More:
Aya and her sister, Elli, fled a raid on their home village and never went back after waiting two weeks at the designated emergency rendezvous only to have no one arrive. They struck out north, to the wastes, concerned they might be followed, and took odd jobs to pay their way. One such job took them to an isolated home asking for temporary security, but their arrival was late enough that they were asked to stay the night and begin their duties in the morning. Aya woke in an unfamiliar room to a searing pain in her back, and went in search of her sister to find her dead, the victim of some kind of implantation experiment. The perpetrator, their employer, was gone, and Aya systematically destroyed the facility, finding another experiment victim in the process, and they're searching for the man responsible.

Sample:
"How is it?"

"Do you really want me to tell you?"

Aya sighed, letting her shirt drop back without even attempting to look in the mirror behind her. "So it is spreading." She had known that -- the network of slender lines had been growing ever since Yumil had burned the arcane symbol into her back.

"Slowly, yes." Her companion stretched her legs in front of her and arched her back with a weary sigh. "I'm sure there's some way to fix it."

"I'm not." Aya offered a crooked smile, reaching up to brush her fingers through her her hair. The short crop startled her for a moment, a recent change and a meager attempt to disguise the fact that her hair, too, was changing. Growing paler. She looked at her companion, and the smile faded. "Though I suppose I have less to complain about than you."

"Oh, didn't you know I always dreamed of being a dog?" The slender hound laughed, shaking her hanging ears. "It's just one more thing to take out of the bastard's hide," she added.

"True enough." Her tone turned momentarily grim.

"We'd better get on this, though. Child missing, and all that."

"Child dead," Aya corrected her. "I don't think there's any rush."

"But they don't know that yet."

"Ruun, they've lived here longer than we have ... I think they know." She got to her feet, though, brushing off her breeches with no discernible effect, apart from kicking dust into the air.

"There's knowing and there's knowing."

"Aren't you considerate today."

The hound got to her feet, ambling lazily toward the door. "Maybe I've had a litter, Aya, you consider that? You wouldn't know."

"Not even the most desperate dog would take you." She walked out the door, sliding her weapons, sword and gun, into place at her belt.

"Oh, that's horrible! How could you say that!"

Aya didn't answer, nodding a brief acknowledgment to their current employer, a brown, stocky woman who owned the small inn they were staying at.

"Who knows," she said quietly as they walked down the stairs. "Maybe we'll get some exotics to sell out of this."

"I'd rather just exterminate them," grumbled Ruun. "Those things are an abomination."

"True enough." But so are we.

She felt a tingle trace the lines of the arcane circle and wondered not for the first time if Yumil knew they were hunting him. And, if he did, what he had prepared for their arrival.