Tina stared at herself in the mirror for a very long moment. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She had never been human for this long before. As the blanket she wrapped herself in lay on a heap on the bathroom floor, she examined herself from head to toe. Tina had no fur, no claws, no muzzle, no tail, nothing.
Her outward appearance was one thing. What she felt inside was definitely another. She had none of the usual cravings that she usually experienced after a transformation. Tina was barely hungry, but she definitely felt weak. Weak, and powerless. The scents of the bathroom in Jeff's house that usually annoyed her when she was a wolf - soap, perfume, anything artificial - were actually pleasant to her nose and that in itself annoyed her. As for her other senses, she could not sense other than what her eyes, ears, and nose told her, and in human form, they told very little. Tina could never find much advantage in seeing in color, a trait traded for another: her keen sense of hearing. Now she could barely detect danger if it made any noise at all. And if Tina was in danger, human instinct was a poor substitute for animal instinct.
On a typical full moon, Tina could withstand a whole night as a human, and actually enjoy being a two-legged creature. In human form, Tina was tall, slender and beautiful, and she herself thought so as well, even if she was in a form that her kind feared. But she was unaccustomed to being a two-legger for this long, and confusion dominated her mind as to what was wrong.
Tina had but one answer to her prolonged change. She had, of course, mated with Jeff. It was spontaneous, random, and certainly without regret. But her choice may have come with a price. She could not explain why she had remained human, but this was her only explanation.
Tina was overcome with emotion. She sat down on the floor and leaned up against the bathroom wall. She had never been so confused and afraid since the first time she changed.
Teyna darted across the forest with the rest of her wolf-friends. It was well past sunset, but that didn't stop her or her friends, including Brynn, from playing in the vast reaches of the woods. It was a simple game of hide and seek, only that their keen sense of smell made it easier to find each other, quickly turning the game into a round of tag. Teyna was fast on the scent of Brynn...or Lupa. She always had trouble distinguishing the two scents. But she was following the scent, quickly running past countless trees to track one of her friends down.
Suddenly, disorientation came over her. Teyna, feeling dizzy and not knowing why, in her fast pace flipped over and tumbled along the grass before colliding into a patch of fallen leaves. Teyna quickly came to with a burning sensation all over her body. What was happening? The burning turned into a sharp pain that affected every part of Teyna. Teyna let out a yelp when the pain increased in her snout. In the corners of her eyes she saw what seemed to be her muzzle reshaping itself. She pawed the air in front of her as if to signal for help, but even her left paw looked different.
When the sensation hit her stomach, Teyna fell on her side, where on the grass she squirmed around knowing not how to handle what she was going through. At that moment, several figures appeared from behind the trees. They were her friends. Brynn, Lupa, Ashana, among others. But they seemed different as well. It was something about their eyes she noticed when they inched closer. They were bright in the dark as usual, but...their eyes had a different tint, a different kind of glow. It was unlike anything she had seen before, but Teyna knew the problem was with her own eyes. The scenery around her changed, turning into all different kinds of glows and tints but never differing in shape. The trees, the leaves, the grass, even the sky, they all remained the same except the glow it seemed to give off.
And something else was different. The snout which Teyna had always had in the corner of her eyes were gone. It was still there, except that it didn't pick up on the scents of her friends anymore. They all smelled the same, or rather everything smelled the same. Teyna could not even begin to understand it.
She tried to get up on all fours even as the pain enveloped her body. Not looking down on the ground, Teyna could feel that her paws were different, that they had grown in size. What's more, Teyna fell onto her other side when she tried to balance herself. Oddly enough, her hind legs felt like they were longer than her front limbs. Teyna tried to pick herself off the ground again, but she found it difficult for her front limbs to support her weight. Falling to the ground once more, Teyna squirmed even more. Her friends watched in fear as they as well as Teyna could tell that she was changing.
The pain lessened but didn't stop as the seeming reshaping of her body slowed to a crawl but refused to end. Teyna moaned in pain. But she could not recognize her own voice as she let out that yelp. As her tongue slid back in, she felt her teeth. Her sharp front teeth were missing; rather, they had grown shorter and dull.
What Teyna found she could do was reach up with one of her front limbs and feel her teeth. Instinctively, she did so, and what she saw was frightening. Most of her life, Teyna was never able to see most of her body, but she knew there was always a coat of fur that wrapped around her. But the fur on her limb was gone, replaced by a smooth layer of skin that had another different glow altogether.
One of the last changes Teyna could feel was at the top of her head. She could feel the fur on her head slide out, as if they were trying to fall off her head. But the hairs on her head slid out even further until, finally, the hissing noise that her head made stopped as well as the sensation of pain that Teyna had suffered.
Teyna was unable to feel relief even after the pain stopped. She looked around and the entire forest emitted a completely different glow than what she was accustomed to. Her face hot and her breathing heavy, Teyna tried as best she could to crawl on her four limbs, experiencing great difficulty with each step. She inched closer to her friends, but to her surprise they all stepped backwards with each step she took forwards. Finally, all but one - Brynn - darted away into the darkness that the forest provided. Brynn tilted his head in curiosity. Teyna reached out to him with her left limb but he too darted at her advances.
She was left with the haunting silence that the forest at night was known for, and for the first time in her life, Teyna had experienced three sensations that she had never experienced all at the same time: cold, fear, and loneliness.
After recalling past memories, Tina had hardly felt lonely when she sat there on the bathroom floor. But she was, in fact, cold and was afraid. In her adventures as a human, Tina seldom feared the unknown, but not being able to know her own body after all of these years was indeed frightening. She sunk her head into her hands, not knowing what to do next. Instinctively, she wanted to be a wolf and thought of nothing else except being a wolf.
An odd sensation. On the palms of her hands...they were rough, not smooth. Tina took her hands from her face. She turned them around and saw on the back of her hands...hair. No, not hair, it was fur! And slowly, it grew thicker, and longer. It was starting. The transformation. It was late, but it's starting.
Tina quickly picked herself off the floor and gazed into the mirror. Up and down her naked body grew a thick patch of fur that was beginning to spread to the rest of her skin. She brushed the fur on her chest and her skin felt the sharp point of a sharpening claw on her index finger. Tina's wolf form was slowly but surely returning to her.
But horror quickly replaced relief in Tina's eyes. She had expected to turn back into a wolf in the morning when Jeff woke. But Tina, having let her guard down, was not prepared to show her secret. She had not planned for what reaction Jeff may have when he sees her in her true form. And now, locked in the bathroom of her mate's house, she was now changing back.
Horror intensified. A knock on the door shook Tina even as her wolf features became more dominant. Then, a voice, Jeff's voice, "Tina? Are you OK in there?"
Tina trembled. She replied, "I-I'm f-f-f-fine." But her voice was very scratchy and snarling. She looked in the mirror again, and by now fur covered her entire body, with Tina's nose ready to reshape itself into a muzzle. Her brown hair shortening back into grey fur, Tina panicked. It was getting harder to stand on her two feet. She had to hide from Jeff. Somewhere, anywhere. Quickly, she took the blanket and covered her entire body, which now laid on the floor. It would not do anything to keep Jeff from seeing Tina as she really was, and she realized that. She realized that she was not ready to show Jeff who Teyna is.
Her ears picked up a sound. It was the sound of the doorknob of the bathroom door jiggling. Tina shut her eyes. She wanted to be human. Right now, she NEEDED to be human.
The door burst open and Jeff invaded the bathroom with a toothpick needed to pick the door's lock in his hand. Sure enough, Jeff found Tina, completely obscured from view, laying under the blanket on the floor. "TINA!" he exclaimed. Thinking she might be hurt, he pulled part of the blanket away from Tina.
"NO!" Tina covered her face with her hands, "Don't look at me!"
"What's wrong!?" Jeff cried, not knowing what the problem was.
Tina stuttered, "I'm...I'm..." Wait! Her voice! It was human again! Afraid to look, Tina opened her eyes and looked at her hands. They were back to normal. Normal, at least, in the sense that they were human. Everything else about her was human again. Her legs, her skin, her nose, everything. Except, of course, her slightly-pointed ears, which have always stayed with her in any form. Relieved, Tina let out a laugh. Then another laugh. And then another, until she laughed uncontrollably, excessively relieved for the time being.
"Glad to see you're alright," Jeff smiled, though puzzled, "Come on, maybe you should get dressed."
After catching her breath, Tina wiped a small tear from her eye, relieved that she was in the form she WANTED to be in, for once. Even if she was in human form. She picked herself off the floor and kissed Jeff for a long moment.
When they broke, Jeff said, "What was that for?"
"Nothing," Tina replied, "Everything is great."
"Glad to hear. Now you better put some clothes on, or I'm gonna have to take mine off again!"
Tina grinned, and she exited the bathroom completely naked, leaving the blanket on the floor. Jeff shook his head in delight, not making heads or tails over what just happened. No matter, he thought to himself as he picked the blanket off the floor.
"That's funny," Jeff said to himself as he examined the cloth, "There's a whole lot of cat hair on this thing..."
As she slipped on the clothes she had on the night before, Tina quickly ascertained that she was a rollercoaster (she never did know what that meant, only that it was an expression of sorts) of emotions. Happy one moment, confused the next, only to be relieved and then shocked after. All of this caused by her delayed change, and then her seemingly-voluntary shift back to her human form. Ever since she was cursed, Tina always thought that it was the full moon that was responsible for the transformations. But the full moon was long gone, and still she was human. This morning had been one big confusion, and Tina was barely capable of piecing it all together. Why was she changing back into a wolf so late in the morning, and how was she able to shift back into a human?
Maybe, just maybe - and if it was true, Tina would be very happy about it - she had been granted a gift she had always wanted: the ability to change into what form she wanted, whenever she wanted. Tina - as Teyna - always scared her wolf-friends away when she transformed unwillingly into an adolescent girl. As time passed, Tina learned to love her second form, just never her incapacity to shift to that second form at will. Always during the full moon...she had hated being unable to fight the change, and being unable to keep her slender two-legged form when she wanted to.
Somehow Jeff fitted somewhere into this new experience. Of course, if Tina were never...special, she nor others in her pack would dare dream of mating outside their species. But Tina did it, and now she could only wonder if it had side-effects or not.
Damn, Tina thought, she was making far too much out of this. She didn't need to explain anything. Only that she was far different...on top of being far different. And she let her thoughts make her mind wander. Tina gazed down at her hand; it had grown bits of fur again. Reacting to yet another sudden change, she thought of being human, and once again the fur retracted back into her skin. She smiled at herself, looking for the word the two-leggers use for a moment like this. It was...cool.
"So where do you want to go today?" Jeff asked when he walked into the living room.
"Hmm?" Tina replied.
"I've never seen you in the daytime. Let's go out. Anyways, it's our four-month anniversary."
Months...months...what did that mean again? Oh, that's right, Tina thought, it's how much time between those full moons. "What do you have in mind?" Tina asked with delight. It was about time she experienced what it was like to be a human full-time anyways.
End of Part Three.
Click here for Part Four.