Wolf City

Intro

Authors Note: This is a new story called Wolf City. I hope you enjoy it, and Happy Reading! 

_____________________________________________________________

        When I was a little girl, people always asked me what I would like to be when I grew up. I always replied with nothing. I had always said that I didn’t know what I wanted to be. All the other kids of course had great answers. They wanted to be anything from a princess to a doctor or a president. I guess I had always been one of the odd kids, but I never quite knew how odd I was until I turned twelve.

          I was a foster kid for a long time, and until I turned twelve I had never really settled with a family. John Sanders, my guardian, and my very best friend, became my father along with his wife Cassie. They just seemed to get me, and they seemed to know everything about me. Obviously I thought it was a little odd, but I wasn’t going to ask questions because I didn’t want to ruin something I knew was the best thing that had happened to me.

          I am now seventeen years old, and my birthday is next week, on a Friday. Some people might think our family is a bit strange considering we are out all hours of the night, and we don’t really communicate with anyone outside of our social circle. You would think that people would just think that we are anti-social, but actually human beings are pretty smart when it comes to keeping their families safe. I’m not saying that my family murders people, but every now and then someone will come up missing because of a wild animal attack.

          We are known by most of the supernatural as Lupus Mutatio, which is Latin for wolf transformation.  There are a lot of rules that go along with being a werewolf and everything, but we all have different opinions on what we think of it. We can shift whenever we want, and we get the option to be as free as a wild animal. However, because we are wild animals, sometimes someone that gets to close gets hurt; we do have to eat. Some people might call lycanthropy a disease or a curse like my father, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as freedom.

          Changing is the worst part. It’s like being torn little by little with needles and rough string. Your bones break and your muscles shift and for a few moments it’s pure agony, but afterwards…it’s like a whole new world has opened up to you. The sights, the smells, the way everything looks and feels is one of the greatest outlooks in the world.

          We aren’t the only ones of course. The next town over has a few wolf families, one of which is very friendly to my own. I have befriended their daughter and son, Alice and Zane. Zane is about to turn nineteen, and Alice turned eighteen a few months ago. We all graduated from high school at the same time and have been friends since I had moved there. We run in the pack together and are like a team, and soon we will be able to carry our adventures even farther considering I’ll be an adult.

          I’m sitting on my bed when I hear a small knock on the door, and I look up just as John is opening it and ripping me out of my past. “Hello?” he asks in a small and tender voice. He has a whole lot of stubble that I can’t see how Cassie can handle. He is muscular with his strong jaw, perfect shoulders, and legs that, when seen bare, really show every time he takes a step. He knows that I am in here, so he doesn’t really hesitate to move on with what he came in here to say. “You know dinner is ready Ava. Come down soon so that we can eat.” He says with one cool smile and then leaves without shutting the door.

          In John’s language this means ‘hurry up because I am hungry but because you are my adoptive daughter I don’t want to anger you.’ It was the one thing I never really understood about John and Cassie. I mean they were like my mother and father and I even called them as such, yet still they treated me like the outcast when it should be the other way around. I stood up looking at my purple walls with Christmas lights strung all of the room pinned down with dream catchers and pictures of flowers and wolves. It wasn't Christmas, but I did like the lights. I preferred them then a lamp or the ceiling bulb.

          My room was the only one upstairs, and right outside my door was the staircase. Over the railing you could see the living room, and across from the last step was the front door and to the right of that was the kitchen. We had a pretty small house in a fairly small neighborhood surrounded by trees right outside of the big city. It was nice living the best of both worlds, even though we never went to the city. I mean John and Cassie did occasionally, but I was never aloud.

          I walked through the door to the kitchen and then through the archway to the right into the dining room. My father sat at the end of the table, my mother sitting to his left, and my seat empty to his right. The seat across from my dad was always cold and distant. On the mahogany table sat a small vase of lilies in the center, and plates full of steak, salad leaves, and berries. A glass of water always accompanied the plates. Because we were wolves, we were kept on pretty strict diets.

          We finished our meals and then mom did the dishes. Disappearing into my room I shut the door behind me. Picking up my phone off my bedside table I noticed I had a text from Zane. He was asking his usually nightly questions when he got bored. I replied back telling him I was doing the same thing he was, and that was absolutely nothing. We texted for a while and then at some point I fell asleep with my phone in my hand. I knew that in the morning they would be begging me to come over for a run.