Devious Claws

Chapter One

It wasn't always easy knowing Luke Fanning.

He was a six foot, shaggy ball of undiagnosed ADHD bouncing walls, ceilings and ideas. He often wore the same shirt days in a row, creased from sleeping in it, and tussled his hair into a tower of brunette strands making him the picture perfect mad scientist. That's what he prided himself in being, a scientist, a truth-seeker who saw past the bullshit of the government or, hell, even the municipal authorities. At only twenty-two, he had some sizeable revelations under his belt -  like that time he claimed to have seen a UFO and then proceeded to spend a month printing flyers and littering his small suburbs with red papers featuring a blurry picture of a black dot in the sky underneath the words: "BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE". One of the flyers was hung up in his room, the attic above his mom's house, alongside souvenirs from his other quests.

Luke wasn't predictable, nor particularly understandable even to his near friends (of which only a few brave ones remained). Once, in high school, he exposed the cafeteria to be using expired bread for their sandwiches - a point he drove home by bringing a megaphone to lunch. That quest is my favourite, it always was; I remember sitting just right of him, a few tables away, and staring at his dirty Doc Martens stomping against the cafeteria table. He was wearing a wool shirt, it was grey and old but Luke himself was so fiery and alive that it didn't matter. I remember resting my chin in the palm of my hand as he yelled into the megaphone which distorted his words into a high-pitched squeal. He looked at me. Brought the megaphone down for a second. And squinted. "Do you enjoy that sandwich?"

I was enjoying it. "No."

"Exactly, because that bread is old and moldy - and they feed it to you regardless of what it may do to you longterm!"

There was always a them, I learned during my friendship with Luke. He and I were us and anyone else was the enemy. I was only sixteen, wide-eyed and sheltered, and I couldn't think of anyone else I'd ever adored that much. We stuck together through high school, when he actually showed up to classes, and I would always listen to his rants, spread his flyers and sometimes ditch class to help him do research in the school library.

He was my first love - even if he never knew it - and at twenty-one I still had a soft spot for the boy who had now become the neighborhood crazy. He stayed with his mom, surely because he didn't have anywhere to go but I liked to think that it was in part because he had always loved his little suburbia. We lost touch when I moved away for college; I never did share his love for the town we grew up in, despite my best efforts.

My mother wasn't warm and loving like his, and my mind never wandered far away enough to ignore that fact. By now I only came back for Christmas - even this year.

I walked the aisles of the supermarket that hadn't been renovated since the seventies. I put the same cookies in my cart that my mother had loved since I was a child. As I went to the counter, I could swear that the man behind the register was the same kid that had worked summers there a couple decades ago.

Nothing ever changed in Hillstone.

Not even the flyers, one of which hit my face as I stepped out of the supermarket, distracted by digging for my gloves in my pocket. The paper was pushed by the icy winds and remained firmly plastered to my face before I tore it off, huffing and puffing.

"BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE."

My anger dropped alongside my frown. On cue, my heart did a little skip and a hop. A few meters away, in a small circle made in the snow, stood a man no older than me. Spiky, gelled hair collected snow flakes while long fingers sprouted from within the much too big sleeves of an old leather jacket. Luke Fanning held out flyers to everyone who passed - and was adamantly ignored - while yelling something that was grabbed by the wind and thrown to the snow.

I almost didn't notice myself fixing my hair and correcting my scarf before I began making my way to him. Stupid, I chastised myself. He won't even remember you.

"Hey, Luke, I think you dropped this." I held out the flyer that I now noticed had a picture of a wolf on it.

A gaze, much darker and steadier than I had expected it to be, pinned me. "That's fine, I have enough. Keep it. Remember to watch your back around the old chocolate factory. Hold on..." Luke paused, as if the manuscript faltered and he tapped into his proper vocabulary. For some reason, I kept shifting my feet. "Do I know you?"

"No, I mean yes, yes you do. Or, well, you used to." Fuck, fuck, fuck. "I'm Cindy Williams."

"Cindy Williams," he echoed, looking like he was already losing interest.

I attempted a small smile but imagined it looked rather painful in the nipping air. "We used to hang in high school."

A flicker of recognition lit up his eyes. He slapped the flyers in his right hand against his left palm, a wide smile slowly stretching across his face. "Cindy! My side-kick!"

It was a bit embarrassing how I let out a relieved sigh. I laughed. "Yes, of course."

"You used to have braces," he announced, pointing the pile of flyers at me. "But now you don't."

"Exactly."

"And you're hot now!" He stepped back, making a point of looking me up and down, letting out a low whistle. "Ay, ay, ay, look at you! College treating you good, I bet."

It was such a cheesy bit, and had anyone else done it then it would be annoying. But something about Luke - maybe it was the disarming smile or the fact that he looked like he hadn't aged a day - made the words endearing. I smiled. "How have you been, Luke?"

"Me? Good, good. Just been trying to spread the truthful word, but y'know," he paused, attempting to hand off a flyer to another customer quickly hurrying by, "nobody in this town wants to hear it."

"That's too bad." I switched the groceries to my other hand, feeling the cold beginning to creep inside my coat. "How's your mom?"

"Ah," he said dismissively. "Ma's doing great but, err, dad died a few months ago."

"I'm sorry, Luke." I wasn't. I never met his dad. I'd never heard of him either. I honestly wondered if they even had a relationship at all. "That must be tough."

Luke scratched his head, seemed a bit aloof suddenly. "It is. Especially since it was the werewolves in the old chocolate factory that got him."

The old chocolate factory. That building was deserted even when I was a kid, but for some reason was never torn down. Teenagers used to go there to smoke weed or drink - Luke and I had spent some evening there; me, listening to his stories and him rolling the joints. And I don't know what it was but as I stood there outside of the supermarket, suddenly he looked no different than the sixteen year old yelling about old bread in the cafeteria. And I felt a need to keep him safe, get him away from the glaring people entering and exiting the store.

"Hey, Luke, it's getting pretty cold. You want a ride home?"

Luke paused, looked to his papers as if he had important work to do and I just asked him to clock out early. "Err, yeah, sure. I'm just going to leave this here." Before I could ask, he threw the flyers up into the air. The wind caught them, spreading them around. Like red leaves, they swayed slowly to the ground. Luke watched me as I watched them, and then grinned. "Alright, let's go."

"That's littering, you know. It's against the law."

"How would you know?"

"I'm studying Law."

"Like, law inforcement?"

"No, like judicial."

"That's good." Luke quieted for a second, getting into my mom's old Volvo, before shutting the door and looking at me. "The police force is infested by aliens, you see."

I laughed, turning the key. "You really haven't changed, Luke."

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A/N

Hear ye, hear ye!

I'm back on Wattpad!

I got logged out of my last account and, I'll admit, lost my will to write (and live) for a bit. But here come Christmas break, and with that, a new story!

Hope you like werewolves.

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