Tales of the Were

Chapter One

Adrian

Chapter One: Complicated

I am alone. Isolated from the world in which I inhabit; the world that has had no place for my kind for centuries. I am human. I am beastly. I am…unlike the others of this world. I am not completely sane, but of course that would be a drag if I was. There would be no adventure, no excitement. The thrill that we dream of as soon as we begin to recognize that single word…wow…the feeling is almost unreal.

           Quite like the feeling of hanging from a cliff-rock-climbing, I assume is what it is still called-with only a flimsy wire supporting your weight, but at the same time, you feel weightless and free. Wind soft on your face… a clear, couple hundred-feet drop beneath you…the pounding of your erratic heartbeat hammering in your chest.

          These are the moments my kind live for. Fear. The fear that drips off a human’s body when they feel unsafe or threatened. Vulnerability is what we relish from. Not our own vulnerability, of course. We are family. Pack-mates, if you will. So, we hold no interest in harming one-another when we are desperate. Instead, we come to the other’s aide and act as if nothing had changed in the relationship. The friendship…partnership…whatever you may call it, for us, it never changes.

          We are always the same…except when a full-moon is hanging in the air, that is. On those nights, we are restless, ruthless, and cruel to anything in our path. We don’t hunt as a pack. We feed as a pack. Which seems to be the only time we are ever together. At least, in my mind.

          I am alone. Well, not completely. My very own older sister/personal pain-in-the-ass is almost always by my side to make sure a stay within a 100-mile radius away from anything dangerous.

          “You’re too young and fragile,” she always sneers at me when I grunt at her about giving me my space.

          “You’re not my freaking mother,” I shoot right back every time. “And even if you were, I wouldn’t be here because my mother is a total CONTROLLING BITCH!”

          Okay, so that last part was just in my head. But I can assure you; it stayed hidden there for good, logical reasons. If I had said anything of the sort, she would have swung me onto her shoulders and hurdle me out of our pre-paid hut that sat safely tucked away in the corner of the woods.

          See, mom died just a couple of months ago and dad skipped out when Viv was a kid, so I never really knew him. All I know is, Viv and dad were pretty close, according to mom. Says they used to get up super early every Saturday morning to go hunting, and Viv loved every minute of it. I remember vaguely the sight of her beaming face one Saturday afternoon when they finally returned home, with a dead deer slung over dad’s shoulder. It always bugged me as a kid to see animals slaughtered and bloody but now it doesn’t bother me as much. Which is probably for the best, since its pretty much all I can force down my rigid throat. I still feel distasteful towards the salt/rust stench that practically screams into my nostrils whenever I’m near freshly-shed blood.

          Viv says I’ll grow more accustomed to the smell as I age but that doesn’t make me any more hopeful than before. So, to clarify, I’m not in any way excited for when I fully Turn. Or Change. Or, whatever it’s called, I am not looking foreword to it.

          Viv is about a year-in dog years, as I call it-since she transformed a little while after mom died. It must have been really rough on her when mom died, keeping in mind that dad’s little residuals that were left trailing behind him. My mom had to clean up everything when he left. She barely spoke for months, just trying to recollect herself and move on with her life. She knew that if we saw-as young as we were-that she wasn’t moving on, then we never would. She knew that it would haunt us forever, and I mean, literally.