This crazy business would never end. It was the only coherent thought that managed to come out of my exhausted brain, while I put my last strength into this umpteenth race through the woods. I had switched to automatic mode and relied more on my instinct than my reflexes to avoid obstacles. I still noticed that Jude didn't seem much more alert than I was and that we were not far from reaching our limits, both physically and emotionally. Finally, as far as I was concerned, because Jude's emotional behaviour remained an unsolvable mystery to me. I just followed him, without even trying to find my way through this maze of plants. My reflexes were so slow, that by the time I realized that Jude had stopped, I almost hit him.

He was on alert, with his bow stretched, and moving forward at slow and cautious steps. I imitated him immediately and pulled out the gun I had picked up after the fight. I looked intensely at the darkness around us in the hope of distinguishing what had put him on alert, but without success. Machinally, I stretched my mind towards him to ask him what he had seen or heard, before I realized that he couldn't hear me. Not like Feline anyway.

The strange emotional communion that Jude and I had briefly shared seemed over. "Seemed" was apparently the right word, because at the same time he turned around to give me an interrogating look. Even though he obviously didn't understand what I had intended, he still felt something. Given my failure, I decided to refocus on the present and the threat he had detected by approaching him and asking him orally, but he was quick to react. He came backwards towards me without ever letting go of his target and without making a sound.

- 'It only works when I'm in my animal form,' he told me gently in my ear. 'You will have to explain to me how you manage to do that by the way! Meanwhile, I feel one of our canine friends, straight ahead but... there's something different... Follow me and be ready, in case there are several.'

Great, I must have really been out of shape for not sensing them, because the last time I was the one who detected them first. Well, I decided to stop thinking and followed Jude, all my senses awakened. Nevertheless, despite all my concentration, my already injured foot caught in a root and I lost my balance again. I clumsily caught myself on Jude's shoulder. He grunted in pain and, out of reflex, pulled out of my grip. Deprived of my only support, I suddenly fell to my knees on the uneven ground of the forest. It was not so much the pain that surprised me as Jude's reaction. To get him to react like that, I must have hurt him pretty bad, because he was more of a stoic kind of guy. Besides, the dark spot I saw appear on his light t-shirt on his shoulder blade was proof of this.

- 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry!' I said to him quietly, trying to get up as silently as possible. 'I didn't know you were hurt.'

- 'It's nothing,' he told me as he rearmed himself and began to move forward as if nothing had happened.

- 'From where I stand, it doesn't look like nothing! Let me at least have a look, maybe I made it worse by leaning on it like that?'

He only turned around to glare at me and resumed his silent progression. Nothing had changed. It was reassuring to see that there were some things that were unalterable. Like Jude's bipolar pigheaded temper! I continued to follow him, worrying about this injury, because I saw his arm shaking more and more. Whatever he said, it made him suffer and obviously bothered him to hold his bow. I was about to insist on examining it, when the silence that had reigned for some time finally reached my conscience. If there was one of these monsters in front of us, how come we couldn't hear anything? They were only animals after all, they couldn't be totally silent. Especially since it wasn't a good sign for Worth either. Jude waved at me to stop and I saw him examining something on the ground a few meters away. As he laid his bow down, I understood that there was no immediate danger and, as he seemed to have temporarily forgotten me, decided to approach without waiting for his approval.

He was in the middle of a sort of glade. A clear space would be more appropriate to describe this part of the forest, which was a little less abundant in trees and thorny bushes than the others. At his feet lay an animal, visibly dead from several bullets in his head.

- 'If the monster is there, where is Worth?'

- 'I don't know. But what worries me most is that I don't think he's alone. Do you feel another one?'

- 'No, that's the weird thing. I didn't feel anything all along. But if he killed him while we were still far away, maybe that's normal? Hopefully, there was only one!'

I couldn't believe what I was saying. I felt something was wrong too. I tried once again to use my new senses but didn't catch anything, as if something was blocking me. I turned my attention to Jude, always leaning over the body and about to turn it over. I approached to see what he was up to.

- 'It's not the same as last time,' he said. 'Look at the face.'

Indeed. The body was the same, but the head looked more like a cat's this time and, looking closer, I realized that it wasn't just the head that was different.

- 'Look,' I said to him as I showed him the retractable claws of the animal, closer to those of the tiger than the cat. 'I don't think I'm getting too far in assuming these freaks are playing with genetics, but for what purpose?'

The moment I showed him, Jude stood with his bow in hand and looked up at the trees overhanging us. I hastened to imitate him, without really knowing why, however.

- 'Claws mean good climbers, and there's something wrong with this fo...'

Before he could finish his sentence, an imposing black mass fell off the tree behind him and landed on his back in a spectacular jump, sending him to the ground. I may have had my gun pointed in the right direction at the time of the attack, but I didn't have time to shoot. What the hell was that thing? No animal was able to jump so far, so fast and in complete silence. Nonetheless, unfortunately for it and fortunately for us, it was alone.

So, without thinking, I aimed at its head and shot it before it had time to tear off Jude's head. I too could be fast when I wanted to be! Even if I didn't miss my target, it didn't seem to hurt it. The creature stared at me, with its yellow and crazy look, one of whose eyes had just been punctured by my bullet, and made a noise for the first time. A kind of distorted growl that sounded more like a strangely muffled whistle. I may not have killed it at first, but at least I had freed Jude from it. I sincerely hoped he was still strong enough to help me kill this thing, because if the bullets were obviously not enough, let's hope the arrows would be.

Jude managed to take his bow and shoot as fast as he could in his condition and position. On his knees and with blood dripping on his face from a bad cut above his brow bone, he managed to untick three arrows and shot the monster. The moment it died, the forest came back to life in one second. As if the light and sound had just been restored. My perceptions also came back violently and made me stagger. I looked up at the tree where the animal had been a few minutes earlier and knew, before I even looked, what I was going to find there, or rather who. Worth was already coming down and helping Cassie do the same.

- 'Where is Adam?' I asked with some anguish, when I did not see him come down after the others.

- 'He's coming. He... he's in the middle of... "changing"?'

The inspector's questioning tone made it clear that he did not know what to think or how to express it.

- 'Are you all right?' Cassie asked in a slightly more alert voice than last time. 'We wanted to help you, but this beast was tracking us and Gabriel was out of bullets... Oh my God!'

She took her face in her hands and started sobbing.

- 'We tried to warn you, but what Adam did was double-edged,' Worth continued. 'It prevented the creature from seeing, hearing and feeling us, but it also prevented us from communicating with you.'

- 'Where is Adam?' Jude asked, who now stood up and wiped his face with the bottom of his T-shirt before turning around.

His wound had already stopped bleeding for lack of complete healing. It was pretty cool the shape-shifter genes, though.

- 'He was in the tree with us. I suppose he wanted to regain his human form before he joined us.'

- 'If he has really transformed, it is one of his first times, and he will need another shape-shifter near him to regain his human form so quickly. What animal did he metamorphose into?'

I would have been very interested in what he was saying if the situation was different, but I was still obsessed with his shoulder injury, which I could partially see through the shreds of his T-shirt. It was a nasty wound, not healed at all, a bit like a burn. As if his skin had come into contact with an incandescent object and kept the mark. The question was: why had he not yet healed? His exhaustion did not explain everything.

I approached as quietly as I could and held out one hand to remove the fabric that was blocking my view. With horror, I noticed that this reminded me more and more of a red-hot iron burn. Where the hell would Jude have gotten a wound like that? We were no longer in the Middle Ages! No, I must be wrong.

I was only a few inches from my target, when he heard me, or felt me, and turned around and grabbed my wrist before I had time to touch it in a single fluid movement.

- 'Don't worry about that!'' he told me, looking me straight in the eye, his face tightened with anger.

Then, as fast as he had grabbed my arm, he dropped me and began to walk towards the tree where Adam was supposed to be.

- 'We don't know, we haven't seen him... but he can't be very big,' Cassie replied as if our brief exchange hadn't taken place or she hadn't noticed it. 'He just told us that he had acquired his animal form and a gift that could be useful to us, but that he needed calm to transform quickly. Then he climbed higher up the tree and after a few minutes, the creature couldn't find us anymore.'

Jude stood at the foot of the tree, closed his eyes and began to call Adam both by his first name and through his power, given the breeze that was forming around him and beginning to move up along the tree making the leaves rustle. This sudden gust may have seemed a little strange from where we were, but a glance at my two companions reassured me that they had apparently not noticed anything unusual. The wind stopped as abruptly as it had appeared and Jude raised his arms to grab something we couldn't see from where we were, before coming back towards us with a gentle step.

As he approached, the three of us saw what he had wrapped around his left arm, a snake and not just any snake... A cobra! I knew it was Adam, but I couldn't help but have an instinctive backward movement. What reassured me, and made me feel less ashamed, was that the other two had the same reaction as me. Jude, for his part, smiled a little bit, despite his tired look, at our reaction.

The moment he stopped, the snake suddenly dropped to the ground and began to run in my direction, undulating on the ground at a high speed. I started to step back, when I remembered that one should not run away from a predator. But did this apply to snakes? I was seriously leaning in favor of no, when Jude's voice stopped me.

- 'Worth, don't shoot! He won't hurt her.'

Only then did I notice that Worth was trying to hold the snake at gunpoint with the weapon I had imprudently left on the ground, once the threat had been removed.

- 'Don't be afraid and don't run away. He's just looking for your connection,' Jude continued, speaking to me again.

I stopped and, not seeing why Jude would lie to me or want to hurt me voluntarily, I decided to trust him. So I crouched down, very gently and with a little apprehension, before reaching out to the cobra.

- 'Why doesn't he stay with you instead? He barely knows me and I don't think he trusts me particularly,' I asked as I tried not to shake my arm like a hysteric in contact with the scales of the deadly dangerous reptile on my skin.

- 'What do you think are the snakes' natural predators?' Jude asked me with his sarcastic grin, which I was beginning to get to know well.

- 'But you are in your human form now!' I argued.

- 'He's too young for that to change anything. In his animal form, it is still his instinct that dictates him. For him, I feel like a raptor, and it is the instinct of his beast that takes over his logical reasoning. He needs the presence and strength of another shape-shifter to transform himself so soon after one of his first metamorphoses, and you are the only one available, except me.'

Worth and Cassie followed our exchange with painful concentration and wider and wider eyes.

- 'But you know I'm not a real metamorph,' I argued again in a slightly panicked voice.

And for good reason, I had a deadly dangerous snake driven by its instincts on my arms, literally, and I had no idea what to do to help him.

- 'Apparently, you're enough, so help him.'

- 'Okay... but I don't know how to do it!'

- 'I'll help you and explain, but it would be nice if we hurry because I hear our dear inspector's colleagues coming in soon, and I'd rather they didn't see a live metamorphosis. This investigation will already do enough damage as it is,' he said in an acidic tone.

I could see that both Cassie and Worth were dying to flood us with questions, but fortunately for everyone, they kept quiet. The inspector lowered his weapon and even offered to meet his colleagues so that we could have a little more time. He took Cassie with him, instinctively suspecting that the more privacy we would have, the better. So I found myself standing in the middle of the woods with Jude's falcon-like gaze on me and the hypnotic gaze of a poisonous rattlesnake.

It gets better and better!