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[Demeter]

She no longer cared to maintain her secretive mad scramble-dash from safe point to safe point. She now ran as fast as she could for the castle ahead. Between her injured leg and the heavy weight of her womb, she wasn’t all that speedy right now. She could hear the pack of dogs behind her, baying and gaining on her.

She’s bided her time for centuries, waiting for them to return to England. A week ago she’d felt it, like a bell tolling in her heart, that Robin and Will had returned to England together. She’d made her escape, dropping what she’d been doing and running. Her current captor had grown lazy at her apparent acceptance of the situation and had stopping using chains, ropes, and other means to contain her. His loss, she’d thought as she staggered around a corner.

She’d waited millennia for this moment and she’d have waited millennia more for it.

She knew her captor wasn’t after her so much as the kit she carried. There was a thriving underground market for Elemental Shifters kept as pets and the kit had potential to be a very valuable asset. Her current captor, a cruel woman, liked to brag on how much it had cost her to acquire the pure-breed English Elemental Red Fox stud.

When Richard had passed and John had ascended to the throne, she and the boys had been persecuted. Robin and Will had been cut down and she, while fleeing in fox form, had been caught in a snare. Her punishment for rejecting him and siding with her men was to be treated, he said, as the high born bitch she was.

John had his black hearted magic user curse her to remain as a fox for all time. She’d been spelled mute and all would be bewitched to be deaf and blind. And then he’d handed her over to his Master of the Hounds to breed up little foxes for hunting sport.

She’d been bought, sold, traded, stolen, inherited and given away to a variety of people since then; all of them believing that having a fox elemental as a pet was an exotic and daring thing. One had noticed the spells and had altered them to trap her in her current hybrid state.

She’d known her men had died and she’d felt the ebb and flow of them as they’d passed in and out of human lives. She’d felt the pulse of their current lives for centuries as they’d returned to a state of being that could do something. And now they were back in England.

She ran up the road to the castle, leg and back aching. The hounds were growing closer and the riders of their horses shouting about what a jolly good time hunting her was. She heard the disgruntled shouts of the townsfolk. As she passed under the gateway, she felt the familiar pulses of her men. With the riders rushing in behind her and the castle guards rushing towards her, Marion screamed for Robin.

****
In their tower room, still sorting through the aftermath of Lilythorn, Ellie half listened to the commotion outside. At the first screamed call for Robin, Finn and Colby’s heads snapped up. At a second cry for Will, they shot up and out of the room.

[Maira]

The Lilythorn incident had been exhausting for all of them, and Finn was more than ready for a break. He'd been lost in thought when a scream for "Robin" caused him to drop the record of one of the rescued Lilythorn children. When a second cry, more desperate and the same voice, Finn lurched to his feet and bolted for the door. It took a moment for him to realize that Colby was also sprinting through the corridors and, for a moment, he thought he saw somebody else running beside him. Somebody in clothes from a long ago time period. A servant screeched as the two men tore around the corner, and Finn had to look forward to keep from running into the poor young man. When he glanced back at Colby, the strange vision of the other person was gone. Shaking his head once in confusion, Finn put it out of his mind and focussed on the source of the voice.

As he hurried to make his way down from the tower and out of the castle into the courtyard, Finn silently called to all willing canines in the vicinity. **Save the woman! Let no harm come to her!**

Those unfamiliar with how keen animal senses were, would wonder how such a simple command could get the desired results, but included in the message was the feeling of panic the woman's screaming had caused in him and that implied that she would be panicked too. Animals, especially cunning canines, could smell panic and sense a person's true intent. They'd find her and surround her until he could get there.

*****

Before Finn reached the courtyard, the place started filling with dogs. Most of them rushing from the village through the gate on the heels of a terrified woman. Finn's own hounds, never caged in case of situations like this where he had to summon them mentally, came running from the direction of the stables (the stable boy was a softy who spoiled them with treats now and then), and rushed to meet the village dogs and the woman. A very short way away, the hounds with the riders broke out of their lazy hunting lope (meant to keep them fresh while tiring out their prey) and joined the pack of dogs now surrounding the woman.

The woman screamed when the hunting dogs joined the strange pack around her, just as Finn and Colby finally burst out into the courtyard. At the same time the the castle guards met the hunters at the gate, the woman safely behind them with the dogs. Having seen Finn's hounds among the pack, the guards had left the dogs to their work and focussed on the actual threat.

Seeing the growing pack of dogs, Finn let out one last burst of speed and joined them as they circled the woman. When he got close enough, Finn smelled fox. It only took a moment for him to realize that the scent was coming from the woman and when she turned around to face him he nearly toppled where he stood. "Marian?" he exhaled, feeling like he'd been kicked in the gut by a horse but not knowing why. He didn't know anybody named Marian. Let alone a female fox shifter or elemental.

Like in the hallway with Colby, another person was suddenly standing in front of Finn. This time she was human with long curly brown hair and older styled clothes. Jostled from an elbow to his ribs, Finn blinked and looked at the offended. He caught Colby looking a little dazed too and when he looked back, the woman was gone and in her place was the poor woman-fox hybrid. Same dark curly hair, but otherwise very fox looking in modern women's clothing. A very pregnany belly was testing the stretch of her clothes.

The belly was what finally shook Finn from his haze, and he stormed around in front of her, his hounds still mingled with the village dogs and the hunting hounds behind him. Faced with two men and some dogs, Finn had no doubt that the hunters would have pressed their advantage, but with a castle full of guards pointing weapons in their general direction, the hunters stopped a short distance from the woman, men, and the milling pack of dogs.

"Whatever it was you thought you were going to do to this woman is clearly not going to happen, gentlemen." Finn sneered, before adding with a snarl, "I suggest you go home now."

While waiting for the hunters to turn their horses and leave, Finn questioned the hunting hounds if they were happy with their current masters and offered a place in his pack to any that weren't. He was mildly surprised when even though they had all happily done his bidding to protect the woman, only three stayed. And one of them was barely more than a pup. This was probably even his first hunt.