Amy shuddered, rolling in fever through the mass of scattered chart scraps. They stuck to her damp skin, to the thick fur that creeped to the surface.
Her gaze returned to the moon, minus glasses or artificial lenses. She saw it with total clarity, for the first time in weeks.
“Now…Now I know…”
She lifted her head and released a steady howl, feeling the shift of her legs, her mane, and her tail.
The astronomer rose, no longer Amy Sheppard, not quite Flaxmane. Her own completion, the next intricate puzzle, waited…
Party central saw the desperate, frenzied dancing of hundreds of girls, students and hopefuls. They mingled freely beneath the glass dome of the Fine Arts building.
Everyone was invited to have a cup of ruby-red punch, specially mixed by the party hostesses. The swirls of crimson and slight clear bubbles that spiked the bowl went unnoticed by all involved.
The guests drank themselves into rapture, bringing the residents to greater states of hairiness and incivility. The off-campus guests joined in eagerly; many were secretly delighted in the new luster of their eyes and the mysterious tapering of their ears.
The bash finally hit full swing at moonrise, when a raver chick in flowing orange danced atop the table, thrashing to Hoobastank, or perhaps her own internal beat.
She snapped to her feet, howling like a madwoman.
A hundred more bestial voices joined the changing girl seconds later, bonded by the sheer delight of mass transformation, of unity at its most pure.
Amanda pushed the accelerator to the floor, urging the Nissan to perform. The cramps in her legs refused to ease up; Amanda could feel the muscle and sinew reworking itself even now, refusing to conform to a human shape.
She cursed angrily, digging her partial claws into the solid rubber of the steering wheel. Remaining on the road was a strain; she was pushing 70 when the fog surrounded her. By some miracle, she had reached Wolf Lake before moonrise.
The key was to avoid howling; it meant submission to the beast, a covenant that would take her humanity. No matter how much she changed, despite the pain, she’d remain human long enough to do what was needed.
The road narrowed, transforming as involuntarily and radically as she was, from two-lane blacktop to unpaved dirt. Amanda eased off the gas, struggling through sweat and fatigue to keep up speed. She knew the path to the cave, but it must be reached quickly. Her biggest fear was not that the werewolves would come looking for her, but that she’d be happy to see them…
Within forest limits, the trail lurched suddenly left, snapping her reflexes to meet the turn. She avoided a tree by inches, nearly sliding off the thin pathway in the process. Desperately, she overcompensated to the right, starting the skid that would pull her from the trail and into the ancient pine alongside the road.
The crush and grating of warping steel was pure pain in sonic form to Amanda’s enhanced hearing, and she screamed over the whoosh of the air bag and the clicking of the bolt that held the seat belt in place. Urgently, she slashed the deflating bag with her demi-claws and tore the seat belt from its moorings. Her best efforts went to ignoring the trickles of blood from her twitching ears, along with the accompanying dull ringing.
Her warped door was stuck, or it would be for someone without even half the strength of a wolf. She exited the wreck on wobbly feet, already swelling within her shoes, and looked over dizzily to see she had totaled the Sentra, having wrapped the front end around the old tree and obliterating most of the engine. It didn’t really matter, compared to having her humanity irrevocably destroyed.
The one piece of cargo that mattered was still in the trunk, as she discovered when she yanked the lid open, snapping off the lock. Still wrapped in its blanket, shielded again inside a thick backpack, was the possible salvation of herself and every infected lycanthrope in Wolf Lake.
She threw the pack over her furry shoulder and ran, intent on clearing as much distance as possible in the few minutes she had left before moonrise…