Raised By Wolves

Chapter One | The New Guy

Marking the black cross over the number five in the Tuesday column, May frowned as she stared at the Friday covered in pink highlighter. It was fast approaching, much too quickly for her liking. Friday was her seventeenth birthday and after the uneventful turn of events on her sixteenth, she wasn't looking forward to it. Being a wolf shifter, it was on the first full moon after turning sixteen that her kind were able to connect to their wolf. There was a ceremony involving the pack Alpha's, some howling and what May liked to simply call, wolf stuff. Then there was the waiting, which for May soon led to nothing other than humiliation.

Her birthday had only validated the teasing from the other shifters who knew about her less than perfect lineage. She was a runt, and not even the halfling kind like her older brother Chad. He could shift, then again he was also adopted. A spark of jealousy bloomed in her stomach, yet she couldn't sustain it. Just like how she sometimes hated her Mum for making her this way, even though she knew there was no reason to think that.

"May, are you up?" Her mother called out from down the hall.

'Speak of the devil,' May thought with a huff, dropping the marker onto her desk.

"Yeah Mum, I'll be down in a minute!"

If there was something her hate could stay in place for, it was school and the sympathetic look from her father as she entered the kitchen, told her he knew enough.

"Morning princess."

"Dad, I'm nearly seventeen. Stop calling me princess!" That said she took a seat beside him at the table and didn't protest when his arm went around her shoulders to hug her.

"You could be fifty and you'll always be my princess!" He assured her.

Groaning, May pulled way. "You're so embarrassing sometimes!"

"It's our job as parents!" Her mother dared to look amused as she walked past to go to the coffee machine. "Did you finish that biology assignment?"

"Yes Mum."

May helped herself to a bowl of cereal, ignoring both their gazes. All month it had been like this, them watching her. The closer it got to her birthday, the worse they became. She caught the look that went between them; a whole conversation going on without them speaking a single word. It was part of the connection they had as mates, something May feared she'd never be able to feel for herself.

"I'm fine. It's just a birthday and besides, I'm glad I don't have to turn into stupid animal!" She snapped.

"Stupid animal? Seriously June, it hurts you think so lowly of us." Chad declared, appearing out of nowhere.

"You're like fifty, when are you going to give them back your house key. Normal people have boundaries." May instantly argued, her mood not improving.

"Fifty? Ouch, how old does that make you two then?" He teased, glancing at Braydon before helping himself to breakfast too. "Thought you'd want a lift to school?"

"No!" One look from Miranda had her sighing in defeat, "No, thank you!"

"Someone is a little-"

"Chad," Miranda warned, still only seeing him as the sixteen year old boy she first met.

Then again, not much had changed. While his eyes revealed someone older than his thirty-three years, he'd managed to maintain a rather youthful appearance. It did nothing to stop a few of May's friends from crushing on their English teacher despite the fact he was double their age, had a beard that made him look like the missing link in man's evolution from the apes and still mooched breakfast off the only people he had really known as parents.