Cold As Stone

Chapter 2

Katherine panted as she pulled out the headphones from her ears and leaned against her knees to catch her breath again. She had been running for almost an hour now and she was starting to get into unfamiliar territory. It wasn't very often that Katherine got out of class as early as she did and it was even less often that Charity would just leave her without trying to convince her to leave for at least another half hour and by then Katherine knew it would be too dark to get a decent run in.

The sun was starting to set now so Katherine thought she probably ought start heading back to the school. However just as she was about to put her headphones back into her ears she heard something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. A loud howl echoed through the forest but it was dangerously close to where she was currently standing. She swore under her breath when the scar on her thigh began to burn like before. It hadn't done that in so long.

"Calm, you're going to keep calm Katherine." She murmured to herself as she stood back up and brushed her hair that had escaped her ponytail back behind her ears. Quickly she wrapped her headphones up around her phone and then placed the phone in the small pocket on the right side of her shorts. It would not be a good thing if the howling got closer to her and she wasn't able to hear it. She would just jog back to school and be fine. Nothing was going to happen.

She quickly turned on her heels and began the jog back. She was absolutely doing her best not to freak herself out as she listened for more than just the sound of her feet hitting the forest floor, but thankfully there was nothing.

However the silence gave her mind the ability to start wandering, which led her to dark places. That night to be exact. Katherine didn't understand, and she didn't think she ever would, how she had gotten so drunk so fast. She had only been on her 3rd drink for goodness sake and Katherine knew from experience that she was not a light weight... or so she thought. Also she never would have been so easily persuaded to get into a car with three different male strangers who she did not know. Nothing about that night had ever made sense to her in the two years that had passed, but still she couldn't help but always going back to these types of thoughts.

None of it made sense. All she could remember was drinking her final drink, which she had made herself, and then being dragged out to some car with a boy she had never seen. Charity hadn't even batted an eye when she saw Katherine being pulled away with three tall strangers, Katherine could remember that much. The next parts got a little bit fuzzy. She remembered climbing into a black SUV and she remembered driving for what felt like hours but that didn't make any sense either because her unconscious body had been found a mile from the party.

But Katherine had been the only one found. The other driver of the car hadn't even been there for goodness sake. Katherine remembered loud noises suddenly and then she blacked out. When she woke up alone in the SUV her head was pounding, the doctors assumed she hit it on the passenger side window and shattered it which led to the scar on her forehead. When she had come to she had sworn she could hear multiple wolves howling and ever since that night the noise made her physically ill. The howls also somehow triggered a burning sensation to begin in her leg like nothing she has ever felt before. The pain had been so much she had passed out again from the pain and woke up in the hospital. When she woke she remembered that she had never felt anything burn so intensely in her life but the doctors all brushed her off like she was crazy and told her it was just a cut. But she knew there was more to it. Every so often after the accident the burning would start up again but not so intensely, the sensation had stopped altogether once she got to school and for that she was grateful.

However the repercussions of that night had been more than just a brush off the shoulder and she was not grateful for them at all. Since nobody was at the scene of the crime besides Katherine she had been shouldered with most, if not all, of the blame. Her license had been revoked and many legal fees had to be paid, she had lost her parents trust, and she no longer felt like she knew who she was.