Celestial Heartbeat (Book One) COMPLETE

Chapter Twenty Six - Revelations (REN)

Note: The image on the side is a drawing of Evie and Ren done by the lovely artist  DaryaSpace of Deviantart :) Please go check her out!

~Ren~

I hadn’t been human for over three days.

After shifting when Marcy had disappeared I’d done nothing but run around frantically trying to locate her. Finding people was usually something I was good at. Which also explained my uncanny knack for avoiding people. My nose never failed me and for that very reason it was my very favourite part about my curse. But I felt as hopeless at finding her as I did at math. I was following all the right formulas, I could find the patterns but never the solution or the answer. I could smell Marcy everywhere and could find everywhere that she had been. Her home, her college, her local park. Everywhere but where she currently was.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Heck, I could barely think. To put it delicately, I was a mess. A huge, stinking mess. By the time that I realized that I wasn’t shifting back to my human form when I should have, it only sent more panic buzzing into my brain. I couldn’t decide whether the curse was making itself permanent and I’d somehow misinterpreted the dates I’d been told my whole life, or if whatever force had taken Marcy away had also messed with my curse. But by the time the third day rolled around and acceptance was settling in over top of my panic I remembered something that my mother once said to me.

‘Don’t let your fear control you. You are not a monster. You are only afraid.’

She said it to me a lot when I was younger. Mostly because when I was little and I would shift at night, all I could think about was the way that dad was fully wolf and that I was destined for the same fate. I’d get so wound up and terrified that I’d start trying to tear apart our furniture and pillows. I would always feel horrible once I was back in my human form again and mum would always reassure me that fear was just a manipulative emotion that could both disable and enable us from doing things, depending on how we let it treat us.

I wasn’t stuck in my wolf form because the curse had finally claimed my human body, or that any other caster had forced me into it. I was stuck in my wolf form because I was afraid. There was nothing more terrifying than the notion that I would have to return to my human form and face the fact that Marcy was gone, Evie would be next and I’d have to deal with the thousands of missed calls from Cosmo.

But I had to.

I couldn’t waste my last moments as human by being a wolf.

So on the third night I’d headed over to Evie’s. I was exhausted, physically weak from not eating and barely sleeping. I was scared of seeing her. Scared of her anger that she’d feel towards me and scared of having to explain to her the danger that she was in. But I was growing weaker and sicker, and if there was any hope of me turning human again I was sure it was to be at Evie’s side. After all I had shifted in my sleep without so much as blinking awake for a second.

I don’t remember much of showing up at Evie’s house. Only the sweet scent of her and the happiness I felt when she didn’t smell like anger; only concern. But somehow I ended up laying in her bed, unable to keep my eyes open any longer than they already had been.

**

“Ren… Ren. Are you awake?”

Evie’s voice stirred my mind and light began to fill the darkness beneath my eyelids as I awoke. I couldn’t remember falling asleep next to her, or much else for that matter, but it seemed like a good start to any day.