How long had it been since she had last felt safe? It could only be a few days.
Until then Selene had lived in the remains of an old lodge in the middle of the forest. She’d had fresh water, and food; she’d had shelter from the night, and from the beasts. It had just been her, and life had consisted of getting by from day to day and trying to understand what it was she had become.
But now...
Now she was in an unfamiliar part of the forest, the trees different, the scents on the air strange and intimidating. Now she had no supplies and no shelter from the night and all its evils.
Now she was alone in the forest and someone – or something – was following her.
§
Her memories were vague.
There had been a place called the Sanctum, where a man had offered her safety she could not take. Before that... her home in the forest, her security fractured by a man called Skinner and, later, by a pack of beasts.
Before that...
There had been a world before all this. A world of towns and cities and all kinds of comforts. Despite the vagueness of her memories, she still had occasional flashbacks to those times, when things had been very different. Before the world had been ruined by plague... Plagues that had wiped out millions; plagues that had damaged and changed the survivors, broken them and turned them into beasts.
People whose nature was uncertain, who could be perfectly normal by day and beast by night.
People like Selene.
§
She found shelter in the first spreading branches of an oak tree the night after she had made her escape from the Sanctum. Up above head height, a broad limb broke away at right-angles to form a natural platform. She sat here, with her back to the trunk and her knees drawn up, fearful of the drop but more fearful of what lay below.
Every sound made her tense up; every scuffle in the fallen leaves, every creak of a branch or screech of an owl.
If it was a human on her trail, she was safe for the night. No fool would be on the hunt in the dark.
And if it was something else, then she had the comfort that the beasts weren’t climbers when they were in wolf form, at least. They might hunt her down, but they could not reach her tonight.
§
A sharp crack. A twig snapping, somewhere down in the darkness.
She held herself tense, frightened even to breathe.
Nothing more.
She tried to relax but it was hard, because whenever she allowed the tension to ease her body wanted to change. Muscles tugged, joints needed to pop, bones to stretch. Even as she fought it, she felt that familiar prickling across her shoulders and down her spine.
She needed to shift.
Everything within her desperately wanted to give in to change.
It would be so easy.
Let herself relax, allow those bones to stretch and shift, feel that animal strength flow through her body. She could just drop to the forest floor and she would have nothing to fear. She would be in her element.
So easy...
But she fought it.
She would not give in. She would not become beast again.
She remembered the Sanctum. A place so like the refugee camps she had once known. The Sanctum had been surrounded by a broad no-man’s land enclosed by two lines of high fence. Within that space, beasts roamed, guarding the settlement from the wilds. Beasts so far gone with the changing viruses that they were more animal than human; some could barely even come back to human form in broad daylight.
She had to fight the urge to shift. She could never allow herself to become like them.
But maybe just for tonight? Let herself change and flee in animal form... So tempting.
She shook herself, trying to force a return to self-discipline.
She knew she couldn’t trust the change. She knew all too well that the shift was more than just physical: as her body changed, so too did her mind. Allow herself to shift and she would lose who she was: her beast consciousness was a here and now thing, living in a world of the senses, of immediate response to scents and sounds and bodily needs.
She could no more give in to change and use her wolf-form to flee than she could remain human and run around on all fours.
Give in to change and she would just as likely hunt down her pursuers as flee, and who knew where that would end?
§
And she was being pursued. She knew that much.
Walking through the forest that day, trying to keep going despite the utter fatigue, it had started as no more than a nagging feeling that something was amiss. No scent, no sound; certainly no sight of any pursuer. But it had been there, and she knew to trust those instincts that were beyond human or beast.
She had lain in wait, hoping to catch sight of whoever was on her tail. A risk, she knew: lie in wait and she was inviting her pursuer to catch up.
Nothing.
Either her pursuer was still some way behind, or they were wily and wise to the ways of their prey.
§
Now, as morning stole over the remains of the night and the forest became visible in monochrome and then hints of color as the light strengthened, she was full of doubts again.
Had she imagined it all?
A hunch without the supporting evidence of the senses is no more than a hunch.
She should be on her way. Make the most of the daylight ahead. She didn’t know where she was going, but she knew where she did not want to be.
And then... at last: evidence of the senses.
A scent on the air. Faint, but human. Someone approaching from the direction she had come from the day before.
She froze. Waited.
The scent faded. Had she imagined it, or had it been carried to her on a subtle change in the breeze that had now shifted again?
She waited long enough to convince herself that it had been no more than her paranoia, and then, poised to drop from her vantage point to the forest floor below, she paused again.
A sound.
A footfall, soft in the leaves. A careful footfall. Someone approaching cautiously.
She surveyed her surroundings, her senses heightened, but saw nothing and heard nothing more.
She allowed herself to change position, to stretch her taut muscles, and there was that unmistakable pressure in her joints, the need to stretch a little more, to shift to a form more capable of dealing with a situation like this.
She fought it back down. She couldn’t give in. She wouldn’t allow herself to lose a hold on who she was and become what she was.
Another sound. Soft, but much closer now. Her pursuer was being careful.
A figure. A human. Short and slim, shoulders broad, dark chestnut hair tied back in a tight pony-tail. A woman, she stood with a hand against a tree trunk, then dropped to her haunches, studying the ground, looking for the trail of her target.
Spine cracking.
The urge was so strong now!
She fought it, and watched as her pursuer straightened and approached, apparently unaware that her prey was still nearby.
So close now.
She dropped from the tree, and landed in a squat, before straightening. Immediately her pursuer recovered from the surprise and now stood in a half-crouch, a knife drawn, raised ready to throw.
“Tabitha.”
“Selene.” The name they had given her at the Sanctum, when her own name had evaded her. Selene. The name Tabitha had given her.
“Why are you following me, Tabitha?”
Slowly, the other woman relaxed her stance, then straightened and tucked the knife away at her belt.
“I... I had to get away. They treat me like nothing there. A woman who cannot breed is little use to Marshall. I was no more than a barren servant there. So I followed you when you broke out.” Then, softly, she repeated, “I had to get away.”
“You know what I am.”
Tabitha nodded cautiously. “I know you change,” she said. “I know you control it better than any other I’ve seen. I know you showed me more kindness and respect than anyone has in years. I know I’d rather be with a beast as human as you, than a man as beastly as Marshall.”
Tabitha had been kind to her at the Sanctum. She had washed her, and soothed her; she had talked with her. She had given her a name. Selene.
She nodded – Selene – and turned.
“I’m heading this way,” she said.
“Where to?” asked Tabitha.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just away.”
§
Having company was strange. The sounds and scents of another, so close. For one as attuned to her surroundings as Selene was, it required a lot of adjustment.
They came to a road, sometime later in the morning. Not as wide as some roads she had found before, this one was only a narrow track, its surface black and crumbling, with young trees growing through rifts in its surface.
“Do we follow it?” asked Tabitha, and Selene hesitated before answering. The woman was clearly no stranger to travel in the wilds – she had been able to track Selene, after all – so why the innocent questions now? She must know that following the road would be risky, that it would inevitably take them to ruins, to fallen towns infested with the worst of the changed, or to refugee camps – infested with the worst of the unchanged, the soldiers and camp barons.
Selene ducked her head down and crossed the road. There was a fine line between healthy wariness and paranoia. Had she really forgotten how to trust?
§
“I have food.”
Selene knew Tabitha had food. Meat, cheese, fruit, bread. She could smell it.
She clamped down on an impatient response.
Tabitha was being nice. Yes, the presence of food in Tabitha’s backpack was obvious to Selene’s heightened senses, but the woman’s words were more than a simple statement: she was telling Selene she had food to share.
It was as if Selene had forgotten the language of being human, of being sociable. Another sign, perhaps, of the inevitable decline into pure beast.
“Thank you.” Even speaking felt a strange thing to do these days, all words foreign on her tongue.
The forest here was young, mostly saplings that were barely more than head height. This area had been open land until recently, or forest that had been cleared and then abandoned. A forest fire, perhaps?
Visibility among all this new growth was poor, but equally that meant they could conceal themselves easily, and so they hunkered down in the greenery and Tabitha broke out a meal of dried bread, cheese that was even drier and chewy slivers of meat jerky that could just as easily have been leather.
“So what did you make of him?” asked Tabitha.
“Marshall? He’s got it made. King of his own harem.” One man and all those women, back at the Sanctum.
“But what did you make of him?”
He had been totally in control. A man accustomed to women melting before him. She remembered his touch, the scent of him. Remembered that overpowering need to have him deep inside her, the hot blossoming of his climax and the intense, body-wrenching heat of her own.
She shrugged. “Just a man,” she said, and took another bite of dried meat.
§
Selene and Tabitha came upon another highway and then, almost immediately, a row of abandoned houses. The buildings were low, with broken verandahs and windows, doors hanging, and their roofs mostly caved in. The two women approached this little cluster of relics with caution, but there was no sign of any recent occupation, not even in the last of the buildings where the door and window shutters still closed flush and the roof remained reasonably intact.
They ate in silence out on the porch, making the most of the last period of daylight before darkness descended. Before them, a paved lot fronted onto a highway, giving them good visibility all around.
When had this highway last seen any kind of traffic? It was deserted now, save for the burnt out hulk of an abandoned truck, and the lot was covered with grass and moss cropped low by rabbits or deer.
“So what’s it like?” asked Tabitha, the first to break their silence again. “Changing...”
Selene shrugged. “I don’t know. Ask me what it’s like to be human, though, and I’d struggle, too. All my memories are so vague. When I’ve changed... when I come back, it’s all I can do to get even my most recent memories back again. When you’re a beast it’s all about the here and now; there’s nothing long term. When I’m me again, it’s as if some of that focus on the present remains and the past is foreign territory.”
“But you can control the changing, can’t you?”
“I do all that I can to control it,” said Selene. “All I can to hang on to what I have. The urge to shift is most powerful at night, but it can hit me at any time.” For most shifters it was a night-time thing, the changing virus becoming more active when the host’s guard dropped.
“You passed all our tests when we took you in at the Sanctum. No shifter has ever done that before.”
Selene laughed. “Are you telling me I’m the most human beast you’ve ever known?”
“You’re the most controlled. You’re special. Even Marshall didn’t spot the signs in you. I’d love to have seen the look on his face when you changed like that...”
“I can’t always keep on top of it,” she said. “Then, when I was with Marshall, I couldn’t control the need to shift. It was over-powering.”
In the growing darkness: Tabitha’s eyes were wide, the whites like twin crescent moons.
“Are you scared now?” asked Selene. “Scared that I won’t be able to control it now that it’s night-time?”
A shake of the head. “I can look after myself.”
§
They slept tangled, Selene spooning Tabitha, their body-heat a shared resource in the chill of the night.
Waking sometime in the dark from a dream, Selene’s senses were alive and her heart pounded in her chest like a trapped animal. For a moment she thought they had been found by someone, or something, but there was no sound, no scent. She calmed herself, then, reassured that it was just the two of them.
She closed her eyes, and fell straight back into dreaming.
Dreaming of him. The other man she had encountered recently. The one who had caused her to flee her safe lodge in the woods. He’d called himself Skinner.
The hunter.
In her dream he was standing in the forest pool again, where she had first seen him. The water came to his waist, the ripple of his abdomen reflected in its mirror surface as he stood and watched her. Where his chest broadened to his shoulders his body formed an inverted triangle; his jaw was strong, lined with the short stubble of a beard and, all the time, he studied her with those piercing blue eyes.
She woke, and suddenly she was conscious of the hot body against her, as Tabitha turned and snuggled in, one leg now resting between Selene’s.
She was very aware of her own heightened senses now, of how the dream fragment was not just an image but a memory, carrying with it other, associated memories. The scent of him, the taste of him – of his mouth, of his skin, of his juices. The rasp of his body hair against her own smooth skin, the hardness of his muscles, every twitch and pulse of his shaft in her hand, in her mouth, the delicious sliding sensation of him entering her, filling her.
Tabitha woke with a start. She started to pull away but her leg was trapped between Selene’s. She tugged again and succeeded in disentangling herself, leaving Selene lying with her thighs clamped hard together, an intense, throbbing heat in her abdomen, a pulsing lower down, a tightening... almost, but then the sensation was receding, and then gone.
Awkward, Selene shifted position, trying to calm herself once again. She felt shocked at the intensity of the dream and all too aware of how such intensity could be the thing that took her to the edge of losing control altogether.
§
Morning came, and Selene was cold and stiff from the hard ground. She had lain awake since some time in the depths of the night, not trusting herself to relax; scared that if she slept, another dream might come and she would lose control. She had listened to the sounds of the forest as she lay there, an unsettling mix of the familiar and sounds that were foreign to her ears. She needed to find somewhere she could feel safe again. Somewhere she could learn to read her environment, so that she could be sure when a sound or a scent was a normal part of her surroundings or something new. Could this place be it, perhaps?
“We’ve had visitors.”
Her first reaction was to dismiss Tabitha’s words. If anyone or anything had come near in the night, Selene would have known. Tabitha was just a servant on the run: what could she know? But then Selene remembered how skillfully Tabitha had tracked her down.
“What is it?” she asked. “What have you found?”
Out on the porch there were no signs of disturbance, but beyond, in the heavy dew that turned the grass and moss into a magical silvery carpet there were darker patches. Foot-sized prints, where the dew had been disturbed.
“Human – not a shifter in human form,” Selene said. “Alone.” Tabitha looked surprised, but didn’t question her judgment.
The trail was of a single set of footprints; large feet, so probably a man. He’d been here around dawn – after the dew had fallen, and recent enough that no fresh dew had formed to disguise the prints. A man, because a shifter would have come in the night.
Just curious, perhaps? Had they missed signs that someone else had been staying nearby? Someone hiding, like them.
Or following them...?
“Marshall,” said Selene. “Would he have sent anyone after you? Or after me?”
Tabitha’s response was immediate, and betrayed far more than she must have anticipated.
“No,” she said sharply. “Not Marshall. Somebody else. Following us.”
How could she be so sure? Now wasn’t the time to get distracted but– “Why not Marshall? What do you know?” And then it all became clear: not Marshall because he had already sent someone after Selene and she was right here before her!
“He sent you didn’t he? You’re not just a disenchanted servant on the run.”
Tabitha wouldn’t meet her look, pretending to concentrate on the tracks in the dew instead.
Selene took a step towards her, grabbed her shoulder and turned her so that they faced each other.
She felt close to the brink. Briefly, dizziness stole over her and she staggered, losing her grip on Tabitha’s shoulder. The other woman looked concerned and then suddenly alarmed.
What was happening to her? Had it been more than dizziness sweeping over her? Had Tabitha seen the change in her features? A flickering human, not-human thing?
So close...
She could give in, welcome the change and destroy this deceitful human with the swipe of a great paw... tear her to shreds.
She hung on.
She couldn’t.
She wouldn’t.
§
“Why should I trust you?”
They were back inside, the door securely wedged shut. Hiding from the day when they should have been on their way already.
“Because I came with you,” said Tabitha. “Because since I’ve found you I’ve done nothing to stop you, and nothing to try to turn you back, which is what he wanted me to do.”
“You couldn’t turn me back alone. You could still have some kind of trap lined up.”
“There’s no trap. I was to track you down and subdue you with drugs and then signal for others to come for you. It’s true what I said: he treats me like nothing.”
“But why should I trust you?”
“Because I held you in the night when you were dreaming. Because I held you close when it would have been so easy to drug you and do what Marshall had wanted. Because I have made my choice and I would rather be out here with you than back there in the life he allowed me.”
But... was that enough? Would that ever be enough for a woman who had forgotten how it was to trust another person?
§
They set out again, walking in silence and eating the last of Tabitha’s supplies as they went.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Just away.”
She’d found a routine before. Water, food, shelter; a place where other humans rarely strayed. But Skinner’s intrusion into her home territory had shattered that illusion for her, and then her brief time at the Sanctum had only emphasized how uncertain this world was.
It was dangerous to be locked in that mind-set, thinking only from day to day. She was young and fit now, but what would happen when age caught up with her, or if illness or injury struck? It would be so easy to get stuck in that routine, though: thinking like a shifter, where only the very immediate could matter. Another day survived; another night.
But was she wrong to dismiss it as a shifter thing? Perhaps it was a very human thing, after all: it wasn’t that she was incapable of thinking ahead, but that the possibilities of her future were all too clear and they scared her.
“I don’t know,” she said again, sometime later, more to herself, her mind still going round and round.
§
Joining up with other humans would never be an option for Selene, though. It might for Tabitha: security in community, with people she could come to trust.
But Selene would always be the outsider, the dangerous unknown.
And so, when they came upon the refugee camp the next day, it was all she could do to hang on to her human form and not give in... shift to her beastly form and flee as fast as she could.
§
They’d spent the night in the forest, taking turns to keep look-out, and neither of them managing more than the most fitful sleep. Other than some minor wildlife, the night had passed quietly, though. No beasts. Nobody sneaking about in the early hours.
They were still cautious the next day, but there had been no more sign of pursuit, and now those footprints in the dew seemed a long time ago to Selene.
Now, part way through the afternoon, the camp took them completely by surprise. Following an animal trail through the bushy growth beneath the trees, they’d come to a rise, a thickening of the undergrowth, and then–
–through the wild tangles of ivy and brambles, the land fell away and the trees thinned and then were replaced by... buildings. A loose cluster of shacks, gathered around two large warehouses.
And people. People moving around; a couple of horse-drawn wagons. People working the land, gathering food from plants and tilling the soil.
Selene turned to Tabitha. “You should go down there and join them,” she said. “They’re like you. People. Human people.”
Tabitha shrank away from the harsh tone of Selene’s voice. “No. You can’t just dump me now,” she said. “I’m not going there. What if it’s just like the Sanctum?”
Selene shook her head.
“It’s not,” she said, more softly now. What had drawn her here? Pure chance, or some kind of homing instinct? “I know this place. You’ll be safe.”
“And you?”
“Not me. I’ve fled here once before...”
§
The past, so nearly buried in the depths of her mind, rose up and hit her like a hammer when she realized where they had come.
A camp for refugees. For those who had escaped the plagues, and those who had survived them.
“You were a refugee?” asked Tabitha.
“No,” said Selene, shaking her head. “I was a doctor.”
Long before one of the shifting viruses took her, she should have known it was inevitable. She’d taken all the precautions, she’d been scrupulous about hygiene discipline, but it had not been enough.
She’d seen so many variations, as different strains of the viruses swept through the refugee population. Some were so severe that the first changing was too much for the human frame: she’d watched grown men and women being literally torn apart by the change. For others, the fevers had given way to shifting, and apparently normal people would become beasts – sometimes a night thing, and other times as a response to arousal of any kind.
The first rule of hygiene discipline: you’re only as clean as the people you’re with. For all the precautions she had taken, there were others less scrupulous.
One other: Felipe. Charismatic camp director and driving force behind the camp keeping operating even through the darkest of times.
What had become of Felipe? Was he still in there, kept locked up with the other victims of plague?
That time... Back from a long day in the camp, hot and smelly from being cocooned in a containment suit for too long, all she’d wanted to do was strip off, wash, eat and sleep, and she didn’t much care about the order.
She’d known Felipe for years, but there had never been anything there, until...
One time there was something different about him.
As a doctor, she, of all people, should have known to be wary of change... of any kind of change. But the urgency of his desire had distracted her; the urgency of her own, too.
He’d wandered into the dorm where she was changing and there had been a spark in his eye and suddenly a man who had just been Felipe was now Felipe. Tall and dark, with a tone to his skin that made hers look so pale in contrast. It wasn’t unusual for someone to walk in when she was dressing – there was little privacy for anyone in the camp – but somehow, before she realized what was happening, she was in his arms, her bare breasts squashed against his hard body. One of his hands held the back of her head, controlling and guiding her, while the other was flat on the small of her back, drawing her into his embrace.
His mouth was eager and clumsy... on her face, her neck, his teeth scraping, stubble scratching and that hand, now hooked in the waistband of her knickers, starting to ease them down.
He had always been such a gentleman and yet now he took her by the wrists and pushed her down onto a bunk, pinning her down with one hand and the weight of his body while with his free hand he fumbled with his belt, his pants...
She’d never known anything like it... that sudden transition from the safe and familiar to this. Such an intense thing: his need, becoming her need, becoming a wild frenzy of shared need. A sudden pressure, a parting and he was sliding relentlessly inside her, driving deep until his pelvic bone came up hard against her, and then he started to pump his body, still pinning her to the bed beneath him.
Planting her feet on the thin mattress, she pushed up hard to meet each thrust, a small part of her mind thinking she’d be bruised and torn after this but she didn’t care. All she wanted was that delicious sliding as he pushed deep, the silky, lubricated intimacy of it all.
He climaxed with a sudden twisting of his body, pulling himself clear and then thrusting down again hard, his shaft against her belly now, its base grinding down on her clit. Wet heat erupted between them and then she was clinging to him with her thighs clamped tight as orgasm took her and that wet heat joined their lower bodies as one.
It was the next day that they quarantined him and then she started to realize what a fool she had been not to spot the signs, not to have understood that the change in his behavior was one of the earliest indicators that a virus had taken him.
It was the next night when he shifted for the first time and she was there watching through the reinforced window of his confinement cell.
Watching him change, watching his naked torso stretch and contort... seeing how his features shifted... she was struck by the parallels, by how the straining and intensity in his movements and looks were so familiar from the man who had been taken over by a different passion only the day before.
§
“They tried to cage me, just like all the others. For my protection. So they could study the changing. But I had more control than the others and I managed to convince them that it had all been a mistake and that I hadn’t been infected and gone the same way as our camp director.”
She’d slipped away one night not long after that, alone and terrified and not yet understanding how much her heightened senses would help her learn and adapt to life in the wilds.
“And you want me to go there?”
“It’d be different for you. What future do we have out here in the wild?”
Tabitha was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t go there. I’ve just come from a place like that. I won’t leave you alone.” Eyes fixed on Selene, she went on: “Back at the Sanctum you scared Marshall. That’s why he sent me after you.”
“Scared him?”
“He’s there in his stronghold trying to breed unchanged humans, but I think he’s scared that you’re the future, not him: a kind of human that’s changed but not destroyed by the plagues. Let me come with you, Selene. Let me be your friend.”
§
Selene was more disturbed than she let on to Tabitha. Disturbed that they had come across the refugee camp – in itself, that was perhaps not so unexpected, given that she had fled the camp on foot and can’t have ever traveled far away from the place.
Disturbed more than anything by the clarity of her memories. She had grown accustomed to the past being blurred territory, to that focus on the here and now.
To remember so clearly all of a sudden... it was a change from what had become familiar. Was this an indication that something new was happening to her, that her virus was taking a fresh course? Did it mean that more change was ahead?
Or was it simply a natural response to the shock of finding herself suddenly looking down upon a place where her old life had been ripped away from her?
“Let’s go,” she said, and the relief in Tabitha was a visible thing, a weight lifting. “Let’s get away from this place.”
§
She should have known there would be no easy escape. Someone – she was still convinced it was a someone rather than a something – was following them.
“Are you sure Marshall trusted you?”
Tabitha’s response to that repeated question had gone from fiercely defensive to uncertain.
“You don’t think he’d have sent someone else after me? Or after both of us, when he realized you weren’t returning?”
“I...”
They were several days clear of the refugee camp now, and they’d spent most of that time passing through a landscape that must once have been farmland but was now new-growth forest. The line of sight was so short in this lush growth that they were both seeing danger in the shadows and the fluttering of leaves wherever they looked.
There had been nothing more than gut feeling to spook them, but it was such a powerful thing. Now they had emerged from the new forest that instinct only grew.
Walking along a highway, its surface broken and contorted, they’d finally agreed to put their instinct to the test, and slipped away from the road to hide in the trees. They waited through the heat of the day, long after Selene had convinced herself that they were getting alarmed over nothing. But they had to be sure: they couldn’t allow their actions to be dictated by paranoia and fear.
“Come on,” said Tabitha, the first to give up. “Time to hit the trail again.”
Selene’s hand darted to her companion’s arm, halting her in mid-stride.
She’d spotted movement, off to the left. A figure on the road.
She knew immediately. They’d convinced themselves far too readily that it must be Marshall who had set someone on their trail.
But no. She recognized the way he moved more than anything, and then as he grew closer it was the dark hair almost to his shoulders, the broadness of those shoulders.
“It’s Skinner,” she whispered into Tabitha’s ear. She’d told her companion about her encounter with the hunter, but she hadn’t thought he had it in him to track her this far.
“Skinner? The hunter?”
Selene nodded.
“Is he a danger?”
She nodded again.
That was why she’d abandoned her home. Skinner had been sent out to hunt down changers like her. He may be clumsy and unskilled, but his purpose was clear, and as soon as he’d learned that she was a shifter she’d had to leave.
§
She tried not to have any doubts.
It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.
She’d run for so long: now was the time to fight.
She stepped out from the trees just after he had passed.
“Skinner.”
To his credit, he didn’t even flinch. And equally to his credit, he looked embarrassed that she had so easily surprised him. She could have been at his neck by now, if she had relented and given in to the almost over-powering urge to shift.
He turned, and gave a brief nod in greeting, and she had forgotten just how disarming that look of his was.
“You’re not easy to find.”
“You’re not easy to lose.”
“Maybe you should stop trying.”
“Maybe you should.”
Why should something that was so damned easy be so damned hard at the same time?
Even now, from the corner of her eye Selene could see Tabitha working her way through the forest fringe, so that she would be able to step out and have an easy throw with one of the knives she carried. And all the time, Skinner was oblivious.
He was the enemy. She had to remember that he was the enemy.
The hunter.
“You should have let me go on my way.”
“I tried,” he said. “God, how I tried! Why would anyone in his right mind follow someone like you halfway around the world? Believe me, I tried, but it was impossible. I was completely, utterly enchanted by you.”
“‘Enchanted’?”
He nodded.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
“I’m a shifter.”
He laughed. “You think I didn’t realize that by now? The whole changing into a wolf thing was a kind of a giveaway.”
“How did you manage to track me?”
He shrugged. “I just did.” He was fresh out of the camps. When she had first met him, it had taken her a while to realize just how callow and inexperienced in the wilds he was. He didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to...
And that was when she realized.
She glanced at where she had last seen Tabitha, but she was gone. At any moment she might...
“It was no effort at all, was it? You didn’t even have to think about it. You just knew.”
She remembered how it had been. Those first changes when everything was heightened and the world so much more vivid. The sounds, the scents.
“You’ve felt it, haven’t you? You don’t even have to spare a thought to understand the meaning of a shift in the breeze, of a new scent. Do you feel different? Is your body more alive?”
He looked puzzled. He didn’t know, didn’t have a damned clue!
“The viruses,” she said. “They pass through close contact. Bodily fluids. Bites. Sex...”
Viruses that intensify the world, and your response to the world – viruses acting as an aphrodisiac to aid their spread.
“You have it. You’re just like me now. Have you shifted yet? Or is it still just the strange sensations in your body, where your bones grind and your joints pop and you feel like a dam is about to break inside you?”
“You mean...?” Still so slow.
“You’re a shifter, Skinner. I’m sorry.”
Another shrug. Not the response she would have expected.
“I can live with that,” he said. “You can teach me. All I want is to be with you.”
There! Movement in the undergrowth and suddenly Tabitha stepped out into the open, arm raised ready to throw.
Selene leapt, and her bones ground, the joints popping, muscles shifting and stretching. The world around her was suddenly now: the play of light all around her, the scent of Skinner, of Tabitha, the soft whipping sound of a knife being thrown – hard and fast.
She hit him in the chest, all paws and teeth and then the barreling weight of her body, knocking him off his feet as the knife flew. If she’d made her move only a split second later that knife would have been buried to its hilt between Skinner’s shoulders, but now he was rolling away and Selene scrambled to stay on all fours, twisting to face Tabitha.
For a moment there was a silent stand-off, and then, with an almighty effort, Selene forced the changes to reverse. Muscles tightened, bones ground again, and then she was lying on the ground, her breath heaving, her clothes in tatters.
§
They spent the night in the virgin forest, limbs tangled so that body heat was shared. A touch here, a touch there, but it didn’t matter.
His mouth on hers, hard and eager. Her hands on his body, tugging at clothes, dragging fingernails over taut ribcage. Her hands on her, cupping a breast, twisting the hardness of a nipple.
Legs pressing, hard thigh against soft, wet heat.
Teeth. Nipple. That sharp stab of pain that becomes pleasure.
Soft skin against more softness, silk on silk.
Coarse body hair. More hardness. More wetness. Taking him deep, raking his length with tongue and teeth so that he cries out into the night, a sound that is closer to animal than man.
Sweet salty wetness. A tongue probing, flicking, driving deep. Meeting hardness, the solid bulk of his shaft buried deep. Tongue tip flicking from shaft to clit and back, flicking over and over and then switching to long sweeping movements.
Soft mouth against soft mouth, breasts against breasts, hands on ass, tight, fingernails sharp on soft, yielding flesh. Astride his face, grinding down on the stiffness of his tongue with a rolling, fluid motion of the pelvis.
Heat and tightness. Need.
So intense!
Bodies, slick and hot, bucking and tightening, moving as one. Pressing and grinding until all is spent and they slump, disentangle enough that they can rearrange themselves to lie in each other’s arms, limbs tangled, skin pressing, drifting into sleep.
The new pack.