Darkwell - Douglas Niles [36]
Her heartbeat slowed as that muscle grew to accommodate the larger body, and her black eyes took on a reddish cast. The growl that rumbled unconsciously from her chest could never have been uttered by a marmot.
But the marmot had become a wolverine. Robyn flexed her powerful rear legs and slipped through the cave entrance with a single fluid motion. The monster leaped backward, flapping its great wings in surprise. Its ghastly mouth gaped in rage, and it hissed a challenge.
The wolverine's forepaws reached out and clutched the thing's body in a steely embrace. Robyn's teeth sought its throat, and only the monster's desperate twisting prevented her from administering a fatal bite. The creature tumbled backward as the wolverine clung tightly to its breast. Her rear legs flexed and kicked as Robyn used those sharp claws in an effort to disembowel her opponent, all the while ignoring the pounding of its wings against her head.
All of a sudden, the creature's twisting evasion took them over the ledge. Robyn felt them both falling, bouncing against the rocky cliff. But now her animal instincts – instincts among the most savage in the natural world – compelled her to cling to her victim tenaciously. This tenacity saved her life as they suddenly crashed into the ground, and she felt the creature's body break beneath her.
The frenzy of the wolverine's attack did not abate, however. Robyn slashed and bit and growled until the remains of the unnatural monster had been torn into shreds. Feathers covered a circle ten feet wide, and bits of cracked bone lay scattered over a similar distance. In the center of the circle, only the staglike head, lying flat on the ground with its antlers spreading treelike above, remained as mute evidence of the beast's nature.
Finally her rage faded, though Robyn, still cloaked in the body of the wolverine, paced restlessly around the remains of her foe for some time. Every so often, she paused and glared at the sky, as if challenging another of the creatures to attack.
Eventually she sat up on her haunches and tried to concentrate, to call up an image of her own human body. For several minutes, her mind whirled with a confused blur of pictures, none of them familiar. She found her attention wandering to thoughts of food.
Instinctively she growled, and the sound shocked her back to awareness. I must think! I must shift… now! A deep fear began to grow within her. Perhaps she had waited too long… perhaps her powers had waned too much for her to change back!
With a desperate strain, she pictured herself, and called upon all the spiritual power gathered in her tiny, muscular form. The world spun around her, and she gasped for air, feeling her windpipe contract. A sickening sense of nausea rose in her stomach, and then she lost consciousness.
Robyn awakened some time later. Dehydration swelled her tongue, and her lips cracked painfully as she struggled to open her mouth. But it was a human mouth, and a human tongue! Still, a great sense of lethargy lay upon her, as if the effort of the shape-changing had drained more of her strength than she had to give.
She sat weakly on the rocky ground as her world spun madly. "Mother, what is happening to me? Where are you?" But as before, when she had tried to pray, there was no answer to her question. It took her several minutes to regain her strength.
She noticed a gnawing ache in her stomach and realized with chagrin that she had neglected to bring any food with her. Nor had she brought a bedroll, or a waterskin, or any of the other equipment that was necessary to this mission in her human body. Somehow she had felt that she could reach the well and work her magic in the form of the wind, with