Wolf's Desire

Bad moon rising

Noah

I parked our obedient Volvo 940 Sedan in the parking lot and unfastened my seatbelt. The Volvo was a 1991 model, but Jackson Delgado, my father and an incurable freak for older cars, looked after it more than for his only son. Anxiety was already creeping into my flesh; even after Jackson's assuring words that we could blend into this town without a problem, I was still on edge. If I had got to decide where we would live after the storm that took away the only security we had left, it would have been some secluded place. For example, a forest. But here, in Everburn, among the people, we had to pretend to be something we could never be, and we had to hide every once in a while.

Sometimes, at night, I would ask the higher power why I was alive at all. Living with a curse that has no remedy, a curse that you carry in your veins everywhere you go, was not living. It was simply surviving.

We got out of the car, smashing the Volvo's doors behind us with a loud and fierce clank. As we walked towards "Grizzly", the hardware equipment store, my father patted my back.

"Your tension is suffocating me, too," he said, "loosen up a bit. We'll get through this. I promise."

I sneered, looking away from him. Not because it was funny, but because it triggered the memories I desperately wanted to forget. He moved his hand away from me.

We entered the store, observing the rows of parallel shelves supplied with all kinds of tools – tapes, hammers, packages of nails of all sizes... chains. I took a deep breath, urging my pulse to remain steady.

"Hello! How can I help you, sir?" A youthful face by the desk asked. He could not have been older than me – probably saving up the earned money for college. Kids like him were waiting for the day to leave this gloomy, ominous town. And here I was, preparing to let my roots grow here as deep as they could.

"You got some super strong padlocks, son?" Jackson asked the boy.

"For sure, sir," the boy ran off to get those from the warehouse, as there was none left on the shelves.

I slid my fingers across the glistening metal surface of the chains, lying viciously on the white board. My heart thumped in my chest, carrying the sound towards my ears and temples.

What if everything went wrong, again? What if I inflicted pain... again?

"We'll need those, too," dad pointed out to me, as his eyes fell on the chains I was touching.

I gritted my teeth, a growl igniting in my throat. "I know."

*

Lisa

"Don't you think it's stupid to hang out with his sister after the break-up? I mean, they were as cold as stone towards one another before that," Ruby, my friend and one of my closest neighbors, mentioned, as she scrolled along her Instagram feed. She was talking about a girl from our high school, but the weather was humid and depressing, and I was certainly not in the mood for gossip.

"God works in mysterious ways," I blurted out, squeezing my eyes as the headache from all the light outside was preparing to assassinate me.

We were walking back from school, with hauling steps. It seemed as it was going to take us a century to get to our homes.

"Why are you so-" Ruby opened her mouth to ask something, but stopped when an old Volvo decelerated next to us. Our feet froze on the asphalt moist from rain, as the window slid down to reveal a handsome, but stern face. It was my new neighbor... Noah.

But instead of him, what I presumed was his father spoke to us as he gripped the steering wheel. Watchfully, we approached the window.

"Hello, girls," the gray-haired man asked, his dark beard and strikingly light eyes complimenting his age as if he was an old wine, "do you need a ride home? Noah told me to stop the car because he recognized Lisa. So, which one of you...?"