Kagen stared in absolute horror at the woman.
She stood with her head thrown back, mouth raised to the bloated moon above, eyes filled with an utterly lightless darkness. Her beautiful lips—so soft and hot moments ago—now seem to wrap around the sound that issued from her throat. Those lips fluttered and rippled and seemed oddly distended.
And that cry seemed to go on forever, as if she had no need of human breath.
Then it was that Kagen saw that the lips were actually stretching. Her knees buckled and fell once more to the floor. Her hands were no longer hands at all but had instead become dark and twisted nightmare shapes.
Her howl trailed off as her respiration quickened, until she was panting like a dog. Expressions came and went with wild rapidity, as if the very structure of her mind was undergoing a radical series of changes. Kagen watched in frozen horror as the shape of her body moved and altered, as if each bone was being bent into some new and horrific form; her muscles rippled beneath her ivory skin. Then waves of goose bumps formed all over her flesh, but it was no reaction to the cold, for Kagen saw new hair follicles shoot through each bump. These hairs were the same mixture of dark black, red, and blond as the hair on her head.
Her feet expanded and black claws tore through the tips of each toe, tearing away the original nails, which fell bloody to the stone floor. He saw the heels rising and the toe-claws dig into the stone, gouging deep ruts. Then Tikaani opened her mouth again—not to scream but because the mouth itself was changing, growing longer. The visible molars shifted to allow strong new carnassial teeth, and the incisors and canines grew much larger, curving down or up from bloody gums. She stared wildly at him and he saw the color of her irises swirl and change. The dark brown melted away to be replaced by a burning orange that was nearly the color of the flaming logs. Her body began expanding as its muscles swelled and its chest grew more massive, absorbing the fatty tissue of her breasts. All along her back larger vertebra punched outward against the thickening pelt.
“Gods of the Harvest …” breathed Kagen, in his shock praying to the gods who had abandoned and condemned him.
Tikaani was no longer a woman. Nor was she a wolf. The creature before him was something else, something so different as to be a blasphemy against nature itself. She took a step forward and her paw slapped the floor with improbable weight and power, and the tower itself seemed to tremble. The world was never meant to bear the weight of so terrible a thing as this.
She looked at Kagen and black lips peeled back from daggerlike teeth. Then Tikaani once more raised her head to cry. To scream.
To utter the soul-shattering howl of a werewolf.
And the rest of her pack raised their voices in shared triumph.