The darkness slowly receded, yielding to the hazy fog of returning to consciousness. Azaria's senses awakened one by one, the first impression being the biting chill of the night air seeping through her coat from the cold ground beneath her. Close behind came warm wetness dragging repeatedly across her cheek and jaw. Her mind was foggy and still half there in the safety of her everyday routine, it reached instinctively for the most logical explanation to what was happening in the moment.
"Stop it, Wolf," she mumbled groggily, her voice barely a rough whisper against the night. She lifted a hand to shoo away the dog, assuming her husky had somehow snuck into her bedroom to pull his usual morning antics.
Her eyelashes fluttered, her vision adjusting slowly to the pale glow of the moon filtering through the high forest canopy above, but as the shapes around her adjusted into focus, her breath hitched in her throat, her entire body freezing.
It was not her dog.
