The Things We Hunger For

Chapter Four - The Wolf in Cabin Three *Ryan* Part II

Not that it mattered, I wasn't going to be sticking around.

"Hi," I said back, my voice a whole lot less enthusiastic than I had been intending. She entered the cabin quickly and I followed, closing the door.

She put the backpack down as soon as she was inside. It was a big backpack and I really hoped it was full of food.

"I wasn't sure if you had a favorite food or something but I got you all kinds of things. Ham, sausage, raw hamburgers and some frozen meat pies. I figured you might be able to cook them on the portable stove. And you can put the stuff you don't eat outside so it won't spoil. Only good thing about this weather. Oh I got ketchup too." She held up the red bottle. I smiled. She pulled out a whole bunch of more stuff, bread, beans, more water bottles, some canned stuff, putting it on the emergency supply box. I was kind of using it as a table. Remembering I had been drawing with the crayons earlier, I felt my cheeks get a little warm. Annabeth picked up one of my drawings. It looked like a five year old had done it.

"I was just..." I began as I walked forward to take it from her. "...just passing the time."

"Well good for you," she said, hiding a smile. I went over to get the rest of the stuff out of the backpack. I was getting seriously hungry.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered with the trouble of cooking any of the stuff, but I figured with Annabeth there I should. It was the normal thing to do. She took a bag of some sort of candy from an outside pocket of the backpack and sat down on the sleeping bag, studying me as I got the little stove going.

"You don't know much about what you are," she said after a while. It was a statement not a question. "You hadn't heard of shifters until yesterday." This too was a statement. "Still you are a werewolf or something."   

"Yeah," I said, looking up at her. "I guess I am."

She raised an eyebrow and opened the bag of candy."Now you wanna share huh?"

"I guess I'm beginning to trust you. And you did just turn from wolf to human in front of me."

"Not totally in front of you," she said, tucking her bare feet into my sleeping bag and putting a colorful candy of some sort in her mouth. "That would have meant naked awkwardness," she said, grinning.

Smiling to myself I decided not to tell her I would have traded all the awkwardness in the world for a glimpse of her naked. Figured that was the kind of thing you had to know someone a whole lot better before blurting out. Even then they'd probably take it the wrong way.  

"I don't know what being a werewolf is like," she continued, and suddenly her tone was serious. "But I figure I can tell you about being a shifter. If you want you can tell me about how it's different for you. If you don't, that's okay. I'll come back tomorrow and the day after and the one after that and maybe you'll want to tell me one of those days."

"Okay," I agreed, even though I wasn't planning on being around for long.

"So where to begin..." She hugged her legs closer to her chest, her blue-blue eyes staring up at me. I had never seen that kind of eye color. It was somehow electric and icy at the same time.

"How about the beginning?" I suggested as I got some food cooking. Beans, sausages and some of the ham. I was thinking since she'd made it sound like her father was like her it was probably genetic. But if it wasn't I would love to know if it was possible for me to become like her. To be able to change when I wanted. To not have to live with hunger for the kill, for human blood and flesh.

"Beginning? I'm not sure how we began. There is this one, like, creation myth my brothers used to tell me. It's about a huge wolf that came down from the sky." She ate another candy."She was as big as the ocean and as tall as the tallest mountain –don't ask how that makes sense- and she fell madly in love with a human. Their children became shifters. But apparently she didn't like that her love loved the children as much as her and that some of the children loved other people, so she killed her love and went back to the moon. I'm not sure how much of that to believe, but-"