wolf’s breath misted in the cool night air, and she saw his ears perk up and he jerked his head to the right as he bared his teeth in a silent snarl. Brienne followed the wolf’s eyes and saw that one of the hunters had been rushing to flank them, and though she could tell that the armored man had not seen them, he soon would.
The hunter was dressed much like the three others that Brienne and the wolf had made bloody corpses of back at the clubhouse before taking flight. She had no idea how many of them might be out there, considering the chaos they’d left behind. Likely many of them would be rushing to remove as much evidence of the recent battle before local and federal authorities arrived. The wolf’s hackles rose and he began crouching low to the ground, prompting Brienne to do the same, and then he began to slink towards the hunter. The man was wearing night vision goggles, though Brienne knew that such technology had its limitations, and though the man could see in the dark the wolf was a master of stalking prey. Brienne dared not move from her position, camouflaged as she was by a thick clump of wide-leafed ferns, though she began to draw upon her powers in preparation.
Druid magic was slow to rise when compared to the savage ferocity of shifter magic, though once in place it became as powerful as any other force of nature. Her body was like a hollow reed and the energy of the earth filled her as she called out to the land. The power crackled at her fingertips and she felt as if she was breathing pure light as the magic rose to meet her desire. As the wolf crept closer to the hunter Brienne used her mind to call up the symbols that would help her shape the raw power she now struggled to contain. The druid’s mind swam with visions of Celtic knotwork, symbols within symbols, and into that network she poured the energy. It had taken years of study and training to call the knots, to learn which symbol would channel the energy to what manifestation. Plenty of druids through the ages had burned out or gone mad because they had not learned the humble patience required for the deep magic of the earth. Brienne had that patience, even if she still struggled with the humility part.
The hunter began stalking in her direction, his face obscured by the night vision goggles and the matte black face covering that matched his modern body armor. In his hands the hunter wielded an ugly looking combat shotgun, and from recent experience she knew that it would be loaded with silver buckshot. While the hunters seemed ignorant of the druid, they had certainly come prepared to engage with the pack of biker werewolves.
Arn was nearly upon the hunter as the two enemies closed distance, and Brienne knew it would only be a matter of seconds before the hunter’s night vision goggles revealed the wolf stalking him. Brienne began to envision the burning light of the sun, reaching out to touch the solar energy that coursed through the plant bodies of the flora that surrounded them. Plants were incredible batteries for solar energy, and for druids solar magick wasn’t as much about connecting with the sun as it was connecting with the very plants that depended on it for life. Her hand began to grow hot, and she knew without looking that to the eyes of anyone who could see power it would look as if she held a mini-sun in the palm of her hand. As it was, the hunter was a mundane, and what he saw was a young woman emerge from a clump of ferns holding her hand up and palm out. At the same time he saw the giant wolf crouching in the underbrush nearby, though as he raised his shotgun to fire at the wolf a flash of light burned out his night vision goggles.
The hunter screamed in pain as Brienne’s sun spell blinded him. Arn leapt upon the man and the wolf’s weight brought him to the ground. They brawled for a brief moment, then as the wolf got its jaws around the hunter’s throat it ended with the sound of tearing