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Save Point: The Night Has Claws

"You have to have a little animal in you to survive an attack like that," suggests Cleo, reading not in the headlines but in a much smaller article how a locally well-known cheerleader and her friend were quite thoroughly raped after straying across the county line into a lesser-known werewolf town on the full-moon night when the pack was holding their celebration. Everybody knows but no-one tells, and so this surprisingly high-profile violence has already scared up a convenient scapegoat in the form of a known trouble-maker.

She imagines the young girl passing out as she is brutalized, regaining consciousness standing next to a tree in the snow, her fingers raised like nailed talons and covered in someone else's blood, while the red that drips slowly out between her legs is her own. An unlucky to way to come into yourself, into your talent, attended by a trail of clawed-up and unconscious werewolf males regretting the bad decision.

She must have already smelled of it and the pack is known for their violent and enthusiastic sprees throughout the resident wilderness, even running through the town centers when it's late enough and everyone sensible has gone to bed. A spontaneous defloration ceremony to force the transformation of an unexpectedly intruding female is exactly their level, something no-one has done pretty much forever but which is vaguely remembered through the haze of lust and drunken hunt-blood.

The unfortunate victim is getting support and help from the women of the town, who are outraged at this appalling lapse of common human decency, she notes. This, reading between the lines, means that the werewolf matriarchs of the town have taken her in tow and are giving her a crash course in how to be a werewolf bitch.

It's the unnamed friend she feels sorry for, however, because she hasn't suddenly come into the full use of a regeneration that will heal all the outrages inflicted on her person. Bought face-to-face with a truth of the world, that it has claws and fangs, how will she cope? And what about the boyfriends, who were so badly beaten when the ever-shifting will of the pack coalesced around separating them from one another and enforcing the change?

She puts down the paper and sighs. It seems nothing ever changes. Maybe she can offer them one of her gifts, her extended responsibility for the various changes she has bought on the world by her decisions and ongoing nurturing of the lineage. There will be conflict again soon unless they learn to get along, and given what happened, she wouldn't blame the girl for nurturing a rage and terrible grief of her own. It's not something that can be easily reconciled.

Maybe she can tell the girl something of herself.

~*~

Transformation... as her shoulder-blades split apart, becoming a layered stack of several bony plates, able to be folded or hunched into a wider range of positions than some mere human. The unique sensation as her pelvis does the same, allowing for orientations that make loping and even running on all fours feasible in a way it would never otherwise be.

Her fingernails sort of curl up sideways, becoming stronger and thicker and narrower, but still firmly anchored in the nail-beds, not retractable. Her spine doubles on itself as her ribs shift into a different configuration as her heart ceases to be central to her vascular system, pump functions redundantly replaced in multiple locations throughout her body.

The stretching out of the bony muzzle is, strangely enough, the least of it. It's all so swift there's really no chance to be distressed by it, like being popped in the nose so suddenly it doesn't hurt until you see the bleeding. What she does find strange, because it takes the longest, is the way the tail extends from the base of her caudal vertebra, as though it was a later add-on, or some sort of afterthought. The stretching growth changes the position of her anus, pulling it higher, pushing it further out and making her feel more exposed.

As always, having six breasts suddenly dangling from her chest takes her by surprise. Admittedly the lowest pair are basically just engorged nipples, and the middle ones are firmly medium perky, but the top pair are big and commanding, jutting magnificently and demanding to take up their share of the available space. On a woman it would be deeply awkward, but as a wolf-bitch she has no trouble taking and balancing the weight, leaning back slightly to keep it all balanced.

Teeth grow outward, and muscles twine downward along her legs like slithering snakes to wrap lower around ankles that have become a second set of knees. Things click and groan in her spine and joints and she staggers into her new gait, no graceful way to go from one to the other, and yet the whole thing has taken only a very few seconds, two or three at the most.

Most people misunderstand the transformation, how it works. They think it's a physical shift, growth and change, when in fact it's simply a flow between two settings, the stuff in between only happening because the whole thing takes a short but finite length of time, and everything has to be somewhere partway through.

Her vision finally changes and she sees the world through golden eyes in a new, different range of colours that can't be expressed to someone who hasn't seen with them. There are more depths in the dark and less bright in the light, more shades to see with. She has tried in the past to paint her memories of what she sees as a wolf, but she just can't seem to represent them correctly with the limitations of brush and canvas.

She scents the air, digs deeply cleft clawed toes into the dirt, and ululates a yowling shout in the low subsonic to let the rest of the pack know where she is. No need for dramatic baying howling, not when the deep sounds propagate better and further amongst them in all sorts of terrain, their long wavelengths less susceptible to being interrupted by small-scale features like tree or leaf.

Similar replies return after a short delay, like submarine pings giving a rough estimate of the last known position of each of her fellow wolves. She took off her clothes earlier, this always a sensible precaution when shifting for anything too form-fitting, so she carefully folds them away safe and changes into her other outfit, simpler and more robust to the point of being tribal, made of soft deerskin leather beaten until it submitted. There's a basic loincloth that goes over her hips and under her tail, to cover a twat that has gotten firm and almost spade-like but which she doesn't necessarily want everyone to see, and a large square of the same material that folds down into a triangle over a length of braided cord, draping down over her main set of breasts in a loose-fitted manner that doesn't really conceal the secondaries or vestigials.

Where the wolves go hunting, there's always plenty of spare deerskin to go around afterward and so they'll give you one of these practically for free, with more always available if yours should get ruined, although you're really supposed to wear them in, let them get the blood and woodsmoke and grass-stains ground in until they fit naturally to your new shape and that you are clothed at all seems merely an afterthought. You can always claim the outfit is for sexy play, if anyone might find it in your glove-box, and a few stains help to sell the suggestion. No-one has ever caught her out yet, but she supposes there's always a first time for everything.

It's nice and loose and gives her freedom of movement between the trees without the risk of any snagging, but it's only some feathers and facepaint away from being irredeemably primitive, even if it is always strangely exciting to run around like this, near naked and unsupported.

Outfit ready, she dashes happily into the trees, determined to enjoy her weekend.

~*~

After it gets dark, the deep center of the forest is different. The partying wolves have set up small torches and bonfires, and further out where things start to shade into darkness, the trunks of the trees and raised outcroppings of stone have been painted with swirling rising lines of neon paint, both the conventional glow-in-the dark kind and some otherwise harmless colors that only pop the way they do to werewolf eyes, creating a sort of chromosteriopsis in which contrasting parts of the pattern seem to move, possessing false depth.

All is rush and flow and excited madness in the pitch blackness, where a human would be unable to see anything at all and even to a werewolf it's kind of dim. The smell of moist earth and leaves and excited wolves is all about, creating unseen contrails through the warm air that can be chased to their logical conclusions.

Some of the glowing painted trees have werewolf bitches fastened to them, slender and mostly all symbolic chains depending from branches above to hold their wrists above their heads or link to collars decorated with faintly seen studs that catch stray glimmers of the light. They could escape easily if they wanted to, but instead they wait excitedly with their backs to the rough bark of the trunks, mostly in a sort of squatting position with knees spread wide, ready to be found and bred by the man-wolves roaming the woods, once the foreplay of hunting and chasing and pouncing is done and they're suitably aroused.

It's not a scene she's into, but she can understand the appeal. One of the she-wolves is wearing a magnificent leather harness, dyed somehow to shades of deep purple, with a multitude of buckles and fasteners that support her breasts, and is literally gnawing at her own collar in excitement and anticipation. It probably won't be long until she gets all the attention she can handle.

She recognizes the one who was wearing a raven mask and pink between-the-paws leggings back at the autumn festival, sitting between the ancestor-skulls as they blazed orange from their eye-sockets, the candles within lighting up the night. Tonight she's not wearing the mask and has body-painted herself with the same patterns as the offering trees.

~*~

"The whole red riding hood thing is a pickup."

"Wait, what?"

"It's how a certain sort of werewolf girl gets some action. You know those stories about a certain coloured handkerchief in a certain pocket means you're up for doing it in a particular way, or guys wearing that one gold earring have certain inclinations? Same as that. These days it's a red raincoat, if possible with a fur-lined hood, just to avoid any uncertainty. It's highly visible through the woods, you see, so if you go out to a well-known pick-up spot there'll be swift shadows stalking you out of the corner of your eye from behind the bushes in no time flat."

"That really puts a whole new spin on things."

"Oh, there's all sorts of symbolism involved. Goodie basket means we go to your place, like having a picnic; make sure grandma and the other senior females are out first, so they don't laugh at your clumsy courting efforts, or worse yet try to get in on. No basket means come back with me to my place, I could use a male to provide and gifts are welcome. A conspicuous map or pretending to be lost, asking for directions, that means we'll meet later at the spot I show you."

"So the faerie tale..."

"...is a young wolfess picking up a male wolf, wanting to go to his place but making sure the senior females are out doing something else first. Yeah."

"So what's with the woodsman?"

"A wolfess used to carry a little hatchet with her as a guarantee of good behaviour. Get frisky like she doesn't want and you'll get your wood chopped off. Which is not as bad as it sounds, because of course we're werewolves. It'll grow back, and be an embarrassing lesson."

"Ouch. He must have been a very naughty puppy. "

"Huh, some of them liked it! People are weird, human or otherwise."

"And the thing with the stones?"

"Your stones'd be pulling up into your belly too, if you were getting your nuts dry-shaved with a hatchet by a forceful werewolf girl. I'd say that only having to sew em back in could be considered getting off very lightly under the circumstances."

"Damn. Hah! It would've served them right if I'd had one."