As Sharp As Fangs Or Knives

TITLE: As Sharp As Fangs Or Knives
RATING: Eventually quite NC-17
SUMMARY: Dusa Jones is one deer shifter who defies expectations - even if she's rather horrified by it all. Raised by her father to be skilled with a blade and become the hunter, rather than the hunted, she's never needed to utilize her training in real life. Until the day that a pack of wolves move into the brownstone on top of the basement floor she's renting. Now she needs all her bravery not to give in and run away - and to keep her sanity, because a certain, very odd wolf shifter named Melantha Lills is out to get her heart, in the most romantic sense possible.




Don’t change.

It was the only thing she could remember. She could barely think it. Words rising in her head in screeching sounds that failed, still, to block out the whisper-crack of leaves and stems broken in the hunt all around her. Too quiet to be so frightening, but it set her heart racing, her senses reeling. She didn’t remember if she drew air into her lungs but she knew her throat ached. Her limbs would have felt strong except that they were tight with nerves and coiled without the ability to spring, and-

Don’t change.

The words were beginning to lose meaning. They broadened, lengthened, grew transparent in her mind, an endless litany that lost itself in repetition. The world was sharp shadows and moonlight and silence around her. Everything else had fled, safely. That was because they weren’t the prey. She was the prey.

She was.

Oh, god.

Don’t change!

She didn’t remember how long she’d been running. She didn’t remember where she had started running from, or where she was running to, except that it was where she needed to be headed, away away away from the hounds at her feet, shadowing her, mocking her. She could hear their silent dog laughs, huffs of breath and a spring of step and menace in the air that choked her, that made her feel like she had canine teeth in her belly already, warm blood flowing, flowing and oh god, she was-

Sharpsweetpainirresistablereliefacrydeadonherlipsasshechanged.

The hunting dogs let out a chorus of victorious howls. She ran on four slender feet and was fast, faster than when she’d been a girl, her muscles still shivering with the aftereffect of reinvention. Her heart was beating so fast, faster than human fear could dictate, her heart was going to burst soon, she ran, she-

She stumbled, fell, blinded in pain, a hunting dog on her left flank, tearing long red stripes through her soft fawn hide. Her delicate legs splayed, twisted, a sharp starburst of pain in one and it was broken, and she screamed beneath the weight of another hound barreling into her, saving her from the voracious snarls of the first. The earth was cool and her wound stung and she hurt she hurt she hurt her leg was broken she couldn’t run her heart beat so fast to make up for that speed she couldn’t find and

she

screamed.

The nightmare ended on a gunshot.

And again, a gunshot like the world falling in on itself and being recreated in echoing reverberations around her. The dog was gone, she heard them whimpering, she heard heavy human feet in the brush, and she was scared. For a moment she struggled to move. Whimpered. Her heart pounded, pounded, pounded. And she heard a voice say, distant, dislocated, but somehow clear:

“Dusa! Dusa, Dusa, baby. Baby, I’ve got you!”

And it was: a shuddering relief to unwind her bones and fold them back together in her skin, her skin to twist and stretch and change, and her shape was new again. “Daddy,” she heard someone say brokenly, and the raw pain of her throat was red in the back of her eyes so she knew it was her. So she said again, “Daddy, daddy,” and was sobbing it in moments.

He knelt beside her, placed his shotgun on the wet leaves and dark earth of the forest behind their- it was their house. She’d been running to their house. Of course she had. “Daddy,” Dusa whispered, crying, she couldn’t feel anything but pinpoints of fire eating into her. Her daddy curled slowly and gingerly around her, and Dusa shuddered and relaxed, heard him say something in a voice gone pale with residual fear and anger but couldn’t catch the words.

The breeze blew in the leaves of the oaks high overhead and the earth was rich and soft and cool on her fevered flesh, and she heard a bird sing out tentatively somewhere, and her daddy had his arms around her and he’d scared the dogs away. “Sorry,” Dusa murmured, and faded out of consciousness to the feeling of her father’s hands stroking dirt from her brow and his voice rough and aching, murmuring nonsense low to her. She just…drifted away. Safely, for a time.

What she did not hear, but would come to understand: her father’s words, the hard glint of steel in his eyes and settled heavy on his mouth, dragging it in tight and low. He said, “You will learn to fight back. I will teach you, and someday you will be able to even walk side by side with wolves and have no fear.”

CHAPTER ONE
Neighbors


The sky was gray and heavy, clouds like pale steel shining in the white sun of winter, and Dusa huddled in her heavy coat and jacket, wished she’d put on two more pairs of leggings that morning, and smoked quite viciously on her halfway done cigarette.

“I see you’re still courting death.”

Dusa shifted just enough from her huddle to see her friend, Robert, with his eyebrows raised teasingly at the smoke wreathing Dusa’s dark hair. She smiled through the chill, and had to suck down another wave of smoke on a sharp inhale before she could remind her body that it wasn’t, actually, frosted insensate. “Because three weeks of holiday with my mother was going to make me stop?” she asked, casually, flicking ash. “It’s a natural inclination. What can I say.”

“Well,” he said, leaning against the wall beside her perch, and sliding down to huddle behind his knees and blow hot air into his chapped hands. “At least you’re properly conscientious about it?”

“Mm.”

They were silent for a minute or two, watching the people thronging the streets, moving so quickly, brisk sharp movements made involuntarily in an effort to keep warm. Children skipped with noses red and young teenagers just out of their first day back at school walked around in too little clothes as if braving the cold was something to get a medal for. Dusa thought they were the most heinously stupid people she’d ever seen.

She said, “So what brings you to my neck of the woods, birdman?”

Robert cocked his head at her, and Dusa smiled behind a veil of smoke; it was a very birdlike move, tilting in angles, sharp and exact. His eyes were bright and jewel-dark in his pale face, and his soft hair spiked out beneath his slightly lopsided hat on one side. It was endearing, and Dusa liked to look at him, his sharp face and quick smiles and expressive eyebrows.

“It’s hardly so far, Dusa,” he said quite dryly, “why, by anyone else’s measuring, it’d be just down the street.”

“Imagine that.”

Robert laughed, a sweet sound, and gave a move like he was ruffling invisible feathers as he settled down against her legs, leaking warmth into hers and sharing, getting it back again. “So I’ve heard some news.”

It made Dusa laugh. “You would, you insatiable gossip.”

“Shut up,” Robert smiled. But then he lost the smile, and gave a quick dart of his eyes up and down the merry street, with lights drooping form apartment balconies here and there, brownstones lit from the inside with warm glows, the streetlamps wrapped with metallic tinsel that sorely needed taking down. Dusa felt herself still at that small motion, paying much closer attention than she had a moment ago.

“What is it?” she asked, a little sharper than she’d meant to. Her hand was very still holding the cigarette, so that it trembled, held there so suddenly.

Robert shifted in distaste, like he was uncomfortable with the feel of the words in his gut, like he didn’t want to hear them spoken, and so was loathe to. He said, “There are wolves come to town.”

Dusa stared.

She said, “You must be joking.”

Robert positively bristled. “And since when, may I ask, have I ever been prone to joking about big, hairy, snarly, fanged brutes?”

“Well,” said a voice from above, “you might want to make that your first one, then.”

It was deep, and golden, and the sound of it felt a little like brushing against some powerful beast. Robert and Dusa stilled so completely they nearly turned to stone. Dusa wished they’d turned to stone. Slowly, she tilted her head up; she was sitting on the rail that bracketed her tiny block of what was basically flagstone yard, and the only place that voice could be coming from was the brownstone built on top of her low, basement abode, up the heavy stone old fashioned stairway.

Dusa had realized when she got back that morning that the real estate agent had finally found a family to settle in, above a college student living in the dislocated basement. She hadn’t met them yet, didn’t particularly care to. And now she was about to.

The woman who’d spoken was lolling casually against the railing, warm-toned skin and auburn hair around slender, muscular shoulders, with eyes like someone had taken pieces of the sky and breathed fire into them until they glowed. She was beautiful, her smile was a lazy, canine thing, and she wore a tight fitted sweater vest and low slung business slacks. Her bare toes curled over the edge of her pseudo-balcony without a care for the cold.

“It is below freezing,” Dusa said incredulously.

The woman laughed, and it was like a living thing; the only comfort Dusa had for the low dark things the sound automatically did to her was that she saw Robert shiver delicately, and clear his throat very carefully. “It is very hard,” the werewolf said in amusement, “to be cold on the night of the full moon.”

Faintly, as though it took all of Robert’s unconscious effort to move his lips, Dusa heard him say, “How come they get all the perks?”

The werewolf snorted. “Oh please. You can’t tell me you don’t feel like you could fly up to touch god when the sun’s at its strongest.”

Robert shifted uncomfortably. “Er. How did you-“

The woman made great show of taking a large, sniffing inhale. Robert made a faint squeak, and Dusa shuddered, knowing that the werewolf was able to mark her scent, know that she was a deer shapeshifter.

“Relax, birdman,” the beautiful werewolf said, her smile showing more teeth and a lolling tongue. Her eyes laughed at them, in sparks of blue flame. “You have too many feathers to be worth being my dinner. Deer though, hm.”

Dusa stiffened fiercely, despite her hammering heart.

“Oh?” the werewolf laughed, and again Dusa felt like she was shivering just out of touch of a great, contained power. “Isn’t that what you were expecting me to say?”

Dusa opened her mouth, couldn’t hear the words she’d say in her head for the hammering of her heart, because this creature wasn’t attacking, was just standing there untouched by the New York cold. It didn’t make sense.

Robert said, rather quickly and without his usual dry humor: “A pleasure to know I’m not on the menu ma’am, now if you’ll just excuse us.”

And with that Robert grabbed Dusa’s arm, pulled her roughly to her feet. She wasn’t much taller than him, but he had to work for it with the full weight of all her muscle mass tensed and coiled. Her dead cigarette fell to the ground and she tore her eyes from the werewolf’s who lived above her and fumbled her door open, Robert nearly pressed against her back as he tried to get in at the same time as her.

Behind her, as she struggled to push the door closed, the act a trial because of her cold and trembling hands, her numb mind, her frantic heart, she heard a cheerful parting shot:

“Nice meeting you neighbor!”

She shut the door as firmly as she possibly could, and didn’t even flinch when it knocked a picture frame off the wall beside it, and glass fractured over the dear faces of her parents. For a moment, she stood still, and breathed. Tried to breathe. Couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe.

“Oh my god,” she said, with a lilting sound of sudden surprise as if the full conveyance of what had just occurred was finally settling in, now that she was safe inside her home. “Oh my god.”

“Y, yeah.” Robert swallowed convulsively. “Uhm, about what I was saying earlier. It seems a wolf pack has moved into the area. And uhm. Apparently they’ve moved in right above you?”

Dusa stared at him, and Robert stared back.

“Fuck, Deuce,” he said on a shaky exhale. “You’re screwed.”

Which was, of course, exactly the wrong thing to say.


*


Well, here we are, embarking on what I hope is to be a grand adventure! So far I have around 13 thousand words of this story written, and fully intend on finishing the damned thing. It promises to have lots of panic attacks, strange courtship rituals, hot sex, and of course, the big bad wolf coming to town. I hope you will stay with me and enjoy your read! If you see anything that should be fixed, or have any helpful critique, I welcome any and all! Thank you!