Suddenly they were broken apart, and it had happened so fast Adelaida paused to reflect. The wolf had been expecting more fury from the coyote, and yet the small creature stood before her, struggling for inward control. Part of Adelaida was disappointed, part of her was intrigued. She stood there with her shoulder bleeding, having anger the female to attack in the first place, and now they were just standing, staring at one another. It must have taken a lot from the coyote to willfully just snap off her momentum like that. Perhaps it was for the better, because despite her size and clever mind in these manners, Adelaida was not an experience fighter. Her trick of shifting weight may have kept her from a serious wound once, but it wouldn’t have worked twice, and although Adelaida welcomed such a response from the coyote, she did want to be able to walk away from this.
Her voice was still angry, it came out in a snarl, and yet as the masked female’s ears perked forward, she could hear a tinge of something else. Had it not been for that note, her mood would not have broken. Yet she heard it and it struck far deeper than her hatred of the coyotes. Adelaida was empathetic, and she did not usually go out of her way to cause stress and harm to others, so why was she here? Suddenly she had no answer. Blue eyes bored into the coyote, looking her over again, but Adelaida couldn’t bring herself to speak. No apology, no sarcasm, nothing would come out. She couldn’t put past the fact that the other was a coyote, but she couldn’t get the female’s words out of her head, and the longer she stood the more amplified that one note got into her head until she couldn’t stand to listen to the inner monolog any longer. With no word and no indication of why, she took a few steps backwards, keeping her eyes on the female, and then turned and left.
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