Elizabeth had managed the Change when Andy brought her down. Andy's teeth found fur instead of skin and she pulled her jaws back, spitting it out. She snapped at her throat again, again only connecting with a mouthful of fur. After the initial burst of instinct, she was regretting not having opposable thumbs; they would have made this so much easier. She reared back again when Elizabeth's fangs slashed at the air dangerously close to one eye. The return attack pushed Andy back just enough for the brown wolf to roll from under her, and then scramble to her feet.

With the element of surprise gone, Andy needed to reform her plan of attack if she wanted to make it through this fight. Elizabeth was circling around, trying to corner her against the gate. If she succeeded, Andy would have little room to maneuver her new body. Andy lowered her head, her hackles rising, and she growled, pushing forward to prevent the cornering.

The faint scraping of paws on gravel is just enough warning for Andy to instinctively duck and roll. She feels a breeze on the back of her neck as Elizabeth’s pounce fails its mark. The other werewolf stumbled, slamming into the gate as she regained balance. It wasn’t too much of a setback as Elizabeth leapt again, this time her paws hammering down into Andy’s back.

‘Wuuuf’, the air escaped Andy’s lungs as the full weight landed on her. Teeth slashed into her shoulder, moist breath tickled her ears. It wasn’t possible to scoot forward, but maybe if she just…

Elizabeth let out a quick noise of surprise as Andy darted backwards, making her attack overshoot her next bite. As Elizabeth jaws closed on where Andy just was, Andy herself was sprinting towards the house and the woods behind it. Elizabeth had years of being an Alpha behind her fight, Andy could feel the experience as the other werewolf matched her attack for attack, but Andy felt that she could level the playing field by drawing Elizabeth into a situation where she couldn’t rely on the advantage of sheer strength.

As Andy flew over the grounds towards her goal, she felt the freedom of the run wash over her. For a brief moment, the entire situation, Elizabeth, the betrayal, the life-or-death fight, all of it faded in the discovery of the run. Andy could see why Miranda found the gift exhilarating, and she wondered if the two of them could ever just run through a moonlit night. Then reality crashed down, and Andy skirted left, tripping over a paw as Elizabeth rushed up onto her. ‘Shit!’ she screamed internally. She stretched out her neck, willing her speed to increase.

Elizabeth’s breathing faded away as Andy brought distance between them. The shadows of the woods fell in around her. She didn’t slow down, trusting her body to instinctively know when to duck, jump, or weave between the trees and undergrowth.  Behind her, Elizabeth crashed through the green as well, trying to keep on Andy’s tail. The further in they went, the darker it got; when Andy could barely see more than twenty feet before her, even with the heightened sight of the wolf, she slowed down.  As she concentrated, she realized that Elizabeth had stopped charging through the woods like a rabid bear as well. Perhaps the Alpha couldn’t hear her, but now Andy was deaf to her movements as well.

‘Good going, Saks’ she berated herself, cocking her head to try and pick up even the quietest of footfalls. With the adrenaline wearing off, the dark woods shifted from her sanctuary to a deathtrap. Every rustle, every breeze, every snap of a twig reverberated around her, making it almost impossible to pinpoint the direction, or the distance. The shadows cloaked all the ambush points where Elizabeth was stalking through, waiting.  ‘Focus’ she told herself, shaking away the creeping doubt. Elizabeth was as blind as she was.  ‘There are two sides to everything. There’s this big ol’ wolf-monster-thing, and then there’s me. There’s Andy. Let’s be Andy for a moment.’ Andy closed her eyes and pushed back the primal reactions flickering through her brain. In their place, she tried to imagine the patience and the determination hat she had been known for. A heartbeat passed, a twig snapped, nearly ruining the whole thing. Andy opened her eyes again and saw the woods as just another problem to be solved before the deadline.

She pricked her ears again, only this time, her hope was to pick up on the quiet rushing of a stream, instead of Elizabeth. After all, something fed that lake behind the house. She concentrated and found her mark: a soft bubbling of water that flowed east of her. Andy bared her teeth in a wolfgrin and threw back her head to let out a long, loud, triumphant howl before thundering through the brush towards the water.

An answering snarl echoed back at her, but she didn’t wait. Within moments her paws were splashing through the cold current, but her eyes weren’t on a bank or a hidey-hole, no. She studied the low-hanging branches, all the while forcing herself to remember the human form that came with the human mind. Every step, she felt the fur recede, she had to throw herself on her hind-legs as her forelimbs returned to arms. Before the change was complete, she saw the perfect branch.

She jumped, using the last of the wolf’s power to push herself out of the stream. The air left her lungs as she bounced against the branch, and the rough bark scraped over her naked skin, but it didn’t stop Andy’s momentum. She swung her legs up and over the branch and scooted more towards the trunk, where the branch could withstand a lot more weight. The change back had drained her, and Andy reclined against the trunk of the tree for a heartbeat before asking her body to make the shift one more time.

It was the longest wait of her life as her body drug up the last reserves of strength to make the Change. The overlap of the two bodies was slower, and Andy feared she would be stuck in some monstrous wolf-human hybrid, but the Change completed itself and the branch didn’t creak at all under the new weight; just as Andy had hoped. Now Andy just needed to wait for Elizabeth to take the bait.

It wasn’t long before Andy picked up on splashes. She craned her head just enough to watch Elizabeth’s progression down the streambed. Then, like Andy, she stopped and looked around. Andy could picture the gears whirring in Elizabeth’s mind as she realized she needed the intelligence of the human mind over the bestial wolf mind.  She couldn’t sniff out the trail, couldn’t stalk with water under her paws. Andy dared a shift in position, and then blinked in surprised.

Elizabeth was changing back! The change was quick, quicker than any of Andy’s, but it happened. Andy froze in confusion, wondering why Elizabeth had just conceded her advantage but the answer came to her quickly: Elizabeth saw the two sides as separate entities.

 Some of us have leaned too far toward our humanity…

To Elizabeth, you were either one or the other; either the beast, or the man. She had forgotten her own fable: The boy, barely able to hold a spear properly, took the Change and became, not a monster living only to hunt and kill, but a werewolf who could master the primal instincts with the reasoning of man. The boy’s power had been to fuse his two halves into a harmonious whole. Something, it was quite clear, that Elizabeth had never completed.

This was all the chance Andy would get. If she failed this, Elizabeth would have the strength that Andy’s body could no longer support. It would mean Andy’s death. Andy skirted along the branch as far as she dared go, using the fact that Elizabeth no longer had wolf-hearing. She was, for the moment, deaf and blind. Andy offered up a quick prayer, and then jumped.

*****

Pain came into her senses first. It filtered through her mind and rattled through her skull like the seven dwarves were mining diamonds behind her eyes. The second sense returned to her was the warmth of sunlight caressing over her face. The third sense was hearing.

“She’s awake.” Doctor Michael’s voice rumbled above her.

Andy knew she should have felt panic at his voice, he had been Elizabeth’s left-hand, but her body didn’t respond. No surge of adrenaline, no increase in heartbeat, no fear crawling up her spine. Nothing to indicate the worry she should have felt.

“Andrea, can you open your eyes?” This voice, soft velvet over rigid steel, belonged to Miranda. Andy could respond to Miranda. With a groan of protest against the action, she opened one eye slowly, then the other one. A sense of déjà-vu washed over her as she looked up into the concerned faces of Miranda, and Doctor Michaels… and as she made to sit up, she realized that they weren’t the only ones in the room.

The three other packmembers were there also, each perched on a different type of furniture, each matching the concern in Doctor Michael’s eyes. Shannon, Joseph, Brianna. Brianna had a patch over her left eye, and was dressed in a bathrobe. Shannon met Andy’s gaze for a moment, then demurely looked away, and Joseph bowed his head.

“What… what happened?” Andy asked. Her mouth was dry.

“You took a nasty fall,” Doctor Michael’s explained, standing up and walking over to the nightstand. He picked up a pitcher of water and filled a glass. When he walked back to the bedside, he handed the glass to her. “A fall that toppled Elizabeth down as well. You both smashed your head against the streambed’s rocks. We found you early this morning, when neither of you returned.”

“Elizabeth…?” Andy took the glass.

“We will give her a burial fit for an Alpha when the moon rises again.” This time, Brianna spoke. Her voice was light and airy, reminding Andy of springtime. “You do not have to be there if you don’t want to, but it’s tradition for us to send her off to the Hunting Sky.”

“Oh.” Andy took a sip of water, then gave Brianna an apologetic look. “Er, sorry, about your, ah, eye.”

Brianna shook her head. “It will heal in time, we have a quick regeneration.” She studied Andy a bit longer. “Oh, are you sorry for the …” she pantomimed the shoe-stabbing. Andy nodded. “Don’t be. At the time, you were fighting for survival.”

“Are you sure?”

Brianna nodded. “Besides, now that you are our Alpha, you will be protecting me. A fair trade.”

“Alpha…?”

Miranda arched a brow. “Blow to the head or not, I know you’re capable of a higher form of speech, Andrea.”

Andy tossed her a weak glare that was lost under the thundering pain in her skull. “You have the seven dwarves digging up diamonds in your brain; you tell me if you can manage more than two syllables at a time.”

Miranda sniffed. “You just did.” She got up; leaving Andy’s bedside, but Andy swore she saw the faint curl of a smirk before Miranda moved away.  “Andrea needs her rest. I’m sure once she’s regained her strength she’ll be more than happy to listen to the lot of you babble like puppies. We need to prepare for tonight, and to make sure the will is adjusted to make Andy the sole heir.” She watched as the rest of the pack didn’t move. They all turned to Andy.

Andy held back a yawn, and then realized that they were waiting for her. “That’s all.” She curled back under the covers as the pack filed out of the room. Sleep was beginning to retake her but before her dreams took her back into the darkness, she heard Miranda laugh as the door shut.