One.
The stench of antiseptic woke me up - sharp and acrid on my tongue and in my nostrils. I kept my eyes closed for an extra-long moment, remembering the mornings when I had complained at my brothers' yelling.
"Get up," the slightly-nasal voice I had come to loathe filtered through the overhead sound-system. I rolled my eyes behind my eyelids, before stretching and prying said lids open. "You have four minutes before testing begins." A sharp cutting-off noise scraped at my ears as the incompetant idiot behind the tannoy stopped the microphone.
I'd been hearing that voice for what had to be months and still she hadn't worked out how to stop interference. I knew it was because she was speaking too closely to the microphone - I knew and I wasn't even using the stupid thing.
I rubbed eye gunk from my eyes and crossed the tiny little white room to the wash basin, where I splashed water on my face and tried to wake up just a little bit. It was either a testiment to their cruelty, or a show of mercy - I wasn't sure which - that they hadn't given me a mirror. I was pretty sure I looked hideous. What I could see of me wasn't pretty: skinny-beyond-measure figure and tangled, greasy brown hair. Not nice.
The muffled pressing of the door told me my time was up. I stood straight and then slouched back onto the basin plastering on the most sarcastic face I could muster at ridiculous-o-clock in the morning. "That definitely was not four minutes."
"I can assure you it was," he pressed his hands together as though we had come to some sort of compromise.
I barked out a laugh - ha, 'barked' - get it? "Nope. I can assure you it wasn't."
"It doesn't matter. Today we're going to-"
"Actually," I butted in, "I think it matters. Like, if I get promised four minutes, I expect four minutes. Promising and not delivering?" I folded my arms, the pretense of me being the one with the power being something I found highly amusing, "That's not on."
Matthew sighed and ran a hand through his dark hair. He'd been working with me since I'd arrived wherever 'here' was. Yeah, they had actually used the word 'arrive', as though it were a nice, little vacation. Joke's on them. This vacation sucked.
"I'm sorry, Robyn - do you want me to go outside so that you can have the remaining," he checked his watch, "one and a half minutes of preparation time you were told you could have?" He arched an eyebrow - it was like a dare, how could I not?
"Yeah, actually."
He growled under his breath. A surprisingly wolflike sound, considering this guy was definitely one hundred percent human. Unfortunate for him. And yes, of course I would have tried to rip a few choice limbs off of him if I could have - I tried that the first time I had woken up in this strange, smelly room.
They'd done something to me. To my wolf. She was still there - I could still become her, I knew it. I just couldn't. It was hard to explain - it was like they'd separated my ability to be a wolf. I couldn't shift. I still had a few heightened senses - not nice, when it came to smelling the chemicals and all that crap floating around in the air - but I couldn't shift. And that made me crazy.
"Don't growl at me," I ground out, all amusement gone.
He nodded, producing a clipboard from behind his back - he seemed to have a never-ending supply of the things. I would know, because I had broken at least ten of them in fits of anger and frustration. When I couldn't gnaw an arm or a finger off, resorting to clipboard-destruction it was.
