Selenophiles ☾ Stiles Stilinski

Chapter One | wolf moon pt. 1

C H A P T E R  O N E

wolf moon pt.1

All of the craziness started on a Sunday.

The last day of winter break had been stressful enough to start, with the anxiety of having to start up classes again sitting at the front of Amber's mind all morning. It would be the final semester of her sophomore year. Then, the next year would be crammed with SATs and ACTs and applying to colleges. One step closer to having to decide what to do with the rest of their lives.

She found it all very daunting.

Since she'd woken up that morning, the girl had restlessly alternated between hiding away in the privacy of her bedroom and lounging in the living room downstairs, unable to find a comfortable place to settle. At some point, she had chewed her nails to the point of bleeding. She'd pulled her hair back into a braid when she noticed herself picking obsessively at her split ends. Her laptop sat open on the coffee table along with a small stack of paperbacks, from where she had started and then immediately abandoned two different television shows and three books.

After dinner, her inability to sit still had finally pushed her older brother, Jason, to his breaking point. He'd demanded she go and change into exercise clothes and dragged her out of the house in an effort to release some of her pent up energy.

Jason forced her out for a jog in the preserve, and only ten minutes into their run she found herself already with sweat trickling down her temple. She was breathing heavily, slowly falling behind, while her brother ran ahead of her with ease.

Amber watched as her brother's lead slowly increased in length while she trailed behind. Eventually, when she rounded a long bend in the hiking trail, she realized that she could no longer see him in the distance at all.

She paused to catch her breath, bending over to brace her hands on her knees in an attempt to pull more air into her aching lungs. When agree lifted her head and looked around, she saw that she'd reached a fork in the trail. Continuing to pant out labored breaths, she returned to an upright position with her hands on her hips while she deliberated which path her brother might have taken.

With a resolved shake of her head, she chose the path to the right. Regardless of which she took, both would eventually lead back to the starting point where they'd parked the truck. So, she continued on.

The pace she settled into could hardly have been considered a jog — if anything, she was moving in a walk with only the exaggerated body movements of a run, but she was tired.

She had only made it a few hundred feet from where the trail split off before she spotted something that piqued her curiosity in a pile of dry brush and leaves at the side of the trail. She slowed as she approached, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead with her shirtsleeve and breathing heavily.

There was something poking out from the leaves — it almost looked like toes.

A choked combination of a gag and a gasp escaped her and she covered her mouth with the sleeve of her windbreaker as she reached the pile of brush. It was definitely toes, connected to a foot, which connected to legs and, well, that was pretty much where it ended because there was only half of a body.

She gagged again, eyes drawn to the clean, smooth cut that went straight through the hips of the corpse beneath the dead leaves. Something had been used to cut them through muscle and flesh and bone. She could see it was a female — the body had been left completely naked.

This had been a person. And they laid on the ground, covered in earth and dried blood, just a few feet from where she was standing. Amber could see dirt caked around the pink nail polish that covered the woman's toenails. Even through all of the blood, she could make out a tiny freckle on the bare skin of the corpse's knee.