Freyja fell to all fours as her bones cracked and reconfigured themselves into a quadruped position. Her shirt was stretched and warped against her back as the ridges of her spinal column pushed out against it, and the fabric itself seemed to dissolve away into a sea of rising ebony fur that shimmered in the light. In the brief moments before clothing melded into the magic of Freyja’s transformation, Cuppy saw a line of tattoos spanning the length of Freyja’s spine from between her shoulder blades to the small of her back, all the phases of the lunar cycle in sequential order from no moon at the top, and full moon at the bottom. A tail unfurled and wagged excitedly behind her leanly-muscled quads, and Cuppy heard the eager padding of her heavy paws on the ground underfoot. Her breaths turned to the hot panting of a lone wolf with a goal, blue eyes narrowed by intense focus within their golden rings.

Cuppy sat astride Freyja’s back, hands grabbing purchase in big tufts of fur and hide.

“Onward, my noble stead.” Cuppy said.

“Don’t push it.” Freyja growled back in a resounding demonic voice, deepened by her lycanthropic form.

Then they were bounding off across the fields and through the trees at a breakneck pace, sharp winds whipping at Cuppy’s face as they cleaved through the air like a gleaming curved sickle.

Gee, we must be clocking in over thirty miles per hour. Cuppy thought happily to himself as grass and stones and little undercut stream banks rolled away underneath them.

Freyja galloped over a chain link fence’s edge, into the urban expanse and across a bustling overpass with the effect of an echo that reverberated down the bridge just like the cars that regularly passed over it.

“Woah! Did you see that shit?!” Freyja’s keen ears picked up, trailing behind them from some hoodlum tagging the underside of the structure with his buddies.

They made their promised ETA thanks in no small part to Freyja subverting Cuppy’s expectation that they would be traveling with stealthy discretion in mind. He stepped off her back onto the soft lawn of the apartment backyard strip, his hood blown back and his blond curls along with it, frizzed out wildly by the winds. He had a dopey grin on his cherubic face.

“That was pretty cool.” he chirped.

Freyja cracked out her neck, grunting slightly from the mild cramping of reverting to her human form. Cuppy watched her back realign itself and her clothes re-materialize out of her receding fur like groundwater pushing to the surface through loosened mud. Her muzzle and elongated mouth full of gleaming canines and fangs retracted back into a pale human girl’s face, cherry lips twisted in a grimace of discomfort as her restored hominid hand clutched at her back.

“You ok?” Cuppy asked her cautiously.

“Fine. My back just gets a little sore from time to time, I’ve never run with cargo before now.” she forced a reassuring smile back at the boy.

“Cargo?” Cuppy pointed to himself.

Over the fence cutting off the forest from the complex, the plume of twisting fog had begun to retract into itself below the tree tops, and settle as a loose light grey haze over the densely-wooded lands.

“This one’s in a hurry, like that leprechaun, it looks like.” Cuppy cupped a hand above his eyes to block out the sun’s glare as he looked across the forest, and whistled at the fog’s rapid shrinking.

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“Then let’s get going.” Freyja nodded, prying the decoy plank loose from the fence.

Cuppy moved to follow behind her, but stumbled sharply down on his lead leg and almost rolled his ankle for it, letting out a startled squeak as his foot squelched through cold mud up to his sock-line.

Freyja dropped the plank and looked back at him, reaching out an arm to steady the boy. “You ok?”

Cuppy nodded and looked down to see that he had stepped into the water channel he and Richie had carved out to carry drinking water from the stream to a stockpile in a tub-sized basin they installed beside the porch. It was idling there as they left it, but its water level too had sunken from the brim to just a few inches at the bottom. The trench itself was emptied out except for a meager trickle.

“You guys have been busy bees working on this place, huh?” Freyja looked up and down the channel. “Who would want to cut off your water supply?”

Cuppy shook his head. “I think tampering with our channel is a consequence, not the end goal. I’ve got a feeling that if we follow the trench, it will lead us right to whoever or whatever came out of the fog. It’s still left in residual form, clinging to the ground, so we might be on a time limit to deal with them before they can fully break out of the fog into our world. Let’s go.”

They traced the winding path of the dried channel through low-hanging branches and tangles of crawling ivy, nearly stumbling variously where big wooden planks had been pounded into the ground to fortify the channel's sides against collapse and loose detritus deposits. Cuppy and Richie had stretched rudimentary tarps of bird netting over long sections of the waterway where it passed under the shadows of nut-bearing trees. At the end of the trail, they came to a large brambly deadfall of dead logs and yellow grasses.

"I don't think this was here before." Cuppy said. "Should we try to climb over it?"

Freyja regarded the huge, almost spike-like jutting thorns and jagged splinters of wood. "Not a chance, it looks like it wants to bite you. Climbing that thing's like a death trap, let's just go around it." she gulped.

Cuppy nodded. "Scenic route it is then."

The deadfall was as long as it was wide and tall, a huge, intricately-laid barricade of interlocking dead wood and foliage whose upturned jaws snapped at cloth and flesh like organic beartraps. Yet, in certain spots of light it looked as though a comparatively soft, nest-like interior could be glimpsed through the edged apertures, half-submerged in stagnant water. Beyond the far corners of the deadfall, the pair came to its front where the creek widened into a large pond sitting at a crossroads of other streams. At the mouths of each, an identical mound had been erected, blocking off outflow.

“This pond fills up when it rains and the streams carry the water through the other parts of the forest little by little. We didn’t think we’d have to worry about it going dry till the summer. Someone had other ideas.” Cuppy whistled as he looked over the barricades.

“You think these are beaver dams, maybe?” Freyja asked.

“Dams yes, beavers probably not. The most ambitious beavers in the world couldn’t pull this off in a day. Something’s screwy going on here. Hey, look!” Cuppy pointed above the pond.

A dozen meters above the water’s surface, a plume of fog was twirling, retracting its running streamers and tendrils from the upper layers of the sky back into itself. At a glance one would be forgiven for thinking that the fog was just lake mist evaporating and rising from the pond, but no water vapor moved like this. The fog, as if finishing tasting the air, was flattening itself against the surface of the pond and spreading slightly to the banks, licking them. The whiteness grew denser and settled over the pond, greying out visibility of the pond’s span and depth. Cuppy and Freyja could make out subtle splashing within the mist’s obscuring shield, which spread distorted shadows out from whatever was casting them the way a prism breaks a ray of light into separate bands of color. Whatever it was those shadows belonged to, it was heavyset and shaped not unlike a large sea lion or other aquatic mammal. Its shrieks were all wrong though, splitting through the forest like the bloodcurdling wailing of a wounded horse gargling lungs full of swamp muck.

Overhead, a solitary Telescope Dragonfly bore witness, sensing the eruption of ether fog from the forest it had become stranded away from HQ in, and following it to its source. A low click repeated itself inside the robotic insect’s thorax.