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He fell into a ditch. It was rank and overgrown, but for the moment he was free. From the other side of the wall he could hear them shouting to each other. Evidently they had seen him go over, but they couldn’t get over the wall, or didn’t dare to. He had to get away before they came round by some other way.

Scrambling hand over hand, snarling at the pain in his hands and thighs, he pulled himself out of the ditch and loped into the forest.

She had spent hours waiting, and finally had been able to wait no more. Pulling on a coat, she slipped out of the house, not bothering to lock the door, and went looking for him.

She had a keen sense unique to her sort, and could know when one of her own kind was around. As she went she could pick up traces of him in the air and the ground, psychic traces like the phosphorescent trails of his passage. But they were fragmented, and growing old. It had been hours since he had passed this way. And it was not long before the tracks faded completely.

Frustrated and growing increasingly worried, she hunted through the shadows, seeking traces of him.

Just short of full, the moon hung in the sky.

The boy lay in a heap under the trees, gasping. He had run through the woods until he could no longer, and now, as he lay, he felt it beginning, a day early, but uncontrollable. It rushed on him like a runaway express train, wrenching at his joints, stretching him, twisting him, bending him in the familiar paroxysms of agony. Blankly, he waited.

The full Change was coming.

The creature lay on the ground, growling softly. He scraped at himself with his narrow muzzle, puzzled and hampered by the clothes. Usually, habiliments were discarded before the onset of the Change, and the creature had never experienced this particular situation before. Finally, ripping with his great teeth and twisting himself, he managed to scrape away the last of the material, and stood clothed only with the night.

He was huge for his meat-form age, and magnificent. The great shoulders, clad in shaggy fur, bulked above the narrow intelligent head and the glowing eyes. The gigantic teeth, too big for his lips to close over, gleamed. When he stood silently, he looked like a guardian of the gates of Hell. When he moved through the forest, he looked like Death walking the land.

Within himself, he was puzzled. He had Changed, but too early, and the cues he relied on, the gravitational and magnetic fluxes that his senses depended on at the full moon, were not completely available, weren’t right. He felt restless and unsure, and he had absolutely no idea where he was.

Frightened and lost, he trotted on through the waning night.

Back in the town, she was still searching.

He came to the lake in the first light of the dawn. It lay before him, blue as porcelain and with the mountains gleaming in the distance in the first rays of the waking sun. Mist eddied above the water, and the first waking birds scritched, but fell silent  when they sensed him.

He had never been in this form during the day, and the sensation was wholly alien. The morning light was too bright, and when he went down to drink from the lake, his own reflection in the water stared back at him with huge angry eyes.

He retreated back under the trees and scraped a place for himself with his paws. He was beginning to get hungry, too, and increasingly conscious of danger. Anger began to flow through him, anger at himself, and anger against whatever was threatening him. Anger against the world.

Before, he had been afraid, and the fear had made him dangerous.

Now, he was simply dangerous.

The sun began to crawl up the sky.

She had returned home at dawn, without finding him. He was not at home. He had not been back home.

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