I was outside. The narrow draw between the volcanic ridges stretched ahead of me, gray sky above, broken rock below. I kept running, or at least what would have to pass for running for now.
My thoughts were strange. Less verbal, more spatial. The world was a map of scent and sound and movement rather than a sequence of words and ideas. My human mind was still there, still thinking, still making observations and filing them, but it was running on a parallel track to something much older and much more direct.
Run. Faster. The thing is behind you.
The thing was indeed behind me. I could hear those awful, misjointed limbs clicking against rock, the scrape of talons finding purchase, the ragged breathing that was more bellows than lungs. It was fast. Faster than something that broken and angular should have been, and it was gaining on me.
The path widened and I burst into open terrain, a steep slope dotted with twisted pines. The ground was treacherous under my paws. My rear legs scrambled for traction and found it, then lost it, then found it again. Every motion required conscious effort in a way that running on two legs never had. My brain kept sending instructions formatted for a human body and receivingerror messages from the quadruped that was actually executing them.
I misjudged a gap between two boulders, went through it at full speed, and hit a pine trunk dead-on with my chest.
The impact knocked the wind out of me and I stumbled sideways and went down in a heap of scrambling paws, then rolled, the scree cutting into my flanks even through my brand-new fur.
The skinwalker reached me before I got my feet back under me.
It came over the boulder in a single motion, scrambling across the rock with a speed that belonged to neither human nor animal. It landed on me, pressing me flat against the ground with those too-long arms splayed across my shoulders and its inverted legs pinning my haunches.
I bit it.
My jaws closed on its forearm with a force that shocked me. I’d been expecting the tentative snap of a dog that’s never bitten anything more consequential than a chew toy. Instead, my teeth drove through its skin and into something beneath that felt like tendon or cartilage, and I clamped down and twisted with my neck, tearing a strip of the dark flesh free.
The skinwalker shrieked, and its grip loosened for just long enough that I kicked free with my hind legs and scrambled upright.
We faced each other on the slope. Blood streamed from the wound on its arm. My muzzle was coated in the stuff, the taste acrid and chemical and making me want to retch, except I was fairly certain wolves couldn’t retch, or if they could I hadn’t figured out the mechanics yet.
It lunged. I dodged left, too far left, overcorrecting, my wolf body’s unfamiliar proportions throwing me off. My front paw caught on a root and I stumbled, and the skinwalker’s talons raked along my right flank, cutting through fur and into muscle. Pain flared, and I yelped.
I scrambled up the slope despite the injury, putting distance between us. The rocks shifted under me in treacherous cascades. The skinwalker followed, slower now, holding the arm I’d bitten. Good. But it was still between me and any route down the mountain, and the slope above me steepened toward a ridgeline that offered no cover and no escape.
I needed to think. My wolf brain wanted to run and my human brain wanted to strategize and neither was getting what it wanted because they kept interrupting each other with competing imperatives that made it impossible to execute either.
Turn and fight. No, run, gain distance. No, find high ground. No?—
Then the world lurched.
My senses collapsed, and the spatial map I’d had access to flattened into the narrow, forward-facing cone of human vision.
I’d shifted. I was back in human form.
And I was naked on a slope in the Jemez Mountains, the volcanic gravel cutting into my bare palms and knees and every other exposed surface of my very human, very unprotected body.
No. No no no no no.
The shift hadn’t been voluntary. My body had done it the way it had done the first shift, without consulting me, without warning.
The cold hit me first. Mountain air against bare skin, raising goosebumps from my scalp to my toes. I was utterly vulnerable, no fur, no claws, no jaws that could tear through flesh and bone. Just a naked woman kneeling on broken rock with blood running from a gash on her right side.
The skinwalker closed the distance in three strides.
Its weight drove me flat against the ground. Gravel punched into my chest and belly and thighs, and those too-long arms planted on either side of my shoulders, caging me. I rolled onto my back, which was a terrible mistake, because now I was pinned face-up with the full visual horror of the thing directly above me.
But I couldn’t fight face-down, and I was going to fight.
I was going to fight this thing with tooth and nail if that was all I had left.
It straddled me. Those inverted legs folded on either side of my hips, the weight of the creature pressing me into the scree. Its face hung above mine, the too-wide mouth and the void eyes and the elongated skull that wasn’t coyote and wasn’t human and was older than either.
Dark blood dripped from its torn arm onto my bare stomach.
