Booted feet pounded the forest floor with the same rhythm as a relentless war drum, the sounds preceding the kind of horror that only a wild imagination and fluttering heart could ever imagine. The chill was seated deep in what was normally such an adamantine spine, that now held the kind of fear that could only truly come from being pursued by an apex predator. It was an amalgamation of nothing but tooth, fang, claws, and unadulterated fury forged into flesh and blood by eons of evolution to keep it on the top of the very top food chain.
She knew it was close, knew that he was close.
She knew it because while she couldn't hear him, she couldn't hear anything. The air was still for a place that should have been teeming with life. It was as if the denizens within the foliage and flora could sense it, just like she could. Or so that's what she'd surmise if she had time to stop and think, and she had a lot of things at the moment but time wasn't it.
Lungs on fire, an ache deep in her legs that felt as if an inferno had been set off within the sculpted muscle; the same muscles working on overdrive, that had her propelling herself through the undergrowth like a splendidly mad hare with nothing stopping it other than the friction of the ground and air. She might have been able to make a hurdler stare at her in green eyed envy, but even a woman like her had her limits and--
Craaa-ACK!
There it was! Snapping through the log it put its paws upon, its canine frame bathed in the light of the moon that showed through the canopy of the trees. A perverse depiction of nature, the wolf that stood on two legs but with such a hulking frame that it might as well have been on all fours from the weight of its front. Claws like ebon daggers, teeth dripping with rope like strands of drool that lined a maw that seemed never ending when it opened to let out a baying howl that burned away the courage of men.
For a moment, it looked like a primordial entity with the wreckage of the trees lining it's brow with the same purpose as a king's crown, the moonlight cascading down its back, the beast wearing it like a forlon noble would a cape.
The beast would be regal, if he wasn't so terrible to behold. The snarl that left him ripped through the forest as if it were a royal declaration of intent.
She responded with a smile, and an extension of her middle finger, a message punctuated by a kiss to the air in his direction before the redhead turned on her heel and sprinted with the gusto of gazelle on a full tilt! She might be his prey, but she'd never be easy.
She didn't have to be.
She ran, he lunged.
She juked! He crashed into a nearby tree, those yellowed eyes focusing on her to the point that he didn't see the obvious that laid beyond her; damn that predatory tunnel vision. It was a form of the detective's curse transmuted into something primal, something that even he couldn't deny when the animal took over.
The moon called, and his insides had answered until they'd become his outsides and a hunger permeated throughout him for something that food could not slake the desire of. The reason and logic of the man has given into the doggedly one tracked mind of the beast inside of him.
In short, he couldn't think rationally
His lover could though, and she delighted in being the sole fix for the addiction that rattled through his bestial soul; even if that meant she was playing the part of his prey, leading him on a chase through a winter bitten forest, metaphorically freezing off the ass that he seemed so focused on chasing after.
Frankly, Siobhan adored being the sole center of his attention.
Or she did, until she slipped.
Rubber and leather met a hard patch of ice on the soft ground, and she found herself on the forest floor with a sudden weight ontop of her that she couldn't deny.
Not that she wanted to. It wasn't the first time those impressive tits broke her fall, it wouldn't be the last.