Jared felt on the brink of an emotional meltdown. His own father hadn't recognized him and had just left with the one thing that might help Jared regain human form.
With whimpering and walking in the tight circles permitted by the length of the lead not doing him much good, Jared stopped to consider options.
He could wait for his father to get back, hopefully with the amulet, but that was a rather passive option with a lot of variables.
He twisted and turned, seeing if he could slip out of the collar. The leather collar stayed tightly around his neck. "If I could get free, I could head to Blaine's house. He'd help me!"
Blaine and Jared had been best friends since an aggressive encounter at the elementary school playground in first grade when they had gotten into a scuffle for the last available swing. Their teacher had made a bigger deal out of it than necessary. Blaine and Jared had dusted themselves off, only to discover that Suzie Barton had appropriated the swing during their scuffle. They'd laughed about it and targeted Suzie with some grade-school taunts until she abandoned the swing. Unfortunately, by that time recess had ended, but not before they'd become good friends who eventually shared an interest in online games, stealing an occasional joint from Jared's dad's stash to share, and, for the past couple of years, different girls at Nelson High School.
"I know he could help me," Jared said, putting an inordinate amount of faith that Blaine could see through his canine guise any better than his own father had done.
But, until he got free of the lead or the collar, that option remained a tantalizing but unavailable prospect.
Jared looked at the hardscrabble dirt beneath his paws. "Maybe I could write out a message to dad," he thought.
He felt his tail wagging as he picked up a stick he found on the ground. Manipulating the stick with his jaws felt more awkward than holding a pencil, but he pushed ahead. He figured writing the word "Help" might be a good start and pointed the tip of the stick into the dirt.
He started to fashion an H when his mind did the funniest thing... he went completely blank about what he was doing. He stood there on all four paws and let the stick drop from his mouth. When he came out of the fog a moment later, he saw he was drooling on the stick.
Not to be defeated, he regained the stick and set to work. The fog ate up his thoughts on the letter H as soon as he pushed the stick into the dirt. He repeated the process with the same results. Something was keeping him from writing out a message by plucking the letters and words right out of his brain whenever he tried.
He dropped the stick again. He felt nervous. If he couldn't speak and he couldn't even scrawl a message in the dirt, getting help might be more of a challenge than he had at first realized.
He would have pondered the situation in more detail, but...