The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 2 - An Honest Mistake

Hi everyone! Come on. Huddle up. Get comfy. I've got some more story to tell you. This book should be sticking at weekly updates, now that I'm a little bit less ill :) And we'll try and keep it on Saturdays. Cool? Also, we've already got readers from six of the seven continents, which is pretty awesome, if you ask me. If anyone has a friend in Antartica, you'd best send them this book so we can make it seven out of seven.

I did try to find the easy paths for Kara. The ones that were well-travelled, beaten down, and minimally covered in tree roots. Otherwise, she would go tumbling to the ground every half-hour or so. We'd had a neurology unit in A-Level biology, so I knew why she kept falling. There was a part of our brain, right at the base of the skull, called the cerebellum. It dealt with fine-motor control, and it was very good at learning how much force you needed to apply to your muscles for every activity. Kara's cerebellum had only ever learnt about flat ground. So now she was having to catch up on all the tripping over that I'd probably done when I was a toddler.

But the trouble with the well-travelled paths, as I saw it, was that we risked meeting people. I wasn't keen to meet a rogue, after the incident with the fish. I also wasn't keen to meet any human beings. So we tried to be careful. We would walk in silence, and we would duck into the undergrowth at the slightest sound of crunching leaves. Nine times out of ten, it was just a bird. But I hadn't lived this long by fumbling along and hoping for the best.

"We must be nearly there," Kara muttered.

Some of us were better at walking in silence than others. Caution didn't come naturally to her, I didn't think. She would make a face every time I dragged her off the path, and that face didn't change until we were walking again. But she hadn't complained. She wouldn't.

"I don't know, okay?" I sighed. "The map is not exactly to scale."

"It's just ... it's getting dark."

I glanced at her wearily. I'd been hoping we could sleep in a proper bed tonight, but it would be cruel to push her. "Is it? I think we've got an hour or two yet. We're nearly at the top of this hill. Let's have a proper look around, and then we'll figure out if it's worth stopping."

We'd found a compromise. Kara followed me quietly all the way to the crest of the hill, and then she spun in a slow circle while I was still catching my breath. She almost made three-hundred-and-sixty degrees before she stopped dead and squinted.

"There. What's that? A car?"

I followed the angle of her gaze, and I saw it too. There was a glimmer of red through the trees, and beside it was a patch of light that looked like it had been reflected off something

I looked down at our miserable scrap of paper and then back at the car, and I felt excitement rising in my chest. "That's got to be the pack. I can see the river and everything."

Kara kicked at the dirt. "That looks far, Emma."

"Yes, it is. I don't think we'll make it there tonight. Not unless we shift," I said. It began as proper words, and it ended as mumbling, because there was a reason we walked everywhere, and that reason was Kara.

Sure enough, she was very quick to fold her arms and shake her head now. "Nope. Not doing that. Ever. I told you."

I'd tried not to push her in the past. And I didn't want to push her now. But the thought of spending another night with my stomach empty, while there was hot food just a mile or two away ... it was almost enough to break me. "Why, Kara? You don't have to tell me. But I'm just ... I can't help wondering."

She scowled at me. "I like my wolf form ... but the idea of getting stuck in that body forever ... I'm just not keen on it, okay? I don't want to risk it. It'll take a long time to run that far, and-"