I screamed bloody murder.

My legs thrashed and the muscles in my back tensed up to the point I thought my spine might snap.

Azad and Xandra were kneeling by me, their hands tearing away at my shredded shirt to better see the wounds which were there.

"What happened?!" Xandra shouted.

I could feel her hands touch close to the open wounds, her fingertips slick with my blood. I thrashed wildly, unable to stop myself from showing the full extent of the pain set deep in my chest.

"You have to heal yourself!" Azad shouted, "Now Burgess, now!"

With what small sliver of thought I could muster I tried healing myself. In my mind's eye I begged the fragment of the power responsible for healing, and the other fragment containing all the medical knowledge I had absorbed, to combine yet again to fix the life-threatening wounds at my chest.

Right away the power fragments responded and I felt the wounds at my chest closing up. But even with such a miraculous power there was no such thing as a free lunch.

"Yes! Yes!" said Xandra, who was close to tears and happy to see the wounds starting to close.

But the momentary joy I saw on her face soured as she saw what I was becoming. I could feel my teeth lengthening, my ears growing longer, my nose reshaping into a monstrous snout.

The were-fox-frog-monster lurking within me was starting to take over again.

Stop! I thought, and the transformation taking hold of me ceased.

At the same time however the wounds at my chest, which had slowly started to seal as if invisible stitching and staples were being put in place one at a time, opened up like blooming flowers, undoing what little progress I had made.

The pain climbed yet again, and I screamed even more.

"What's happening?!" Xandra cried.

Azad put one of his hands which was covered in my blood to his temple as he tried to figure things out. He looked utterly out of his element to deal with something as awful as this.

"It's that monster he became," said Azad, "If Burgess uses his power right now then the monster will come out again. He won't be able to heal himself unless he becomes that thing again."

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"Then I won't!" I shouted, "I'll never–become that—thing–again!"

More screaming from me. Warm blood leaking down the sides of my chest. So much blood.

"Can't we heal him somehow?!" Xandra said desperately.

She put her hands to my wounds and tried to tap into her power to do something to fix the open gashes. Azad did the same, the pair holding onto my open wound as if they were trying to push the power within themselves into me.

Each second which passed was more pain, but I could also feel the wooziness from loss of blood starting to creep in.

You'll be dead in less than five minutes if you do not heal yourself, the fragment of the power told me.

"I don't know! I don't know how!" shouted Xandra.

She was crying. Azad was on the verge of tears too. He let out an angry yell of frustration and looked around as if to find some solution to helping me.

"It's okay," I choked out, "I won't become it again. It's okay."

"It's not okay!" Xandra screamed, "You have to heal yourself right now! Do it!"

"No!" I yelled, "The monster!"

I didn't have the air in my lungs or the presence of mind to tell them the facts of the matter. Azad was still injured from the last fight. He was in no state to fight the full-fledged monster I had become all over again. Not when there had been a good deal of luck in the timing of our last fight that allowed him to clinch the win. There was no chance for them to survive another round of the monster's rampage.

"I'll fight it!" Xandra shouted, "I don't care if you become the monster! I'll take it on! Heal yourself now, I mean it!"

"No!" I shouted, shaking my head and feeling tears streaming down my face, "I can't!"

Death was getting closer. I didn't need the power to tell me as much. Soon all the pain of what I had gone through would be over. Nobody had to get hurt anymore. I had escaped death so many times already, surely this outcome for me was inevitable anyway?

"Azad tell him!" Xandra shouted, "Make him listen, please!"

Azad considered everything for a few seconds and seemed to come to a decision.

"Right," he said.

He turned his attention to me.

"Burgess!" he shouted, "Become the monster. Heal yourself. We'll handle the rest. You have to believe in us!"

"No!" I choked out, my thrashing slowing as my body responded less to my attempts to move, the blood no longer circulating how it should.

"Trust us, Burgess!" Xandra shouted, her face scrunched and wet with tears, "Just do it!"

The truth was, I didn't want to die. Being so close to death was the scariest thing I had ever experienced. Before, when I was the monster, being close to dying came as a relief.

But being human, and feeling the life leaving my body, knowing that whatever lay beyond life was near, that was something truly horrifying to face. I wasn't ready to die. I wanted to keep living with every fiber of my being.

It all came down to a simple question in my mind:

What was the courageous thing to do? To let myself die and to protect Azad and Xandra from the monster I would become? Or to put my trust in them that they would be able to overcome the monster?

With this question crystal clear in my head, it was my heart which told me what the answer I was looking for was.

I tapped into the power and began to heal myself. Right away the monster within me began to take over. The muscles of my body began to expand, the nails on both hands growing into claws; the pain at my chest fading as the wounds healed rapidly.

Fading again. Losing control. The beast in me coming to the fore.

A dreadful scream escaped me again and became a nightmarish roar.

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