It made her back up slowly, never taking her eyes off the wolf, until she felt the bookcase behind her.
There's something you need to get, a voice in her mind was whispering to her. It wasn't like the voice of another person, but it wasn't exactly like her own mental voice, either. It was a voice like a dark cool wind: competent and rather bleak. Something you saw on a shelf earlier, it said.
In an impossibly graceful motion, from eight feet away, the wolf leaped.
There was no time to be scared. Hannah saw a bushy, flowing black arc coming at her and then she was slammed into the bookcase. For a while after that, everything was simply chaos. Books and knick-knacks were falling around her. She was trying to get her balance, trying to push the heaviness of a furry body away from her. The wolf was falling back, then jumping again as she twisted sideways to get away.
And the strangest thing was that she actually was getting away. Or at least evading the worst of the wolf's lunges, which seemed to be aimed at knocking her to the floor. Her body was moving as if this were, somehow instinctive to her, as if she knew how to do this.
But I don't know this. I never fight . . . and I've certainly never played dodge ball with a wolf before. . . .
As she thought it, her movements slowed. She didn't feel sure and instinctive any longer. She felt confused.
And the wolf seemed to know it. Its eyes glowed eerily yellow in the light of a lamp that was lying on its side. They were such strange eyes, more intense and more savage than any animal's she'd ever seen. She saw it draw its legs beneath it.
Move-now, the mysterious new part of her mind snapped.
Hannah moved. The wolf hit the bookcase with incredible force, and then the bookcase itself was falling. Hannah flung herself sideways in time to avoid being crushed-but the case fell with an unholy noise directly in front of the door.
Trapped, the dark cool voice in Hannah's mind noted analytically. No exit anymore, except the window.
"Hannah? Hannah?" It was Paul's voice just outside the room. The door flew open-all of four inches. It jammed against the fallen bookcase. "God-what's going on in there? Hannah? Hannah!" He sounded panicked now, banging the door uselessly against the blockage.
Don't think about him, the new part of Hannah's
mind said sharply, but Hannah couldn't help it. He sounded so desperate. She opened her mouth to shout back to him, her concentration broken.
And the wolf lunged.