The witch had made a critical error.
Everyone knew about the Slayer and her pet vampires. A disgrace to the powers of darkness, to the shadowed underworld that birthed them and the magic that created them, they hunted their own kind to shelter the mewling prey too weak to fight back.
They had to go. And since she had also been a former lit-geek before moving beyond such trivial interests for words of real power, she had determined that their punishment ought to be both suitably demeaning and dramatically ironic. Circe, she thought, remembering dull-eyed classmates too stupid to comprehend the true beauty of the tale, Circe had been a powerful sorceress, and turned Odysseus's men into the pigs they were…
It didn't take long to find the right kind of hex. She gathered the ingredients personally. Her mastery of Greek was flawless. She had made sure the spell wasn't just an illusion or mere shape shifting, either. No, they would be reduced to the pathetic animals they were. The magic would choose a shape that saw to that. She would bind them to their true, pathetic nature.
Something, somehow, had gone terribly wrong.
Where the two had stood fog swirled to shreds and dissipated, leaving her staring at the results. The cunning pride that had welled up from the spell's flawless execution soured in her mouth and she went cold.
To her left, where the shorter blonde one had been, cocky and smug in a long leather duster, stood a stocky black and tan rottweiler with studded collar, muscles bunched under the sleek fur, lips pulled back not in a snarl, but something like a canine smirk to reveal inch long teeth and a mocking sliver of tongue.
To her right, where the tall dark one had been, grim and glowering, a sleek black panther crouched, massive paws splayed on the slick concrete, claws extending and retracting as the arm-thick tail twitched ever so slightly.
Both predators observed her with glowing gold eyes, their gaze filled not with anger or fear but instead undisguised amusement, as if to say, "Really, what did you expect? Fluffy bunnies?"
She raised one hand and opened her mouth, incantation rising to her throat- and they leapt as one and bore her down.