Snoek-Brown Hagridden (excerpt)
The wind picked up, some squall brewing out in the Gulf, and it woke the old woman already distressed from dreams of her son returned from the war faceless and without wits, just a dumb smear of blood where once his features had been. She reached across the pallet to find the girl missing, and without thought she leapt from the pallet and ran toward the hut door, but upon opening it she beheld the dark red face of a wolf, huge crimson shoulders hunched behind and the hulking mass of a man-sized beast emerging through the rushes. Flash of bone-white teeth in the starlight. The creature paused and swayed on light forelimbs as though wrought solely of pent-up energy, and a low rumble near to laughter rolled up from deep in its throat. Then it charged her and she screamed and fled back into the hut. She dove to the floor and tore through their stores hunting the first weapon she could find, but the creature burst in after her and grabbed her about the waist and hauled her away from the stockpile, threw her meatily to the floor by the door. She scrambled and tried to dodge around the rougarou, still after a weapon, so it hit her hard in the face and then reached and grabbed one ankle, dragged her scrabbling out of the hut and flung her across the yard. She rolled to a crouch and made to run but the beast seemed precognizant of all her thoughts and moved with her, circling with its arms and legs wide to snatch her from her flight, cutting off her every escape. And it spoke. “Settle down, now, I ain’t what you think I am.” The woman’s eyes went wide and her face contorted and she began to holler. “Oh Christ, it speaks with the tongue of man, Lord save us!”
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