Mara:A Charmed Affair

2:Shift

Mara sighed and patted the thin black cord around her neck, she noted with fear that it greatly contrasted with her color, “What if he sees this? Will I get in trouble?”

Clarisse sat on the end of Mara’s bed and shook her head, “The cord will change along with you and blend into your fur. Before you change you must lift up your eyes to the moon and mutter change.”

She wrinkled her nose and touched the cord again, the velvet felt smooth against her slightly callused hands, “Change? That’s it? Pretty simple,“ but it had to be more complicated than that, “Are you sure?”

Her aunt nodded as she stood, dusting her jeans for no reason at all, “Positive.”

A strange scent teased her nostrils and she sniffed. It was strange definitely; spices, and floral, nothing at all like the musky scent of the trees that surrounded them, “It smells odd.”

Clarisse simply nodded, not caring too much about the scent of the cord, her mind was on bigger things, such as the status of her niece. If there was a way she could get Mara to comply, then she would most certainly try her best.

Mara will thank me for this later, she thought and nodded her head.

Mara eyed her auntie warily, that lady was always up to something, if she wasn’t trying to help Mara fit into the tribe, she was trying to push her onto Alec. She loved her auntie, she truly did. If she didn’t have her then she certainly wouldn’t have been able to survive. On cue, she thought about her cousin Rafe, Clarisse’s only son, “Wheres Rafe?” She questioned.

Clarisse sighed; it always pained her to think about her son, “Who knows?”

Mara knew, or she had a suspicion. No doubt he would be where he always was, in the arms or some human woman he had managed to beguile and seduce. What her friend Andrea saw in her cousin she couldn’t understand. Rafe was vile, violent and completely useless, even as a wolf. In the past he had wreaked much carnage, hence the reason why it was becoming so hard to keep their race a secret. They remained hidden in the deep of the woods, on top of hills and away from the humans to retain their secret. It was strange, certainly, but to have a hybrid of wolf-men living so close to civilization was disastrous, the leader of the pack, Mason knew from experience. Long ago he had attempted to live peaceably among humans, in another country of course, but when members of his pack began to kill villagers by the dozen he had no choice but to leave. His former pack, he would state with a drop of the head, were hunted and slayed.

So vulnerable we are, Mara sighed. She fingered the cord again and inhaled the scent of cinnamon and cloves, she could identify it now, and it soothed her nerves.

If only it could turn her into a chameleon.

The car ride was always the same; too loud and chaotic. Mara pressed her head against the window as Rafe leaned out of his own window and howled at the moon. Andrea joined him, her howl just a bit more proper and contained than his animalistic one. This was exactly the reason why the pack preferred to hunt away from their dwellings, people like Rafe made it hard to kill discreetly.

Mara would take no part in the hunt, she rarely did, the taste of innocent animal blood in her mouth wasn’t nearly as appetizing as the others made it out to be. Rafe proclaimed it was the sweetest taste on earth, and Andrea cooed that it was like heaven when she was in her wolf form. It was because she was different, because she was half human….human, she made it sound like such a dirty word. Maybe human was the wrong word, because she was still human, she just wasn’t a normal human. Sure the red liquid tasted as sweet as honey, but as soon as her senses alerted her to the fact that it was blood, it would immediately transform into a terrible metallic taste, one that she would remember even days later.