Antoinette woke after only a couple of hours, shuddering with cold. Despite the blanketing leaves, the night time wind had found her, stealing heat her exhausted body could not afford to replace. She shapechanged, grateful for the tiger’s furred pelt, and started off, limping stiffly and painfully until she warmed up.
The river turned abruptly northwards, away from Tracker. The drop to the river was steep and the water blue-green with depth. Forced to continue following the road, Tigresse skirted a small town and padded on.
Some time later, Tigresse paused. A deep, roaring sound echoed ahead of her, faint but definite. She and looked down into the endless depths of the river and looked downstream. Baffled, she sat down, willing the shapechange.
After a moment, Antoinette stood up, shivering in the cold wind, and looked over the edge of the cliff. Unable to determine the source of the sound, she shapechanged and continued northwards down the road.
She trotted along the highway, hoping it might have be a way across.
The road turned. A tiny parking lot held several cars at the edge of the cliff, and beyond it, ran across the river with a small building set on the downstream side. The sound a deep throbbing noise now, felt as much as heard through the concrete under her pads. At the other end of the dam, the road snaked up the far cliff of the canyon and dived into a deep cut heading westwards. The way across!
Slipping from shadow to shadow, she made her way out onto the dam. A chain-link fence with a brown and white sign on it lined the downstream side.
HELL’S CANYON DAM
SNAKE RIVER
She raced across the dam like an orange-and-black ghost, reaching the other side before any vehicles could reveal her in their headlights. She fled up the road with hysterical relief. Another barrier keeping her from Tracker, passed!
The burst of energy was soon spent, however. Tigresse lay panting in the shadow of a large rock, looking back down at the dam. Her passage had gone unnoticed. After a few minutes, she stood and started off into the mountains again, following the highway and the pull of her location-sense.
As the morning arrived, the mountains seemed to be growing lower. Exhaustion reduced her pace to a dogged trot. About mid-day, she reached another Interstate and crawled into a drainage culvert under it, falling into a leaden sleep.
She woke suddenly from a dream of Tracker. Close! Very close now! Only hours separated her from him. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain of it. A sudden, burning need to reach him filled her, frightening her with its intensity. She reached out with her dangersense, but it gave only a faint warning. Danger, but nothing pressing.
She crawled through the culvert to the other side and looked out. Early afternoon, by the sun. I must be careful, now that I am so close to them, she thought. The ones who stole Tracker must not know I am coming. She changed back to tiger form and slipped into the forest.
She ran steadily the rest of the day. The mountains grew lower and further apart. The sparsely settled land made it easy to avoid being seen. As darkness fell, it almost seemed she could reach out and touch Tracker’s hand. Her hunger to be with him again kept her going well into the night, long after she would otherwise have stopped for more sleep.
She passed a farmhouse about midnight. It was dark, with everyone asleep and no security lights outside. Laundry hung on the clothesline, startling her with its ghostly fluttering. A dog barked once, then fell silent as she moved downwind and passed the farm as silent as the moonlight.
Tigresse slowed to a walk. Ahead was a large cleared area with a tall chain-link fence around it. She could hear an odd, buzzing sound and smell a faint acrid scent. She eyed the fence suspiciously, then began to circle to her right, prowling the circumference. After an hour of careful padding and inspection of the perimeter, carefully avoiding being sighted by guards at two different gates along the way, she had returned to her starting point. She sat down and relaxed, willing the shapechange. She needed to think, to plan, and she could think better in human form.
Antoinette stood and pulled her hair over her left shoulder. It was tangled and dull. She raked her fingers through it as she tried to make a plan of some sort. He is in there, she decided. I must get to him and get him out. I can jump the fence and change back to human, then hunt for him. Either I will find him, or I will be captured. If they capture me, then I might learn who they are and where they have Tracker. As long as I can keep them from realizing I can change and go through the walls, I can escape as soon as I learn where he is and go free him.
But I will need the clothes. I can refuse to answer their questions, but if I am naked when they capture me, they will wonder why and I must not risk their guessing that I have the enhanced abilities. Perhaps that farmhouse. She changed back to tiger and retraced her steps.
She approached the silent building from downwind, mindful of the dog. In the farmyard, she shapechanged and padded barefoot across the grass to the clothesline. She found a lightweight blouse and an elastic-waisted skirt that barely fit her, hanging loose off her hips. Rolling them into a bundle, she changed back and picked it up in her mouth. The breeze shifted, and the dog woke with a cacophony of barking. She bolted for the woods as a light came on in the farmhouse and disappeared into the undergrowth.
