High Hopes

Chapter Two - Horny Monkeys

  I’ve been running for hours now, and I’m miles away from Riverside. I past the state line two hours ago and I haven’t stopped since. It was becoming hard for me to breathe, so I stopped to take a quick break. As I lay down on the forest floor I start to listen in on my surroundings. I hear the pecking of a woodpecker and the almost silent trickle of water over rocks; water! I jumped up from the ground and jogged over to the small stream and drank like my mouth was a desert and the rain that fell from the sky couldn’t quench its thirst.

  After drinking my fill I looked around the quiet forest to see a small bluebird fly by me and perch on a tree branch. It chirped at me and I barked at it, why isn’t flying away like the rest of them? It flew down circling my head, and then it pulled on my ears. I snipped at it and started jumping around trying to catch it. By now my old injuries have healed and the stitches from the gash across my stomach can be removed in a day or two, though even with the pains I have become accustomed to running while being injured. I jumped up one last time but when I land I felt like someone was watching me. Looking around I saw the bushes to my right shake and rustle; I crouched low and started growling. A little bunny rabbit hopped out of the bush and ran into its nearby burrow. I laid down under a small spruce tree a little ways away from the calm stream.

  I had just begun to fall asleep when I heard a twig snap nearby. I raised my head up in alarm, they couldn’t have chased me this far. I was more than sure that they wouldn’t chase me; they NEVER chased rogues past the borderlines of the territory. I mental started freaking out while on the outside I stayed calm and collected as I stand up and start creeping forward; that was until I saw a wolf two and a half times my size come out of the bushes. Its coat was the color of midnight with dapples and light streaks of mahogany, its eyes were a warming shade of milk chocolate. I saw three other wolves come out from behind it; they were growling and snapping at me with anger and hate burning deep within their eyes. I whimpered and backed up out of fear, I kept backing up until my butt hit the spruce I was just laying underneath.

  This can’t be happening I’m going to die and it hasn’t even been a day yet, I thought to myself angrily. I am not going to let these wolves scare me off when I haven’t even done anything to them; they can either kill me or piss off. I stood up to my full height but faltered a little bit when my ribs started hurting, so I just shrunk back down to my original state.

   The black wolf shifted into a very handsome guy that looked like he could be in his early to mid-thirties. He was probably a little over six feet tall, he had a nice amount of facial hair and he looked angry. No scratch that he looked pissed; his brown eyes were rimmed with red, I shrunk back more with my tail tightly tucked between my hind legs. I would roll over on my back and expose my stomach and neck in submission but I am too scared to even think about doing that. He would probably try to kill me the first chance he got. The other wolves behind him shifted and I turned my head to the side placing a paw over my eyes so that I couldn’t see them all in the nude, if I were in my human form I would be red from head to toe from blushing.

  “Shift,” chocolate eyes commanded. Darn it I don’t like being in the nude in front of people it’s just weird and I feel violated every time. “I said shift!” he yelled the red rim around the brown growing bigger almost like it was eating the warm chocolate brown. Much to my dislike I shifted, but I stayed crouched down on the ground with my long curly hair surrounding my body like a curtain. The bruises on my body were now visible to the strangers in front of me; I scooted as close to the spruce tree as I could. I wrapped my arms around myself as I heard the audible collective gasps of the strangers.

  “Who did this to you?” a shocked voice asked me.

  I looked up and a woman was standing next to the warm eyed man, “My pack.”