I was tumbling through a kaleidoscope of agony, horror and confusion, the last mostly because of the first two. The pain was abrupt and intense, before it I'd floated in an endless moment of absolute nothingness. Probably my minds attempt to protect me. I'd actually had time to wonder if I was dead and in limbo before the torture began.
And God did it. My empty stomach clenched at the wrenching, awful, breath stealing feeling of my arm being wrenched from the socket. I think a couple of my ribs may have at least gotten bruised but my shoulder muscles were currently hogging all the attention. I tried to gather my scattered wits to figure out what the hell had happened. Somehow my current theory about being rundown by a shag Land Rover didn't seem all that likely.
Even the dregs of my warped sense of humor got jarred loose when I finally slammed into the stinking garbage strew ground. One moment I was staring up at a fire escape that had probably been condemned a decade ago and the next I had flipped over my own head and was standing on my feet, instinct having taken over. Apparently twenty years of living the cushy pampered life of a successful artist hadn't completely worn away the tempered edges of me, forged on the dark side of survival.
The days of my being the damsel-in-distress were long gone, washed away in some pedophiles blood spraying the walls of an alley remarkably similar to this one. I thought of him briefly as I jammed my wounded shoulder against a brick wall to put my arm back in its socket. My ribs finally screamed loud enough to get all my attention as I felt the uncomfortable pressure against my lungs increase to almost suffocating levels. Maybe I over did the wall slam a bit but it's not the kind of thing you have time to calculate. Especially when whatever had collided with me in the first place is standing between me and the open end of the alley. Growling.
Growling?
That's probably not a good sign.
The grayness and spots were slowly receding from the edges of my vision. Yay for me not fainting in the middle of an as yet unknown dangerous situation. Except as I looked up, somehow I'm just not sure whether I should be thankful for my enhanced vision in this situation. Staring up at a giant mythological monster in twenty-first century Philadelphia, it occurred to me that some obscuring of the details might not have been unwelcome.
It, and it was certainly the only proper pronoun, appeared to be a huge two-headed wolf. Complete with all the tooth-and-clawiness you'd expect when those three words make up a real creature standing in front of you. Yeah, I know right, over-kill much. Like it really was going to be that hard to take me out, and to add insult to injury it was roughly the size of a small bus from the tips of its noses to the end of its tail.
Silver moonlight glinted sleekly off of fur every shade between black and white with hints of chestnut thrown in to make up what could loosely be defined as gray. Bright amber eyes seemed to glow softly in the darkness and I knew that I'd have been able to perfectly identify their color even without my new natural night vision. The hair across its hackles was fluffed up standing on end and its mouths were pulled up to reveal identical sets of razor sharp teeth.
I've seen enough nature shows to know that the show of aggression isn't great for me but so far all it seems to want to do is growl warningly at me. I edged experimentally closer toward them and not coincidentally also closer to the mouth of the alley. They moved half a step closer and the rumble somehow managed to become more menacing without actually increasing in volume.
