I was half-mad with joy and terror as I got up from my bed, my footsteps making no noise at all as I left the room, my shirt almost hanging off of my body while my pajama pants were uncomfortably tight. I crept down the halls, peeking around corners and keeping an ear out for any sound, no matter how slight. When I was sure that nobody would see me, I almost sprinted down the halls, my footsteps still utterly silent as I entered the showers, closing the door behind me with a soft 'click'. I was shaking as I approached the mirror, stopping myself from reaching to touch the reflection. My face was the face in my dream. My body was her body, small but fast. Tiny claws had replaced my fingertips, sharp and quite possibly lethal. My ears stuck out of the top of my head, twitching and turning as they took in every little noise around me, the mass of fluff atop them making me very aware of the slightest change in the air currents around me. My eyes were her eyes, red irises with black sclera, greedily taking in every detail of my new body.
I froze as I heard it. Footsteps coming down the hall. Towards me. More than just one pair, five adults, one child. My heart began to hammer away at my chest, the footsteps seeming to slow as I desperately searched for a way out. No windows in the room, no place to hide that they couldn't easily find me, no… I looked up, mind whirling. The panels. All it took was two leaps, one onto the wall, another to grab onto the ceiling and move the panel out of the way, get into the crawl space and move it back into place just before the door opened. I froze, not moving a muscle as I listened.
"I saw… I saw whatever demon that took Max come down this way, Sister May." Peter's voice echoed on the linoleum. Demon?
"You did well to tell us of the monster, Peter, but it seems that whatever it is has escaped the Lord's justice this day. Officer, is there any way for you to set up a search for this… creature?" Sister May's voice lacked the sister undertone it usually had when talking down to one of us kids, but I could still make out the faint traces of malicious glee.
"The department don't got the resources to spare for that, ma'am, but I could see about reaching out to a few of my FOH buds, see what they can do about this whole mess." FOH? I frowned in my crawlspace, ignoring Peter for the moment and trying to puzzle out what was going on.
"That would be a great help. I've already begun reaching out to some in the Church that may be able to help us exorcise the monster from poor Maxwell once the demon's vessel has been captured." I fought the urge to shift, keeping my ear to the room below me and waiting for my chance to run.
"I'll let the Friends know, but the boy might be too far gone to be helped. We'll take the thing alive, if we can." A hiss of breath left my lips, barely audible. I froze, ears straining.
"Anyway, I'll be staying around for an hour or so, try and take it in if the thing happens to come back."
"That would be greatly appreciated, officer. The other children will be waking soon, so I must prepare breakfast and find a way to break the news."
The shower room door opened, five pairs of adult footsteps leaving, the sixth pair that belonged to Peter following shortly after. The police, and whoever those 'Friends' are would be hunting me, and I had absolutely no idea what to do. I remained frozen in place for five minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to calm my hammering heart as my mind scrambled to come up with a plan. In the dream, I was fast and strong, but I didn't know how well that would translate to reality. Didn't know if I'd be able to escape. I took in another breath, letting it go and steeling myself. I couldn't just live in the ceiling, hide away and hope that nobody ever found me. I'd have to run, see if I could find someone, anyone, to help me.
A claw dug into the plaster of the ceiling tile, slowly shifting it out of place. I looked around the shower room, double checking that nobody had entered while I wasn't paying attention, then dropped down, landing on my feet. I looked up at the out-of-place tile with a scowl, debating if I should try to slide it back into place, but decided that the time wasted doing so would only hurt my chances of escape. Instead, I pressed one of my new ears up against the door, listening for anything out in the hallway. Footsteps from downstairs, a couple of people moving inside of the dorms, none out in the hallway, that I could hear anyway. I moved my hand to the knob, slowly turning it and preparing myself to run like heck if there was anyone in the hall to see me.
Poking my head out the door, there wasn't anyone waiting out there for me, none of the officers, Sisters, or other Orphans. I wasn't at all relieved, not yet. I still had to escape from the building, then get out of the area and try to find help. I left the shower room slowly, creeping down the hall as quietly as I could, the pads on the bottom of my new feet muffling any of the sounds I might make. My confidence increased as I made it to the stairs, creeping down while keeping an ear out for the noise of anyone approaching. There was a window on the other side of the lobby, one that was pointed towards the woods, though they were a ways off from the Orphanage still. One more look around, nobody was there that I could see, and I almost sprinted to the window, yanking open the latch and pulling on the frame with all my might as I heard heavy footsteps rapidly approaching. I finally got it open as the footsteps rounded the corner.
"Freeze, freak!" I did not, yanking myself through the window and flinching as the 'BANG' of the police officer's firearm went off, the bullet missing me by inches. It seemed to be moving… slow, though. I picked myself up off of the gravel, the rocks that I'd kicked up in my fall almost suspended in midair. What? I shook my head, ignoring the headache that was building, and began to run through the open field, towards the woods. The bullet began to trail behind me as I ran, leaping over fences and sliding under cows, the bullet hitting one of the poor animals in the front leg as I pulled myself over the last fence, scrambling down the hill and into the underbrush. My pajama pants caught on some of the underbrush by my knee, tearing a hole in the fabric that I had to ignore as I fled further and further into the woods.
Things around me started to speed back up as I crossed over a stream, hopping from rock to rock as the waters below me began to flow again, the suddenness of the transition startling me enough that I nearly fell in. I balanced myself on the stone, gritting my teeth and fighting against my sudden exhaustion as I leapt to the next, then the next, jumping one more time and rolling to a stop at the riverbank, panting and staring at the sunlight filtering through the trees. I didn't know how far I'd actually ran through the woods, keeping track of the distance travelled hadn't exactly been a priority, but it must've been a fair distance, because I couldn't hear any distant vehicles, or the yelling of whoever was hunting me. With a groan, I picked myself up out of the mud, trying my best to wipe it off of my pajamas and beginning to walk. There were trails that wild animals would take, mostly deer tracks with some other, smaller, ones that I couldn't properly recognize. It didn't matter what it was, really. Probably a fox. I took deep breaths as I wandered down the path, the burning in my lungs making it hard for me to keep on moving, even if I knew I couldn't stop. Not now, not while they could be so close behind me.
My feet didn't sink into the ground, nor leave any tracks that I could see when I looked behind me, but that didn't mean that they wouldn't have dogs or something like that, something that didn't need tracks to find me.
-
"Just.. gotta keep on going." I muttered to myself, hand briefly resting on the bark of a tree, claws digging into the surface as I anchored myself, taking couple of deep breaths while I gazed up at the sky. I'd been walking for hours now, enough time that the sun was almost directly overhead, it's rays filtering through the leaves to illuminate the foliage around me. I hadn't really slowed my pace at all since the river, and that was starting to take it's toll on me, no matter how well built my body was for constant movement. I hadn't heard anything that would lead me to believe that the hunters had my trail, but I couldn't let wishful thinking blind me to the reality that I was a target right now. They thought that I was a demon, or something like that anyway, that had stolen my body, and that meant they'd be really fudging motivated to hunt me down, get 'Max' back.
I pushed myself off of the tree's trunk, forcing myself through more shrubs and bushes as I fought against my body's exhaustion. The fact that my pajamas were completely filthy and torn in so many places didn't bother me as much as it probably should have, might have something to do with the fuzz (fur?) that now covered me from head to toe. I pushed aside the branches of a smaller tree, ducking under the ones that I could without getting my ears caught and continuing onto another worn trail, no human footprints, but plenty of hoof-prints from deer and faint paw-prints that I couldn't figure out the source of. Wolves, maybe? I shuddered at the thought, putting one foot in front of the other and trying very hard not to think of what sharp-toothed monsters might be present in the woods.
It was as I began on my way down a slope in the woods, still following the deer tracks, that the hairs all over my body began to stand up. I didn't know why, but whatever was causing it couldn't be good, so I started moving faster, my poor, abused muscles complaining as I began to jog instead of merely walk, trying to keep myself from making too much noise. I moved as quickly as I could through the woods, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
I heard the barking of the dogs in front of me, and behind me, the exited yelling of my hunters just a bit further away. I grit my teeth as I forced myself to start running to my right, where I couldn't hear any of the dogs or people, crashing through the underbrush and using low hanging branches to launch myself further, like I'd done in the dream. The world stuttered for a moment, time slowing and resuming randomly as I ran for my life, the dogs so close now that I could hear their steps as they chased me, barking and snarling and howling like something out of a nightmare. I didn't turn around to see them, jumping onto a branch and scrambling as high as I could go in the tree.
The dogs waited in a circle around the base, snarling and snapping as their human masters came into view. Each and every one of them was dressed in leathers, a some with a tactical harness over the top of it, and all of them holding a firearm. Pointing them at me. One of them, a man with a buzz-cut and a trimmed red beard, the leader if I had to guess, looked me directly in the eye, grinning.
"This is gonna end one of two ways, freak! You get your ass down here, and you might get to live." He gestured towards his rifle with a malicious gleam in his eye. "Or you stay up there and we fill you with lead." I stared back at him, breaths coming quicker, panic seeping into my mind. Was this how I was going to die? I froze as goosebumps began to trail up and down my body, another voice coming from just above and behind me. It was that of an older man, with a faint trace of a german accent.
"I have an alternative suggestion." I slowly turned my head, trying to stop my body from shaking. The first thing I noticed about the man was his helmet, a shining scarlet with silver accents, dipping down to cover the nose and protect his head. The cape on his back fluttered in the wind, the rest of his armor seeming to be a strange blend of metal and leather, covering all of his body but his lower face and eyes. Despite the cool politeness of his tone, the man's mouth was twisted into a severe frown, eyes locked onto the men who'd been hunting me.
The weapons, guns and blades, were ripped out of their hands and their harnesses, the screeching of metal and muffled explosions of gunpowder going off made me wince, the noises echoing in my hearing. The floating man's eyes shot to me, his frown lightening somewhat as he returned his eyes to the men beneath us.
"You will run, flee as far from us as possible, and I will, perhaps, not hunt you down like the animals you are." It didn't take more than that for the hunters to grab onto their dog's collars and start running. The older man watched them for a moment, before turning to me, a relieved smile forming on his face.
"I am sorry that it took me so long to find you, child. My name his Erik, a mutant, like you." Mutant? He reached out a hand, smile still firmly in place. I took in his features, those that were visible beneath the helmet, anyway. His was a kind, grandfatherly, face, his eyes understanding and kind.
"There is a place, far from here, where mutants like you and I are safe. It belongs to a good friend of mine, and I have no doubt that he would take you into his care in a heartbeat." The decision wasn't that hard to make.