by Lori Drake
“Hey, furry! Over here,” Joey shouted, then let her wolf take the lead. The marble floor was cool beneath the pads of her paws as she landed on all fours.
Dawn’s head whipped to face her, teeth bared and a deep rumbly growl emanating from her broad chest.
They locked eyes from afar, predator to predator, tension thick in the air.
Friend, Joey reminded her wolf. Her front paws slid easily on the dusty stone floor as she lowered her chest to the floor, butt in the air in an invitation to play.
Dawn stared at her for several long seconds, then launched herself at Joey with a snarl. Her legs were more human than wolf, but her feet were longer, with long, hairy, claw-tipped toes. There was little grace in her lumbering stride, like she wasn’t used to her own body—and Joey supposed that might be likely. If Melinda had used a captive wolf and somehow merged it and Dawn into one body, her wolf would be completely unfamiliar with this hybrid wolf-human form.
Joey used this to her advantage, waiting for Dawn to close in on her and then easily dodging out of the way of her clumsily swung claw-tipped fingers. Dawn emitted a frustrated growl and lashed out at her again, but Joey danced nimbly out of the way on her four paws, then went down in that crouch again, butt in the air. She yipped, then bounded away, not needing to look back to hear the unsteady footsteps thudding against the marble in her wake.
All things being equal, Joey’s wolf preferred to do the chasing, but she enjoyed a good run in any form and easily ran circles around Dawn’s hulking form. Dawn tried getting down on all fours to chase her, but that proved to be even more awkward for her than lumbering around on two feet. Joey pulled out all the stops, capering about gracefully while Dawn stumbled like a newly changed pup, unsure how to deal with her new circumstances.
She proved to be a fast learner, however. Pride and unease circled around in Joey’s chest as Dawn’s movements became more confident, her lunges and swipes harder to dodge. What’s more, Joey was all too aware of magic filling the room, both Melinda’s and Dean’s. She couldn’t spare much attention to see what was going on with them, too busy keeping an eye on Adam and Chris—the latter of which remained slumped over the table. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she suspected he’d gone astral. And since he had shifted in the tunnels, he probably didn’t have his anti-possession charm. In a room that was probably crawling with vengeful spirits.
Praying St. Dean would watch over him, she drew Dawn farther and farther away from everyone, down the length of the big ballroom. Dawn’s speed and accuracy were swiftly improving, and Joey was sure she felt those wicked claws part the fur on her back once or twice as she barely ducked or dove out of the way. Nearing the end of the room, Joey took too hard of a left and her back feet slid out from under her. She skidded sideways into the wall, scrambling for purchase even as Dawn bore down on her. She managed to get traction at the last minute and sprang forward to dart between Dawn’s legs, but Dawn made a grab for her and caught her tail.
A painful yelp flew from Joey’s mouth as Dawn yanked her tail. Joey’s nails scrabbled against the tile as she tried to pull free, but Dawn’s grip was like a vise. She didn’t want to hurt her friend, but enough was enough. Twisting, she opened wide and sank her pointed teeth into Dawn’s meaty calf. Dawn howled in pain and released Joey’s tail. Joey scrambled free, heart racing. That was close. Too close. She skittered away a few steps while Dawn spun to face her, favoring one leg.
Joey thought the wound might slow Dawn down, but she was wrong. If anything, it made her angry. Though Joey could smell the blood soaking into Dawn’s dark leg fur, Dawn paid it as little mind as if it were an insect bite—annoying, but hardly debilitating. She launched herself at Joey again, driving her back with swings of her arms that were so fast they blurred. One connected with the side of Joey’s head hard enough that it lifted her in the air and sent her flying—but not before the claws on the tail end of the swipe raked deep furrows up the side of her face.
Joey hit the ground hip-first and slid across it until she fetched up against one thick leg of the table in the center of the room. Stunned, she lay there blinking for a few precious seconds, only vaguely aware of the big hairy feet marching purposefully toward her. Then that powerful hand wrapped around her hind leg and dragged her out from where she lay. That brought her back to herself a bit. She kicked and writhed, tried to pull her foot free, but Dawn’s fist only tightened. The fragile bones in Joey’s foot compacted painfully, grinding against one another. She whined and kicked some more, then did the only thing she could think of: She shifted back into human form.
The foot Dawn was holding suddenly grew several times its size, startling her into loosening her grip. Joey scrambled a few feet backward in a crab-walk before pulling herself into a crouch. Her foot ached, as did her phantom tail, but those were nothing compared to the screaming agony from her neck up. She didn’t need to see herself in a mirror to know it was bad. The right side of her head burned where the gashes ran up into her hairline. She was lucky she hadn’t lost her right ear or eye, though she could barely see out of that eye, blinking through the blood that ran into it from her forehead.
Grimacing, Joey spat some blood onto the grimy floor. Hers, Dawn’s, whoever’s. Probably a bit of both. “That the best you got?”
Dawn threw back her head and roared, the sound loud enough to rattle the ancient windows and the chandeliers overhead. Joey swallowed, grimaced, then spat again, keeping her good eye on her foe.
Crouching, Dawn mimicked Joey’s posture for a brief moment, then launched herself forward again. This time, she bounded at Joey more like a wolf than a human, on her toes and fingertips, teeth bared in a menacing snarl.
Joey’s stomach sank. Maybe this time she’d bitten off more than she could chew.
The astral plane was normally a practically grayscale version of the real world, but when Chris stepped out of his body in Melinda’s subterranean lair, the world was tinted red. He froze, a chill running down his intangible spine. Fear spiked, joining the distracting tangle of emotions surging through him. It took him a moment to get them under control, seconds he couldn’t afford when time was very much of the essence.
Around the room, intangible wisps of white floated like a patchy fog. He stepped into the table to his right to avoid one of them, uncertain what they were but not wanting to chance coming into contact with them. There was no telling what sort of harm they might cause his spirit, and he’d only just managed to rid himself of his last aura injury thanks to Dean’s timely arrival.
Dawn’s ragged scream drew his attention back to where she knelt a few feet away. The urge to help her welled inside him, but he didn’t know what to do. Her body shook and jerked and contorted as her limbs elongated and thickened, as she sprouted fur and claws… he eyed the chain tethering her to Melinda and crossed the distance between himself and it in the blink of an eye—one benefit of travel on the astral plane. He curled his fingers around it, finding it surprisingly solid under his hands. A faint golden shimmer coated it, a hint of magic covering it like a nonstick coating. Maybe that had something to do with why Dawn couldn’t free herself of it. He tightened his fingers, squeezing, and a surge of energy flung him across the room and through the wall into the room next door. The dark room spun a bit, but he regained his equilibrium quickly and was just about to zap back into the ballroom when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye.
Turning, he saw a faintly glowing ball of energy hovering at the center of the wall. A closer look revealed thread-thin tendrils of power emanating from the sphere in an intricate pattern. The webbing covered the wall and continued up across the ceiling, spreading in the direction of the door through which Melinda had entered the ballroom.
He zapped back into the ballroom and looked up. The pattern continued across the roof in there, winding around each heavy crystal chandelier as it passed them.
“My beautiful, beautiful girl.”
Melinda’s murmur drew
him back to the here and now, but he filed the presence of the unfamiliar spell in the next room away for future reference. Dawn’s transformation was complete. Chris couldn’t say he shared Melinda’s sentiment regarding the literal monster that the figurative monster had turned his dear friend into.
“Kill them. Kill them all,” Melinda said.
Dawn’s answering howl set off phantom goosebumps down Chris’s intangible arms. She turned back to face the table, where Adam was still on his hands and knees, staring at her with tears running down his face.
“No!” Chris cried and threw himself at Dawn without a second thought. He sank into the now monstrous form of his friend, prepared to assume control. If Dawn had no will to fight her captor, he sure as hell did.
Normally, possessing someone was as simple as slipping into their body and taking over. He had no idea what happened to the possessed’s consciousness. When he’d been possessed by a spirit, it’d been like a blackout. He’d woken up afterward, completely unaware of what’d happened. While he was possessing someone, Chris had no awareness of their presence, but as soon as he stepped into his friend’s altered body, he knew he wasn’t alone.
Rage wrapped around him like a physical thing, primal and hungry. A wolf howled, seeming to echo all around him, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Dawn’s wolf. The wolf Melinda had somehow given her. And she was pissed.
But there underneath the rage was terror. Chris zeroed in on that instead.
“Dawn? Dawn can you hear me?” he asked.
“Chris?” Her voice was so faint, he almost didn’t hear it over the racket her wolf was making. Its focus had shifted from Adam to Joey, and he was aware of the body he was riding in springing after her but was unable to do anything about it.
“Melinda altered you magically. You have to rein your wolf in before you hurt someone.”
“I’m a lycanthrope?” Her voice grew a little louder, and the knot of fear he’d associated with her dimmed, supplanted by curiosity.
“You’re… something. More like a werewolf from a B horror movie. No offense. But you can change back.” He hoped. Fervently.
“H-how?”
Chris grimaced, uncertain how to answer that. He’d never had to explain shapeshifting to anyone. It came naturally to lycanthropes, at a certain point. “You just… pull it back inside you.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Chris would’ve wrung his hands if he could. As it was, all he could do was watch Joey toy with Dawn’s wolf. The creature was clumsy at first, but gradually getting its feet under it.
“I can’t,” Dawn said. “So much rage. She’s not listening.”
It was difficult to hear Dawn over the racket the wolf was making, so Chris had a good idea just how impossible she must be to reason with. She was like a squalling infant, having no other way to express her discomfort. An idea came to him in a flash.
“Sing her a song.”
“W-what?”
“A song. A lullaby, I dunno. Music soothes the savage beast, right?” It was a long shot, but the best he had.
“I’ll try,” Dawn said, then went quiet again.
Chris wasn’t sure why he couldn’t hear her communicating with the wolf, since clearly they could communicate with each other. But whatever magic Melinda had worked to bind them together was something else entirely from what allowed Chris to communicate with them as he was. She’d created something new, something the usual rules didn’t apply to. He knew a thing or two about that.
So, he waited and watched as Dawn’s wolf chased Joey around the room, and he had a front row seat to the moment when things started to go very, very wrong for his beloved.
He watched her sail through the air with his heart in his throat, watched her shift forms seconds later to escape the wolf’s grip.
Terror ate away at his careful control of his emotions like acid.
“No! Stop!” he cried, instinctively drawing on his own wolf’s power, turning his words into a command for any beta or weaker alpha.
Dawn’s wolf, now running at his injured, vulnerable mate, skidded to a sudden halt, ending up inches away, practically breathing down her neck. Joey scooted backward, using the table for cover. But Dawn’s wolf didn’t pursue her. Chris felt the change the instant Dawn took control a few seconds later. The dominant presence of her wolf subsided as Dawn’s consciousness surged to the fore.
Chris waited on the edge of his figurative seat for her to change forms, but nothing happened.
“Joey?” Dawn croaked. Her voice came out all wrong from the monster’s throat. It hardly sounded like her at all.
“Dawn?” Joey peeked out from under the table at them. “Are you in there?”
“Yes,” Dawn said, looking down at her big, hairy hands with their razor-sharp claws. She recoiled, scrambling backward in horror, taking Chris with her. But there was no escaping what she’d become, and even as she scooted back until she was huddled against the far wall, curled in a ball with her long arms wrapped around her long legs, the change didn’t come over her.
“Chris?” Her voice was clear as a bell in her mind. Their mind?
“I’m still here. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“What’s going on?” Melinda called, peering over at them from across the room. “Why did you stop? I told you to kill them!”
“What did you do to me?” Dawn said aloud, in that strange raspy voice. “What kind of monster did you turn me into?”
Melinda breathed a put-upon sigh. “I suppose every parent has to deal with ingratitude at some point, though I’d hoped it wouldn’t be quite so soon.”
“I’m not your child!” Dawn snapped. Fire sparked within her, and she pulled herself up out of her huddled pose and into a crouch.
“Don’t talk back to me.” Melinda’s eyes narrowed. “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.” Magic sprang to life around her.
“Not if I take you out first,” Dawn growled and leaped forward so fast that Chris was thrown right out of her body.
He staggered, finding himself in the red-tinted version of the world once again. Those strange cloud-like wisps still floated in the air, but now they were drifting toward Dean, whose silvery glow eclipsed Melinda’s golden one. Several shades were clustered around him, most of them misshapen or contorted in some way. Melinda’s victims, clearly. But one of the spirits appeared whole, a willowy Hispanic woman in a short denim skirt and tank top. She stood there frowning with her arms crossed, her eyes on Dean where the others were staring in Melinda’s direction. It had to be Trish.
“What are you even trying to do, chulo?” she asked, with a fierce frown that could rival Joey’s best.
“Just give me a minute. I have an idea, and I’m concentrating here,” Dean replied. Sweat beaded his forehead, and after his brush with Dean’s power earlier, Chris imagined it was cold.
Trish snorted, but there was no mistaking the worry in her voice. “You’re going to end up in the emergency room.”
“One crisis at a time,” Dean bit out as he lifted a glowing hand and began moving it in a circle, like he was stirring the air with the tips of his fingers.
All the spirits around him—minus Trish—transformed into puffy clouds and slid through the air toward his fingers. Soon he had a veritable whirlpool of spirits swirling beneath his fingers. He turned his hand over, and that whirlpool lifted up to swirl around his hand, engulfing his arm nearly to the elbow.
“Dean…” Trish said, a warning in her voice.
Dean pointed his arm at Melinda, but he wasn’t even on her radar. All her attention was focused on Dawn as she barreled toward her. Threads of a spell came together in the air ahead of her, a solid shield of air forming to deflect her charging foe.
Channeling his inner Ash, Dean muttered, “This is my boomstick,” and the white mess of souls shot from his hand like an artillery blast. The spirits shot through Melinda’s half-formed shield and enveloped her in a swirling mass. She
staggered backward as if from a physical blow, and the spell she’d been working misted away as a ragged scream tore from her throat. The momentary distraction was all Dawn needed. She pounced, knocking Melinda bodily to the cold, hard floor. The spirit squad dispersed into puffy clouds once more.
Melinda shrieked and writhed, shoulders pinned by Dawn’s ferocious grip. “Get off me, you ungrateful bitch!”
Dawn leaned down, putting her fearsome visage in her maker’s face.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t rip your throat out,” Dawn said in that growly inhuman voice.
Magic surged around Melinda once more. “Oh, I’ve got a reason…”
“I’m listening,” Dawn said, though she shifted one furry, clawed hand to Melinda’s throat.
Joey scrambled out from under the table, her face a bloody mess thanks to Dawn’s sharp claws. “Don’t let her cast!”
Melinda was quiet for a long moment, her face turning red as she struggled to suck in air. The glow around her stuttered and nearly winked out. After a few long seconds, Dawn must’ve eased up enough to let her speak, because she rasped, “One… word.” She paused, sucking in another breath. “Failsafe.”
Melinda smacked one palm against the floor, and a burst of mystical energy radiated from beneath her palm. It spread across the floor and up the walls in an intricate pattern, joining with the web of energy laced across the ceiling. Those threads surged brightly, and the chandeliers began to shake.
Chris gaped as the pieces clicked together. The webbed magic, the mysterious spell in the room next door… the whole place was rigged to blow. Chris couldn’t get back to his body fast enough.
He opened his eyes, shaking off the disorientation of returning to the physical plane so swiftly as best he could. “Don’t kill her! It’s a—”
The ground joined in the shaking, and when Chris’s eyes finally focused on the scene before him, he was too late. Melinda’s lifeblood pumped from a savage gash in her throat and dripped from Dawn’s bloodied muzzle.