Eyes of the Wolf

28
Watching somebody shift from human to wolf was, apparently, different than seeing the process reverse itself. In a bad way.

Of course, that might have been because the guy doing this had already shown a tendency toward violence. My foot—case in point.

Something, while watching hair recede into pinkish skin like a video on grass growth kicked into rewind, seemed to jump-start my head into thinking and not staring like an adrenaline junkie. This wolf would kill me.

He was shifting.

He was weak.

I was in a tree. He was not.

I jumped and landed on my feet—on his bristly, hunched shoulders.

There was a yelp like a whipped dog, and then my landing turned horizontal and I hit the ground with a thud, leaving much of my air supply behind.

My lungs heaved, but nothing went in. I was aware of being on my back, with some weight on my right arm, and an ache was spreading through my chest and back. I saw movement in my peripheral vision. The wolf was recovering faster than I was. I wasn’t breathing.

I put my scabbed hands under me and tried getting up, and my respiratory system seemed to finally resume function, albeit painfully. I gasped for oxygen and tried to get up, but only managed to roll over, and then sit up with much use of arm leverage. It hurt.

Sound resumed slowly, and snarls became apparent to me again. None were coming from my pursuer, who wasn’t pulling himself together as quickly as I had thought upon my reaching earth. He was still an odd mixture of wolf and human, though mostly human. Half a tail still protruded from just beneath the small of his back, and his whole body seemed to have a five o’clock shadow. His shoulders were still smoothly making the transition from torso to neck, instead of making a huge notch in the formation of the body. Even so, I could tell one of them was not at the right angle, for either species.

I worked on breathing while I could, as he lied there, and then he stirred. Quickly as I could I got to my feet and collapsed against a tree, bracing myself at the rush of pain that thrummed through my body. From the angle I had achieved, I could see that his hands still had stubby fingers and rough palms, and his eyes were still shuttered tight.

Not wanting him to leap up and attain the upper hand, helpless as he seemed, I walked as steadily as I could to his back. My figuring was that, if he wanted to attack me, he would have to roll over first, and even if he managed to hit me, I could fall forward on my knees and, in doing so, inspire considerable discomfort by landing said knees in his abdomen or maybe even lower. That had to hurt even tough werewolves, right?

His eyes opened.

Immediately I was on the defensive and, as he turned and looked at me over his awkwardly-positioned shoulder, I warned, “Don’t try anything.” My voice was low and unsteady, but I didn’t break eye contact. He didn’t either, for awhile, and I wondered if he was contemplating some move he could make that I hadn’t thought of. How bad of a position was I in?

His body moved, and his blue-eyed gaze dropped. No—his gaze lifted.

The pale body at my feet turned so that the hairless stomach was exposed, and his chin went up to bare a throat that had lost the tough protection predominant in his other species. His arms hung limp at his sides, and his legs extended as far as they could, despite the hybrid bone structure of shifting from wolf to man. It looked like he had too many joints.

His body shook, and a sheen of sweat glittered on his skin where the hair had receded. I tried to figure out what the pose meant, it seemed familiar, but all I could think was that I really wished he would cover his…parts instead of displaying them so prominently. Thank God he looked far from aroused.

But what was I supposed to do now?

We stayed there, unshifting, for several long minutes. The tumult of sound in the background continued for awhile, then slowly faded. The forest was silent. I could feel my pulse in my ears and against my sore ribs. Brambles and leaves were stuck to my shirt and pants, and they itched, but I didn’t break the tense silence to scratch or groom. My bloody foot hurt.

Finally I heard footsteps. The attention of the wolf beneath me changed, and I growled another, “Don’t move.” He stayed still. The gold wolf and a black, white clad wolf companion came through the trees like coalescing shadows and sunbeams, both on high alert. The black one, with a stripe down his face and a couple of what Chris would call socks (horse terminology, apparently) on his feet, strode over to the man at my feet, his hackles slowly dropping to their original orientation on his spine. The wolf peered at the man, unfazed by his nakedness, and then walked around to look at me. My green-eyed friend followed after him and looked into the face of the man.

The man snarled, and his snout began to lengthen, hair on his spine growing much faster than the rest. I looked to the newcomers, terrified at the sudden life beneath me, but the black wolf spun on his back legs instantly and clasped the man’s neck in his jaws, his forelegs on either side of his half-formed hands. The man fought for a brief span of time, foolishly, I thought—could he not tell that the black wolf could easily just chomp that exposed neck of his completely asunder?—before settling again, his chest rising, seemingly attempting to meet that of his captor.

The gold wolf came to me after the man was subdued and put his nose to my stomach. He sniffed my legs next, trailing his nose down each one, and then coming up to reach my shoulders to smell at my arms. The process felt odd, especially so when the nose only brushed at the hairs on my arms, and not the skin. The wolf then moved to my back and repeated the procedure. He then came in front of me and looked into my face.

I don’t know what he got from the whole evaluation, but it apparently satisfied him. He licked gently at my left arm, which, I noticed belatedly, was bleeding from a ton of different tiny scratches. I must have done that while climbing. Maybe from landing. I had no idea.

Then he was turning and leaving, running back toward the village. I assumed the wolf still with me had sent him, since he obviously couldn’t go himself, what with half-formed under his close guard. The hackles on his back formed a ridge in his coat, and his snout had visible wrinkles in the skin, exposing long white teeth. The man’s chin was up again.

The gold wolf came back with a brown wolf and another black one—this one solidly so—and escorted us back to the houses.

:o3

I was taken to a house I had never been in before. The lady, named Moss, led me down a short hall and into a big room. In this room was a bed. In that bed was Niko.

He glanced at me and smirked as I limped to him. “You look like shit,” he commented wryly, sitting up. I opened my mouth, but stopped. Raking blood streaks etched their ways from the side of his neck and across, and a delta of blood was slowly winding its way down his chest. One of his ears was bleeding, and a couple of cuts had marked his face from the corner of his eye to the base of his jaw, but that one might have been shorter than it seemed—there was a red river there, too. The picture he made was a gruesome one, and one at which I would normally have turned green and turned away, but this was different.

“What happened?” I croaked at him.

“I won.” His eyes on me were steady, and there was an expression I couldn’t place hidden in their blue depths.

“Why did they attack us?”

“I’m assuming they were in another pack,” he said softly. “There are wolves with alphas that aren’t as okay with humans as James. They must have smelled you passing by.” His eyebrows moved together suddenly like magnets. “What were they doing in our territory?”

“A man came in and told James that I was telling your secret,” I told him. At the look he shot me, I said, “I haven’t been, and I still don’t plan on it.”

He nodded, his face showing smoldering, undirected anger.

“Don’t they know that some people won’t rat them out?”

“They don’t want humans in the packs at all, good humans or not,” he shot back at me. “The human is bad, and they expose the pack and gets them killed. The human is good, and the human finds a mate in one of the pack members, but is unwilling to change to a wolf. No wolf pups.” He seemed to have a gentler demeanor now, despite the harsh words. The weird look was back. I ignored it.

Niko leaned back into his white, pockmarked pillow, then tensed, his nostrils flared. He glanced at me with an altogether different expression, and it made my blood run cold.

“Anyway, you’d better get home from your run, right? Or your dad will be worried. Have Sparrow escort you back.”

His tone had no obvious explanation behind it, but there was a blatant dismissal in it. I bristled, but decided that throttling him would stain my hands, so I walked out the door.

:o3

Moss offered me another pair of shoes, and I accepted, seeing the sorry state of my own. We sorted through what must have been the entire hand-me-down closet for the pack until we found a pair that fit my tiny feet. They had Bolt on them, but I figured I could deal with it. Already I was thinking to tell my dad that Chris had given them to me as a joke. When had I become such a liar?

Moss brushed off my clothes and sent me off. I went alone.