The Wolf Bridge

Chapter 4

Author's Note at End

Retreating to my room for the rest of the day and night. There was no appetite for food and a lot of the emotions that I had long ago buried were rising to the surface. Taking a long hot shower after high tailing it back to the room. The water slid over skin, as I stood face tilting up to the shower spray. The water combined with salty tears I couldn't hold in anymore. Immediately crawling into the large bed after the shower, wrapping the blankets around me as a barrier, a protection. Staying like that until the morning when the sun was shining brightly through the window. I hadn't drawn the curtains before falling asleep.

Lying in bed facing the ceiling as memories of my prior pack came up, conversations I'd overheard from my parents, the teasing in high school, the normalcy I had felt in college, and the last real conversation I had with my parents.

In the pack, I had friends start shifting around fourteen and fifteen years old. We would whisper or pass notes during high school about how they felt the growing pains and a push against the back of their mind.

Wolves would show up in our mid teen years, as both our human body and our wolf would be at an age 'mature' enough to handle the other.

The feelings would intensify until they were kept home from school, until their first shift happened. Then within a week, they were back at school somehow seeming more mature and prouder.

As I started getting closer to the age of sixteen and there were no pains or pushing against my mind, those who I had been friends with started asking if I was even going to get a wolf. I would adamantly respond 'Yes!' that I would. Soon sixteen came and passed with no wolf. We went to a high school with humans from another neighboring town, so as those in the pack started getting their wolves, they started hanging together more so than before getting their wolf. The humans 'wouldn't understand' and soon I didn't understand.

My friends in the pack moved away from me, and I tried making friends with the humans, but they were not interested in new friends at that point.

High school then became a place where instead of feeling like I could belong, it became a desert of nothingness. I turned towards my studies even harder. Maybe if I could be the smartest one in the pack, then I would be accepted.

My parents' stress began to rise, though they tried to hide it. How could they have had a child with no wolf? It was not something that happened, ever. Dad, being friends with the Alpha and Beta, began to send out letters if something like this had happened before. Had any other wolf been a late bloomer? Of course, no names were involved. Answers came back and though while it wasn't common, there were cases where a child born of two wolf parents hadn't ever received a wolf. Most packs integrated those individuals into their pack regardless of the lack of a wolf.

My pack wasn't that way. They treated me decently and were polite, but they never embraced me as one of them. When I finally shifted, there was shift in the pack. They were anxious to see what would happen. While there was a warmer reception after shifting, there was still an awkwardness living with them all that I couldn't do the normal wolf things, like shift and run perimeter routes. I wouldn't become an enforcer, like father, and I had no clue what to do around blood or stitching a wound, like mom.

When I told them I had been accepted into a university and was going for a Law degree, they questioned it. They didn't understand the need for me to go to college. But when I said I would have an emphasis in Wildlife and Environmental litigation to help the pack, they were more supportive.

The years at college breathed life back into me. The normalcy I felt there was a new experience. The humans accepted me because they didn't know better. I made friends, enjoyed parties, studied hard, graduated with honors, and found male relationships that I had not had before. No one looked at me differently.