"Let's go," Kess says as he walks past you.
"Go where?" you ask, confused. "The curfew....if we get caught--"
'Then we had better not get caught," Kess grins at you, halfway out the open window already. "Hadn't we?"
You are worried, but you reluctantly follow Kess to drop from your second-story window and sneak from shadow to shadow. You encounter security patrols here and there, but Kess shows no sign of worry, and seems relaxed, even. You, on the other hand, while you are aware the security patrols never place their gaze on you, can't help but wonder what you got yourself into this time.
Finally, Kess leads you to a deep forest on the edge of the academy property, a place utilized for practical training. However, it was completely deserted right now, except for whatever wildlife might exist in there. You give Kess a questioning look.
Or you try to. As you turn to look at him, a stray cloud wafts across the moon, causing everything to disappear into blackness. Everything, that is, except for two points of reflected light. As the cloud moves on, what you see in the moonlight nearly causes you to screech.
Instead of a thirteen-year-old runt, standing next to you is a tall, wiry man...except he isn't a man, not completely. The reflected light was coming from his eyes. His wolf eyes. That's right, it was a man with the head of a wolf, fangs and all.
"Now, let's see what you're really capable of," a gravelly, inhuman voice snarls at you. The only reason you know it's Kess--or whoever the strange woman actually was--was because the creature was wearing Kess' clothes, although now they looked quite small on the lanky frame. "You have to the count of one hundred. Hide as well as you can. At that point, I will begin the hunt. If you can make it out of the woods before I catch you, you can head back to bed. If I get ahold of you--" the fangs glistened in the moonlight as the lips drew back, "--I'll carve the lesson into your hide."
You freeze for a moment, unable to comprehend what you were just told in your shock from what you had just seen.
"Tick tock," the wolf head glowers, and you scram off into the woods as fast as your feet will take you.
Although this particular stretch of woods is unfamiliar to you, you had spent plenty of time in the forest hunting for food over the years, so the terrain itself was fairly familiar. It was just that you were now playing a demented game of hide-and-seek with a wolf-headed assassin and you almost felt like you were losing your mind. You really didn't want to find out what Kess meant about carving a lesson into you.
Even though your heart is going a mile a minute, you remember to count off the seconds, so you are roughly aware when Kess might begin looking for you. You rub yourself with strong-smelling leaves and clay, then climb a tree and leap across branches, trying to minimize your scent, unsure if Kess' transformation means he has a lupine sense of smell. Considering the way his eyes reflected light, you wouldn't bet against it.
After various other attempts to throw Kess off your trail, you sense the countdown is nearly over, so hide yourself in the hollow of a tree for a moment to catch your breath and come up with a plan of action. You hadn't moved in a straight line, because to get out of the woods and back to your nice, relatively-safe bed (the one that was directly over an assassin's bed), you have to head roughly back in the direction you had entered from, which meant you would have to move toward Kess. Your only hope was to create a false trail that would bypass your location, then scoot back to the entrance before Kess realized.
But Kess was an assassin. He probably already realized that was your only play. So how were you going to beat him?