Olive the Other Werewolves

Chapter Seventeen

thank you to Itzbella00 for the cool cover <3 she is a great friend & i'm so glad to have met her, go check out her writing!

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After our little encounter Matteo and I steered clear of each other and continued on with Fran and Amias into the new land without another word.

It seemed like we were always traveling like this, either in complete silence or outright brawling. There was never an in-between.

By the time we reached the central city of Freeman's Land, I understood how the unclaimed territory earned it's name. It was chaos personified.

People ran wildly through the streets in various states of undress, fires burned in the trashcans lining the streets, there was screaming and music everywhere I turned. It looked like the modern day equivalent of the raucous port of Tortuga from Pirates of the Caribbean, complete lunacy.

I flinched when a bottle fell from the sky and crashed onto the ground right beside me, shattering into a million different fragments. I glowered up at the second story apartment window where the bottle hailed from, a clearly intoxicated man sat in the sill singing a song about cheese.

"Which cheese is the saddest?" He crooned sloppily above us, "Bleuuuu cheese because it will forever be provoloneeee!" The man drunkenly lost his balance during his big finale and slipped from the step of the window. He sunk to the ground landing remarkably almost in the exact same spot as the bottle he sent down moments earlier.

He wasn't moving or singing anymore for the matter.

Fran stooped down to check his pulse, her grim expression was the only explanation she needed. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for Amias. He too crouched by the man's body to confirm Fran's judgment call and after a moment he seemed satisfied with her findings as well.

We turned away from him, looking around at the packed streets hoping someone would speak up and claim him but no one spared the scene a second glance.

"We can't just leave him here." Amias fretted.

Matteo frowned immediately, "Sure we can and we will be leaving him here. He and his unfortunate alcoholism is none of our concern."

Amias sputtered wordlessly as he looked to Fran or I to back him up, "The man is lying dead in the street after serenading us with a cheese song, it would be wrong to leave someone like that!" He turned with his arm outstretched to emphasize the condition of the poor man's lifeless body but when we faced the building again, there was no longer a body.

The Cheese Man had disappeared.

Amias knelt by the glass where the body had just been seconds ago, searching for some indicator or sign that he had been there but there was nothing. No blood, no body, nothing.

Matteo suddenly grabbed my arm and continued down the street with a renewed vigor as he dragged me along. "Keep moving." He didn't seem terribly worried but there was definitely something he knew that encouraged him to leave behind the Cheese Man mystery. He seemed to know something was not right with the situation.

I had to jog every few steps to keep up with Matteo's quickened pace, I was so lost in my thoughts that it was difficult to keep one foot going after the other. Finally, they overflowed into a cathartic release of confused inquiries as he guided us through a series of quick turns and blocks, "What is this place? What just happened to that man? Who are these people? Where is Lysander? Why--"

Matteo clamped his hand over my mouth and pulled me down an alleyway with Amias and Fran in close tow. Only once we reached the end did he remove his hand, I scowled at him and made a dramatic show of wiping my mouth from his touch. "Are you going to answer my f:cking questions now?"