're thinking the dragon killed the sorcerer with its magic," the medic picked up where she left off. "Can't say why it lashed out at you and Herald, too, without hurting any of the rest of us. It probably thought the storm would kill us all once we didn't have Jiam's protection. Maybe it just didn't care. Truth of the matter is, I'd just as soon not know." He leaned back away from Marc and got to his feet, rubbing at a kink in his neck. "Soon as we get back to Boendal, I'm spending a healthy month in Neutral Landing and drinking all memory of this adventure away."

Well, none of their talk of sorcerers and dragons made any sense to Marc. Where had that presence back on the airplane sent him to?

The medic placed his hand over the door's handle, but the woman with the dagger hanging at her belt touched his shoulder, and he waited expectantly. "Just a moment, Rias," she said, then turned to Marc. "Tolinom, could you tell us the name of your friend here?" She nodded down at the black feline kneeling beside him.

"What?" the cat person said, looking up at the woman in surprise.

"Just indulge me. I'll apologize if I'm wrong."

The black furred cat girl returned her gaze to Marc's face, her feline features growing more alarmed every second he hesitated. What should he tell them? If the black feline had told him her name since he'd been awake, he couldn't remember it. The expectant silence grew between everyone until it seemed it would shatter like glass at the slightest noise.

"I don't know," he said finally, and the silence did indeed shatter.

"What?" the kneeling feline exclaimed at the same time as the woman standing behind her said, "As I thought. He's been hexed, too."

"You're just joking, aren't you?" the black cat said, grabbing Marc's upper arm while squeezing his palm in her other hand. "Tolinom, tell them you're just joking."

"I'm sorry," Marc forced himself to say. He still wasn't having much luck getting his feline mouth to form human words. Nonetheless, he made himself go on, feeling that this was as good a time as any to let them know just how bewildered he really was. "I don't even know who this 'Tolinon' is." He wasn't sure if he'd pronounced that right...

"_You're_Tolinom! Now knock it off. This isn't funny."

Marc looked into the other cat person's eyes, and was amazed at how expressive her face could be. He'd never seen a cat's brow furrow with as distressed a frown as she wore at that moment. "I'm sorry," he repeated quietly, but he felt like the apology was hopelessly inadequate when the cat girl turned her dark face away to hide the tears pooling in her eyes.

"So then," the woman said, showing no concern for the female crying at her feet, "if your name isn't Tolinom, what is it?"

Marc hesitated again, once more unsure of what to tell them. He could claim he had amnesia, but the woman questioning him was looking at him critically. He knew that look. It was the look a teacher gave their student when they expected the student to make a mistake. The woman's suspicion didn't convince him of what to say as much as the cat girl's distress, though. She looked very lost, and that was something Marc could strongly sympathize with at that moment.

"My name's Marc." He'd never been a good liar, anyway.

"Just the same as Herald, then." The woman nodded, her suspicions evidently confirmed. "His memories aren't his own."

The medic, Rias, regarded him with his arms folded across his barrel chest. "He's handling the curse a great deal better then Herald, though. He's jittery, but I haven't heard one scream from him."

"You're sure you can't do anything to help him?" the black feline asked.

Rias looked down at her, a frustrated frown flashing across his face. "If I could, my brother would be back in his right mind by now, wouldn't he?" He sighed, unfolding his arms and opening the door behind him to go outside.

"Rias isn't the kind of man who takes his failings well," the woman said, though Marc couldn't tell if the explanation was meant as apology or admonishment.

The cat girl looked up at her, never letting go of Marc's arm and hand. "There has to be something we can do."

The woman grimaced like she had a bad taste in her mouth. "We can wait, and hope their brains unaddle themselves. If you have any other suggestions, by all means, offer them up. I don't look forward to putting Herald in an asylum once we're back in Boendal."

Marc's eyes widened, and he felt his ears twitch flat against his head before the fiery pins and needles made them start trembling all over again. An asylum? He should have tried to lie to them. "Hold on," he said when the woman turned to the door. "This Herald, the one that was hexed..." He stumbled on the word; there were too many consonants in it for his muzzle to say it clearly, but he went on without correcting himself this time. "He didn't say that his name is Brandon Davis, did he?" He took a deep breath. That was the longest sentence he'd been able to force past his tingling lips so far.

The cat girl shook her head. "No, not Brandon Davis. He keeps calling himself Trent."

Marc blinked, surprised. He only knew one Trent, but it couldn't be him. "Not Trent McCafferty?" he asked, and the woman and cat girl shared a surprised glance.

"How did you know that?" the feline asked him.

"He must have woken up when Herald was throwing one of his fits," the woman said, but she was squinting at Marc like she hadn't seen him before.

He shook his head where it lay on the bed, talking up toward the low wooden ceiling. "Trent's a friend of mine, but it doesn't make any sense that he'd be here." Of course, it didn't make any sense that Marc was there, either. He found that if he spoke slowly and didn't concentrate too much on manipulating his feline muzzle, his words were able to flow more smoothly. "He was back in Ohio when time froze."

"When time froze," the woman repeated skeptically.

The other cat person frowned at him, her feline features looking confused. "Herald said something about time standing still, too."

"And he said that word, 'Ohio,' as well," the woman said thoughtfully. "He said that was where he came from."

Marc nodded. "We've known each other for years. Could I see him?"

Both females shook their heads at once. "That's not a good idea," the human said. "Night's the only time we get any peace from him. Best to let him stay asleep."

"He was a little better today," the panther girl admitted, "but the way he behaves around me... I'd rather not be closed in with him."

Marc craned his neck to look back and forth between the two of them. "Please? I just want to figure out what's going on." They still didn't look convinced. "You said both he and I have had a spell cast on us. Maybe if I talk to him, we can find a way to fix this." And by that, he meant they might find a way to get Trent and him home.

The black feline still seemed reluctant when she looked up at the woman. "Do you think it could help?"

"I can't see how it would hurt," she muttered, though she didn't look happy about it when she opened the door and stepped out into the starry night.

The cat girl turned back to Marc as the door swung closed. "Are you sure you're up for this, Tolinom?"

Marc nodded and tried to push himself up onto his elbows. He didn't see any point in correcting her about his name. "Just let me sit up," he grunted.

"Here," she said, swinging a black furred arm behind his shoulders in the same way that Rias had. "Let me help."

Marc wanted to tell her that he could manage on his own, but he knew he would very quickly prove himself wrong if he tried. Instead, he accepted her assistance with a silent nod of gratitude, letting her pull him upright. He had to stop her with a half hissed, "Wait," though, before he was sitting all the way up, as a twinge of pain struck at the base of his spine. Grunting in irritation, he reached beneath the blanket covering his legs while the other feline kept him from falling backward and pulled a long, slender white tail out from where it had been trapped underneath his bottom. The painful pinch below the small of his back receded when he let the tail curl beside him, and he sighed in relief, but those pins and needles never left.

While fishing out his tail, he also found that he was naked underneath the blanket. Feeling blood rush to his face, he pulled the wool covering up to his navel before it could ride any farther down his body. "Thanks," he said, after clearing his throat in embarrassment.

The panther girl looked away from him, her triangular ears flicking back along her head. "We had to get you out of your wet clothes. You'd never have dried out if you were still wearing them." Her eyes snapped back to his face, and she added hurriedly, "Not 'we,' I mean. Rias is the one who took care of...all of that." An awkward pause passed between them. "Your clothing's under the bed now, if you want to get dressed."

"That's all right," Marc said, since she didn't seem to intend to leave him alone to do so. He wasn't sure if he had the energy to dress himself without help, anyway. "It can wait. Besides, I don't think I'll be getting up and leaving any time soon."

Not wanting to make her have to keep holding him upright, he tried to scoot around so that he could lean back against the wall beside the bed. A wave of prickles coursed up and down his legs when he used them to turn himself, but it wasn't as bad as his face or tail. Still, he frowned at the little hill his knees formed in the blanket. He couldn't seem to straighten his legs out completely.

With the panther girl's help, he was seated somewhat comfortably with his back against the plank wall by the time the room's door opened again and the woman who had left returned, shoving another bare-chested man before her, this one even taller and more broad shouldered than Rias.

"All right, all right," the man mumbled sleepily in a deep voice, rubbing at one eye with the back of his knuckle. "No need to manhandle me like that, you Jamaican dominatrix."

Marc stared at the man, dumbfounded. Despite the low rumble of his voice, there was some quality to his words that Marc recognized, as though he'd rehearsed them before they left his mouth. Trent's transformation was almost as unbelievable as his own, having been put in a body at least ten years older than his true age, and far more muscular.

The man looked blearily in Marc's direction, then snapped to attention, backing up slowly until he was in the small room's far corner, beside the door that the woman was closing behind her. "Could you ask Yin and Yang here to put dampers on their eyes?" he said. "They're freaking me out. Why did you wake me up, anyway?"

Marc glanced at the panther girl, who was glowering at the man, her frown looking particularly threatening in that predator's face. Her green eyes did glow, he realized, when she turned toward the lantern, collecting the light into themselves as if they belonged to an animal watching a campfire from the safety of surrounding undergrowth. Marc imagined his own eyes must be gleaming in the same manner.

That was kind of cool.

"Well?" the woman asked impatiently, planting her fists on her hips. "You heard the lunatic. Why'd you have me go and wake him up?"

Marc didn't know how to begin, so he just asked the first question he could think of. "How did you get here, Trent?"

The man stared at him for a long moment, then snorted a laugh. "Great. Someone finally gets my name right, and it's one of the talking cats."

"I'm Marc, Trent. Marc Daniels."

"Sure you are," the man said exaggeratedly, as though replying to a child who'd just announced that he was a unicorn.

"I don't know what happened to us any better than you do," Marc went on, ignoring Trent's sarcasm. They both had a right to be a little incredulous. "I was on a flight to Brazil with Brandon, time stopped around us..." He hesitated, still unsure of what to tell everyone. What would they make of him telling them that he'd spoken to an invisible presence that communicated through images and visions? "Then I blacked out, and woke up here," he finished.

"That's all very interesting," Trent said over-sincerely. "I'll be sure to tell Marc all about that next time I see him after I wake up."

The woman with the dagger at her belt took an aggravated step toward the man. "I just got you up not two minutes ago, Herald."

Marc rested his head against the wall behind him wearily and looked down his muzzle at Trent, just now noticing how his short, feline snout was a constant, unfocused obtrusion in the bottom of his sight. "You think you're dreaming," he said.

"That I do," Trent answered with a confident nod.

Marc shook his head. "I don't know about you, Trent, but I don't have the kind of imagination to dream all this up."

"Which doesn't make much difference," the man pointed out, "since you're just a part of my dream."

Marc stared at him for a short while, then let out a quiet laugh and turned to the human woman. "Could you pinch him for me?"

"Oh, I've tried better than that," she replied, scowling at Trent, "but no matter how much I hit him, he just calls me 'more vivid than usual.'"

Marc sighed. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. But when he looked down at the backs of his white furred hands folded in his blanketed lap, he had to wonder if Trent could be right. Had he just dozed off during the flight to Brazil? Was all this just a really weird dream? How could it be anything else?

But what he'd told Trent was true. Marc's dreams didn't usually make sense on the few occasions he could remember them after he woke up, but none of them had been nearly as confusing as what he was living through now. Then there was that awful prickling sensation that kept nagging at the parts of his body that had changed, as though they were feeling circulation through them for the first time. His arms and legs sometimes fell asleep in the middle of the night, but even if that sensation was leaking into his dreams, it wouldn't explain how he was able to feel a cat's ears tingling on his head, or the base of the tail now curled beside his leg burning below his spine.

"Did you feel pins and needles when you first woke up here?" he asked, reaching past his knee to pick up the end of that white tail. He still couldn't feel it where his fingers held it, but the slight movement made his lower back twinge as muscles he shouldn't have had shifted.

The big man grimaced slightly, but didn't otherwise answer.

"And I know you've gone to sleep and woken up again still here, in someone else's body, at least once, right? If you're just dreaming, then you must be sleeping in the real world for a really long time." Marc blinked. Through that entire short speech, his feline mouth hadn't so much as tingled. Now that he was thinking about it again, though, his lips went numb, that familiar prickling tracing its way across them, down his chin, and up over his nose. He wriggled his muzzle, trying to shake the sensation away, but that only made it flare up worse.

"I'll admit that detail's crossed my mind more than once," Trent was saying reluctantly. "But this has to be a dream. None of it makes any sense, otherwise."

"I'm with you there," Marc agreed, glancing down at his tail.

"And as long as it's a talking cat trying to tell me otherwise," Trent went on, "a crazy dream is what it'll remain."

The panther girl stood up sharply, glaring angrily at Trent. "Okay, I've heard enough. Captain Lebram, could you get him out of here?"

"What? Why?" Marc stuttered, her sudden hostility making him more confused than ever.

"Why?" she repeated incredulously, frowning down at him as though he'd grown horns. "After the way he keeps insulting us..." When all Marc did was stare back up at her in bewilderment, though, her angry retort spluttered to a stop almost before it started, and her features mellowed a little. Still frowning, she folded her arms in front of her chest and leaned against the wall beside the head of Marc's bed, one feline foot rising to support her against the wall at her back. "If it doesn't bother you, then why should it bother me?" she muttered. "Well, what else do you want to hear from him? We already know his mind's been addled."

Trent opened his mouth to protest, but the woman standing in front of the room's door, Captain Lebram, spoke up before he could respond. "All I want to know is how to cure him." She turned to Marc. "You said that if you spoke with him, you might be able to think of a way to make him better."

"We're not diseased," Marc replied, a little indignantly. "All I meant then is that we need to figure out how Trent and I got here so that we can get back to where we came from."

"You think Tolinom and Herald will come back when you leave?" the panther girl asked, though she still looked skeptical with her arms crossed as they were. Marc just shrugged in response.

"Don't encourage them," Captain Lebram reprimanded the black feline. "It's as you said: their minds are addled. It shouldn't be anything that a few slaps upside the head and some hard work can't remedy." By the way she grimaced at Trent, Marc guessed that she'd already tried those methods without much success.

"Except that whatever's wrong with them, it was caused by sorcery," the panther girl pointed out.

Lebram hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. "And you won't find any wizards in my crew. We could take them to a fortune teller or charm merchant in Boendal, but they're all just con artists, and not very good ones, at that. Like as not, they'd sell us a finger of spun glass, claim it's a unicorn's horn, and tell us that if our hearts are pure enough our boys'll get better in time." She turned her head to the side, as if to spit, but apparently thought better of it. "The only person I know of who could tell us what spell was cast on them and how to lift it died three days ago."

"Who was that?" Marc asked. They'd told him that he, or this "Tolinom" whose body he was in, collapsed three days ago, and he thought he might have been fading in and out of consciousness for that long. He didn't know if it would help, but if this person who died three days ago could have had something to do with Trent and him being there, Marc wanted to know.

"Jiam, remember?" the panther girl told him. "The sorcerer."

Trent lifted his chin and said knowledgeably, "He fought a dragon with water tornados."

Marc almost laughed at the big man's disbelieving sarcasm, but the two females' grim frowns made him restrain himself. He remembered then what the black feline had told him about the sorcerer and the dragon. "You said that this Jiam just dropped dead at the same time as Trent and I collapsed?"

"When you and _Herald_collapsed," Captain Lebram corrected, but she nodded at him.

"So you think that the dragon is what killed him and brought us here?"

"It's the only explanation that fits," the black feline said, "but again, why did it curse you and Herald, and none of the rest of us?"

Marc couldn't believe he was giving all this talk of magic and dragons so much credibility, but he had nothing else to go on. He frowned down at the tail curled in his lap. How could he dismiss anything as impossible anymore? "So, if the sorcerer who fought the dragon is dead, are there any other sorcerers we can go to that might be able to help us?"

Trent groaned, a deep rumble in his big chest. "If anyone mentions ruby slippers or a yellow brick road, I'm jumping overboard."

"What?" The cat girl looked at him with a strange expression on her feline face. Marc decided it was bafflement, but he couldn't be sure with her bestial features.

"It's from an old movie," Marc explained briefly, and when they turned their confused eyes on him, he added, "A children's story." He was in a place with sorcerers, dragons, and shirtless doctors. Of course no one knew what a movie was . "Look, that's not important. Do either of you know of anyone who might know how to send Trent and me home?"

Lebram glanced at the black feline, who was studying her crossed forearms with a pensive frown. Taking an exasperated breath, the captain turned back to Marc. "They say Taurus, the Royal Right, is an expert in all things arcane. Some even claim he practices sorcery himself, but you'll have a hard time tracking him down."

"Why's that?"

"He's the king's head diplomat, always traveling back and forth between Eyrasabi and noble estates around the country. You could always head to the capital and wait for him to return, I suppose, but even then, a sailor and two Oncan sightseers would never get an audience."

"You sound like you don't plan on going with us," Marc noted.

Lebram smirked at him. "She might seem small to you, but Falcon Wing's an ocean vessel. She can't travel far up the River Eyral before her hull bottoms out."

Marc had to piece that together before he understood her fully. "Wait, we're on a ship?" he blurted out before he could stop himself. He should have been able to figure that out before, by everything everyone had been saying, and by the way his bed was still rocking gently beneath him. Trent snickered quietly.

"I might know someone," the cat girl said into the awkward silence. All eyes turned to her. "Someone who might know how to reverse the dragon's spell."

"Who would that be?" the captain asked.

"A magician near the crossing into Bandarethe." Her black tail flicked at some agitation while she stared at the wooden floor in front of her. "I saw him work an illusion once."

Lebram narrowed her eyes at the panther girl, something in the feline's nervous behavior evidently making her suspicious. "Does this magician know enough magic to bring these two back to their senses?"

The black feline glanced at Marc, then back down at the floor briefly before meeting the captain's steady gaze. "The illusion was...very convincing."

Marc looked back and forth between the two females as another long silence stretched between them. He couldn't think of anything else to say. Finding someone to send him home and out of that alien body was the only good idea he'd had since waking up in the little room.

"Well," Lebram finally said, and took a deep breath before continuing. "We have until we reach Boendal to decide what to do about this. That gives us two or three more days, at least. By then, with luck, the hex will have worn off." She turned and pushed open the door behind her. "Best we catch what sleep we can before dawn."

"Now there's a lovely idea," Trent proclaimed, and he followed the captain out into the starry night. Before the door could swing shut, though, the big man caught it in his meaty hand. "Hey, Tolimarc," he said over his shoulder, combining Marc's name with that of the cat person whose body he was wearing. "In freshman year, you got into an argument with a teacher when you started signing your name on your papers with a 'C' instead of a 'K.' She threatened to count all your homework and tests as incomplete unless you started spelling your name right. What was her name again?"

"Mrs. Couler," Marc answered with a grimace. He still resented that teacher for making such a big deal over such a little detail. The woman had been out to get him his entire freshman year.

"Oh yeah, that's right," Trent said. "I actually had forgotten." He let go of the door, then, muttering to himself as he walked away from the little room and out of earshot.

"What was _that_about?" the panther girl exclaimed.

Marc sighed, suddenly feeling very tired. "I think he was testing me to make sure I am who I said I am. Since he still wants to believe he's dreaming, he had to ask something even he couldn't remember the answer to."

"Oh," was her simple response. She slid down the wall until she was sitting at the head of his bed, her legs folded underneath her. "You speak Crazy Person really fluently."

He managed a small smile despite the uncomfortable tickling at the corners of his mouth while she edged closer to the bed and leaned toward him.

"Tolinom, this isn't all some game, is it?" she said hopefully, leaning closer and speaking quietly enough that no one would be able to hear if they were listening outside the little room's door. Marc had to concentrate to understand her himself. The buzzing in his ears had never left completely, he realized. He just hadn't been noticing it while so many more important matters were on his mind. "A trick, to keep anyone from finding out who you really are?"

Marc frowned, the prickling in his mouth and forehead a slight distraction. "Why wouldn't I want anyone to know who I am?" Was she talking about what the voice from his vision had said back on his last day of school, about Tolinom being the destroyer of worlds?

The black feline pulled back, setting her jaw and looking Marc in the eye. "You must not be Tolinom, then," she said, sounding hurt and frustrated, "because he would let me in on whatever he's planning."

Marc sighed again. Her words were meant to sting, he knew, and maybe if he was this Tolinom, they would have. Instead, he could only sympathize with her confused frustration. "I'm sorry," he said inanely. "Let's just find this magician of yours so that we can fix this." He began awkwardly trying to turn himself so that he could lie back down, and it took a few moments for the other feline to decide to help him. He lay on his side facing her, finding the position much easier on the disk of irritation over his tail bone than when he'd been laying on his back. "Thanks," he murmured. He used his forearm as a pillow, and had to ignore the way its fur tickled his half numb muzzle. "Where will you be sleeping?" he asked blearily, then felt blood rush to his face when he realized how that must have sounded, with the cat girl kneeling beside his bed.

If she noticed his blush, though, she made no sign of it. Of course, with all of that white fur on his face, his blushes probably weren't even visible. "I'll sleep in here, on the floor," she said. "I think I make the crew a little uncomfortable."

"Because you're a girl?"

She stared at him for a while, then laughed. "Of course not. They have no trouble taking orders from Captain Lebram, after all, or sleeping near her. It's because I'm an Oncan."

"What's an Oncan?" Marc asked, and she laughed again.

"You're serious?" she said. Marc nodded against his arm, blushing again at his ignorance. "We're Oncans," she explained, seeming to find the conversation amusing. "The children of Bandarethe."

"You mean the cat people?"

All at once, her expression changed from amusement to indignation. She looked ready to thump him on the head. "We're not cat people, any more than humans are monkey people. We're just people, no matter what we look like." Marc tried to apologize, but she wasn't finished. "I can't believe you've forgotten what you are as well as who. You sound like a human yourself."

"Well, that's what I was before I was brought here," he told her. "We don't even have cat...Oncans where I come from." He grimaced at his slip of the tongue, as it earned him a sharp glare from her.

She shook her head after another long moment of staring at him. "None of this can be possible," she groaned, turning to sit with her back leaning against the bed.

Marc closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Tell me about it."

A period of quiet passed between them as they both drifted closer to sleep, the only sounds coming from the ship's creaking beams and the waves slapping gently against its hull. The ship's slow rocking motions were hypnotic, and Marc found himself pulled toward slumber more quickly than he could remember ever happening before. Another question came to him in his last dregs of consciousness, though. "No one ever told me your name," he whispered.

For a long while, she didn't answer, and he began to think she'd already fallen asleep. Then he heard a quiet sniff beside his bed, and she said, "I'm Dola." It came out as a sob.

Marc opened his eyes, but could only see the back of her black head. He couldn't think of anything to say, and his lightly furred eyelids were just too heavy to keep open for long.

When he finally fell asleep, though, his thoughts weren't on the Oncan girl crying beside him. He felt as lost as she appeared, and had his own worries to torment his dreams. His concerns took shape in his mind, simple visions in their own right, though he would never remember them when he awoke. Pieces of the puzzle he found himself in fell together in his subconsciousness, and he didn't like the picture they formed. Brandon had been with him on the flight to Brazil, free from the frozen time as the other presence demanded Marc's consent. He didn't know why Trent was there with him in that foreign world instead of Brandon, but one dream plagued him through the night, repeating like a skipping DVD until he woke up.

A wizard with flowing robes and a white beard that swayed down past his hips stood between a dragon and two others, a bare-chested sailor and a fully feral, white furred tiger, their faces transforming now and again into the features of Marc, Trent, or Brandon. The wizard wielded a burning sword, and with it, struck at the monstrous dragon, which opened a cavernous mouth full of rows of shark-like teeth and breathed a torrent of fire over the wizard, sailor, and tiger. When the flames lifted, Marc and Trent were standing where the tiger and sailor had been before, two teenage boys with backpacks slung over their shoulders as though they'd been on their way to school before they'd been kidnapped and brought there.

The dragon took wing, and Trent and Marc were left behind, alone. In the spot where the wizard had been standing was only a smoking pile of ashes.