Remember Me

Chapter 3

Lupa

I am human again. I don't know how, but I am. My face hurts where Ava punched me over and over again while bloodlust was taking over. I tried to warn her. I gave her many warnings about my trigger, but she didn't listen. I pawed, I growled, I did everything I could. But she didn't listen. I wasn't telling her to take the splinter out. I was trying to get her to recognize me.

But how did she recognize me? The scars are covered by rough patches of fur, my eyes turn gold, and I am a wolf. How could she recognize me?

Then something else clicks in my mind. I had left Ava alone in my house. I get up and walk out of the woods, back to my house. She is still in the living room, where I left her. Only now she is lying down, unconscious, in a pool of her own blood. With worry in my heart, I rush over and examine her.

She is face down, but I can hear her heartbeat still. Thank God. I crouch beside her and pick up her torso. Her arm is ripped and bloody from the bite, but luckily it doesn't look like a mark from a dog or wolf. It looks like she fell on a sharp rake.

I pick her up and walk out of the house. This time the moon doesn't change me and I walk through town carrying her body. However, I don't actually walk through the streets. In the years of full moons and Blood Moons that I've been on this mountain, the wolf in me has made small, almost invisible trails through the woods and moor that only I know. Now I prowl down them once more, only this time I am a human. I walk through the countryside, hurrying to get her to the hospital and get her healed.

Radcliffe's hospital is small and concealed to any outsider. Built into a sheer cliff roughly the size of an eight story building, you have to look hard to find more than the admission cabin. I lope towards it once I see it, and the automatic doors burst open slightly dramatically to announce my arrival. Four nurses peek their heads over large desks to see what the commotion is and when they see me, the heavily scarred outcast of the town carrying an unconscious girl in my arms, they burst into action.

"Someone get a gurney over here!" One shouts.

"Page Dr. Cooper now!" Another yells.

"I'm here," she calls. Dr. Cooper is an older woman, with dirty blonde hair and sky blue eyes. Her facial features remind me of a wolf; eyes that make you feel like she knows something you don't and a long narrow face. "Could you tell me what happened to your friend?"

"She... She was getting a rake from the shed," I stammered, lying like a professional, "She was helping me clean up my yard and there was this crash... I-I think she fainted or something, but when I went in there, she was sliding down the wall, reaching for the rake."

I shook my head sadly as the doctor loaded her onto a gurney. She gently opens Ava's eyelids and shines a light in both her pupils quick to see the response.

"Okay, good news is she didn't hurt her head," the doctor explains to me. "But that wound is still bleeding pretty good. She's going to need some surgery before you can see her again. Are you sure it was the rake she was grabbing for?"

"I-it might've been the pitchfork," I bite my lip and catch the quizzical glance from Cooper. "I live on a farm. But please, just make my friend better."

The doctor nods and wheels Ava out of the pit, towards an elevator marked Surgery Wing Only. No Admittance.

I watch for a long time after the doors close on the elevator that carries my friend-who-is-not-my-friend-yet to surgery, and sit and hope that she will be okay.

Ava

Lupa and I are in an autumn clearing that I feel like I know. We are sitting down in the long grass, under the light of an orange moon rising. I look over at her and see she is scarless. Before I can say anything, a cold wind picks up and swirls around us. I pull my red cloak around me and pull up my hood, shivering.