Violet Riding Hood

Chapter 19

Mystery

Vallery spent that day sitting on the snow beside the body of Catherine, crushed by her loss and the solitude around her as she recalled all of the happy days, great moments and mischievous adventures that they had experienced together through their lives.

It seemed impossible that Catherine was dead, even more impossible than the lies of her mother and the awful fact that her father had always been a Wolf... Vallery held the cold hand of her friend for many hours, and she felt a terrible guilt for having doubted about Catherine when she had asked her to run away together.

Maybe, she thought, that would have saved everyone and nothing of all this would have happened at all.

"After all the lies, my mother's... and my father's" Vallery would whisper looking at her, like Catherine could hear her somewhere in the sky- "Only you were always there for me, only you were True..."

Vallery did not want to abandon Catherine, so she spent that night beside her on the snow instead of getting inside the abandoned house. She felt asleep only to be haunted by despair and nightmares about her father's transformation, and the ordinary wolves were howling somewhere in the forest while Vallery awakened the following day.

The intriguing howls reminded her that she was not a normal person anymore, and her violet eyes looked up as the last Purple Moon slowly disappeared from the sky...

"Curious, it looks different now..."

It seemed at first that the Purple Moon was losing its eerie color and returning to normality, but very soon Vallery discovered that nothing strange had happened to the Moon after all: The problem was something in her eyes, since now she was experiencing the world in a completely different way.

"What is this?" she whispered, sitting on the snow and looking at the sky.

The Purple Moon now looked like a deep and frozen shade of blue, the same had happened to her violet cloak and the soft shades of the twilight sky had transformed as well. They were not as charming and beautiful anymore, the frozen blood all over the clearing looked gray and black and Vallery gasped when she turned her head and had a look at Julie's house:

The stained glass windows had lost all of their magic, their wide variety of colors replaced by sad and quite limited combinations between gray, yellow and blue...

The stories always said that the Wolves suffered from a weak color vision, and now she knew that it was true.

Vallery was quite surprised at her new vision of the world, but she was truly shocked when she looked to the other side and discovered that Catherine's body was not lying on the snow beside her anymore. The frozen blood remained there just like before, but Catherine herself had disappeared and the body of Harry had vanished as well.

"No..."

Surely the wolves of the forest had taken the remains of her friends while she was sleeping, but the bodies of Julie and Sallyahel remained frozen hard where they had fallen... all that Vallery could see were footsteps on the snow, and there were marks of grayish blood where there was no blood at all last night.

The footsteps formed of a pair of trails that led up the mountains, a clear indication that two people had abandoned the clearing while she remained asleep...

"Catherine?" Vallery called out, standing up and looking around with desperation- "Catherine! Catherine!"

There was no answer for Vallery apart from wolfish howls and the soft whispers of the wind, and even though she searched for hours in the forest she could not find anything else... not even her Wolf abilities would detect the slightest hint, and Vallery returned to the house that would become her new home.