else already there.
"Please, Dontaine. Call my beast." I said it so calmly when I wanted to scream it, especially when his heart started pounding in fright, in terrifying realization that something worse, much worse, was going on.
"Blessed Night," he whispered. Then he gave me what I asked for. The energy in his arms, only his arms, changed, like a distinct line drawn up to his elbows and stopping there. A hot wash of energy poured out from him, powerful waves coming out as if pushed by a tide from the arms that I held. Beneath my touch I felt his skin shimmer and change under the cloth covering it. Felt his bones shift, elongate, tendons and muscles popping into new positions. His hands, the only things visible, stretched, became wider, the fingers rougher, coarser, the skin thicker, less human and more Other. A sheen of fur flowed over the skin as power spilled down his hands. They spasmed once, then huge hooking claws popped from his fingertips like energy let loose to take form and substance and shape. That hot wash of energy flowed up my hands where I touched him, and into me, tingling and heating my palms, then spilling it up through the rest of my body until I was pulsing, vibrating from head to toe.
That Other in me could not stand beneath that warm flooding power. It was pushed aside, and my animal self rose. My tiger stretched and roared, then snarled, caught, unable to come out, unable to fully rise to the surface. That small lingering presence of that demon-tinged Other interfered with it, so that while my beast presence dominated, it could not totally push out the other entity. Both were caught in incompleteness, one coming, the other going, neither able to reach their destination.
His hands - his claws - pulled from me and I let them go, and turned to look up at Dontaine. He was still in human form, his face still etched with that strong masculine beauty. Only his forearms, his hands, had changed, looking unreal against the normal rest of him. "You didn't change completely."
"Neither did you. Your eyes, though, they are that of your beast's... and not of her. Are you better?"
Better? I laughed, and it was a harsh, crying sound. A sound that made Dontaine flinch. "Yes, I'm better. Anything was better than that... but I can't completely change. She won't let my beast come completely out, Dontaine." The urges and needs of my beast, however, were there, though the form was not. The animal hunger, the need to hunt, to bring down prey, to feel the hot spill of blood and quivering meat sliding down my throat... it beat within me. Only I was still in human form, like Dontaine, but not because I willed it. Oh, no. My will was being roadblocked by that she-bitch I had sucked into me.
I was caught in a limbo of in between, feeling the needs of my animal self, unable to fulfill it in my human form. And before me stood something that could sate my hunger, something that still looked like prey. I pushed away from him, gasping, falling onto my back, crawling away from him, hysterical giggles choking my throat. I didn't want to drink him anymore. Now I wanted to eat him.
"Don't... don't..." he warned, and as I watched, his eyes turned from emerald green to autumn-leaf brown. The eyes of his beast, his wolf.
"I'm sorry," I said, knowing I was triggering his own hunting instincts, "but I... I can't stay here." I turned, scrambled to my feet, and ran. Fleeing from my fear, my hunger. But, unfortunately, I couldn't flee from myself.
I ran blindly, desperately. Without that natural liquid grace that had always been a part of me, that came from my Monere blood. Now, for the first time in my life, I stumbled, tripped, almost fell. I ran with human clumsiness, as if that limbo I was caught in shut down other parts of myself, my gifts of strength and grace that I had taken for granted, always there like the air I breathed. Only it wasn't there now. I ran and knew even in my panicked confusion that I could not hunt like this. I could not capture, much less bring down even a rabbit in this condition, and without sating that bloodlust, I could not free myself of this state. I lurched up against a tree, felt the hard uneven