[body horror ish]
It seemed safe to assume that at no point had anyone present thought, "this is going really well!" Each consecutive moment exasperated more than the last. Dealing with the doubler one on one wasn't a homecoming highlight he'd have chosen, but as Cricket's energy continued to sour and Birdie (the good Dr. Quinn) neared, the ordeal potentiated collateral damage he wasn't willing to chance. Only two weeks under its influence, the Winter Mantle was more help than harm at this stage. Both his anger and the ability to act on it amplified, the cold calculus of Winter worked contrarily to leash his rage. Resolved to let the trickster go for now, the other two in the clearing between striped tents were more important.
"Cricket!" he barked. A junkyard dog with his teeth in a juicy steak, he kept his brace around the Fae's neck, working through his stubbornness toward releasing her. "You're being a possum." The shortest route from A to B suited best at the moment: Fae weren't known to be mind readers capable of co-opting an inside joke, and he knew her suspicions. He wanted her to stay, but wouldn't complain if she put distance between herself and possible fallout. His focus cut back as the trickster blurred. What replaced fake-Cressida made him pull his head back, incredulity yanking his mouth into a widening grin. He laughed. No longer entirely human, the bitter sound was a monstrous splice conveying a non-verbal what the fuck. The Fae expected he'd be startled or disinclined to injure himself. Rather than release, he ground the back of the creature's head into the tentpole.
Quinn grew in his peripheral. James glanced to see her more solidly. "No one's hurt." Cirque employees threw knives at each other nightly, a middling bruise wasn't real harm. The real Jaime. He cast a dubious squint in her direction. "Yer fixin' to get walloped, stay back," he implored her, though the threat of noxious herbals concoctions was nothing to laugh at.
Stars burst in his right eye as the doppler's fist glanced off his temple, in motion. He tossed his head to clear it. In the half second lapse, his jaw unhinged, making room for the rapid growth of a craggy range of predatory teeth, sickly yellow, cracked and far too large for a human mouth. Breath rattled like a pinball ricocheting inside his expanding ribs. He could have pulled himself back, could have shrugged off the annoyance, were it not for the push of solidified air cleaving him from his prey. Off balance, the fallen lantern cracked beneath his boot heel. An enemy held at bay by light, shadow leapt from the nooks and crannies. Their corner of the midway slipped into darkness. Light from across the path blocked by a hanging tree of stuffed animals carved strange shapes across the scene. He'd get what he wanted, when he no longer wanted it.
The bones of his fingers elongated past his skin's elastic tolerance, ripping through his fingernails, cracking joints and tearing sinew as they extended into talons. His MagLite lamp was in his damned rucksack, across the clearing. James pulled his hand from the pinned Fae, staggered back in an attempt to get nearer to the far off golden glow. One knee joint ripped through the leg of his jeans before its opposite did the same, stealing his balance and pitching him to the earth. He sank in a howling deformity of roiling limbs, clawing at his mutating throat with bloodied hands which no longer resembled them. Too near to Quinn, he opened his broken mouth to send her back, but produced no human sound. Eyes lost to the void of his sockets couldn't convey the plea. His jaw hung grotesquely before new sinew at his mandible began to reattach it, reformed. A claw razed the earth at his side, gouging canyons in the dirt as the spiked process of each vertebrae began to split and tear through the back of his shirt like the a spine of red earth pressed high between the shift of tectonic plates. The creature which began to form from the lurching shell that had been James Deckard was near large enough to compare on such a massive scale.