Tracey drifted off fairly quickly but her sleep was neither restful or pleasant as she began to dream. Darkness, it was all around Tracey while she slept. She tossed and turned fitfully and looked around wide-eyed in her Rem-cycle, her dream state to see if she could find anything that would shed light here and penetrate the darkness till it vanished and left her alone.
"Hello? Is anyone there?" She called into the darkness, receiving no answer until a cruel voice began to laugh from beyond the darkness. "Who's there?!"
"What wrong little girl... are you afraid of the dark?" The voice asked with a laugh. "Through all the hours of fun we had together, this was your weakness?"
Tracey looked around frantically now, wanting to find the source of the voice and then shut it up, but a cold shiver crawled over her skin and when she turned around her breath caught in her throat. Directly behind her stood Moriarty, his slender frame, his pale skin was tolerable, but his eyes were the stuff of nightmares. His eyes glowed red and hot, and his voice sounded playful and cold like a snake's scales slithering over dead leaves towards its prey. As she started to step back he grabbed her forearms in both hands and squeezed hard, bringing forth tears to Tracey's eyes and screams to her lips. The pain was intolerable and she was forced to her knees, all the while she tried to escape from his grasp.
"That's right Tracey... you will suffer even now. I won't let you get away just because you skipped town on me." Moriarty laughed, leaning down and bringing his face closer to hers. "I will always be here in the shadows, you won't be getting rid of me any time soon so get comfy my dear, I'm here to stay."
"Get away from me Bastard!" Tracey screamed, finding the strength to rip her arms out of his grasp.
She lunged forward and tackling him, taking him bodily down to the floor, straddling his waist with her knees and holding him down with one hand on his shoulder while the other came down in a fist to clobber him. That same urge that she had felt in the common room came back in full force and she couldn't fight it off anymore. A bright light surrounded her and she heard a thunderous growl from in front of her. Upon looking up she gasp and found herself looking into the yellow eyes of a massive timber wolf. The wolf's eyes dilated and it leapt forward into Tracy's chest where it vanished into light and she was rocked backward. Tracey quickly doubled over as a new pain spread throughout her body. She howled in pain as her bones cracked, muscles stretched and her form changed completely to that of the same timber wolf she had seen. When her transformation was finally completed she turned her yellow eyes to Moriarty and savagely tore into his flesh before he could do anything to stop her.
At the end of the ordeal, Tracey's muzzle was stained with blood and was her gray fur, now speckled with droplets of blood that splattered onto her when she bit into her prey's jugular and torn it open. She paced around the mauled corpse until a sudden force bowled her over and suddenly she fell. It felt like a sudden drop with an equally sudden stop and when she opened her eyes from her dream she was on the floor, the solid wood rough against her cheek, but something was wrong. She looked around and got up, everything was slightly taller than she had remembered it. Passing by a mirror she howled at the reflection in the glass and growled. It was her own reflection, but she was no longer human! She had shifted into a timber wolf in her sleep and things were slowly starting to go wolfish, if that could have been the right word for it. She looked around and hoped she could get Artemis's attention before she did something she would regret.
Artemis was asleep in the chair one leg draped over the arm her journal lying open in her lap totally unaware that Tracey had transformed. "Artemis! Artemis! I need help here!" Tracey said, though they came out in not words but in growls and sharp barks.
After a moment Tracey realized the she wasn't going to get anywhere this way and took a quick breath before slinking forward and whined a little while nipping at Artemis's pants leg. She shook her a little and tried to wake her up as gently as she could but all the while she left herself slipping a bit without knowing why. Starting to whine loudly and more pitifully, Tracey placed her massive front paws on the table and nudged Artemis's hand with her wet nose.
"Artemis wake up!"
Artemis jerked awake the journal sliding and she scrambled to catch it then yelped and swore seeing the wolf. "Holy fuck!" She scrambled back into her chair looking around the room for where it had come from then to the bed jumping up when she saw the bed empty. "Tracey?!"
"Yes... I'm here." Tracey barked, taking her paws off the table.
Unfortunately Tracey wasn't getting through to Artemis because she was starting to use colorful language now and she was worried that she'd start slinging around spells so she had to do something else to prove who who she was. She barked softly and bowed her head a little, studying Artemis before turning around and snatching up her satchel in her teeth and bringing it back to drop at her feet.
Artemis stared at the satchel then the wolf. "Oh shit." She whispered. "Shit shit shit… Tracey?" She ran a hand through her hair and sank down on the floor. "You're a wolf…. shit…"
Tracey sat down on her massive gray haunches and narrowed her yellow eyes at Artemis and whined a little, barking a little more so. She knew that she was a wolf and now Artemis did too. The biggest problem now was how they were going to get her back into her body. Tracey did realize that the bandages she was wearing when she went to bed were in a pile there and she knew in an instant that it was going to be just like New York all over again. She got the twitchy lips again and then looked back in the mirror that occupied the room and pulled her lips up to see her gleaming fangs. Growling a little, Tracey shook her head and closed her eyes tightly, turning back and laying on the floor.
"Help... me."
Artemis reached over and gently pet her ears. "Oh Tracey… How do we keep getting into these situations." She sighed and smiled a little. "Well at least you can be all your favorite animals. You like being a shifter. Now how to get you shifted back. Have you tried the way we used to do it in New York?"
Raising her head a little, Tracey shook her head and then got up on all four paws. She found her center of self and growled in pain as she morphed back into her normal human form and breathed heavily from the exhaustion. Shivers ran over her body and she huddled on the wood floor for a moment and then looked up at Artemis with a relieved expression on her face.
"Well that was fun... This just got a whole lot more interesting." Tracey said slowly, coughing a few times and grabbing for the bandages so she could wrap herself up again. "You think it could be all the animals I could change into or just the one? I guess we'll have to try that later because I don't think I could handle more than one or two changes a day unless it's really necessary."
Artemis helped her get wrapped up. "I have no idea. How did you even transform in the first place? You were human when I fell asleep."
"Moriarty was in my nightmare and I... saw the wolf and it merged with me and I... I, oh god Artemis I ripped his throat out for hurting me." Tracey aid, putting her head in her hands. "He said he's not going to let me stop hurting even though we've left."
She rubbed her eyes and blinked tiredly.
"Looks like I might have to ward my dreams again... That nightmare wasn't fun and I'm not looking forward to a repeat."
Artemis rubbed her back. "Warding won't work this time hon. Moriarty isn't like Dahok, he's not real here, the only power he has is in your head… You have PTSD and the dreams are the manifestation of that."
Tracey took a breath, shook a little with the cold shiver that went up her spine, and then got under the covers again and fluffed up her pillow.
"Then I'll just have to rip his throat out every time he decides to come back... but we might have another problem Artemis, there's something wrong, I can feel it. When I changed into the wolf, I felt myself slowly slipping... it's like I couldn't think like a person anymore. It felt like I could have been going wolf and it was a little scary, I was trying my hardest to be gentle when trying to wake you because I wasn't sure how much power or control I had over myself."
Artemis frowned a little. "That is alarming. We'll have to experiment when we're both more fully awake and can control the experiment." She stretched a little.
"I couldn't agree with you more Artemis and perhaps we should try tomorrow." She said, laying her head on the pillow and blinking slowly as sleep was starting to take her over again. "I'd hate to think we'd have to go to drastic measures to make sure everyone was safe, like tying me up every night like Hercules had to do for Thadeus."
Tracey curled in on herself a little and pulled the rest of the sheets up to her neck.
"I'll try to keep everything under control on my end... try to get some sleep Arty, we'll figure out what to do tomorrow."
Artemis smiled and crawled in beside her curling up and settling in.
