My Master let out a broken scream caught somewhere between surprise and pain as the dog pushed her to the ground, its teeth firmly locked in her forearm. Her screams gained focus on the pain as the dog shook its shaggy head from side to side in an attempt to dislodge her arm from her body.

She was going to be fine, so why was I making a beeline straight for her?

She could handle herself, so why was I leaping onto the back of a dog that was nearly three times my size now?

I said I wouldn't risk my life, so why was I screwing up and sinking my teeth into its shoulder, instead of its neck?

Because it was bigger than me, faster than me, and stronger than me. And, even while its mouth was bathed in the blood of my Master and its bulging eyes seemingly remained locked on her frightened face, it still saw me coming. It tried to shake me off as soon as I had jumped on, and in desperation I clamped down on its shoulder with my mouth.

There was nothing else to do. If it shook me off, I would be at its mercy. And this creature had no mercy.

The dog wasn't able to hold on to both my Master and attempt to shake me off at the same time anymore. With a twist of its head, it flung my Master from the porch of the shed where she fell into a crumpled heap in the grass.

Curses of every sort bounced around in my head as I scrambled to dig my claws into the dog's body. The thick tangles of its hair made it impossible to reach the skin with my tiny paws, it was a miracle I had managed to find flesh with my teeth. Within moments, however, that miracle was torn away when I was slammed up against a picket fence with enough force to bring the whole arrangement crashing down, sending me down with it.

As I struggled to regain my clarity through the debris, I was faintly aware of a massive jaw lined with razor-sharp teeth begin its grip on my neck when a gun shot rang out through the once silent morning.

A scream erupted inside my head when the teeth pierced skin. A second blast from the gun loosened the grip on my body and I tumbled out of the dog's mouth just as its corpse collapsed into the ground—the dog now back to its normal, smaller size.

Lady Louise dropped her shotgun and ran to her daughter as I scrambled away from the dead dog. Little sprouts of searing pain had erupted from the spots where the dog's teeth had broke skin, but otherwise I was fine.

The same could not be said for my Master.

Lady Louise was screaming things I could not understand as she fell into a kneeling position beside her daughter. My Master's skin was chalk-white as her mother scooped her up. Whiter than I had ever seen anyone's skin. It looked like make-up. It didn't look real.

            The ravaged remains of her forearm looked much more real. All red and flesh and even a bit of bone. I had seen similar sights from the remains of the little creatures I hunted. It brought me back all the way to the time I had first eaten raw meat. When I had torn open a duck and ate its insides.

            This wasn't anything new. Though, Lady Louise was looking down at the wound like it was her own insides that were spilling out. Her face was almost as chalk-white as her daughter's. Almost. 

She turned to me, her almost-chalk-white face awash with sweat, and started screaming things at me. I made the effort to walk closer to the two of them, but even if I could understand her, what could I do?

            Lady Louise seemed to realize this as she soon went back to her daughter and continued to cradle her in her arms. She spoke softer things as she risked gently shaking my Master in an attempt to wake her up.

            But my Master was not asleep. Her eyes were half-open. Un-blinking. Not seeing anything.

            It was a look I had seen before. A look I could not stop seeing whenever I thought back to that cabin.

            She had to be—

            "Change."

            I nearly fell face-first into the grass as my world suddenly became smaller. I had to brace my hands on the ground to keep from—My hands!

            I really did fall on my stomach then when I brought my hands to my face. They were hands. Human hands with fingers and everything. I grabbed one hand with the other and then the other with the one. I flexed the fingers. I thought I was about to cry.

            "Flametail."

            Lady Louise seemed to be crying in my stead. The tears intermingled with her sweat as she struggled to hold the body of her daughter out to me. "Take her. Take my daughter."

            Take her wh—

            No, Alex, don't think it. You can use your words now.

            "Take her where?" I asked. My voice was surprisingly clear, despite the long break. I didn't miss the agitation laced behind my words and neither did Lady Louise by the way her dark brows furrowed.

            "To a hospital."

            "But she's—"

            "You will take me to a hospital," an incredibly agitated voice said. I wasn't foolish enough to think I wasn't the only one who had heard it. Every word spoken that way had an echo to it. As if my head was a hollow pumpkin. "You will drop me off at its front doors, bang on those doors, and then you will turn back into a fox."

            I gritted my teeth as I stared down at the corpse of the girl as her mother continued to hold her out to me. "The hell—"

            "Pick me up."

            "The hell if I'm going to let you turn me back into that thing," I continued, though I fell silent when I bent down, picked up my Master from Lady Louise's arms, and cradled her against me, all without wanting to do so. Like a puppet being pulled along by strings.

            "You don't have a choice," my Master said, her words echoing the growing dread seeping into my every nerve. "Now, take me to the hospital."

            "What about the Lady?" I said, trying fruitlessly to stop my legs from moving as they made their way over the ruined remains of the fence.

            Lady Louise remained knelt on the ground, still pale and covered in sweat. The dead dog lay not far, blood beginning to pool around its mangled corpse.

            "Leave her where she is," came my Master's response. "In her state, you'll do more harm than good if you try to move her. If you run, it should not take long for you to make it to the hospital and back."

            I tried, and failed, to hold back my next words. "Is that a suggestion?"

            "No, it's not. Run."

            And then I was running, holding the dead girl close to my chest, and cursing her name over and over again under my breath all the way.

...

"Wanna tell me why you aren't bleeding?"

"What?"

"Your arm. There's a big hole in it, but no blood."

It was still early in the morning when I made it back to the city. Son's city. My Master may have forced me to go to a hospital, but she hadn't been specific on which. And, if I was going to be forced to do something beyond my control, I might as well try and get something out of it.

Though there weren't many people out in the streets yet, I found myself trying to keep my eyes looking every direction at once as I traveled through back alleys and abandoned buildings. From my very short time in Son's presence, I knew she wasn't a witch to take lightly.

"Did I command you to run or to ask stupid questions?"

I was momentarily distracted from my constant vigilance by the bubbling liquid in my stomach threatening to boil over. "You know—"

I bit my tongue. No, Alex, don't get feisty. Not with her. Anyone but her.

"No, I don't know," my Master hissed in my head, her every word a dare for me to speak again. "Why don't you tell me?"

I reached the end of an alleyway when I regained control of my body. Up ahead, across the near deserted street, lay a towering building at least ten stories high and nearly just as wide. The name of the building was spelt out on great big, red letters above its many automatic sliding doors. Since I couldn't read it, I had to assume it was the hospital Stallion had told me about.

Ash's hospital. Kat's hospital. Maple's hospital.

I looked back down at the unmoving girl in my arms.

And, soon to be, my Master's hospital, too.

The threat behind her words continued to lay within my mind. With a deep intake of breath, I set my Master's body on the filthy, concrete floor.

"What the hell are you—"

Her words went silent when I fell upon her and latched my teeth on the pale flesh of her neck. I didn't waste anytime to bite down hard enough to break the skin. Of course, I tasted no blood.

"You try to change me again, or try to order me to stop—if I even feel like I'm starting to loose control of my body—I will rip out your throat. I don't know what, exactly, you are, but I doubt even you can just walk away from that."

My Master said nothing in response. I could read nothing from her closed eyes and unmoving face. The flesh in my mouth was cold. Ice cold. Her whole body was cold.

She was dead. My Master had been dead since the moment that dog flung her into the grass.

"What the hell is going on here?" I demanded inside her head, clenching my jaw and threatening to bite down even harder. "You're dead. How are you talking to me? Are you...Are you even talking to me? Am I going crazy?"

"Is that implying you weren't already out of your mind?"

My instinct was to throw an insult right back at her, or just rip out her throat and be done with it. But something stopped me from doing either. Something in her voice. Not irritation or frigid ice or seething anger. It was something I had never heard in my Master's voice before. Humor.

"It isn't that complicated," my Master went on. "I am dead. I've been dead for awhile now."

Unconsciously, my teeth relaxed a little from her neck. I knew it. I knew it since I first saw her mangled body. But hearing it from the words of the dead girl herself put a certain unrest on the whole thing. "Is that your Knowledge then? To make yourself...not die?"

"No. It's my mom's—well, it's an extreme version of what she can do."

My Master was being evasive. I could hear it in the subdued way she was now speaking inside my head—something else that was different from the norm.

I reapplied the tight bite on her neck. "Elaborate."

A deep sigh answered my demand. It almost made me pause again. Did things like that really translate this way too?

"Only if the person really wants you to know that they are sighing," my Master said, answering the question I hadn't realized I had asked 'out-loud'. "Are we really doing this now, in a dirty alleyway? Why don't you—"

"No, shut-up! I said no more orders, didn't I?"

My Master remained silent until she deemed that my own silence was permission to try again. "I'm not trying to order you, you stupid fox. It was just a suggestion. If someone sees us, you're going to be the one in trouble."

            "I don't think you really get what's going on here." I gripped her shoulder with my clawed hand, threatening to break the skin with my nails. "You are going to explain everything, or you aren't making it to that hospital."

            Of course there was no reaction on her cold face. Of course she felt nothing at all.

My teeth trembled and I had to physically fight the urge to sink them in deeper. This wasn't good. The more she played stubborn, the harder it was getting to restrain myself. Like these past months of waiting patiently for her to warm up to me didn't matter.

It didn't matter. I was sick of waiting. Sick of not knowing what was going on. If she didn't answer me, right here and now, I wasn't entirely sure I could stop what would happen next. It would be inevitable.

"I hate you."

I didn't move my teeth, didn't remove my hand, but not because I wasn't taken off-guard by those three words. My body became stiff and cold, like I had fallen through a frozen lake. She sounded so much like her. When she cried, when she yelled. They were almost the same person.

"You're a monster. An animal. Mom—Mother lied to me. Hornroot lied. Everyone lied to me."

Why did the words that echoed in my head have to ring so broken? Why did this way of talking have to allow me to hear how hollow— how empty her words were?

But why, most of all, could I not decide how I felt about my Master?

"Rosetta—"

"Shut-up."

I could feel it like a switch being pulled. The words in my head would no longer reach her. The desire to reach her was still there, but a physical force was keeping me from thinking clear enough. The ice water had reached my brain.

"Release me."

My teeth left her throat and my hand jolted away from her. A stabbing pain inside my head answered my brief wish to resist, and I nearly cried out at how it seemed to twist my brain like a sponge.

"Guess you won't be getting those answers you wanted so badly," my Master said. There was no triumph in her comment, no smugness. Her voice remained as cold and empty as the body it inhabited. "Change."

I lost my footing and fell face first into the sticky concrete. When I tried to get back on my feet, I discovered that they were once again tiny black paws. I was once again nothing more than a fox.

I wanted to be angry. I wanted to shout, to bite, to scratch, to end the life of the pathetic little girl who had ruined what was left of my life. But the anger was weak, a whimper. It meant nothing when faced with a person who did not fear death. Who felt nothing.

"Go back."

My body moved on its own, back the way it came. It did not need to know where, exactly, my Master wanted me to go. Our link filled in the blanks. Away from here. Back to my mother. Leave your Master alone in the alleyway. Don't look back. Don't help. Just go away.

Just go away and never...

Never...

Silence. The vast cave inside my hollow pumpkin head did not make a sound. Our link was broken, but not because I had moved that far away. I was still in the alleyway. I had almost reached the end of it when a figure had stepped out and blocked the way.

She had the rising sun to her back, hiding in the shadows of the tall buildings, so I could not see her face. But she was tall, very slim, and had the most striking green eyes. Eyes I hadn't seen since—

"Foxy."

...

Gasp, another cliff-hanger? Am I testing the patience of my wonderful and devoting readers? Maybe, but, hey, at least this one not as...life threatening. Maybe.

Either way, Foxy's risk has paid off. He's about to meet another old friend. But how will they react to seeing him after these past few months? How has their time with their Master changed them? Are they at peace, like Stallion? Or fighting tooth and nail, like Foxy?

Whatever your thoughts, be they insightful observations or name calling at my expense, I would love to hear 'em!