Have No Fear

Reality

Later during that night, when I'm asleep in my bed, I'm woken up by a strange loud noise that's coming from outside. A high pitched scratching that's so painful, it makes me have to cover my ears.

When it finally stops, I look out of my bedroom window and can see four male figures outside, trashing my new car. The sound I heard was one of them running their keys along the paintwork.

"Ren, stay in your room!" my mom shouts from downstairs, knowing that it must've woken me up too.

My dad rushes outside into the dark to confront the four men, and there's a lot of pushing and shoving between them when he tries to get them to leave.

Mom soon follows him outside and starts threatening to call the cops on them, but as things get even more heated I worry about what could happen.

That's when my mom gets knocked to the ground and my dad, in his anger, begins to shift in front of the men. All of them are all clearly terrified as they watch the skin quickly tear from his body.

"What the fuck is happening?" one of them starts to back away.

Instinctively my mom changes too and now both of my parents were wolves and they've shifted in front of humans, which breaks Lycan law. This is not good.

In their fear and panic, one of the men quickly reaches into his back pocket and pulls out something that I can't make out in the dark from up here.

"Do it!" one of the men yells at him.

Seconds later, I hear six loud pops and watch as my mom and dad fall to the ground.

"No!" I scream from my bedroom window, banging on the glass which draws their attention up to me.

"Let's get out of here!"

"What about the girl? She saw us!"

"Shut the fuck up and run!"

The men disappear down the road and I run down the stairs and straight outside, but collapse to the ground sobbing when I see my parents laying on the ground next to each other.

My mom is completely motionless, her eyes closed and silent, but even through the sound of my despair, I hear my dad wheezing and taking a few laboured breaths before he goes quiet too.

That's when everything goes dark.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not sure what happened, but when I gain some semblance of reality back, I'm naked and running in the middle of the road to the only place I could think to go.

When I get there, I start desperately knocking loudly on the door until someone eventually answers.

"Ren?" Claire's grandpa Oscar answers the door to me.

He helps me inside the house before covering me up with a large jacket of his to cover my body and guides me into the kitchen, where he sits me down on a stool.

"Ren, what happened? Whose blood is this?" he asks and I look down to see my bare legs coated in a sticky red liquid.

Claire's grandma Mary walks in and screams when she sees me sitting there, shaking and terrified.

"What happened?"

"Mary, you need to call Ambrose right now. I think the poor girls in shock".

I couldn't bring myself to talk. I couldn't even contemplate what had just happened in my mind.

The next twenty minutes was a stressful blur of questions and confusion until Ambrose finally arrived and knelt down in front of me.

"Ren, you need to tell me exactly what happened" he asks firmly and his commanding presence snaps me back to my painful new reality.

"Mom and dad" are all the words I could manage.

It didn't seem real, this has to be a bad dream that I'm going to wake up from any second now, right? How had my life gone from being so happy to this nightmare?

"Now tell me what you remember?"

"Somebody...they had a gun".

"Where are your parents?"

Flashes of my memory, with them laying there on the ground in their wolf forms covered in blood come into my head.

"They were in the driveway".

Still kneeling down, he takes a good look at me and seems to notice the fact I'm not wearing any clothes under this jacket.

"You shifted, didn't you?"

I honestly can't remember anything after seeing my parents like that. I'm not even sure if this is their blood that I'm covered in right now.

"I don't know" I reply shakily.

"Keep her here and get her cleaned her up" he tells Claire's grandparents just before he gets up and leaves.

"Claire, we need you!" her grandma shouts upstairs to wake her up.

Shortly after, she comes down and is greeted by the sight of me being led into the bathroom by her grandma.

"I want you to get her in the tub and wash her off".

"What happened? Is she hurt?" she asks worriedly.

"Just do what I say, Claire!"

Within seconds, I'm sat down in the tub and she's using the shower head to rinse my hair. I watch as the blood gradually ebbs off my body and down the drain.

"Oh my god, Ren. You've been shot!?"

Her grandma hears what she said and comes into the bathroom to take a look, finding the hole in my shoulder that I didn't even realise was there.

"Grandma, we need to get her to the hospital, it looks really bad".

Her grandma takes a closer look.

"It's gone through the back, she'll be fine".

"What does that mean?"

"It means her wound will heal itself within the next few hours. If this had happened before yesterday, she probably would've bled out by now".

Claire drys me off, bandages the wound the best she can and helps me get dressed into something of hers, but all I can think about is my mom and dad.

What if they healed too and they were out there right now somewhere looking for me?

The entire night is restless, even with Claire holding me close to comfort me while I lay there next to her in bed like a zombie.

Every single time I try to close my eyes, all I can see is flashes of red.