Poisoned With Love

6

I had nightmares for months after my family was killed. Despite Iona's stubbornness to make me the hunter my folks never wanted, strong enough to avenge her entire family, I could never live up to her expectations. I had learned to use the silver knife in just a few months, but despite rare victories over my grandmother and the fact that I had killed one of her names on the list, it was never enough. It was five months before she stopped seeing me as the solution to all her problems. She was only satisfied with the fact that I had managed to learn to protect myself, so the training became rare and the silent meals gradually became just food ordered from the number on the fridge. Sometimes a whole week passed before I saw Iona again in the kitchen of my parents' house, first thing in the morning, cooking a breakfast with what she had found at random on the shelves and hugging me as if she hadn't been gone for days. But she always made sure that I read a new book and that way I remembered who the murderers of my family had been.

I was only 17 years old and I had grown up alone, but without condemning her lack of motherly sense. Any nightmare that caused me to wake up crying, in the middle of the night would have been seen as weakness and my daily routine as mundane. Instead, she would leave for weeks at a time to set up werewolf kills in various corners of the country, along with other hunters I had never met. I didn't understand why she had left me alone in the same house where my family had met their end, but the werewolves never came back. I found out a year later that it was due to him, the silver wolf that had spared my life that night.

I met him for the second time on my 18th birthday. I never had friends, maybe because I was an orphan whose family had been massacred by creatures still unknown to humans, or because I mostly split my time between my home library, school, and the woods behind my house. The summer I finished high school, however, I took a job at a bar in Inverness that, unknown to me at the time, belonged to one of the hunters who had once run the world with Iona. He had recently retired, so two nights a week he trusted me enough to hand the place over to me, let me bartend, and close at the end of the day.

I finished earlier than usual that day, so I chose to celebrate by myself with a coffee on the way home and ice cream. I was still in a clumsy attempt to open the front door that kept getting in my way when I saw him again that night.

"Happy birthday."

I heard the voice behind me like a sound carried by the wind on that cold April evening. We lived on the edge of the forest, so few ventured down the path that led to the main road to visit us, especially at that hour. I reacted cautiously, dropping the keys from my hand, but looking for the handle of the knife that I always carried in my bag. A few seconds later, I could already hear his footsteps on the stairs in front of the door, a sign that I wasn't a threat to him for a second.

"I don't know who you are, but I'm not afraid to use it!"This is when I raised the knife in the air for a second, just to bring it into his field of vision, during which the footsteps stopped.

I only saw his gaze shining in the darkness, then reflected in the window next to the door. I instantly recognised those eyes staring at me. Of the few memories I had of the night I had lost my family, on that same porch, the black eyes, hidden behind the blood-stained silver fur, had remained imprinted on my mind. They fixed me that night, too, as I sank into the darkness of the forest, and though I would have been easy prey, they did not attack me for a second.

The werewolf who had now exposed himself in his human form only left a package behind me on the wooden porch before disappearing into the darkness of the same forest I had fled to a year and a half ago. He could have easily felt my heart beating out of my chest and my desperation to survive that evening. Instead, he left behind a book wrapped in brown paper, and a journal with a phone number written on the back, signed "Adam K." Later, once inside the safety of my family's home, I dropped on the hall floor a crescent-shaped pendant, similar to the "B" that Iona wore around her neck from time to time, and which I had previously seen around my mother's neck as well. That was my first contact with true werewolf history, which I read in one night and re-read all week until I dared to call that phone number.