Shadow Alpha

Chapter 11 🌙

I know I don't have much time to sort out my survival strategy now that I'm on my own in the ancient past. So I find a vantage point up above a cliff face to survey the landscape, to get an idea of where everything is.

I find more than I thought I would.

I've found a Net Lupine Territory.

It's not a pack, it's a loose group of Lupines living together sparsely in the same territory. An alliance.

It looks exactly like what it's called, a net.

Above the forest on my cliff edge, I see where wild camps are set all around, with some distance between them. Small marked tracks act as roads between them, and it is a Lupine system that covers a whole territory.

Great, at least I have somewhere to explore; albeit carefully.

I decide to head straight down to this Lupine territory, hoping to find some help.

If I had anyone else on my side, anyone at all, I might just stand a chance of survival until the next Full Moon.

****

A few hours later

I've taken off all my clothes, I hide them in a recognisable tree hollow with a swirling shape next to some broken branches. I shift into my wolf, and I run through the quiet forest. I had finally found some living Lupines of the time.

I was attracted to the typical wolf-laughing echoing out from where the creek had widened to large river rapids.

I spy on them.

A large wolf pack stand on all the exposed boulders, catching fish with their teeth. They're chuckling and growling, playing 'who can catch the biggest salmon'.

These Lupines do not have large coats of shiny, silk thick fur. They are battle scarred, with red wounds, odd marks, some with scarred jaws or missing eyes – some have cut tails or bitten ears.

Even with so many healed injuries, they are also the largest Lupine shifters I've ever seen.

I stand at the edge of the forest, staring at them behind a few thick bushes. The wind was volatile today, but so far, my scent was not filtering toward their nose. I was downwind.

There are only twelve wolves here, so I know Jeremy's pack will outnumber them... but even three of these giants could take out all of the college Lupines.

How could I tell?

I felt like I was watching furry dinosaurs with the most wickedly fast reflexes, a whole life spent majority in shifted form.

In the modern world, Lupines were human 95% of the time.

This time? They were wolf 95% of the time.

That would explain all the empty huts I had found earlier, looking like low lying dens – rather than homes for humans to rest and grow families within.

My guess was they changed into humans to make fire.

But interacting with family, with friends? It was in the fur.

Hunting? It was in the fur.

Killing?

Mating?

Living...

...dying... it was all spent in their fur.

Lupines were truly Lupine.

Humans were a different species altogether – obvious, yes, but... I had wondered why I saw one particular sleeping female chained by the ankle in one of the camps, I had thought it was a prisoner.