“What?”
“It can hurt your animal form but not your human form.” Her voice was shaky, so she steadied it as she helped him to his feet. He noted his fur and let them retreat inside his body, where his beast had gone in, too, but was battling its way to take charge.
“It hurt you,” he assumed, already checking her from head to toe for wounds. But there was none, and she stood calmly as she shook her head.
“I was too fast. It wasn’t anticipating me, and now my wolf is gone.”
But Nico didn’t stop touching her, the feel of her skin assuring him that this was real—that she was real and he was holding Anne in the flesh. Then he couldn’t help tightening his grasp until she was fully in his embrace, breathing her in. The perfume from earlier and her natural scent skated up his nostrils as his brain cleared.
“You shifted to your full form,” he blurted out.
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since now. I panicked when I saw it swallow you, and I guess that triggered it.” Green orbs darkened with emotion. “I thought you were dead.”
“I saw you,” he said, recalling the visceral sight of her curled form. “The fog pulled you under. You weren’t moving, and I thought I had lost you. But it was an illusion…a trap. It knew who we were from the start.”
“Or it figured it out when we kept depriving it of its animal kill.”
They stared at each other, acknowledging how much it had gotten to them and how close they had been to their demise. When the off feeling returned, they stiffened and watched the fog hover closer but didn’t creep up the hill towards them.
“It can’t hurt us,” she said. “I was covered in it earlier, and it did nothing to me. I assume it attacked you the moment your fur came out. Maybe it’s not allowed to hurt non-animals or doesn’t have the capacity.”
“So, it was just following us,” he theorized. “Feeling us out and gauging how it could get us to switch to our animal forms.”
“Or just following us.”
His eyes were glued on the fog, braced for the slightest movement signaling it would climb up. But it never did. “But it’s not following us now.”
“It knows we know,” she said quietly. “The only problem is we don’t know what it is and where it came from.”
But it had to involve magic, or at least a significant chunk of crazy energy—nothing that any ordinary shifter or even vampire could do. The minutes crawled by. The fog thinned out, retreating, then eventually disappearing. They ducked, aware that they had no more coverage and were visible to any other predator nearby.
“Care to follow it again?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Me, neither.”
“What’s the next step?”
Nico reflected over it. But there wasn’t much to think about.
“We roam in circles just in case. We lose it and head home. We warn the others so they can pass on the information to our allies. Maybe if there aren’t enough animals around, it will leave.”
It was a solid plan. But a small part of him already knew there would be more trouble along the way before this was solved.
***
“Anne, you shouldn’t be overworking yourself.”
Nico’s reminder fell on deaf ears as Anne’s wolf form streaked past him without a backward glance, larger than it had been the last time. Without the fog and the escape clouding his vision, her form became clearer: a glossy-furred, sleek wolf that was significantly smaller than most but who made up for it with its speed and longer claws. This wolf was no straggler when it came to power, either, showing off its prowess as it pushed rocks and logs out of the way as if they weighed like feathers.
“I don’t think she is overworking herself,” Charlie mused before his figure stopped beside Nico. There was friendly admiration on the younger man’s face as he took in the wolf’s form, mouth dropping open when it jumped up from the ground to a high branch in the blink of an eye. “And showing off.”
“And showing off.”