After all, what normal person would be caught waking up on the hay-strewn floor of a barn, with no clothes and no memory? Slade shook his head; morphing required concentration, so he pushed those thoughts of his missing past out of his mind. Focusing on the wolf DNA that was now a part of him, he felt his body begin to change.
Even though it was probably the fourth or fifth time he'd done this kind of thing, it was still the strangest thing he had ever done. Stranger even than the time he had turned himself invisible in the horse stalls when he and the rest of the Animorphs had been chased by the staff at the race track.
Even as he held the image of the wolf in his mind, Slade fell forward onto his hands. He looked back at his legs and saw that they were now fur covered wolf legs. As he stared at his no longer human legs, Slade felt his shoulders beginning to itch, turning his head, Slade watched gray fur start growing out of the tops of his shoulders and spreading down his arms.
Once the fur had reached his hands, the hands themselves began to shrivel up and become a pair of gray, fur covered paws. Slade's ears began to slide up the sides of his head. They quickly became the sharply pointed ears of the wolf he was morphing into.
Slade's mouth and nose started to push outward, the bones making a disconcerting grinding sound as they were reshaped. His hair, still black up to this point, began to turn gray and shaggy. Well, shaggier, Slade thought with a short mental chuckle.
At this time, Slade was almost completely a wolf, but he was a wolf with human eyes. At last, his emerald green eyes reshaded into the gold and black eyes of a wolf. Slade leaped down from the hayloft where he slept, not caring that it was a more than sixteen-foot drop to the floor.
His four short, strong legs took the impact better than he expected. Slade raced out of the barn like a shot. Slade didn't need the direction of the voice in his head to know where he was going, since some buried instinct was already guiding him there.
Once Slade was outside the barn, he started making up for the time that he now felt he'd wasted. Slade's wolf morph was a good one for long distance travel, and he intended to push it to its limits. If the wolf actually had any limits.
The terrain seemed to blur, both in Slade's eyes and in his mind. He knew where he was going, and how he got there suddenly didn't seem to matter anymore. After what seemed like only a few seconds, Slade came to a clearing. The same clearing, in fact, that he had been dragged unconscious from only two weeks before.
Prowling around, Slade was suddenly struck by the feeling that he needed to demorph. But, at the same time, he felt that if he demorphed he would be placing himself in unnecessary danger. Slade decided to stay in his wolf morph for as long as he could. He started to dig.
Tossing dead leaves and branches around like a dog, Slade began to make progress. He could now see the thick, black-green vines that lay under the leaf-litter. Suddenly one of them reared up, slamming itself down on the spot where Slade had been standing only seconds before.
Slade edged around the vine warily, the wolf part of his mind prompting him to snarl in warning. Slade lunged at the vine, pulling at it and finally severing it with his powerful jaws and teeth. Slade tossed the vine away, then went back to digging.
Slade's digging disturbed several more of the vines, but he dealt with them quickly. At last, Slade managed to make a hole big enough for him to fit through. Before the hole had a chance to close, Slade dove through it.
Falling to the ground with a soft thump, Slade took a little time to get his bearings again. Once he was sure that this ground was at least a bit more solid than the vines he had been digging through, Slade dashed off. He knew where he was going, somehow or other, and all that remained was to get there.
His target, a pod that contained an armored figure that Slade could almost swear he somehow recognized – and not just from that weird vision – was now directly in front of him. Not wasting any more time just staring at the thing, Slade lunged forward and took a big bite out of the pod.
The pod seemed to explode, dumping the small armored figure onto the floor of the base. Sliding himself under the figure, Slade stood up slowly. As soon as he was up, a bunch of those strange vines came ripping toward him. Slade bit down on the figure's arm and took off. Leaping out through the hole he had dug just before it closed, Slade ran flat out until he was out of the reach of those vines.
Once he had put enough distance between himself and that place, Slade started demorphing. Once he was human again, Slade morphed into the horse he'd acquired at the racetrack. Somehow, Slade had no real idea how; he'd managed to keep the figure from sliding off his back while he was changing back into his human form and then morphing again.
Slade ran, taking advantage of the racehorse's greater speed and longer legs. By the time he'd made it back to the barn, the one Slade had rescued was showing signs of starting to wake up. Slade let the figure slide off his back, somehow knowing that the armor was tough enough to stand up to a fall from the back of a horse.
Taking another look at the person he'd rescued, Slade noticed that the armor was starting to glow. Slade started demorphing, as the armored figure glowed ever brighter. When Slade had finished his demorph, he saw that the person he had rescued had already changed into their human form.
It was a girl. Blonde, pale blonde at that, and she looked a bit younger than him. She was also completely naked. Slade quickly turned away, knowing that Rachel always kept a spare set of clothes in the barn for those times that she flew there, Slade hoped that she wouldn't mind if he borrowed them.
Tossing the clothes down next to the blonde girl, Slade turned away to let her dress up with some privacy.