The Woods

Prologue

She would always remember that feeling. The sinking and sickening feeling of falling from that cliff, through the cold night air. The feeling of that older man's rough hands as they slipped off her arm as she fell down. She remembered her throat choking on a silent scream as she waited for her death. 

That was the first time Amber Bane had felt her wolf. It had growled deep inside her and then an immense pain filled her body. Her skin burned as it ripped away and turned into soft white fur and her hands turned into strong paws. When she hit the water, she was no longer in human form. Her wolf had ripped through her human body and saved her life. The skin under her brown fur burned and the dark water swallowed her body. Her body felt weak as she tried swimming to the surface. Above the surface the waves smashed against the cliff face and rocks. Her family was up above screaming her name, searching for her body in the dark of the night. 

"Amber!" Her older brother, Henry, shouted, she heard her mothers' sobs. She didn't know how to growl and her heart felt unusually fast in her chest. A man's deep voice sounded above her head and Amber looked back up at the cliff. 

"Amber, if you can hear me! Get away from here!" Her brother screamed down into the waves, "Get the hell away from here."

Her mother screamed. A gun was fired. A body fell into the water, floating downwards. Amber never really saw her mother's body, but she knew that it was her. 

Amber remembered somehow swimming through the water, the waves thrashing and crashing around her. At some point, the pain ripped through her body again and she turned back into wolf form. Her naked body violently shook in the cold, dark water. 

The water numbed her body and she reached the mainland and collapsed onto the beach. Her lungs were burning. She doesn't remember what the old man who found her looked like, just that he was a fisherman and lived next to the beach. She was told later that she had been calling out, shivering in her nakedness and crying. 

When she was taken to the hospital, she couldn't find the words to describe what had happened. While the tears rolled down her cheeks, she answered questions that she hardly knew the answer to.

"Where are your parents?"

"Where do you live?"

"Why were you in the water?"

That was the night Amber became an orphan, the night she lost her family and her home. There was nothing left in the world to her, she didn't feel pain, just a void that was slowly being filled with anger. Her wolf lay deep within, not daring to release its self again. It was hard to control, the wolf side of you. It took years of practice, the ancient knowledge passing down through generations. 

Amber's family had been slaughtered. Her brother had been found miles from where she had been found, knocked unconscious. They had only told her that Henry was in a comma about a week after she had been admitted to the hospital. It had taken a week for her to recover enough for her to stay awake for more than a few hours.

They had asked her who they should contact and she knew that her uncle was the only one she had left. "Albert Smoke," she had said. "He's the only one I have left." 

 He was quite a lot younger than his sister and her mother. He lived on the outskirts of a town, about three hours drive from the hospital. She had visited his house once before, it was an old building surrounded by an old forest. 

When he had come to pick her up from temporary foster care, she had only had one large bag and her bicycle. Her mother's property would be held by the bank until she came of age or her brother awakens. She had pleaded with her foster parents to let her stay on in her own house but they said that legally a sixteen year old should not live by herself. There was nothing left for her. Not her mother, her brother or her home. All she had to keep her going was rage against the man who had murdered her mother and put her brother in a coma. One day, she would take revenge.