Teige stood at the edge of the narrow dirt road, waiting, his mane and tail caught in the slight late-night breeze. Behind him was the gas station Hawk had pointed them towards--it was empty and dark, and even the road sign that had marked the dirt lane had fallen over. There was no light on the road but for the nearly-full moon.

The werewolf had come barreling up the hill a while after he and Parker and Abi and Minnie had reached this spot. Pushing past Teige, the werewolf--who was galloping on all fours, his face rather alarmingly smeared with blood--charged helplessly towards Parker and Abi and Minnie, who stood in the shadow of the forest.

"I dunno what t'do for him," he was telling them--he was carrying a limp, bloody animal shape in the crook of one arm--"Those fucking dogs--"

At his heels came the peryton, half-running and half-gliding with his odd wing-arms, and he urged the werewolf now to set the creature down, to let him take a look.

Teige began to pace. The peryton was not a healer but a doctor, and was telling the werewolf sternly to calm down and help him--Teige wasn't really listening to this, either, instead focused on the pops and bangs rising up periodically from down in the valley. The spot where they'd been was glowing now, orange with steady fire, red occasionally with the explosion of spells.

He trotted back and forth for a moment before noticing another, more golden, glow coming up towards him out of the forest below. This turned out to be Kim and Aram--the former with her horn glowing, the latter struggling up the steep hill beside her. Teige ducked his head to help them up the rest of the way, letting Aram grip his forelock in order to pull himself onto the level road. Immediately Parker spotted this and came to help, calling back over her shoulder to the peryton-doctor that they had another casualty.

He'd tell her what to do to stop the bleeding, he said. Parker shied away from this idea, saying she couldn't--

Teige had stopped pacing now. He made for a very large horse, and now this horse was pausing at the edge of the road, muscles bunched up as if to spring down into the woods towards the valley again. He hung his head forward, headlamp eyes huge and frankly quite scared.

The next reports of gunfire up from the valley seemed extra loud, seemed to drown everything else out. He remembered, just for a sour instant, the sight of his own blood on Hawk's fingers. He'd seen it before, and every time he did, the blood seemed redder and brighter.

All the bunched-up muscle, then, did not propel him forward--rather he backed up sharply, away from the edge of the road. For a moment he stood, half-hearing the peryton talking in the background, and then began to pace uselessly again.