What came next were deep growls, strained barking, and desperate scratches. The tap, tap, tapping of rain on a tin roof. Someone coughing and moaning as if in pain.

I blinked once, my vision a swirl of blacks and dark browns. I tried to move my body, but my arms were tied behind my back and my legs bound together. When I blinked again, a pair of boots stained with mud were all I could see.

The owner of the boots gripped me by the hair and pulled me up. The tearing of the roots in my head cleared up everything else. I was in some one roomed cabin, with only an empty chair and a large, metal cage filled with the malnourished body of some great, black wolf. The Hunter was there too, holding me up in the air with one hand while the other went for the knife holstered to his side.

"Fight!" a voice both feral and frantic screamed in my head. "Fight, kid! Don't let him kill us!"

Blood rushed down my arms and legs. The tingling sensation reminded me that they were still there. Bound, but not out of my control.

I sucked in a breath and my stomach burned as I curled my legs as high as they could go. Another unwanted scream escaped me when I pulled my head back, multiple strands tearing inside the Hunter's grip. But his scream was louder after I lashed out with my bound legs, kicking into his knee and forcing it to cave in and bend the wrong way.

The scream ended in a slew of coughing as the Hunter released me and fell back against the wall of his cabin. I was back on the ground, struggling to get away from him, but not getting very far.

"To me, kid. To me!"

I tried to search for the owner of this new voice, but all that was left in the room was the wolf. It had stopped barking and scratching. The massive creature was standing staunch still in its cage, looking at me. With eyes I had seen before.

"Shepherd?" I asked, my voice barely escaping my dry mouth.

The wolf blinked. "Sure, whatever. You can call me whatever the hell you want if you get me outta here. Just hurry with it! That thing is getting back up!"

A loud pop followed those words. I turned and saw the Hunter hunched over his chair, testing the leg that was no longer bent the wrong way. He glanced at me and held up the knife in his hand so I could see.

"Kill you," he said between coughs. Then he was standing, limping in my direction. The knife held up, ready to stab into me.

"Shit! Hurry, kid! You gotta hurry!" the wolf shouted in my head as I crawled towards his cage.

With my arms tied behind me, I had to use my head and upper body to help my legs along. My stomach was on fire with each crawl, and I winced a few times as splinters from the old, wood floor dug into my bare skin. But I kept going. I tried to ignore the tap, tap of the rain and the bump, drag of heavy footsteps behind me.

The wolf was getting closer. He was barking like mad again. Biting the bars of the cage, screaming threats and words of encouragement in my head. I did not recognize him, but something about him told me he was a friend. If I could reach him, I would be safe.

I was close enough so that I could have reached out and touched his prison, if my arms hadn't been tied. That was how close I had come when the Hunter stepped firmly on my ankles and drove the knife into my back.

"NO! No!" the wolf howled. What came after was a slew of curses and empty threats. He was so loud. I could not hear anything else as the Hunter flipped me on my back. Not the tap of the rain or the gasps of my own broken breathing.

The Hunter raised his knife high again. I could only guess he was savoring victory. The white mask and the black eyes told me nothing.

Then his mouth moved and, despite the lack of sound, I could hear what he was saying. Or, maybe, I just knew from experience.

"I want you to show me."

If I had blinked in that moment, I would have missed what happened next. A long arm, covered in black fur with a clawed hand bigger than my head, reached out and grabbed the Hunter's arm. The witch's mask twitched once, and he was gone.

Sound slowly came back to me as I laid there. The rain first, then screams and growls. Pain was next. Stabbing and burning into my back so that it made me never want to move again.

"Hey, kid, you alive?"

That voice again, only now it wasn't screaming. It sounded worried instead.

"Yeah," I said, having to groan when I tried to move. "For the most part."

"You good enough to move? Pretty sure that thing is dead, but the sooner we get outta here the better."

"That thing?" I asked, and as I did, I felt something cool touch my hands. I raised my head a fraction to look.

Red. Everywhere smeared with it. The walls splattered with it. A pool of it growing out from the Hunter and what remained of his left arm. Not even remains. Just a shoulder that ended in severed meat and bones.

I no longer cared how much my back burned. I pushed my body back away from the red and the dead. Back until my head hit something hard that rang out like dull metal.

"Looks like you can move after all." A pair of brown eyes looked down at me from behind bars. Below the eyes were teeth smeared with red meat. "Put your hands in here so I can free ya."

"No..." I started, but then I tried to sit up and my words were lost in groans as my back flared to importance again.

"Shit, kid, don't you dare die on me right now. Here, let's try this."

The black, furry claw snaked its way outside the cage, the skinny arm barely impeded by the small space in between the bars. I wanted to scream, to crawl away, but my brain and mind were overcome with the hole in my back. It didn't want me to move. It wanted me to watch helplessly as the black claw grabbed my arms and...

Tear them free from the rope.

"Alright, now, there isn't much in this place so I bet you anything the key to this cage is somewhere on that thing's person. Sorry to ask, but think you could find it for me?"

I sighed in relief at the tension that was released from my shoulders. It was almost enough to make me forget the stab wound in my back as I lifted myself to a sitting position.

The wolf was waiting for me, gore filled smile and all. A pale arm coated in blood lay in a messy pile in one corner of its cage, like a discarded chew toy.  "Well don't just sit there!" the wolf said, panting and wagging its tail. "I freed you, so you free me. That's not too hard to comprehend, right?"

"Mm." I rubbed my sore wrists, ignoring the pulsing of my back muscles. The pain of the knife wound was already lessening. Benefits of being a familiar.

And if this wolf was talking to me, that could only mean that he was a familiar too.

There were not many directions I could look that weren't coated in blood. The Hunter did not leave the spot where he lay. Did it hurt to lose an arm? I was grateful that I could not see his face.

"You killed the Hunter?" I asked the wolf.

"The prick had it coming," the wolf said before nudging his nose in said dead witch's direction. "The key should be on its body somewhere. If you really want the gory details, I can give them to you once we are out of this hell hole."

I did not move. "You aren't going to try and kill me as soon as I let you out?"

"What?" The wolf did not move either, aside from getting up from his sitting position. "The hell are you on about? You forget that we're in this together? You called me a friend back in your dream. Did you just forget or do your friends regularly try to kill you?"

"I..."

Wind blowing in a dust filled town. Sand grinding in my ears. The Hunter waiting. The Hunter shooting.

"Kid? Hey, you can trust me, alright? We're on the same team here." The wolf moved as close to the bars of its cage as it could, big brown eyes taking up the space in between. "I don't fully get what's going on with you, or what's going on at all, actually. Hell, I can't remember a time where I wasn't trapped in a dream. I don't know what sort of world is out there, but if it has more assholes like your Hunter, then we need to stick together."

I had been running through tall trees and an all encompassing fog. The Hunter had found me, was disappointed in me, and wanted to kill me. Someone stopped that from happening. Some thing. Some great beast covered in black fur.

"Right. I can't face what's out there by myself," I said, standing up while keeping my eyes locked with the wolf's. "There are more witches like the Hunter. Some even stronger than him, I'd guess, but I have to try and stop them."

I turned away, for a moment, and walked slowly towards the Hunter's fallen form. "I have friends—other familiar's, like me. We all serve witches and they are making us fight each other."

There wasn't much to rifle through in the Hunter's coat and pockets. The simple, iron key was tucked in between a blurred photograph of some family and several crumpled strips of paper with numbers and old men's faces on them. I held up the key so that the wolf could see it. "Honestly, I don't even know if they are still my friends—if they even want my help. I've messed up and hurt them so many times they probably wouldn't need a witch's order to..."

I clenched the key as my eyes found the unattended wood floor of the Hunter's cabin.

I wasn't going to choke up. Not there. Not in front of a creature that did not even understand.

"You still gotta try, right?"

His eyes had not moved from me. Eyes so unlike anything animal or human. "Until you're dead in the ground, you fight. I don't get much, but I get that. I've lived that. You need to take on more things like that dead witch there? I'm with you, all the way."

The wolf then sat down and straightened his back. Waiting for me to make the next move.

I moved away from the dead witch and back towards the cage that held the creature that killed him. There was a rapid pounding in my chest and a fresh dampness on my palms, but I managed to fit the key into the lock and turn it on the second or third try.

The creature in the cage did not move until I swung the door open and stepped back. Even then, he took cautious steps out, his head low, and stopped just outside it. He was as big in the real world as he had been in the dream, surprisingly. Almost eye level to me. The only difference was the elongated right arm that did not end in a dog's paw. Rather, it was more like a hand. It did not fit with the rest of the great wolf, and made him hobble as he had moved out of the cage.

            "Was that there before?" I asked, eager to break the heavy silence that had fallen between us.

            "Ah, no," the wolf said as it glanced down at said appendage. "It sort of...turned that way? It saved our lives though, so I'm not going to complain."

            A familiar that could morph it's body? That was definitely new. But if Hornroot and Shepherd could do stuff like control animals, there was bound to be other things they were capable of.

            Before I could think of something else to say, the wolf suddenly tensed. His head shot up and in the direction of the front door.

            "Someone's out there," he said. "They're waiting for us to come out."

            It was more than just someone that waited for us outside the Hunter's cabin. There were three.

  One had a shiny black body and a giant horn for a head. There were no eyes that I could see, just the glossy armor-like material that covered it from head to toe. 

The other had eyes that almost took up its entire head. Big yellow orbs with tiny pupils that honed in on the wolf and I as we stepped outside. It was much taller and leaner than its counter-part, with a pure white body and scythe-like hands that were half the size of it's thin arms.

            Monsters. Both the sizes of cars that the know-nothing's used. They were unlike anything I had seen before and my natural instinct was to run. Run and never look back. Run and forget everything I had just taken in.

But then the strangest thing of it all happened.

            A young girl with wild, blonde hair leaned over the side of the monster with the scythe hands. Like she had been riding the damn thing.

            "Oh, no, was I too late?" she asked, touching her hands to her cheeks. "Did the feral familiar's kill the Hunter before I could arrive? Such a shame."

            She smiled. I think she meant it to be pleasant, but it was altogether unsettling.

            "Guess it's up to me."

...

*Author's Note*

Seems that Foxy and the wolf's trials are far from over. Is this mysterious girl and her monsters anything like the Hunter, or are they something far worse?

Speaking of the Hunter. For those of you who may be a bit curious about his background, I point you to another story of mine entitled "Ducks are the Devil". Within it you will find a boy many years before he was to become the killer of familiars. You can read his tale here: https://www.wattpad.com/148864988-fifth-earth-ducks-are-the-devil