Fight.page

        He struck like a viper, fast, biting, the strength propelling the masculine figure forward whipping the full fledged weight of his fist toward her head. The lithe creature was already ducking, parrying the steel blow aside with an asp's speed of strike, the heel of her lean left hand hitting his ribs like a small shovel, lifting him deftly on his toes. She twisted with a sharp fluidity to stomp the tender back flesh of his knees, but in the instant in which her hip aligned with his, his burly arm snaked around her ribs and jerked with a vise's insistance. Immaculate leverage disappeared in the blink of an eye. The wolf in her snarled. A flash of gold glinted like a knifeblade within shards of grey and blue ice. As he started the momentum of a flip, she snapped a vicious kick to the back of his head that had his narrow jaw clicking shut and his ears ringing to wake the moons. Adept fingers gnarled about his thigh and arm in a tight grasp and wrenched out. He rencountered at the last moment. Both slammed down to the hard earth beneath.
         He missed her wrist by a hand's span; she missed his temple by a hair's breadth with her ridge hand as he moved smoothly away to face her. The pair came back together in a blur of hands and knees, elbows and feet. He took an impossibly close side kick like a hammer, grunted, and veered to drop his elbow on her ankle, watching as the bones in her pretty young face tightened for an imperceptible instant. Thick digits grabbed the slender joint, and twisted almost brutally. She whipped like a top, midair, but a sharply outflung rotating kick caught him on the shoulder as he ducked. She broke free and caught herself with a cat's agility and poised balance, went to one knee, and back kicked instinctively to force the distance before whirling to face him again. He slowly grinned. When they came together this time, it was his spinning ax kick that clubbed down across her shoulder, even as she rode the blow downward into a tentative duck. He twisted; they broke apart and danced in broken rhythm, setting and discarding patterns of movements to tease each other into an attack. A feint, a side kick, a glancing blow... Neither one spoke; they simply fought with silent intensity.
          Damon was breathing hard, and there was something increasingly feral in the girl's expression as she faced off like some moonwarrior sent to steal his soul to the heavens and guide his path, in death, to the moons..
          He saw an opening, shot a kick, but it brushed her side, touching cloth, not ribs. She dropped under and swept, but he felt it coming and threw himself forward. She could not avoid the tackle. She only had time to grasp one of his sweat-hot wrists and, with the speed of a dozen wolves, partially redirect his momentum, but she was still flipped in the tangle.
          He had regained his feet, and she exploded up, catching him off-balance, and threw him with her left arm under his leg, the other at his neck, and followed him down. Her knee dropped like a rock on the joint of his pelvis. Strike! It was the voice of a wolf in her head. Her left hand was like an eagle's claw digging for his brachial artery, her right fingers curled on his throat like the hand of death itself.
         The male froze. Her teeth were bared and glinted white in the shadows that sculpted her features perfectly in tones of white and black. Her breath was quick -- to quick for a woman who thought only in human terms. His own pulse deafened him to sound, pounding in his temples. Sweat trickled down his neck in steady, salted streams. He didn't move. Didn't flinch. Didn't try to shift away. If he moved at all, Alae's wolf-honed instincts would close those half-curled fingers and tear his throat like fangs.
         The prey is down. Make the kill. The blood lust of the grey mental voices tightened Alae's muscles like wire. The trickle of moisture that slid around Damon's ear toward his pulsing carotid artery was a fascination for her dilated gaze.
         Damon's world narrowed to that pair of wolf-blinded eyes. There was a hint of yellow around her ashen irises, as if the eyes were no longer completely her, but partly belonged to the wolves.
        Tear. Slash. Taste the blood on your fangs.
         He started to suck in a breath, but her hands became rigid steel on his neck. Slowly, carefully, like hauling in a catch with a thread, he took air into his starved lungs.For months, Alae had been |2unning with the wild wolves, not with the partner wolf that knew humans. She was too close, too full of the Grey Ones. They gnawed the inside of her scull as she poised, they licked their lips with her tongue, tensed with her muscles, snarled in her throat. It was not Alae who hung above him; it was the wolf pack in the distance. Damon knew all this - was slammed with the realization in that fractional time before her hand tightened, before her nails dug fatally into his flesh, before the wolf in her was loosed. With that flash of knowledge, he recentered himself with the same lightning speed.
       His brown eyes projected the calm he forced himself to feel. He let the tension leech from his muscles so that the change from resistance to No Threat was fast, silent, and soothing.
       Alae felt the challenge in his body fade. Felt the intensity of the moment shift. Felt the hammer of his pulse steady beneath her fingers where her left hand had clawed for his artery. She sucked in a breath. The wolves in her head - ten, twelve of the wild ones - blurred her vision between the man on the training mat and the large elk that was even now being taken by the wolves a bare two kilometers away. The two kays of distance were no barrier to Alae. Even across that space, the gray mental voices frayed the edge of her thoughts as one of the wolves latched onto a haunch of the dying animal.
       Speed. Tear. Yank back.
       Dion's hand tightened around Damon's throat as she struggled to separate herself from the din corrupting the calm of mentality and structure she knew to be her own..
       Damon did not move. He forced himself to watch her with that smooth, calm expression that was his only weapon at present against the rising tide of chaos revolting against her human restraint..
       She dragged in another breath.. She could partly see him now, his golden-brown hair damp and curled, his brown eyes steady as he waited for her to regain control. Control. Woman. Not wolf. But she could feel the bodies, the iron-hard muscles, as the wolves leaped and dodged the elk's deperately tossing antlers. Fur ruffled on broken branches, icy mud squidged up between toes, musk and blood odors clogging her nose. Lupine hunger-lust leaked through her mental shield like a sieve, and her chest knotted as a Grey One slashed the distant elk's flank. Damon did not move. Alae forced herself to focus, to see the Man, not the Prey. Forced herself to strengthen the mental wall until she closed off the taste of dirty hair and raw muscle that came to her with the permeating thrum of the packsong. She licked her teeth and reaffirmed the tiny serrations of human enamel, not the curved fangs of the wolves. She flexed her hand and felt thumbs, not dewclaws, let her legs feel the weight of her knee on Damon's pelvis. Withdraw. She formed the word mentally. Wolves growled in her mind. She shuddered, but pulled back. Control, she snarled to herself.
        Damon still did not move, and said nothing, as the grip on his neck was relinquished and she slid smoothly to her feet. He rose slowly, carefully, watching the wild one in silence.
       Alae was looking beyond him, however, and there was still a ring of gold to icy hues. When his voice began to rise, she silenced him with a glance. "I must go."
      Damon said nothing, examining her as she glanced back toward the shadows once again. She was gently flushed with exertion, and wild tangles of silver-streaked ebony hung like a halo about her slender face, having freed themselves from the leather restraint. She was tightening it almost absently with fingers that still wanted to tremble. Her body was not wiry, but slender and lithe from a dozen years of riding and running trail.
       There were always rumors about the Wolfwalkers. They could hear with the ears of the wolves, see in the dark, smell danger before it struck. It was rumored that they were as wild in bed as they were in a fight. They fought like wilderness rearing up against order, not like a human who touched the wild. It was said that, with each passing decade, Wolfwalkers lost more of their humanity. Damon nodded to himself as he studied Alae's stance. Sometimes myths were true.
       Alae Ember Kiaska was hardly something of myth or legend, although she was well enough known in these parts. She had been trained since early childhood as a healer, and she had achieved her master rating a year before she bonded with the wolf Grey Kael. Since then, she had become everything; she was a tracker who could follow a tree spirit through the very air, a scout who could ghost through any forest, a Wolfwalker who could Call any wolf to her side, a healer whose patients were not touched by death. She could dance steel with the best of swordsmen, shoot rapids like a warbolt.
       As he watched her, Damon could only wonder if the years had been too much for the young creature, who had now been bonded for two out of the eighteen years of her life with the packsong, and the ghost of a lupine that |2an by her side.
       Alae, however, turned something of a faint smile toward him, shaking her head apologetically for what had transpired. Glancing briefly toward the spectators - the majority students of the weapons' master she had just felled - she turned and moved to the forest, vanishing into the weight of shadows within to be joined by the darker shape of a wolf, whose gleaming golden hues shifted back over the clearing from which they moved, perhaps amused at what had occurred.
       Then again, it could have been the shadows.

...the wolves have claimed her Soul...

...but none can claim her heart..

..the wolf still hunts where angels fear to tread..

Alae Ember Kiaska

The sword makes a better handshake,
The knife makes a smoother speech,
An enemy makes a wilder lover,
A foe creates a stronger goal.

Grey Kael..

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