Two Hearts: The Hunt [Slowly Editing]

Chapter Twenty-Six (Part I)

A/N-Sorry for the long wait; I was spending a lot of time studying for SAT's which were yesterday and I was completely drained.

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Caleb's POV-

The day of our one-month anniversary was the day that we received Esmeralda Blackwell's invitation. The invitation that would change everything.

It was weird, having Cat come over my apartment. And it wasn't weird in the way you're thinking it was-on the contrary, I think that what made the whole situation a bit odd was what it wasn't really odd at all. Nothing about it was awkward. We were both completely at ease.

The last time she had been to my small, one-bedroom apartment was when I had taken her from that party after breaking Jimmy Dean's nose. Now here we were, about a month later, with Cat standing in the my foyer taking in the familiar scenery of my apartment, and me closing the door shut behind me but never keeping my eyes off her because she tended to look the most mesmerizing when she believed she didn't have the weight of intrusive eyes on her.

Now old feelings were resurfacing once again-except this time they were directed at a certain blonde with a big mouth and a bigger attitude. She was beginning to fill the void my past love had left.

One month later and I think it is safe to say I was falling for her. Hard.

I was like big, fiery meteor falling from the gravity of space, speeding in the direction of Earth with nothing to slow me down. I was going to meet the solid soil of Earth no matter what, just like my feelings for her were developing at an increasingly rapid rate with no apparent way of changing them. I was getting closer and closer to making that massive, catastrophic clash.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll give you a hint. It's a four letter word that quite frankly is probably the most important thing you can ever tell a girl, mainly because her reaction depends on if she feels the same way.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Right now, I was falling. This scary, rapid phenomenon triggered a series of thoughts over the many, many issues that revolved around our relationship. The most prominent one was the fact that she was a mortal and I was a werewolf who aged, but not as fast as she did. Oh, and there was also the fact that I must turn into an ugly, powerful, hairy wolf with sharp teeth every day in order to feed.

I thought about telling her. I had come close to telling her once before, but when I flipped out at the last second she misinterpreted my behavior into thinking that I was going to dump her. After that I didn't dare try telling her again unless I was certain I was actually going to. There was always that guilty thought holding my tongue back: what would my pack think?

As I mentioned before, I wasn't allowed to tell anyone I was a werewolf unless I was planning on changing them into one myself, and this brought me to my next issue: biting Cat and changing her into someone like me.

I didn't think I could do it. I was scared that if I did, she might not survive it. Not everyone survived the transition from mortal to werewolf. Some bodies rejected the change, while others just couldn't handle the dramatic changes in the physiological conditions.

And then there was the fact that I was a man of morals. I wasn't sure if changing her would be the best thing for her. I'd be altering the course of her life forever, cursing her with having to live with another being inside her and having to go through the terrible pain of shifting between animal and human-that horrific cracking of bones that always caused newborn werewolves to scream and writhe in agony the first one hundred shifts or so.