a quick, jerky motion designed to fool the eye. Charles occasionally sparred with Asil using Chinese qiang, and they used the same sort of movements, twirling the spears and making the ends bob around.
Maybe if she'd been human, it would have worked.
Instead Anna dodged, then grabbed the end just behind the hypodermic when the stick pushed past her. She twisted her head while she clamped her teeth on it.
If it had been a human holding the spear, she'd have pulled it from Benedict's hands. If she had been a real wolf, she couldn't have damaged it. But, though she was small for a werewolf, she was huge for a wolf and stronger than a wolf her size would have been. The end snapped and the hypodermic fell at her feet.
She had a weapon - just let them try to get it out of the cage while she was in her wolf skin. And when she was human, she could use it. She smiled at the old man, letting her tongue loll out at him. Take that.
I am not anyone's victim, not anymore.
Benedict dropped the stick and jumped back - and she smelled fear. She showed her teeth to him and growled, just a little. A taunt.
Uncle Travis took four big strides to reach Benedict and slapped him hard in the face with the flat of his hand. "Stop that. Stop that. She is an abomination, but we have killed abominations before. She's a prisoner and weak - you are a Heuter. We don't cower before disease-ridden monsters."
Benedict started to say something, then stiffened and raised his head. "He's coming."
"Who's coming?" asked Travis.
Benedict changed without answering. Between one breath and the next he became something...fantastical.
Anna expected him to be ugly in his fae form, for the outside to represent the inside, but she should have known better. She'd seen the white stag.
A wide rack of antlers, snow-white and silver tipped, rose like a crown from his head - which was not quite human. The eyes were right and the mouth, but the rest of the face was sharper, elongated in an oddly graceful manner.
There was such beauty in the odd symmetry of his features, a beauty not hurt at all by his silver skin. No. Not his skin, though that was pale as well. His whole upper body, face included, was covered with a short, silvery white fur that caught the light and sparkled. His hair was three or four shades of gray and it cascaded through and over the base of his antlers and lay over his hugely muscled shoulders in locks, like drips of melted wax.
He was huge. He wouldn't have been able to stand in a normal house. If Uncle Travis was six feet tall, and she thought he was near that, then Benedict was twice that, not including his horns.
His clothes had melted away - and it occurred to Anna that he probably hadn't changed at all, just lost his hold on the glamour that all fae could use to look human. But his shoulders, chest, and belly were covered with silvery armor that reminded her of an armadillo's covering. It wasn't clothing, but part of his skin.
From the chest downward the pelt of silver hair grew longer, thicker, and curled like the pelt of a buffalo. It covered his hips and left his genitalia peeking through here and there. His legs were built like the back legs of a buffalo or deer - though the size looked more like the giraffe she'd seen at the Brookfield Zoo when she was a kid.
At his...hocks or knees, the fur darkened to steel gray and grew longer, like the hair - feathers, her horse-crazy friend from third grade had insisted they call it - on the bottom of a Clydesdale's legs.
He stood on a pair of two-toed hooves, like a moose. He bent his head back, his nose rising toward the ceiling and his antlers exaggerating the movement, and raised one foot up nervously, before setting it down and lowering his head again. He rocked from one hoof to the other, making hollow noises on the wooden floor and leaving marks on the polished surface.
"He's just scared," said Heuter, in the lazy Texas drawl he seemed to drop and pick up again without notice. "There's no one out there. They are clueless."
Anna hadn't heard a car drive up and couldn't smell anything different, though the door was closed and she couldn't get a good scent-fix on anything outside of