Chapter 20: The Vision Spoken
The world was a narrowing tunnel of pressure and pain, the edges vibrating with the afterimage of that terrible, shimmering energy. Zariah’s breath came in short, ragged gasps that did nothing to fill her lungs. The homestead’s main hall, with its timbered ceiling and dying fire, tilted on its axis. Benji’s face above her was a study in shattered composure—the glacial control he’d wielded outside completely gone, eroded by a terror that mirrored her own.
“It’s too fast,” Jason was saying, his voice cutting through the buzzing in her ears. He had his fingers on her neck, checking her pulse. His touch was clinical, but his scent was sharp with alarm. “The contractions aren’t rhythmic. They’re spasms. The body isn’t guiding the process; the catalyst is. It’s like forcing a key through a lock that hasn’t been filed.”
Another vise-grip seized her lower abdomen, deep and rending. This wasn’t the cyclical wave of human labor she’d read about. This was a singular, sustained act of violence from the inside out. She arched off the blankets, a broken sound tearing from her throat. The bond-thread, already stretched taut, sang with a feedback scream of shared agony. She felt Benji flinch as if struck.
“Do something,” Benji growled, the command aimed at Jason, but it was a plea, raw and desperate.
“I am,” Jason snapped, his calm fraying. He was rummaging through his kit, pulling out vials of dark liquid, bundles of dried herbs. “Elara, I need the bluewort paste, now. Mara, more blankets. Get the fire blazing.” He paused, his hands hovering over Zariah’s distended stomach. His expression shifted, the focused urgency momentarily clouding by something else. A deep, unsettling stillness.
Jason’s gaze turned distant, his pupils dilating as the vision seizes him.
The sounds of the room—Zariah’s pained breaths, the crackle of Mara stoking the fire, the low worried murmurs of the pack—fell away. Jason was elsewhere. His eyes, usually so sharp and present, were filmed over, seeing through the timber and wool and flesh to a cold, hard truth.
He sees Zariah on a cold floor, blood pooling beneath her, the pup still and silent. The future fractures and reforms: she must be changed, transformed into one of them, or she will bleed out before the moon rises again.
A full minute passed. The only movement was the frantic rise and fall of Zariah’s chest. Benji watched Jason, the alpha’s instinct sensing a shift in the atmospheric pressure of the room, a silent lightning strike of doom.
Jason blinked. The world rushed back in, but his face was ashes. He looked at Zariah, then at Benji, his professional detachment incinerated by the vision.
He whispers, ‘She becomes like us,’ and the room freezes.
The words were soft, almost airless, but they landed like stones in a still pond. Ripples of shock moved through the pack members frozen in their tasks. Elara halted, the clay jar of bluewort paste heavy in her hands. Mara stopped mid-step, a stack of wool blankets clutched to her chest. Silas, who had been standing like a sentinel by the hearth, slowly turned his head.
Silas catches the look in his eyes and demands, ‘What did you see?’
Jason didn’t look at Silas. He kept his eyes on Benji, as if delivering a verdict only he could fully comprehend.
Jason turns to Benji, his expression sympathetic but unyielding. ‘There’s no other way. The catalyst has accelerated everything. Her body can’t sustain the hybrid growth without the change. If we wait, we lose them both.’
A low whine built in Benji’s throat, an entirely animal sound of distress. He looked down at Zariah. Her eyes were half-lidded with pain, glazed, not fully comprehending the exchange. The splint on her wrist, the bruising on her face, the terrifying, active swell of her—she was already broken. The thought of breaking her further, of subjecting her to the rending agony of the first change, the one that had nearly killed him at sixteen, the one that scraped the soul raw and rebuilt it into something else… it was monstrous.
Benji’s face drains of color, his hands trembling as he looks at Zariah, still unconscious on the blankets. The pack stirs, murmuring in fear and disbelief.
“A forced change? On top of this?” someone muttered from the shadows. “It’s a death sentence anyway.”
“The Glimmer is in her blood now,” another voice countered, hushed. “It might take.”
“Might isn’t good enough,” Silas rumbled, but his voice lacked its usual finality. It was the sound of calculation, of weighing two horrors.
Silas’s jaw tightens, and he gives a single, grim nod.
Permission. A death warrant. A lifeline. It was all three.
Benji hated everything about this.
The thought was a clean, sharp knife in the chaos. It cut through the panic, through the pack’s fear, through Jason’s grim prognosis. He hated the sterile, violent necessity of it. He hated the men in the mountains who had set this chain of events in motion with their needles and their catalyst. He hated the Glimmer for its indifferent, amplifying power. Most of all, he hated the choice, the brutal theft of agency.
He had gained her trust in which he would have been patient allowing her the time it would take her to be comfortable with the prospect of transformation.
He remembered the look on her face in his cabin, weeks ago, when the first hints of the bond had shimmered between them. She had been fascinated, afraid, but curious. A scientist presented with a stunning anomaly. He had dreamed of explaining it slowly. Of walking her through the woods under a full moon, letting her feel the pack-mind as a gentle hum before she ever experienced its roar. Of letting her choose, with clear eyes and an uncoerced heart, to step into his world. To become his, truly and completely. That choice was ash now.
But he would not let her die.
Another contraction, worse than the last. Zariah’s back bowed off the floor, a choked scream barely escaping her clenched teeth. The scent of blood, fresh and bright, suddenly tinged the air. Not birth blood. Injury blood. Something was tearing inside. Jason saw it too, his nostrils flaring. “She’s hemorrhaging. The tissue is too human, too fragile. It’s ripping.”
He couldn’t.
Benji’s trembling hands stilled. The chaos within him crystallized into a single, immutable point. The bond was not just a thread of feeling; it was a cable of existential truth. Her life was not a separate node anymore. It was the central chamber of his own heart. Without its rhythm, his own would stutter and cease.
Because he knew that there was no moon goddess, no gods no man or beast alike that would stop him from joining her into sweet abyss.
The old prayers, the rituals Silas insisted on, the stories told to pups—they were comfort, tradition, but not law. The only law was this: she lived, or nothing else mattered. If the transformation failed and her light went out, the world would become a flat, grey, meaningless plane. The abyss would be a mercy, a reunion. The cold logic of it was more terrifying than any supernatural fury.
He looked at Jason, his voice flat, stripped bare. “Do it.”
“Benji,” Jason said, his own resolve wavering. “The process… it’s not a gentle bite and a fever dream. To catalyze a change this rapidly, against a body already under this much trauma… it has to be the blood. Directly. A significant exchange. And it has to be you. The bond will anchor her.”
“What does that mean?” Benji asked, though a part of him already knew.
“It means you have to open a vein,” Silas stated bluntly from across the room. His amber eyes were heavy. “And she has to drink. While the pup is still inside. The change will flood them both simultaneously. It’s the only chance to knit her body back together faster than it tears apart.”
Nausea, acrid and hot, rose in Benji’s throat. The intimacy of it was perverse. A grotesque inversion of tenderness.
Zariah’s eyes fluttered open. She was surfacing through the pain, catching fragments. “Drink…?” she slurred.
“Zariah,” Benji said, leaning close, his forehead touching hers. He poured every ounce of certainty, every shred of his will, down the bond. The love, the fear, the desperate, unwavering need for her to persist. “Listen to me. Your body… it can’t do this alone. The baby is too much. Do you understand?”
Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, tracing paths through the dirt on her temples. She was a rationalist to her core, even now. She assessed the internal wreckage, the feel of warm blood between her thighs, the terrifying, alien demand of her own flesh. She gave the tiniest, most defeated nod.
“I have to give you something,” he whispered, his lips against her skin. “It will hurt. It will change you. But it will keep you here. With me. With our child. Do you trust me?”
It was the cruelest question he had ever asked. He was asking her to trust him with her humanity.
Her brown eyes, clouded with pain, found his. She saw the abyss in him, the yawning void of what he would become without her. She saw the boy she’d kissed in the campus shadows, the monster who had frozen a dozen men in time, the protector trembling on the edge of desolation. She saw it all.
Her good hand came up, weak, and her fingers brushed his cheek. “Yes,” she breathed.
The word shattered him and rebuilt him in an instant.
“Now, Benji,” Jason urged, his voice tense. The coppery scent of blood was strengthening. “Now or never.”
Benji didn’t hesitate. He brought his wrist to his mouth. His canines, which had remained stubbornly human through the stress, lengthened with a soft, sickening click of shifting bone. They were sharp, delicate points. He looked at Zariah one last time, an apology in his eyes, and then dragged the sharp tip across his radial artery.
It was not a savage tear. It was a surgeon’s cut, precise and deep. Dark blood, rich and potent with the essence of his lineage, the whisper of the Glimmer, and the full force of his bonded will, welled up instantly.
“Help me lift her,” Benji gritted out.
Mara and Elara rushed forward, sliding supportive hands under Zariah’s shoulders, propping her up just enough. Benji brought his bleeding wrist to her lips.
“Drink, Zariah,” he commanded softly, the alpha compulsion lacing the words, not to dominate, but to guide, to urge a necessary survival instinct.
She resisted at first, turning her head away, repulsed by the instinct, by the metallic smell. But the pain crested again, a white-hot sheet of it, and a fresh gush of her own blood soaked the blankets beneath her. A survival instinct deeper than reason took over. Her lips parted.
Benji pressed his wrist to her mouth.
The first swallow made her gag. She tried to pull back, but Benji held firm, murmuring, “Just a little more. Just a little more.” The bond was wide open, and he fed her his own resolve along with his blood, a torrent of stay, fight, live.
She swallowed again. And again.
The effect was not immediate, and for a long, dreadful moment, nothing happened. Zariah simply drank, her throat working convulsively, her eyes wide with horror and a dawning, terrible hunger. The pack watched, a silent circle of witnesses, the only sounds the crackle of the fire and the wet, quiet sound of feeding.
Then, Zariah’s body jerked.
It was a violent, full-body spasm that made Mara and Elara grunt with the effort of holding her. She broke away from Benji’s wrist, her head thrashing back. A low moan vibrated in her chest, deepening into a growl that was not her own. It was raw, unused vocal cords tearing themselves open.
Her skin, usually a rich, warm brown, began to pale, taking on a waxen, greyish cast. The veins beneath the surface darkened, rising like maps of strange, black rivers. They pulsed not with blue, but with a faint, sickly silver—the Glimmer, reacting to the foreign agent now flooding her system.
“It’s starting,” Jason said, his voice hushed. He kept his hands ready, monitoring, but there was nothing medical to do now. This was alchemy. This was visceral magic.
Benji clamped a hand over his own bleeding wrist, the wound already clotting with preternatural speed. He watched, heart hammering against his ribs, as Zariah’s transformation began not with the shift to wolf, but with the body’s brutal preparation for it.
Her bones began to crack.
It was a series of sharp, muffled pops—vertebrae realigning, the pelvic bones groaning under the strain of the hybrid pup and the new demands being placed upon them. She screamed then, a full-throated, ragged sound of agony that filled the timbered hall. The pup inside her moved furiously, a frantic stirring as the change reached it, too.
Benji felt it all through the bond—a firestorm of sensation that wasn’t his own. The dissolution of self, the cellular riot, the ancient, scrambling code rewriting her DNA in real time. It was a cascade of acid and lightning. He dropped to his knees beside her, gripping her good hand, trying to be an anchor in the tempest. “I’m here,” he chanted, over the sounds of her suffering. “I’m here. Stay with me.”
Her eyes rolled back, showing the whites. The elegant, analytical mind of Dr. Zariah Jackson was being submerged, attacked by a rising tide of primal instinct. Her teeth gritted, and with another wet crack, her own canines began to elongate, piercing her lower lip. Blood, a mixture of hers and Benji’s, trickled from the corner of her mouth.
Silas approached, standing over them. His expression was unreadable. “The first change is a death,” he said, not unkindly. “The old self burns away. Don’t try to soothe the dying part. Call to the new one. Call her up.”
Benji understood. He stopped chanting reassurances to the woman being erased. Instead, he leaned close, his voice a low, powerful rumble that vibrated in his chest and down the bond. He called to the fierce, surviving core of her. He called to the mother fighting for her child, to the mate who had faced down a frozen hell for him, to the fierce intelligence that could, and would, master this new reality.
“Zariah,” he growled, the name a command. “Come back.”
Her body arched again, a tensile bowstring pulled to breaking. The changes accelerated. A dark, coarse fur began to push through the pores on her arms and neck, not in a uniform pelt, but in patches, as if her body couldn’t decide on its form. Her fingernails blackened and thickened into sharp, curved claws that scored the wooden floorboards. The broken wrist in its splint twisted with a grotesque, wet sound, the bones reforming, healing, and then reshaping.
She was neither human nor wolf, but a horrific, beautiful, transitional nightmare.
And then, the pain peaked. A final, silent scream locked in her throat. Her body went rigid, every muscle clenched in a rigor of metamorphosis. For three heartbeats, there was absolute stillness.
Then, she collapsed back into the blankets, boneless.
The only sound was her breathing—harsh, rasping, but steady. The silver-black veins began to recede. The patchy fur stopped growing. The claws remained, but the violent trembling subsided into shallow shivers.
Jason was there instantly, his ear to her chest, his fingers on her neck. He checked the bleeding between her legs. He looked up, his face etched with exhaustion and awe. “The hemorrhage… it’s stopped. The tissues are… knitting. It’s working.”
But Benji wasn’t looking at Jason. He was watching Zariah’s face. The human contours were still there, but sharper, leaner. The lines of pain were smoothing into an eerie, too-perfect stillness. Her chest rose and fell. The bond, which had been a cacophony of torment, had quieted to a deep, powerful hum—a new frequency, stronger, wilder, but unmistakably her.
Her eyes opened.
They were no longer the sharp, warm brown he loved. They were a luminous, volatile amber, ringed with a band of that same Glimmer-silver. They held no recognition at first. Only a feral, blazing confusion. A predator’s disorientation.
She stared up at the timbered ceiling, then slowly,
turned her head towards him.
The amber irises contracted, the silver ring around them flaring briefly like a halogen lamp. She blinked, once, twice. A low sound vibrated in her throat, not a growl, not a whimper, but a questioning rumble that seemed to shake the very air in her lungs. Her nostrils flared, taking in the scent of blood, fear, woodsmoke, and him—Benji, his scent now amplified in her new perception, a complex tapestry of pine, cold stone, ozone, and a profound, aching love that smelled like lightning after rain.
“Zariah?” Benji whispered, his voice raw. He didn’t dare move.
Her new eyes tracked the movement of his lips. Recognition flickered, a dim light behind the feral blaze. Her own lips moved, cracking where they were dry and blood-caked. “Ben… ji.” The name was a ragged scrape of sound, shaped by a mouth that felt foreign, by teeth that were too long.
Relief, so potent it was dizzying, flooded him. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Jason sagged beside them, running a hand over his face. “Cognitive function. Speech. That’s… better than we could have hoped for at this stage.”
“The pup?” Benji asked, his gaze dropping to her stomach, still rounded, still prominent beneath the blanket.
Before Jason could answer, Zariah’s hand—claw-tipped, trembling—moved to cover her belly. Her expression shifted from confusion to a sharp, protective focus. The bond hummed, and Benji felt it too: a steady, strong pulse, a second heartbeat intertwined with Zariah’s own, now slower and more powerful than any human rhythm. It was alive. It was thriving.
“Strong,” Zariah managed, the word clearer this time. Her brow furrowed, not with pain, but with intense, internal concentration. “It’s… hungry.” She said it with a scientist’s detached wonder, analyzing the new data stream from her own body.
A tense, almost-laugh escaped Mara. “Kid’s got priorities. That’s a good sign.” She moved forward with a damp cloth, hesitating before she touched Zariah’s forehead. “Okay if I…?”
Zariah nodded, a stiff, careful motion. As the cloth wiped the sweat and blood from her face, her new eyes closed. The pack in the room seemed to collectively release a breath. The immediate crisis had passed. They had crossed a chasm, and she was on the other side, changed, but present.
But the change wasn’t a static event. It was a cascade.
As the adrenaline of the transformation receded, a new awareness began to flood her. It wasn't a stream of thoughts. It was a tsunami of sensation, unmediated by her former, neatly cataloguing mind. The weave of the blanket beneath her was a topographic map of rough and smooth. The heat from the hearth was a physical pressure on her left side, each licking flame a distinct, dancing entity she could feel. The scent of the room fragmented into a dizzying array of information: the bitter chlorophyll of the healing herbs, the iron-rich scent of her own spent blood, the musk of each pack member—Silas, old leather and dominance; Mara, steel and wintergreen; Jason, antiseptic and underlying, constant worry.
And underneath it all, the Glimmer.
It wasn’t just in the valley anymore. It was in the air she breathed, in the wood grain of the floor, in the pulse at Benji’s throat. It hummed, a sub-audible frequency that vibrated in her teeth and in the newly dense marrow of her bones. It called to the changed blood in her veins, a sympathetic resonance that was both exhilarating and deeply, fundamentally unsettling.
“The world is…” she started, then stopped, unable to find a word big enough, precise enough. “Loud.”
“It’ll settle,” Jason said, his voice assuming its professional cadence once more, though his eyes remained watchful. “The sensory amplification is acute at first. Your brain will learn to filter, to process. Think of it as gaining a new instrument in an orchestra. At first, it’s all you hear. Soon, you’ll learn to hear the whole piece.”
But it wasn’t just hearing. It was a full-body immersion. She could feel the weight of the mountains around them, the deep, slow turn of the earth. She could feel the pup, not just as a physical presence, but as a psychic glow, a bundle of potent, sleeping potential. And she could feel Benji, a steady, blazing sun in her sensory field, his emotions brushing against hers like physical touch: relief, residual terror, a ferocious, guarding love.
“How long?” she asked, her voice gaining strength, though it was lower, rougher around the edges.
“Since the change?” Jason checked a nonexistent watch. “About twenty minutes. The physical restructuring is… effectively complete. The metabolic shift will take hours, maybe days. You’ll be ravenous. Thirsty. The pup’s development seems to have stabilized, for now. It’s drawing on your new physiology.”
Twenty minutes. In twenty minutes, she had ceased to be Dr. Zariah Jackson, astrophysicist. She was something else. The thought should have triggered panic, a grief for her old self. But the panic was a distant signal, muffled by a profound and cellular calm. The old Zariah was not gone. She was just… integrated. Her logic, her curiosity, they were still there, but now they operated on this new, expanded dataset. The skepticism that had defined her was burned away in the transformative fire, replaced by a direct, experiential knowing.
She moved to sit up. Benji’s hand flew out to help, but she did it herself, pushing up with an ease that startled her. The pain from her wounds was a memory, a ghost of sensation. Her broken wrist, still in the splint, itched fiercely. She clawed at the binding with her other hand, the new nails snagging on the cloth.
“Let me,” Jason said, moving to unwrap it. As the splint and bandages fell away, they all stared. The wrist was whole. The skin was smooth, unbruised. The bones had knit flawlessly, leaving no trace of the violent break. Only the faint, silvery traceries of the Glimmer-veins, slowly fading, hinted at the radical healing.
“Incredible,” Zariah murmured, rotating her hand, flexing the fingers. The claws retracted with a thought, sliding back to reveal human-looking nails, though harder, with a slight opalescent sheen. She looked at Benji, really looked at him, with her new eyes. She could see the fatigue etched into him, the microscopic tremors in his hands from the energy he’d expended. She could see the love, and the gut-wrenching fear that had preceded it. “You’re exhausted.”
He gave a ragged half-smile. “You’re one to talk.”
“We need to get her cleaned up, fed, and rested,” Silas’s voice cut through, practical and grounding. “The danger outside is contained, not eliminated. We’re still on a perimeter. Mara, get the bath ready. Elara, bring broth and whatever cold meat we have. A lot of it.”
The pack snapped into motion, the direction a relief. Zariah allowed Benji to help her stand. Her legs held her, strong, stable. Different. She felt taller, her balance shifted slightly forward onto the balls of her feet. She took a step, then another, relearning her own body. The bond-thread between her and Benji was no longer a thread. It was a bridge, solid and wide, and across it flowed a constant, quiet exchange of presence. She could feel his worry for her, his simmering anger at the men in the clearing, his awe at her resilience.
They moved through the homestead, a strange procession. Mara had heated water on the stove and poured it into a deep, metal tub in a small, stone-floored side room. The steam rose, carrying the scent of cedar and lavender oil she’d added.
“I can manage,” Zariah said, her voice firmer. The instinct for modesty was a human ghost, faint but persistent.
Mara nodded, tossing her a clean, folded towel. “We’ll be right outside. Holler if you need anything. And I mean anything. Your body’s gonna throw you some curveballs.”
Alone, Zariah stripped off the ruined, bloodstained clothes. They fell away like a shed skin. In the faint light from a single oil lamp, she looked at her body in the steamy mirror propped against the wall.
The changes were subtle and profound. Her musculature was more defined, leaner, a predator’s economy of line. The scar from an old appendix surgery was gone. The bruising on her face had vanished. Her skin glowed with a health that felt deep, radiated from within. And her eyes… the amber was settling, the silver ring dimming to a faint, luminous outline. They were her eyes, but seen through a different lens.
She sank into the tub with a sigh that was almost a growl. The hot water was a revelation, a symphony of sensation on hypersensitive skin. She washed away the blood, the dirt, the last tangible remnants of her ordeal. The water swirled grey, then pink, then clear. She submerged her head, letting the silence of the water drown out the overwhelming hum of the world for a moment.
When she surfaced, clarity came—and with it, a deep, gnawing hollow in her gut. Hunger. Not the polite hunger of a missed meal, but a consuming, cellular demand. She dressed quickly in the soft, borrowed clothes left for her—woolen pants, a thick sweater. They smelled of pine and pack.
In the main hall, a bowl of rich, fatty broth and a plate piled with sliced venison waited. She ate with a single-minded focus that was almost embarrassing, tearing into the meat, gulping the broth. The food hit her system like fuel into a reactor. She could feel the energy spreading, repairing, integrating. Benji sat beside her, not eating, just watching, a silent vigil.
As the sharpest edge of the hunger abated, a new weariness washed over her. It was a heavy, dense fatigue, the cost of cosmic renovation. Her eyes grew heavy. The voices of the pack—low discussions about watch rotations, about the frozen men outside, about what came next—blurred into a comforting murmur.
“Sleep,” Benji said, his hand finding hers. His touch was an anchor. “I’ve got you. We’re safe here.”
She believed him. The bond told her he believed it, too, even if the alpha part of him was still on high alert. She let him lead her to a small, curtained-off alcove with a deep bed piled with furs. It smelled of him, of safety. She crawled in, the weight of the last day, the last hour, pulling her down into the darkness.
Sleep, however, was not an escape.
It was a descent into a new layer of reality.
OBVIOUSLY SHE WAS HAVING A NIGHTMARE BECAUSE HOW ELSE COULD SHE EXPLAIN the feeling of the forest floor, cold and slick with rot, beneath not her feet, but her paws? The sensation was hyper-real—the give of the moss, the sharp prick of a buried twig, the vibration of her own movement thrumming up through the pads. Trees, monstrous and black, blurred past her in a streaking wall of shadow. Her breath sawed in and out, not from her lungs, but from a deeper, barrel-shaped chest, a steam-engine rhythm that filled her ears.
SHE HAD TO FLEE DANGER.
The thought was pure, undiluted instinct, a screaming chemical signal in her blood. It overrode everything, this need to run, to put distance between herself and the threat. The threat was behind her, a cacophony of crashing undergrowth, of deep-throated barks, of projected intentions that stank of aggression and pursuit. They were coming. They would take it. They would harm it. The thing inside her, the warm, fragile glow in her core, had to be protected.
UNBEKNOWNST TO HER, SHE WAS FULLY SHIFTED AND CURRENTLY RUNNING FROM THE PACK WARRIORS, HER FRIENDS AND BENJI.
The logic-center of her brain, the part that could recognize a friend, was offline, buried under millennia of primal programming. All her new senses reported was threat: the size of them, the speed, the coordinated, hunting nature of their movements. Their scents were familiar, but in this state, familiarity meant nothing. It only meant they were an efficient, pack-based predator, and she was alone. HER WOLF WAS NEW, SHE WAS NOT BORN IN A PACK SO HER WOLF HAD A LONE WOLF MENTALITY AND WAS PETRIFIED OF THE OTHERS.
Aloneness was terror. The pack-mind, that soft, connecting hum she’d briefly felt in the homestead, was now a deafening, hostile chorus aimed at her. She couldn’t hear the individual voices of Benji, of Mara. She heard only the hunt-song, the intention to surround, to contain. It was a wall of pressure against her mind, and her only response was to crash against it, blindly, fueled by panic.
HER INSTINCT WAS TO RUN IN ORDER TO PROTECT HER BABY. SHE WOULDN’T FIGHT. THAT WOULD BE TOO DANGEROUS FOR HER UNBORN PUP.
Fighting meant stopping. Fighting meant teeth and impact and the risk of a blow to her swollen middle. So she ran. Muscles she’d never possessed before powered her through the Montana dark. The world was a symphony of smell—damp earth, frightened deer a mile east, the ozone-tang of the Glimmer pulsing from the granite bones of the mountain. She was fast. So fast the wind keened in her ears. But they were faster. They knew this land. They moved as one entity, flowing through the trees where she fought them.
A root snagged her forepaw. She stumbled, a yelp tearing from her throat. Before she could right herself, shadows detached from the greater darkness, circling, blocking her paths. She skidded to a halt, haunches low, chest heaving.