Lone Wolf (Shifters' World 1) by Ruby

Lone Wolf
    She woke to birdsong, alone.
    Her body ached, her mouth was dry and tasted bad. At least
she didn’t have that hungry knot twisting her belly any more. Food yesterday
had been a welcome relief.
    She opened her eyes. Sun angled in through the trees and the
gaps in the broken roof. The shadow of a supporting beam drew a black line
across the broken concrete floor. This ruined building had once been a hunter’s
lodge, she guessed, or maybe some kind of private forest retreat. Back when the
world had been a different place.
    She sat, stretched, found her clothes in a pile nearby and
stood to pull them on. A pair of loose-fitting jeans held up with a length of
cord, a sweatshirt bearing the logo of some long-forgotten college. She found
her stash of willow-bark and used a strip to rub her teeth clean. She would be
nothing if she didn’t look after herself. If she gave up these last scraps of
civilization she knew she would have lost.
    It was more than simply looking after herself: it was human
dignity, her sense of who she was. You keep yourself clean, you don’t sleep in
your clothes, you do all you can to retain the civilized person you once were.
    In a shard of broken mirror she looked at herself, the
shadows under her eyes, her shaggy, uncut hair.
    This is me , she thought. It wasn’t a question of
liking it or not.
    This is me.
    §
    There were signs of activity outside again.
    Nothing obvious. Just a sense that something had been here,
and those big paw-prints in the dirt.
    She surveyed the tangle of undergrowth around the clearing
that had once been this building’s front yard. Nothing. No beady eyes staring
back.
    You couldn’t trust that, though. You couldn’t trust anything
any more. Not even… your memory.
    Moments before... gazing into that shard from a broken
mirror. She knew that fragment was a prized possession. She knew that this was
a place where she felt relatively secure in a world that was no longer safe.
    But the face in that reflection... She did not know who she
was, or who she had become.
    She did not know who she had been.
    Her heart raced, as she feared that finally her time had
come. One of the viruses, one of the great plagues... was this the first sign
that something was bringing her down? Were the sweat on her brow, the blanks in
her memory and the racing of her heart signs of panic, or symptoms of something
worse?
    She took a deep breath and held it until her heart slowed.
She reminded herself that, sick or not, she must do what she could to survive.
All she had were hope and her treasured few remnants of the civilized world.
    §
    Happy that there was no immediate danger, she gathered the
empty water drum from just inside the ruined wall and set off on the rough
trail that led through the undergrowth and down into the trees. She was lucky
to have somewhere like this: a building with a door that closed and walls that
were reasonably intact until just past the level of her head. It might not look
much, but it was a castle to her.
    Before long, the track leveled, cutting across the sloping
forest floor and then, ahead of her, there was a splash of sunlight where the
trees thinned.
    She approached cautiously, a lesson well lodged in her head
despite her failing memory. Clean water was a place where animals gathered, and
therefore a place of danger.
    She came to a place where creepers hung down from the trees
forming a natural screen, a vantage point she used every time she came here.
    She sensed threat before she saw anything. It was something
in the air. Maybe sounds her ears had picked up but her brain was yet to
process. A strange scent, perhaps.
    As her eyes adjusted to the bright light of the clearing she
surveyed the forest fringe, looking to see if anything was lurking in the
shadows. There was nothing, and then she looked at the pool itself and saw
rings of spreading ripples followed by a sudden swelling of the water as a
bulbous object emerged.
    A head. A man’s head, dark