They glared at each other, Sarah obviously outraged at D's suggestion that her sister's child die, and D equally so by her suggestion that they were dependant on the child.
The tension in the moment was broken by a scream, shortly followed by the sounds of blaster fire from the direction of the camp.
The both moved with unnatural speed, D a beat ahead of Sarah although she all but leapt to her feet. They raced along the river bank, quickly coming into view of the carriage, on top of which Helen was stood, shooting down mist devils with deadly accuracy. Charlotte was nowhere in sight.
"Where?" was all D said as they approached, while Sarah dodged the falling remnants of a mist devil to reach her alternate blaster in her bags on the carriage.
Helen pointed to her left when a scream came again from that direction. D raced off while Sarah paused. "You ok here?"
"What does it look like?" snapped Helen, taking down another devil with barely a batted eyelid. "Go get Charlotte."
Sarah followed D, who was now out of sight but where he'd gone was obvious enough.
She paused at the scene that met her eyes as she came into view of D and Charlotte.
Charlotte's horse was suspended from the ground and obviously dead, with four mist devils latched onto its corpse – most of the body had been liquefied by this point, but the skeleton remained.
Charlotte was fighting vines that were slowly enveloping her body – they'd already locked her left arm and shoulder in place, and a mist devil had latched onto her hand – not much was left of it, and it was beginning to move up her arm. Controlling the vines were three women…or things that looked like woman on one level. They were naked, their bodies visions of perfection as they threw the vines ever tighter around Charlotte, but their faces were twisted, both with hate and something more. D had his sword out and was charging at them with deadly grace, the metal catching the sun as it arched towards the first woman.
Despite the danger of the situation, Sarah found herself catching her breath at the sheer beauty and power encapsulated in the picture he made.
'Just pheromones,' she told herself firmly, taking aim at a second of the women and loosing a shot of energy that seared the thing's arm and made her turn and hiss at Sarah. 'Just pheromones and you know it.'
D neatly beheaded the first woman, effortlessly dodging the barrage of spikes that protruded from her vines to grasp at him, then, pivoting on the spot, drove his sword deeply into the abdomen of another, leaving only the one Sarah had singed.
"Help her," he threw over his shoulder to Sarah, wrenching his sword free.
Sarah nodded and fired at the mist devil, not quite hitting it, but scaring it off Charlotte's arm. Charlotte screamed again as a jet of blood shot from where her hand had been as the devil detached itself. Sarah shot it out of the air and then scrambled over the vines towards Charlotte, ripping a strip off her shirt as she went when something wrapped around her ankle and pulled her down.
She stared with horror and disbelief at the dismembered head of the first woman D had 'killed' as it leered back at her, more vines protruding to wrap around her legs.
She was bringing the blaster up to point at the head when more vines wrapped around her arms, immobilising them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the devils that had been on the horse start to float lazily in her direction.
"D!" she yelled, managing to get out only his name before another vine wrapped around her head, acting as a gag and silencing her. Wrenching her head around before more vines prevented her from moving any further, she watched in amazement as D fought, his sword becoming a blur of deadly silver around him as more and more vines reached for him. The women he'd injured were pulling themselves back together – literally – as the other was laughing at D's attempts to fight, the burn mark Sarah had given her still livid on her arm.
'The burn,' Sarah realised in a moment of horror. 'Heat – they don't seem to be able to heal it. But then D's sword won't do any good…'
Indeed, it didn't seem to be able to stop them for long – almost as soon as D had sliced a wicked point off a vine aimed at his heart, it grew back. Sarah suddenly had a second, horrifying, epiphany.
'Dhampir,' she though frantically. 'Vampire's weaknesses – wooden stakes. If one of those goes through his heart, he'll be dead. But then, so will I be shortly, unless I do something.' She eyed the devil, drifting ever nearer, and her blaster, lying just out of reach where she'd dropped it when the woman had pulled her over.
She eyed the women once again – their attention seemed to be focused on D who was still fighting in a graceful, deadly dance with the vines that was becoming far too close for comfort.
'This is going to hurt,' was Sarah's last coherent thought as she closed her eyes.
Someone watching Sarah would have found it hard to describe what they saw. It was as if Sarah's body became a cloud of red mist, which shot upwards out of the tangle of vines and then reformed into an enormous silver and grey wolf stood on top of the vines that, a second ago, had imprisoned her within them.
All Sarah was aware of was the pain, the breathtaking, agonising pain. There was always a certain amount of pain associated with the shift, but nothing normally like this – it was the vines passing through her as she changed, some deep, still rational part of her mind acknowledged. A moment later, it was over, and she had four legs instead of two, but she still took a split second to regain control after the pain.
One of the women seemed to realise that something had happened to her other captive and looked around, but to Sarah it now seemed slow, so slow, as if everyone was moving at half the speed they had previously. Effortlessly – exulting all the while in the freedom this body allowed her, she surged towards the blaster, catching the handle between her teeth and tossing it in a high arch towards D, hoping that he'd be intelligent enough to at least try it.
As it stood, he was, and caught it without even watching, bringing it down in one smooth motion so the blaster was aimed at one of the women's foreheads. Her eyes widened with shock, but he pulled the trigger before she could react any further, and her head crumbled to a smoking ruin, her body dropping lifelessly to the floor at D's feet while he turned the blaster on a second woman.
The third turned to run. Sarah's instincts surged at what she viewed as prey and she followed after her, easily slipping around the vines that shot out at her, before casually ripping out the back of the prey's leg. Exulting in the taste of still warm flesh in her mouth, she snarled as the woman swiped at her with hands that were suddenly thorn covered. A sudden blast of heat shot over her shoulder and the woman died without so much as a whimper.
Furious at the loss of her kill, Sarah turned to find who had robbed her of taking the woman's life, to find D staring at her in a way that could have been called distasteful.
'Time to come home now,' said a voice deep in Sarah's mind.
The rest of Sarah disagreed, vehemently. She liked this body, she liked living like this, there was no reason to go back to being a two legger, all stiff and upright and unable to smell the scent of the coming dawn on the wind.
'What about Beth?' said the same voice from inside her. 'What about your pack?'
Pack, acknowledged the rest of Sarah. Pack was a concept she could understand no matter what body was in use. Two legger it would be.
Sarah the wolf sat and closed her eyes, concentrating. Inside, Sarah remembered – the feel of grass on bare feet rather than pads, quiet evening meals with Beth and Helen, oil and grit on her hands and under her nails in the workshop, the first view of her nephew on an ultrasound scan…
'Ah,' thought the rest of her. 'That's what being a human is, I remember now.'
She became mist once more, but the pain this time was no where near as bad as it had been – less agony, more stretching long-cramped muscles. Less than a second later, she rematerialised, human once more.
Naked human, admittedly, but human.
D hadn't seen her change, but had already turned away to see to Charlotte who, now freed from her prison of vines, was sat on the ground, whimpering and clutching the still bleeding stump of her left wrist.
Sarah went to help when she became aware that D had stopped, frozen as still as a statue.
"D?" she asked, confused – she couldn't see, nor smell, any new threats. Then drawing level with him, she gasped as she realised his lips were drawn back to expose fangs, and his face looked almost identical to how Erik's had – the mask of the vampire visage – and he was staring at the pool of blood under Charlotte's wrist.
((A/N: Cliff hanger. Whoops, naughty me. On a more serious note, if you liked the characterisation given to some of the shifting Sarah did in this chapter, the credit goes not to me, but to Tamora Pierce, who is an excellent young person's author, and I would heartily recommend her 'Wild Magic' series to any who liked this – there were, and will continue to be, some serious nods in her direction in this story.))