hi y'all!

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Whilst winter had crept over the land and slowly squeezed the life from it, spring burst forth like many of the colourful blooms poking their heads out of the frosty ground; full of life, vibrant and the embodiment of hope and renewal. Birdsong filled the air again. People began shedding their thick, woollen and shapeless garments for clothes that reflected the season. It was not much, a red scarf here, a shirt and vest combination instead of a pullover there, but its effect was to create cheer amongst a community that had been through one of the harshest winters in memory. Yes, winter would be back soon enough, but for now, there was fun to be had and merry to be made.

It was on such a spring morning that the MacCawley family sat down to a typical breakfast; pancakes and syrup, toast and bacon. Coffee for the adults and orange juice for the school-going boys. It was Danny's favourite time of the day; Cole was not normally conscious for breakfast, and the love and goodwill that floated around the breakfast table was something he never got to experience before joining the MacCawleys. On this particular morning, however, the conversation took a turn into dangerous territory.

Mrs. MacCawley took a bite from her toast and said "I saw Giles yesterday buying a rifle. It's too early for hunting, isn't it?"

Cole shook his head. "It's not for deer. He says there are wolves around."

It was good fortune that Danny was not drinking at that moment, because he would have choked. Looking up, he caught sight of Rafe's slightly widened eyes.

"Wolves? There haven't been wolves here since I was a girl."

"That's what I told him, but he insists they're back and it's a matter of time before they get into his herd. Says he's gonna get them before that."

"That's not fair." Everybody turned to him; he did not normally speak out at the table, and interrupting conversations was certainly out of character for him. Danny could no more hold his tongue on this than grow wings and fly. "I mean, even if the wolves are back, healthy wolves don't attack livestock. There's no need to go around shooting them."

"But we don't know why they're here. Maybe they're sick, or hurt. What if they attack someone? Giles lives on the edge of the woods, Danny. He can't afford to take chances."

He was about to argue his point when Rafe suddenly kicked him under the table. The blonde-haired boy took a large bite of his pancake and said "Yeah, well, Mr. Giles has always been a bit…off-centre. I wouldn't be surprised if the wolf was someone's dog. Still, couldn't hurt to be prepared."

Mr. MacCawley nodded his assent, and Mrs. MacCawley chided her son for speaking with his mouth full.

Danny knew what his friend was doing, changing the subject like this. He was uncomfortable talking about wolves and such, especially since the wolf that Mr. Giles saw was sitting right there at the table with them. Still, it was a worrying development; what if there were more people like that, trigger-happy farmer-hunters, who had spotted him? What if they were lying in wait, with traps and guns, for the wolf to make its next reappearance? There was no way he was going to convince Rafe not to go, and there was no way of making sure that in his wolf-form, he didn't stray too close to the edges of the woods.

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The night before the half-moon, Rafe hurried to finish his schoolwork, but hummed happily under his breath; his friend's lack of concern about Giles worried him all the more. He was not taking the threat seriously at all, and Danny could not help but think of all the things that could go wrong and feel a more than a little frustrated at his inability to do anything.

"Hey, Rafe, d'you think maybe you could not go to the forest this time?"

"Sure. I'll just go to the moon, or you know, whatever." He did not even have to look up to deliver his sarcastic comment.

"Why must you be so difficult?" He was starting to get annoyed at Rafe's refusal to recognise the problem that was staring them in the face. "You want to get shot?"

Rafe sighed and dropped his pencil. "Then where do you want me to go?"

"Maybe you could just run around the field here? I mean, you only change after midnight, and your parents sleep way before that, so I don't see a problem with you staying close to the house. It's not like anyone else lives close by."

"You know what the problem with that is? What if my Ma decides to stay up tomorrow? What if my Pa suddenly wants water in the middle of the night? What if they wake up early?"

Rafe was listing every random scenario he could think of, and Danny pointed it out to him. "The chances of that are next to nothing."

"But they're not nothing. I'm not taking any chances here."

Danny scrubbed a hand over his face wearily; he understood why Rafe was willing to risk being shot instead of accepting the substantially-less risky option of staying near the house. He loved his parents too much to face the possibility that they might not be able to accept him the way he was; he could not expect them to, simply because he could barely accept what he was himself. It was a vicious cycle of insecurity that fed on itself, and Danny found himself wishing, not for the last time, that there was something he could do to take that burden away from his friend.

Rafe must have sensed his despair, because his features softened and he said "Look, I'll go deeper into the woods this time so that there's less chance of me straying near Giles, alright? S'not like I have a death wish."

"Sometimes I wonder."

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It was ten o'clock, and Mr. and Mrs. MacCawley had already turned in for the night, not knowing that their son had stolen away from the house to turn into a wolf; he had been gone for a good half-hour already. Danny sat cross-legged on the floor, trying and failing to concentrate on writing an essay about the consequences of the collapse of the Roman Empire; he found himself worrying about the very things that haunted Rafe – whether the McCawleys would somehow discover that he was not at home. What was Danny going to say? What if they decided to wait up for him and he traipsed in stark naked? More sinister thoughts soon found their way into his psyche, courtesy of second-hand hunting stories, too many books and a hyperactive imagination; he imagined the sort of traps hunters laid and what they did to the poor animals that wandered onto them. If something happened to Rafe as a wolf…the thought crawled into a corner of his mind to die a lonely death. Nothing was going to happen.

That was right. Nothing was going to happen – because he was going to be there to stop it from happening.

Decision made, Danny abandoned his paper and scrambled around the room, trying to itemise what he would need and pack it at the same time. A flashlight was a necessity, and he spent 2 minutes looking for extra batteries before writing the search off as thwarted by Murphy's Law. The flashlight went into his duffle, along with a jacket and a change of clothes for Rafe. Mindful that every moment he spent in the house was a moment less that he could use to find Rafe, Danny quickly slipped out through the window and ran across the field, hoping that the MacCawleys would sleep soundly that night. He may be able to blame Rafe's absence on a girlfriend, but his own disappearance would be much more difficult to explain; if the Mrs. MacCawley suspected that something was up, that would be the end of it for them, for she was like a dog with a bone and had astute powers of observation. No more sneaking out for them, and then all hell would literally break loose.

As he approached the woods, Danny felt for a moment that he was in over his head; had he actually been arrogant enough to think that he could locate a single wolf in a whole forest? Just as he was about to despair at the futility of the exercise, Danny realised where the fault in his logic was; he was not here to find Rafe. He was here to make sure that he did not stray too close to the edges of the woods, where Giles and goodness-knows-who else were waiting for him. All that he had to do was keep watch near the edges of the woods, and if Rafe happened to show up there, find a way to usher him back into the woods. If he never saw Rafe all night, it would mean that he could trust Rafe's ability to stay out of trouble. With a new sense of purpose, he started the trek to Giles' property, accompanied by the glow of accomplishment and, unbeknownst to him, a shadow in the dark.

The flashlight came in handy as he wandered into the fringes of the woods; while the half-moon was enough to illuminate his path through the fields, the pale quicksilver beams could not penetrate the thick underbrush that formed much of the woods. He could still pick his way through the underbrush, but it was impossible to see what lay under his feet without some other form of lighting, and it would be the height of silliness if he were to step into a trap by accident. Rafe, for one, would never let him forget it. Nevertheless, it was proving to be a strangely enjoyable sort of night out; the relative darkness sharpened his senses to the point where he was aware of his own heartbeat and the sound of his breaths. There were insects making all sorts of insect-y sounds and every now and again a frog called out, though whether it was to his mate or to just for the fun of hearing his own voice Danny knew not.

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It was not until much later that Danny became aware of a presence close to his; he stopped in his tracks for a moment, trying to discern whether it was nothing more than an insect or something larger. Maybe it was a badger or a hedgehog, out hunting in the moonlight. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the critter, he switched the flashlight off and pressed his back to a tree, trying to diminish his presence so as not to frighten the animal away. A short while later, he heard the sound of something substantially larger than an insect approaching; it made a sort of snuffling, dragging sound, which led him to the conclusion that it was indeed a badger. The moonlight was very weak in the thicket, which meant that he could barely see his hand when he held it in front of his face. Waiting until he could hear the badger walk directly in front of him, Danny pointed the flashlight in its direction and flipped the switch.

His heart stopped.

Caught in the orange beam of light was not a badger, but the most horrifying sight he had ever seen in his 16 years of life, which now looked likely to come to an abrupt and very painful end.

It was a wolf. Not Rafe, but a grey wolf with yellow eyes and a limp tail. That was not what made it frightening; it was the foam that bubbled from its mouth, tinged with pink, and the madness in its eyes that must be caused by the bleeding, infected stump that was its right foreleg.

Danny stood frozen where he was, terrified beyond movement. He would have screamed if he was capable of making a single sound. His legs felt like jelly, and the only reason he remained standing was the tree at his back. One part of him felt sorry for the poor animal, who must have stumbled onto one of Giles' traps, but another part recognised that in its maddened state, it posed a threat to his life that looked likely to materialise. The beam of light shining in its face seemed to hold the wolf back for the time being, so Danny kept the torch pointed at him. The snuffling sound that he earlier assumed was a badger's call turned out to be its ragged gasps, and more pink-tinged foam dripped from its mouth.

Then the inevitable happened. The wolf took a step forward, a low growl emanating from its chest, looking very much like death personified. Danny did not know whether he should stop agitating the wolf by continuing to shine the light in its face, or if that was the only thing that was keeping it at bay. No normal wolf would attack a stationary victim, and the best course of action when dealing with vicious canines was simply to stop moving. The wildcard in this equation, however, was the fact that this wolf was sick and most likely mad.

It took yet another step forward, and this time bared its fangs. He could see that some of its teeth were chipped and bleeding; a souvenir of the ordeal it must have suffered in the trap. For a moment he felt a surge of anger at the sort of person who could subject an innocent and beautiful animal to such pointless cruelty, and in that moment of weakness, the wolf lunged.

The next moment saw him flying through the woods, guided only by the dim moonlight, as fast as his legs could carry him; he had dropped the flashlight in panic. Branches and things whipped at his face and many a time he stumbled over obstacles hidden in the dark underbrush, but he did not stop and he did not slow down, because he could feel it behind him. Run as he might, a sixteen year old boy was no match for a wolf, wounded or not, and he could hear it gaining on him. Danny could almost feel its fetid breath on his skin, feel it snapping at his heels; it would only a matter of seconds before this game came to an end.

His grim prediction never came to pass. So concerned was he about the devil at his back that he forgot to pay attention to where he was going; one moment he was running through dirt, and the next, his foot connected with air where there should have been solid ground. The forest shelf gave way to a steep incline; it was not impossible to walk down, but the momentum of his frantic pace pitched him headlong over the edge.

Danny had not the slightest chance to grab onto something, anything, to slow the pace of his descent; he just rolled, somersaulting almost comically down the incline over bracken and forest debris. It could not be good, he realised detachedly, to be thrown over sticks and stones like this, even though he felt no pain at the moment. The rushing sound in his ears grew louder and louder, and it was only when he fell into icy-cold wetness that he realised it was that the sound of a river that flowed at the bottom of the incline.

It was not a deep river by any means; in fact, it took only a few kicks in the right direction before he was flopped face-down on the riverbank, wet, cold and out of breath. His heart still drummed too fast, but it was nowhere near the frenetic thumping it was merely moments ago, and the wolf was nowhere to be seen. Deciding not to push his luck, in case the rabid animal was making its way down here, Danny pushed himself upon his arms.

Or tried to. Pain lanced up his right side, effectively killing any thought of similar movement anytime soon. His vision, limited at best in the near-pitch darkness, failed for a moment and he thought that he was going to pass out. Unfortunately, the pain did not lessen – it burned with every breath, making him wish he could curl up with agony. The cold water did nothing to numb the pain; it only served to make him uncomfortable all over.

This was bad. He was, quite literally, fucked. If he just lay here, there was a good chance that something would wander along soon enough and eat him; this was cougar territory after all. If nothing ate him, hypothermia would soon set it in and before that eventually killed him, the pain in his side would have driven him out of his mind. Perhaps being eaten was not such a bad outcome after all.

No one knew he was here. No one would look for him.

The ragged sound of his own breaths jarred in the quiet surroundings of the forest; he was making too much noise than was wise, and the wolf should have no trouble finding him now. No sooner did the thought cross his mind than he heard the sound of something approaching. An attempt to hold his breath yielded nothing but more pain, but for the small moment that it succeeded, he heard it; the almost silent breaths of whatever animal approached. Even in his half-conscious state, Danny realised that it was not the wolf that chased him down the incline. This animal was healthy. It was on the hunt. Vaguely he wondered whether it was part of the same pack as the mad wolf and knew that it did not matter if it was a healthy wolf, because he was crippled and therefore fair game. Survival of the fittest and all that.

Trying one last time to move only made clear that he was not going anywhere, since he could literally feel his ribs shift under his skin every time he tried to move his arms. The crack of a twig from the left drew his attention, and he looked up to see a shadow emerge from a cluster of trees not ten feet away. It plainly obvious that it was not the mad wolf; its movements were deliberate and silent, and it was much bigger. The wolf moved out of the shadows and walked through a shaft of moonlight, allowing him a glimpse of its dark, shaggy coat and its unmistakeably golden eyes.

tbc

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heh...that was rather nasty of me, leaving the chappie hanging like that. still, drop me a review and make my day, whaddaya say?