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The Beginning

A man, scruffy and harmless and vaguely dorky. He is walking through a crowded place (a mall? a street? a workplace?) talking to a friend as they take on some everyday reason for walking (going to lunch? shopping? going to coffee?). Their discussion is as harmless as he appears, but he stops in mid-sentence, just for a heartbeat, as he passes another man in the crowd. The other man meets his gaze head on, cold and unsmiling. His eyes slim, nostrils flare, and for a moment he looks a little more threatening than he first gave the impression of being; although that's not much, like a big floppy dog trying to be threatening while his tail wags furiously behind him. Still, it's enough for his friend to notice.

"Do you know him?" his friend says, but the man just shrugs and shakes his head, because he doesn't, really.

"Must be the new guy," he says vaguely, and if his friend wonders how he knows that, he doesn't say anything.

*

The moon is full in the sky, but mostly hidden by the clouds; the night feels blacker than ink. A wolf is running, breath steaming from its jaws, trotting to the not-so-distant safety of a forest. It pauses to scent something at the edge of the wood, and then looks up, and growls.

Yellow eyes glare out of the darkness between the trees, white teeth are bared. The wolf does not back off, but growls and snaps in return.

Then they are a blur of motion, two dark beasts entangled, lunging for throats, sides, anything they can sink their teeth into. For a moment the newcomer retreats, leading a bit of a chase, but at the edge of the territory he spins, refusing to leave, and lunges again, catching the wood-wolf in the flank. They roll, tumbling down a short slope, shapes blurring as they refuse to let go. But as they hit the bottom of the slope they are not grappling as wolves grapple, and truly, their bodies are not quite the bodies of wolves any more; but their jaws are, teeth buried in each others' bodies, hands with fingers and claws gouging deep gashes as they cling and struggle to pin the other down.

One eventually ends up on top; it is the woods-wolf, the shaggy fellow who had looked so harmless, who still looks like your slightly absent-minded neighbor even with blood on his mouth. He has the other pinned with a hand over his throat, his fingers curved threateningly, claws still sharp.

"Yield," he says, but the cold grey eyes of the other do not seem willing or able to.