glitch

chapter one - the invitation

Being a werewolf fucking sucks.

I know, I know: "Theo, don't say that!" I'm automatically the heartthrob in every teenaged human girl's dreams (Gag—I struggle to keep a straight face saying that) just because I was born with some wolfie-blood in me, so I should consider myself lucky, right? I was literally born to be mysterious, handsome, and hot.

Except, the thing is, I'm defective. I don't work how I should; I never have, and I honestly think I never will.

While everyone else around me was boasting about "meeting their wolves" (which, frankly, I never understood—our wolves aren't separate beings, they're just us, so there's nothing to meet) for the first time growing up, I was trying not to cry every time I attempted to shift, my body aching before fur even had a chance to sprout. It took me until I was eighteen to fully shift for the first time. Eighteen.

For reference, the vast majority of werewolf kids manage to shift fully by the age of fourteen—fifteen if they were late bloomers. But then comes along little old me, surpassing even the "late bloomers" by three whole years. And then, even when I did shift, I was still way behind my peers.

My parents blamed it on my late transformation, but it was humiliating all the same. I was excited when I first shifted because I thought that'd mean I'd finally be able to catch up to everyone else my age, but of course, the Gods just had to drag out my torment.

When werewolves turn eighteen, we start to get a surge of hormones every year in early spring. It goes by a number of different names, depending on who you ask: the Heat, as our grandparents call it (younger wolves phased that one out, thankfully; it just felt creepy), the Haze, the Rush, the Surge... essentially anything along those lines. My pack, the Mockingbird pack, tends to lean towards "the Haze" more than anything. This Haze makes us wolves... well, I suppose "horny as hell" is enough to describe it.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't like an uncontrollable need to have a bunch of sex. We just all get a bit "antsy", especially if we don't have a partner to share our Haze with...

...or, so I've been told, anyway. That's just another thing I've yet to experience. For the past two and a half years, I've been pretending to be Hazed just to fit in with everybody else, and every year, it feels more pathetic. The only reason I haven't been caught is because I have a "girlfriend" in "another pack."

(I don't, in fact, have a girlfriend at all, much less in another pack. I can barely get myself to socialize with the girls in my pack.)

But the biggest thing I hate about being me is that I still haven't met my mate.

You know that big moment that's in all the werewolf stories, where two wolves meet eyes and fireworks explode between them? That moment where he just knows she's the one, and vice versa? Yeah, I'm starting to think its bullshit.

Most wolves, supposedly, find their mates between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. Some, though, meet theirs as young as fourteen, and rarely, even younger. Meanwhile, my twenty-first birthday is in three months, and I haven't felt a single spark in my entire life.

While it isn't unheard of for wolves to find their one-and-only later in life, it's certainly not common; and, to my anguish, it usually only happens when their previous mates have passed away, and the oh-so-merciful Gods tactfully draw the widowed pair together so they don't have to spend the rest of their lives alone.

I've scoured forums and chatrooms for hours, begging to find some hope that I'm not destined for a lonely, quiet life of solitude and sadness, but the best information I've gotten has been "your mate's prob dead LOL sucks to be u man."