Regaining consciousness had its downside, a throbbing headache that channeled to her stomach. Nausea made Gretchen heave. Acids burned her throat. She spit out liquid fire onto the hard floor she sat on, her back against the hard wall. Her vision swirled only partly from concussive damage. In front of her, two humanoid figures wrestled and clawed at each other. Their faces mottled with fur had impossibly wide mouths with dangerously long and pointing canine teeth. Their rib cage area had expanded, with the golden brown fur of the female hidden by scraps of her torn brown flannel shirt. Heavy breasts bounced about as she tackled the silver gray male but retained their shape.
"Wolf?" Gretchen muttered, her hand touching her face where another pain targeted it, a finger moving in front of her eye showing blood.
The male thing growled glancing at her and then screamed in pain as a long claw like fingernail penetrated his chest near his heart. Within a second he had the female flipped over and face down, his own claw dangerously at her throat while the other hand pushed her face into the stone floor. "Enough? Enough?" it sounded like he said in his growl.
The female monster on the floor metamorphosed into the most perfectly shaped woman Gretchen had ever seen if perfection meant the bosomy hour glass figure of a men's magazine model, which in Gretchen's case it did. Lust pinged through her pain and fear. And even the scowl on the dirty blonde woman's face didn't erase its beauty, lean and sharply etched with a lengthy nose similar to Wolf's that added character and dazzling hazel eyes that pooled and oozed out a tear.
Wolf returned to his familiar form as well as he carefully removed his naked body from the woman, tensed muscles readying for her renewed attack of his mate. She remained on the floor staring at Gretchen, scowling and near tears. Appearing to be unthreatening, Wolf glanced from her to Gretchen and approached his love tentatively.
"Are you alright?" he asked her.
Gretchen rubbed her face. "I'm bleeding."
Wolf knelt beside her, gently as possible removing her hand. He breathed a sigh of relief. "It's just a prick. I'm glad I pulled her away before she marred your cute face." He kissed the wound. The woman growled. "Shut up, Nina," he growled back.
Both Gretchen and Wolf watched Nina rise to her feet, her body on complete display as she removed the remnants of her tattered shirt. Her khaki pants lay near her feet in a puddle of cloth where they had fallen when her broad hips narrowed during her transformation. Standing with fists hitched to her hips, she glared at Gretchen. Gretchen swallowed. The scary woman was stunning.
Nina spoke in a low and sexy voice, "You promised, Wolf."
"I found my mate, Nina," he explained, wrapping his large arm around Gretchen who tightened.
"This scrawny thing?" Nina spat. "I tossed the cunt like she was a sack of leaves, a small sack at that. And look, she's trembling like a leaf. It's my time, Wolf. You promised."
"Of course she's scared, you bitch," sighed Wolf. "I haven't informed her of our...ways. Instead she's confronted by the worst of it."
Nina laughed. "Good. She'll refuse you and we'll eat her delectable flesh." Kneeling, she lifted her hand and touched Gretchen's cheek. Gretchen trembled at the touch, but when Nina pressed her perfect body against Wolf, anger flashed in her eyes. The flash made Nina smile.
Holding Gretchen tighter, Wolf grumbled his response. "You're not my mate, bitch. I finally find her and you..."
The kiss on his cheek and then the mouth breathing into his ear when she spoke and her hand moving sensuously lower and lower in circles from his chest across his abdomen until it held his hardening penis, cradling it, was watched with intense jealousy by Gretchen. Nina witnessed the power of Gretchen's emotion while taunting Wolf with her breath, "You promised to give me pups this moon, Wolf."
"Oh Nina," Wolf sighed, kissing her cheek. "You know I love you. You're my best friend, my confidant, my lover, but you're not my mate. I don't feel for you the way I do for Gretchen. We're not meant to be mates."
Suddenly Gretchen jumped to her feet causing a wooziness she fought to keep from overcoming her and managed to grab her clothes through her foggy consciousness. Her brain too physically and emotionally rattled to scream at full volume, she unsteadily roared, "I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I'm going to leave you weirdos to your weirdness and try to find my friends!" Her unsteady legs somehow brought her through the main room and upstairs and outside. Throughout she readied to be grabbed but surprisingly no too quick paws prevented her.
Fresh cold air intensified the throbbing until she breathed deeper and quicker and it softened. Following tracks visible in the light of a nearly full moon and cloudless sky, she found the large flat building and the wide ramp lowering to the corrugated metal garage door and beside it a set of steps leading to a door meant for people surprisingly unlocked.
Grasping her forehead tightly with her hand, trying to prevent the throbbing from exploding, she yelled, "Michael! Joseph! Karen!" into the interior of the building. The air of the large space filled with boxes on pallets increased her nausea. It smelled of meat. The cold inside matched the cold outside.
"Gretchen!" she barely heard repeated by two voices.
"Where are you!" she responded, moving past the boxes to find large silent machines filling the space. "Keep yelling!"
The voices led her to the back of the large space and two sets of descending steps and a hallway. The hallway crossed another, and the voices led her left and further down the hall where the concrete walls became glass threaded with a mesh of hexagons made of metal wire of a golden hue.
Joseph, a moderately tall, moderately handsome man with curly light brown hair past his shoulders and a broad face with piercing blue eyes, his body smoothly muscled from martial arts and stage combat training, and Karen, an exotic mix of the east and west, of oriental and Slavic, with Asian eyes on a broad and pretty and intelligent face, her subtle contours like a stout boy, not fat but big boned, stood on collapsible wooden chairs on the other side of glass, their heads tilted up so their voices carried through holes lining the top of the wall.
With a tortured smile, Gretchen caught their eyes and said thickly, "Hi."
"Gretchen!" they both spoke at once, climbing carefully off their chairs and pointing farther down the hallway.
Unfortunately the door with the same glass and metal mesh proved to be locked. Bouncing off it out of frustration, Gretchen collapsed and became unconscious.
Coming to, Gretchen jolted up to sitting, regretting it instantantly when the blood drained from her head, making her dizzy again. She recovered and gazed angrily at the woman sitting near her feet on the edge of the bed: the breathtakingly beautiful woman she had seen transformed into a monster. Nina smiled.
"You're...impressive," said Nina without malice but with a seductive tinge instead. She handed Gretchen a glass of orange liquid which Gretchen quickly swallowed—a familiar taste.
Gretchen realized she was back on Wolf's bed and sounds of birds and a glow outside the open door suggested morning. She smelled bacon and coffee and her stomach grumbled emptily.
"How...?" she began.
"Kat left us some of the sedative just in case. Wolf brought you back here and we...kept you warm."
"You...slept with him after all?"
"Slept, yes. Talked too." Nina's gentleness somehow prevented Gretchen cringing when her fingers slid through Gretchen's hair. "Do you find me...unattractive?"
Gretchen swallowed her lust and stiffened. "Where are Michael and Joseph and Karen?"
Nina chuckled quietly and kissed Gretchen's forehead. "Michael went with Kat. Joseph and Karen are having breakfast." The beauty nodded towards the door. "Here, let me dress you," pulling a heavy green wool shirt from her lap and helping Gretchen slip her arms into it and buttoning it up. The khaki slacks proved too wide and to long, but Gretchen cinched them with a belt and rolled up the cuffs. At her feet were furry suede slippers, a little too big but wearable and comfortable. She noticed Nina wore the same things. "I like comfort," Nina shrugged. "It takes a special event for me to dress up." She smiled and kissed Gretchen on the lips.
"Some women don't need to dress up to look beautiful," said Gretchen before she could stop herself.
Nina nodded and kissed her again. "I agree," she murmured.
A giggle passed through Nina's mouth when she saw Gretchen's powerful expression of anger and jealousy return to her face. Gretchen grumbled, "You're seducing me to be with Wolf."
Nina nodded and shrugged. "But it won't be a chore sharing him, will it? Certainly not for me."
"But you nearly killed me!"
With eyes dampening, Nina sighed, "I'm so sorry, Gretchen. Just know that if I had succeeded, not only would I deny myself the wonder that is you, but my very life. Wolf would have killed me. It's just...I'm in heat and we tend to get feral."
"Feral...?"
"Come have breakfast my remarkable little powerhouse. All will be revealed."
Gretchen rolled up her too long sleeves to her wrists while following the beautiful, scary woman into the main room. Gathered at a rough hewn table were her fellow troupe members and two handsome blonde strangers, one of whom was female. Males and females paired up intimately. The blonde strangers looked like twins: thick shouldered and tall. The male loomed over Karen. Even sitting he was a head taller. The female equaled Joseph's sitting height, but her massive broad shoulders made him look small beside her.
Unlike everywhere else she'd been with Wolf, the room felt warm. She discovered why while approaching the table. The kitchen where eggs and bacon and coffee heated had a wood burning stove. Wolf emerged from the kitchen with a radiant smile and his hands carrying a thick earthenware plate holding eggs, bacon, toast and hashed potatoes and a large mug of coffee.
"Come eat," he said, placing the plate and coffee in the middle of the table across from her friends. "How do you take your coffee?"
"Hot and bitter," she replied, sitting where the plate had been placed. She returned the silly grins of her friends with a tentative smile.
"Then it's perfect," Wolf proclaimed, sitting to her right and sipping his mug of coffee. "Eat. You must be starved." Nina sat to her left.
Her stomach growled in agreement. Instead of asking the million questions dancing in her dazed brain, she filled her mouth with breakfast. As she ate, she watched the interplay of her friends and their mates, introduced as Lou and Reyna. "Pheromones," she thought, "like with me and Wolf." The couples talked so quietly she heard little of what they said. The smiles and laughter and the seductive touching made the words less important than the intimacy of sharing conversation and physical space.
Her stomach sated, she glanced back and forth at Wolf and Nina, noticing Nina studied Wolf like a prime roast. "Tell me what you became last night," Gretchen insisted.
The growl from Wolf set Gretchen on her nerves. It refocused everyone towards him. Nina cringed. Quieting his outburst, he informed Gretchen, though his eyes remained on Nina, "You saw the worst of us I'm afraid. You saw our battling form, the human with the animal, the most vicious of each."
