The hospital room was quiet, the only sound the steady, soft beep of the heart monitor. Jake Gardner lay still in the narrow bed, his own body a strange and distant shell. He wasn’t in it anymore. His consciousness floated, untethered, in a small, quivering puddle of violet slime that had oozed from his own limp penis and now pooled on the crisp white sheets.

He’d been walking home from the bar, a little after two, when the sky had flashed purple. Something small and hot had slammed into the back of his head. That was the last thing he remembered as Jake. Now he was… this.

Move, he thought. The purple mass jiggled. It was like trying to flex a muscle he’d never had. He concentrated, pushing his awareness to the edge of his form. The slime bulged, then stretched. It was malleable, almost like clay, but slick and cool to his own non-existent touch. He found that if he focused, he could will it into shapes. A lump. A disc. A crude hand.

But the easiest shape, the one that felt most natural for motion, was a tube. He compressed himself, willing the puddle to draw up into a thick, foot-long cylinder. It wobbled, then stood upright on the sheet. He looked through it, his vision a strange, panoramic blur. He could see the room, see his own body breathing softly, the IV drip in his arm. A wave of vertigo washed through him—or whatever passed for vertigo in a state of sentient jelly.

Just as he was getting the hang of inching his tubular form across the mattress, the door to the private room hissed open.

A nurse stepped in, her soft-soled shoes silent on the linoleum. Jake froze, his slime-body going still. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, with her blond hair tied back in a messy but efficient bun. She hummed softly to herself as she moved to the monitors, checking the readings. Her name tag, pinned to the front of her pale blue scrubs, read AVA APPLEBOTTOM, RN.

Jake watched her. A familiar, low heat began to glow somewhere in his core. It was arousal, pure and simple. He’d always appreciated a pretty woman, and Ava, with her slender frame and the way her scrubs tightened over a surprisingly generous backside as she leaned over to adjust a dial, was definitely pretty.

But …