Chapter Eight - My Parents Keeper (REN)

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Note: if it is not clear to anyone, this following chapter is written from Ren's perspective.

~REN~

I slowly opened my eyes, greeting the world with a groan, mum was looking over me giving me a small whine. Maybe she wanted fed.

I pushed her snout away from me.

I'd tried telling her that I hated it, but she either ignored me or didn't understand me anymore. I didn’t know how much of my mum could really be left in her furry, four-legged frame.

It hurt too much to think about.

Having a wolf as a mum wasn’t something that you just got used to. Every morning it was like a bullet to the heart, waking up to the pure white wolf whining in my face. I remembered when I’d woken up to her yelling my name each morning. When she’d help me get ready for school, making me breakfast. Now I was the one having to feed her every morning. It wasn’t that I minded look after her, or dad, they could never be a burden to me. But it felt very wrong looking after the wolves in desperate hope that somewhere, deep inside them they were indeed, still my parents.

I pulled myself out of my bed and made my way to the kitchen to cook myself breakfast. Mum trotted dutifully after me.

What’s worse was when the second bullet to my heart hit each morning. When I would get into the kitchen I would remember aunt Cassidy wouldn’t be in there. Alex’s mum, up until recently, had been human. Apparently partners of the Chevalier family lasted a little while longer than those in the direct bloodline. But the curse always claimed them too.

Aunt Cassidy now seemed to reside in Alex’s room, sitting sadly on the end of his bed. She still very much felt like aunt Cassidy, and she still smelt the way that she had as a human, but I was sure it was going to fade eventually. It always did.

I hated this house.

It was dirty, it was a mess and it smelt like something had died in here. That part was probably true. The wolves loved dragging in whatever they could find. Dead. Alive. Or somewhere in between. The scent was certainly reflecting that. Being part wolf certainly made the smelling part a whole lot worse, too.

But all I had was 10 months... If I lasted 10 more months then I wouldn't care about the mess, or the smell. I wouldn't care about anything. I’d just be one of them. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted time to slow down or speed up. Either way, the change after 10 months would be inevitable, and everything felt hopeless because of it.

Mum nudged my leg with her nose. I wiped the tear away from my eye that I hadn’t noticed had formed there.

It was weird. Everything was weird about the Chevalier house hold. It was overrun by wolves and I was the oldest human in sight. It looked like I had some weird pet addiction, like on the TV show that I’d watched not so long ago. There had been a woman who hoarded cats. Every kind, every temperament. She had at least twenty-seven living in her house, but she still didn’t believe herself to be a hoarder. I knew that I wasn’t a hoarder, because I didn’t have a choice. Hoarding wolves. I wish. These wolves were my literal family. My parents, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents and cousins.

I looked out from the kitchen window out to the forest. I could see the others darting in and out of trees, snarling at each other and throwing about a dead rabbit. Dad had blood in his fur. I was going to have to clean that out before someone mistook him for being harmful. My life seemed to be a constant battle of making my parents and other family members presentable so that they didn’t get shot. The people in this town weren’t very trusting of the wolves, despite there being no recorded cases of a wolf attack whatsoever. People were afraid of everything these days.

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