She has long light brown hair that fell to her waist. Wearing glasses, a white coat that goes down just below her hips and dark blue jeans, she looked about the area with the air of a mission to be accomplished. She made her way to the remains of the houses along the side of the road, moving as though she could sense that we were watching her.

She went to the remains of the third house from my own and started to move the ashen beams aside, looking for something. Danny and I shared a glance, we both seemed to think the same thing; what is she looking For? We both turned back towards her when we heard a bang; she had moved a beam over completely and let it fall noisily to the ground. Underneath the beam, stairs that were clearly untouched by the fires, we're seen.

Shocked, I lifted my head abruptly and Angela -who had climbed on my back in her skin- held on tightly to my fur lest she fall. The movement I made caused a branch to break and the woman whipped her head around to our general direction. Just as her eyes were about to find me, a bird flew out of a tree a few meters to my left, and her eyes followed it. After a few minutes, the woman turned back to the stairs and went down the stone steps.

I stood up slowly, so that Angela wouldn't fall off and grabbed the leather bag that I made from around Kai's neck. Each of us had one, except for the triplets, in order to carry clothes and tools as we traveled here. I let Angela get off my back and took the bag from around my neck too, taking out my deerskin dress. I stepped into it and shifted to my skin, buttoning it up quickly. Placing knives into holders around my waist from Kai's bag, I put my own bag around Danny then put the second bag back on Kai.

Kai didn't seem to be bothered by Danny and I switching from our fur to our skin, and he was just as comfortable with us in our skin as he is with us in our fur. He was definitely handled by other shifters in his past, but we had no idea for what purpose. It was common for shifters to handle normal Wolves when they didn't have enough pack members to keep guard around their territory, but sometimes shifters were not very nice to their normal Wolves. Some shifters think that normal Wolves are below them, instead of distant cousins as they are, and use the normal Wolves as ways to get out of killing other shifters to keep the humans happy. It was a terrible practice and my parents were always against it.

"Stay here and watch the pups with Kai, Danny." I said as I made my way down to the town. "If anything happens try to contact me as discreetly as you can. I'm betting that everyone thinks we're dead, and it would be better to keep things that way for now."

I heard Danny growl at me in disapproval, but he stayed where he was. I'm sure if I had not forbidden him from shifting into his skin, without putting clothes on first, in front of my kids, he would have shifted and called out curses to me as I left. I didn't want any of my children getting nightmares because they saw their uncle in his birthday suit.

I soon made my way down to the house remains, and carefully made my way to the stairs. I sniffed the air, but only found the smell of the burned wood around me and the slightly familiar sent of the woman who went down the stairs. I slowly followed her down the stairs, going deep enough that the light from outside started to be swallowed by the darkness down here. Every couple of seconds I paused what I was doing and listened for the woman.

I pulled out one of my bone daggers and held it in a ready position as I continued, the darkness finally swallowing me.