by Ruby Loren
Change, change, CHANGE, CHANGE…
She frowned for a second, not understanding what was happening. Energy started to move around her. She could actually see it swirling like stardust. Then she felt the bone breaking twitch she always did at the start of a change.
Only she hadn’t intended for it to happen.
“No, no way,” she said and summoned all of her strength.
January fully tore free of the invisible strings holding her there, fleeing the clearing by dashing into the forest. Now she was changing, she couldn’t stop. The full moon had made it hard enough to control without the added pull.
She wasted a couple of seconds getting her car keys out of her pocket and placed them between her teeth. This is ridiculous, she thought, as her clothes tore and she shook her mane and tail in the cool night air. Her ears flicked back but silence reigned in the clearing now. She couldn’t stop the shiver from running down her spine.
This was bad. So bad.
Catch her, CATCH HER…
Another alien thought rang around her skull and she knew she needed to run. Her hooves kicked up dirt and she galloped away, a black shadow beneath the trees. Behind her, she heard the howls of the wolves. It made sense to send them out. Almost nothing could beat a wolf over a long distance.
Hampered by the tightly packed trees, January could only run at a fraction of her full pace, but there were fields coming up. She could smell the huge spread of grass. The other edge of the forest was only a few hundred metres away. She flicked an ear backwards and caught the snarls of the pursuing wolves. There were two - no - three of them, just twenty metres behind her.
There was a snapping sound, as a pair of jaws closed on thin air. January knew she couldn’t turn around. The edge of the forest glowed in the moonlight and she surged forwards, finally daring to up the pace. When she exploded onto the gently swaying grass of the miles of fields, which covered the rural area near Hailfield and Witchwood, the wolves fell away and January remembered what it felt like to be able to run forever. That was the one thing she’d missed living in Paris.
The wolves never stood a chance.
The back streets of Witchwood were silent when January arrived back an hour later. The sky was still dark and the moon was clear above. She shivered in the slight breeze and felt goosebumps rise all over her body. She was currently hiding in an alley next to the car park where her red Mercedes shone invitingly. There was a blanket on the backseat for emergencies like this one. Her car keys had miraculously survived the journey, held between her teeth like a bit. The problem was making it across the brightly lit car park, buck naked.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She had an early shift tomorrow at the tearoom.
The gravel bit into the soft soles of her feet. January moved as quickly as she could, her keys ready to unlock the car at the last possible moment, so as not to draw attention to herself with the sound. She felt a wave of relief when she threw herself onto the backseat, glad that the roof was up. She fashioned a simple wrap from the warm blanket. It was hardly Chanel, but it would definitely do for the drive home. She slid into the front seat and started the engine. The accelerator pedal felt strange against her bare foot, but she pressed down and the wheels spun on the gravel before the car shot forwards out of the car park and onto the road that led back home.
She thought her twin headlights picked up on a sudden movement down a dark alley, but when she twisted her neck to look, there was no one there. As she turned onto the main road, she couldn’t fight the niggling feeling that the flash of pale hair she’d seen out of the corner of her eye had belonged to Gregory Drax.
“This has been one seriously naff night,” she said aloud, keeping the car at a high speed when the road led through parts of the forest. The trees almost seemed to swallow the tarmac up and she couldn’t help but feel eyes watching her on all sides. She wasn’t safe yet.
While she drove through the darkness, her mind kept jumping to what her mother was going to say when she found out she’d failed to find her runaway sister and ditched the pack meeting.
It wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Well, tough…” January said, distracted by her thoughts.
That was why she didn’t even have time to swerve when something ran out in front of her car.
5
There was a horrible bang and the scream of burning rubber. January had slammed on the brakes at the last moment, but it had been far too late.
The car ground to a halt with steam already starting to rise from the crumpled bonnet. January sat with her hands frozen in place on the wheel. Her head was ringing from the shock. She shook herself and wrapped the blanket a little tighter, before opening the door and going to see what was lying on the road in an all-too-still heap.
She kept hold of her blanket. Her feet carried her across the tarmac, still warm from the friction of the tyres. She squinted through the gloom, relying on the light from her one remaining headlight in order to see the mound of brown fur and hooves.
It was a deer.
January almost breathed a sigh of relief before feeling sorry for the loss of the unfortunate animal’s life. She’d suspected a trap to get her to stop the car, but it had just been a case of bad timing.
She glanced back at her car and frowned at just how crumpled the bonnet was. It looked like she was going to have to get a new vehicle after all. Her Mercedes was a write-off. The question was, would it get her home?
The nearby howl, which came from somewhere in the forest to the left of the road, reminded her that the crash hadn’t been silent. The tyre squeal and sickening bang had probably been audible for miles around in the quiet forest. She turned back to the dead deer, wondering if she should try and move it out of the road.
That was when she realised what was lying in the road didn’t have fur or hooves anymore.
“Oh no,” January whispered, forgetting about the wolves and running over to where the motionless, naked girl lay. Even if it was some crazy trap set by the psycho cats, the impact had been real. “Please don’t be dead.” She felt around for a pulse and experienced a weak jolt of elation when she found a faint one.
There weren’t any horrific outward signs of the crash but the huge bruise, already forming on the girl’s side, showed where the car had hit. There would be internal bleeding. A lot of it. If she’d been human, she would have been dead already, but even though her faster healing had already kicked in, it might not be enough.
“I’m going to get you to a hospital,” January said, bending down to scoop her up, praying that this wouldn’t just kill her faster. For once, she was grateful for her muscular build. She thought the girl’s eyes fluttered when her fine, dark auburn hair fell across her face, but it might have just been wishful thinking.
With the girl still in her arms, January managed to open the car door with her bare foot and gently slid her into the back seat. She hesitated before unwrapping the blanket she’d been wearing and covering the girl up instead. She needed all the help she could get.
As she closed the door and went to get back in the front, a howl cut through the air - this time just a few metres away to the left of the road.
January turned and stared into the thick mass of dark trees, but she couldn’t see anything. There was no doubt that the wolf was there somewhere though, watching and waiting for an unknown cue.
She heard a panted breath and knew it had started its killing run.
January tensed at the loud crashing sound of breaking twigs and swishing undergrowth. She heard a harsh yelp, which was cut horribly short. She didn’t wait around to see what had caused it, fumbling her keys in the ignition and thanking all of her lucky stars when the car’s engine coughed and sprung to life. It didn’t sound healthy, but at least they were moving.
Five miles down the road (on a round trip back towards Witchwood, where the hospital was) January spotted movement in the back seat.
“Where am I?” The girl muttered and January tried
to adopt a reassuring tone – something she didn’t have much experience of.
“I’m afraid you ran out onto the road in front of my car and I hit you. We’re on the way to the hospital now.”
“I ran out onto the road…”
January suddenly noticed the girl’s terrified face and twitching nostrils. “It’s okay, I’m like you,” she said, knowing that that was the source of the girl’s terror. “My name’s January.”
If the deer shifter had heard her name before, she did a good job of hiding it.
“I… I’m Trace.” She gasped in pain and January almost swerved off the road. “I don’t think I’m doing so well,” Trace said, gritting her teeth.
January tried to increase the speed of her dying car a little bit more. “Almost there,” she said, but the other girl had worryingly lapsed back into unconsciousness.
January parked in a quiet corner of the hospital car park. When she cut the engine, she knew from the final wheeze that it was never going to get going again. Damn, should have left it running.
Trace was still unconscious, but January was pleased to find a pulse that felt a little bit stronger than when she’d found her on the road. She wrapped the blanket tightly, so that the injured shifter would be covered up, but was all too aware of her own lack of clothing.
“I don’t know if you can hear me right now. If you can, I’m sorry, but I have to leave you and run. Feel free to come up with your own story, but I think the best one always starts and ends with ‘I can’t remember’.”
She walked across the concrete towards the brightly lit hospital hoping that no one would see her. When she’d got as close as she could, she laid the girl down on the ground.
“Come and find me when you can,” she said into her ear, as a sudden afterthought.
January walked backwards a little and then raised her voice to its full volume, screaming for help before the energy swirled around her once more. She galloped away into the darkness, leaving the injured girl and her broken car behind.
There was something she still needed to do.
The birds were singing when the sky started to lighten in the east. January took it as a sign that the shifters had all gone home. That or the super pack also included birds.
It probably did.
Her horse nostrils flared as she tried to make certain that no one lurked near to the clearing. A baffling array of scents assaulted her, but her instincts told her that they were all long gone – probably snatching a few hours of sleep before returning to their day jobs, as if the midnight meet had never happened.
Of course, they would know her now before she knew them. That bothered her a lot, but there was nothing to be done about it.
She turned around and trotted through the trees until she reached the rags that had once been her clothing. What she saw through her equine eyes made her change back into a human, just to check it wasn’t a trick.
“What the hell…”
She bent down beside the dead wolf, careful not to touch him.
He’d stay a wolf forever now. There was no energy to change once you were dead, and he was very dead indeed.
There was a huge hole in the wolf’s chest, like someone had impaled him. She bent down and stared into the gory void. She thought she could see a few bits of what looked like splinters. It would appear that someone had staked the wolf. But why? You didn’t have to stake a shifter to kill them. It was true that their kind took a little more effort to kill than the average human, but the same rules generally applied. The silver bullet was a myth.
But here was a dead wolf who’d taken a stake through the heart. Perhaps the killer had got confused with the traditional method of dispatching vampires.
Perhaps it was something else.
While she was thinking it over, she found the torn section of her trousers, which included the pocket she’d left her house keys in. Yes, they were still there, she noted with relief. She’d only thought as far forward as her car keys in the panic last night.
Her nose twitched as something else occurred to her. It was highly likely that the dead wolf had been one of the ones who were sent after her. She wondered if the pack knew that he was dead. Her mouth set in a hard line as she considered how this would look. Unless they’d actually witnessed his death, all of the suspicion was going to land squarely on her shoulders.
Her keys jingled when she twitched them nervously. She’d almost forgotten about the wolf that had found her on the road. That yelp which had been cut short… she needed to look. Perhaps there would be more clues there that might help her to work out the identity of the murderer.
A twig snapped and a dog yapped in excitement. January heard the hushed voice of his handler shushing him and the quiet metallic jangle that could only belong to the pair of handcuffs hanging by his side. My luck just keeps on getting better, she thought, holding her house keys between her teeth and changing again.
It took longer this time, having already completed the process twice that night. She only just made it back through the trees when the police officer walked into the space where she’d been moments earlier. The dog knew she was there and started pulling on the lead.
For a moment, the police officer seemed interested. Then he saw the wolf with the gaping hole in its chest. That held his attention. Up until now, wolves hadn’t been seen in the forest for centuries. This would be big news both in the media and the shifter community.
It was more bad luck.
She moved her hooves as silently as the leaf littered floor would allow, until she was a safe distance away from the police officer and his dog. Someone tipped him off, she realised, and wondered if whoever it was had known she would come back. Her mind returned to the scene and she was bothered by the way the wolf had just happened to be killed in that exact spot, right on top of her clothing.
The clothing that now littered the scene of the murder, covered in her DNA.
Thank God I don’t still have my name sewn into my underwear, she thought, sarcastically. It was very fortunate indeed that she hadn’t brought her purse with her. That was the adult equivalent of a name tag. At least her keys weren’t there to trace.
She risked a trot, knowing that morning had definitely broken and she only had an hour to make it back home and get into her work clothes.
The second scene was similar to the first – the same gored hole and the same splinters. There were no members of law enforcement sniffing around here, which further fed her theory that someone was trying to set her up.
The method of dispatch was another sign.
I’d bet a whole bunch of money that the third wolf got away to tell the tale, she thought, cynically, and wondered exactly what the last wolf had seen.
Although this part of the woods didn’t have the same baffling scent trails as the scene next to the clearing, she couldn’t smell anything other than hoof and wolf. While she was momentarily interested in the hoofed animal smell, she quickly remembered Trace’s appearance on the road. Maybe she was running from something, January suddenly thought and hoped that she’d get better and remember her parting words to come and find her.
If she’d actually heard them.
The sun was a bright beam in the sky when January reached the woods behind her house that fortuitously connected with Witchwood Forest. She changed back to human form, thanking her lucky stars that she didn’t have any neighbours close enough to overlook the house she was renting.
The clock mounted on the wall of her kitchen read seven thirty. January swore loudly. She only had half an hour to throw on some clothes and minimal makeup and get herself down to the tearoom in Hailfield. That was a fifteen minute walk away, now she had no car.
Something told her this wasn’t going to be a good day.
6
“Good morning, what can I get for you?” January asked the man who’d just walked in and seated himself in her table waiting zone - without waiting to be shown a place.
It was three days since th
e night of the full moon and she still hadn’t recovered from the loss of sleep. That was what came of being in your mid-twenties. It was just another reminder that she wasn’t a teenager anymore.
The man lowered his head, his eyes scanning the brief menu for a moment. It gave January a great view of his reddish-blonde hair that had been idly swept back. She sniffed and was almost overpowered by the scent of coconut wax. Okay, so he didn’t just wake up with it looking like that.
“I’ll have a macchiato and a slice of that cake on the counter. What is it?” His bright blue eyes twinkled up at her, but January wasn’t in the mood.
“It’s boozy carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.”
“Really? I’ve never heard of a boozy carrot cake before.”
January stretched a smile, but it was an effort. “That’s because it’s my own recipe. You’ll have to let me know if you think it worked out or not,” she said out of habit.
“I’ll be sure to.”
January turned away to make up his order, knowing that he really meant it. Great, an over-enthusiastic customer is just what I need right now.
Her eyes alighted for the hundredth time on the Witchwood Weekly newspaper that had been published that morning. The headline was ‘Dead Wolf Found In Witchwood’. Hardly a snappy title, but the article itself was seriously worrying. There was even talk of hunts through the forest to discover if there were any live wolves lurking in the woods.
The shifter community was going to be angry. With details of the torn up clothing also present in the article, (the paper attributed it to a possible wolf attack victim, or the brave anonymous hunter who’d done the dispatching) she knew a lot of fingers would be pointing her way. She’d been keeping her head down for the past few days, but tonight was her first gig with the band. There was no way she could pull out of that.
