The Change was something Tom had spent years fearing. His father had goblinized into an ork, and it had damn near killed his mother. The Change had destroyed his parents’ marriage. Fortunately Tom’s grandparents had taken in his mother and her children, and Tom had a good family to grow up in—no thanks to Matthew Walker, his father. The drunken ork had shown up on Tom’s eleventh birthday, shattering Tom’s belief that his father was dead. For Tom it had been the beginning of eleven years of nightmares as he waited to goblinize. It wasn’t until he was a year older than Matthew had been when it happened to him that Tom was sure he was safe from that fate. He thanked God for it every day in the almost decade and a half since. He still didn’t like orks—or his father.