I got a whiff of minty fresh breath. Definitely not, what I'd expect from a wild wolf.

Now you're being ridiculous. If your mom changed into a carrot, I'd think she'd change back before someone ate her, werewolf or not.

No electricity, fridge, TV or game console. I guess changing from human was enough fun and games for werewolves.

My nerves did a jitter dance, stuck between two wolves.

But a smell shivered him awake.It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close.The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel.A shadow moved.It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow...

Her wild race caused the dried-up ferns, thorny plants, and low-hung tree branches—away from the lake—to grab at our clothing in the mad dash over the narrow packed dirt through the trees.

Off Spruce, there was a little known trail. A savage gulley wound through acreage of older residential homes that met up with Green Rock Drive. A natural bouquet gust of wind assaulted me. The domestic and native encroached on each other in a battle for dominance at the edges of the cramped path's undergrowth. The tangy scent of wild onion and sagebrush intermingled with the verdant odor of wild geranium, blue flax, columbine and creeping pussytoes. The wild weeds spiced up the encroaching grass turf and the tamed floral honeysuckle vines and lilac bushes.

Keeping her in her roots of greenness.

I swear it looked like she wanted her words to slither around us and go out the door unheard.

Fingers you, claws me, crossed hoping Dad sees it that way.