The Wolf Bridge

Chapter 2

Author's Note at End

When I was young, I played in the wheat fields near where I lived. Wandering around the fields with the wheat at full height over my head. As I grew older and taller, the shorter the wheat seemed to get. There were times when I would sit in the wheat fields and somehow still see things over the tops of the strands swaying. Every time I sat amongst the wheat strands it was always comfortable but new. A different sunset or sunrise. A new storm or another heat wave. It was where I went when I needed to get away from the suffocation of life. Where I would go after being bullied.

Most werewolves start the shifting process between thirteen and sixteen years of age. I was eighteen when I finally had my initial shift. My parents, and even part of me, had given up hope of me ever getting a wolf before then. All the kids thought it was because I didn't want a wolf. I did want a wolf. I wanted that presence in my mind to comfort me, to help me, to reason with me. To be able to partner with the other side of me and become one.

With my father being an enforcer of the pack, even without shifting during the normal years, he trained me to fight, to protect. But there were always those in training sessions whispering, 'what could she protect without a wolf.' And what could I protect without having a wolf? I could not shift and go on pack runs. I trained just like everyone else, only to sit home at night crying knowing I couldn't be normal. That I couldn't go on a run or do a perimeter check or anything else that a wolf could.

During that time is when the city became a place where I could go and be seen as normal. I could be sixty stories high in the air and not need a wolf. I made sure to be studious. I could get a respectable job and create something for myself. Help and protect my pack in others way, like being a lawyer.

I was alone when my first shift occurred. Usually there are signs a first shift is coming. Growing pains ten times worse than any other pain, is what some kids said it felt like. They could start feeling an inner stirring and then there was heat, a lot of it.

I was driving home from the town after pulling a night shift at the local cafe as a waitress. There was no warning to the shift. No stirring in my mind that another presence was there. No heat, except the summer night air. No growing pains, and I had not grown in a few years. I peaked at five feet nine inches and that had been during the tenth grade.

All I knew was that one second, I was driving home down a two-way highway road and the next I was a muddled heap of bones and fur feet away from the overturned car. It had been an interesting sensation being in wolf form for the first time. I couldn't tell my fur color at the time, but later I would discover it was a deep brown with black undertones in it. That night I lay dry grass on the hard ground whimpering and shivering with stress and shock. I didn't know what to do. I was nowhere prepared to shift into a wolf..

Thankfully, my parents, seeing that I hadn't come home by a certain time, had come looking for me. They found the overturned car and located me in wolf form, pathetically lying on the ground. Surprise would have been an understatement at seeing me as a wolf. Dad had picked me up, placed me in the back of their car, while mom dug around the overturned car for any belongings before taking me home.

~~

The pounding in my head subsided to an extent but was still painful. The only consolation was that at least I was laying on something soft to ease other pains I was feeling. My body felt weighted, and it took an eternity to be able to try and pry an eyelid open.

A cool cloth was set against my forehead which helped pry that stubborn eyelid open, only to see the fuzzy shape of a large person overhead.

"She is waking up." a male voice I did not recognize said.