Shade Darby’s head was changing shape, narrowing, like her features were being squeezed into an invisible mold. Her eyes grew within a narrower visage, large, glittering, slanted, focused. Her lips thinned and her mouth was smaller. Her hair—the hair Cruz had so admired—was wrong, all wrong, not hair at all, really. It was drawn back into something like a series of spikes, drawn back sharply, as if lacquered, like some fantastic punk style, forming points and edges so sharp they might cut flesh.

  Shade blinked and Cruz practically screamed, because for a moment a translucent membrane had come down over Shade’s eyes. Snake’s eyes.

  There came a low grinding sound, a wet fleshy squishing, and Cruz stared in mounting horror as Shade’s legs extended, grew, lengthened, until what stuck out from the cuff of her jeans was nothing even remotely human. The legs were long and brown and seemed to be made of rusted steel, and they ended in feet like no foot Cruz had ever seen.

  Shade’s legs suddenly bent backward, the knees reversing direction. Her thighs swelled with muscle clad in dull armor the color of dried blood.

  In seconds Shade was a terrifying hybrid creature, human mostly from the waist up, though a sleek, streamlined version of herself. From the waist down she might have been some terrifying insect or great bird. Shade stood balanced easily on narrow, spiky claws. Altogether she was several inches taller than normal, with her weight forward like a speed skater in motion, her face and hair looking as if they had been smeared back by a hurricane wind, her hair backswept into reddish spikes.

Monster, Chapter 6