Into the Woods: The Wolves of Redwood Pack

Prologue: Of Mice and Men

A glance at her digital alarm clock told her that it was already midnight, but Samantha resolutely turned her attention to the medical journal she was reading. She ignored the throbbing at the base of her skull and the dull pain at her temples. She had been reading the same sentence multiple times already, but she stubbornly fought the urge to just lay her head down and fall asleep. She had to stay awake just a little bit longer.

Huffing away her unruly mahogany-brown hair that simply refused to stay put at the bun on the top of her head, she straightened her reading glasses. A small metal cage caught her attention: Louis just got on his wheel and kept running aimlessly.

"Hey there Louis, why are you awake?" she smiled at the white mouse. "You miss her, don't you?" she wistfully thought about Thelma, her other white mouse that accidentally got out of the cage and was probably eaten by a cat somewhere.

Hmph. She was still convinced that Thelma's escape was deliberate on Samuel's part. Well, she would get her revenge on her brother eventually.

"Don't worry buddy, I'll get you a prettier girlfriend next time," she said to Louis.

Louis suddenly got off the wheel and turned his tiny body toward her. With his red eyes, he stared intently at Samantha's emerald-green ones. Mesmerized, she stared back.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw grayish-black smoke filling her vision. The red eyes of Louis enlarged and turned gray with black-rimmed pupils. As silver flecks started to appear on them, Samantha recognized the eyes of her gray-eyed phantom.

Come to me..

Samantha desperately tried to look away but for some reason, she couldn't.

Samantha..

She shivered, and then she couldn't move a muscle. And she still couldn't look away. She heard the drum of thunder at the distance. The gray eyes narrowed into slits, and she heard the deep timbre of a howling wolf.

"Samantha!!"

Samantha jerked awake, and realized that she fell asleep on her study table. Her head was resting on the medical journal, still opened at the page on the damned sentence she was repeatedly reading earlier.

"Hey sleepyhead!" her pet-murderer brother pushed her bedroom door open. "Had it again, didn't you?"

Samantha glanced at her digital clock, the time at 12:03 AM. Ever since the full moon four summers ago, she would dream of her gray-eyed phantom every full moon. Always around 12 AM.

"I've been pounding at your door for a while but I didn't get an answer. Good thing I learned how pick locks, right? Why do you keep locking your door anyway?" Samuel asked as he plopped down her bed.

She turned toward her brother, who at twenty-one, was a year younger than her. He could have been mistaken as her twin because they look so much alike.

"Because you still cannot understand the concepts of privacy and personal space." she retorted scathingly.

"Hey, I thought I was your favorite brother!"

"You're my ONLY brother, idiot!"

"So anyway, did you see gray-eyes again?"

Samantha huffed and stood up. "What do you think?"

"Judging by your dreamy expression, it's a yes!"

"Oh, shut up! Why didn't you wake me up anyway? I told you not to let me sleep before one AM during full moon."

"Well then, why did you sleep in the first place? And I did try to keep you awake, but you locked me out of your room."

"Whatever. I shouldn't have asked you in the first place. Now get back to your room, and not a word to Mom and Dad!"

"Retract those claws tiger. Wouldn't want to accidentally kill Louis now, would you?" Samuel teased and he lazily got up off her bed.

"Hey, you still owe me for Thelma. Now leave!"

"Sweet dreams tiger! Rawr!" Samuel growled playfully at her as she pushed him out of her room.

Samantha closed her bedroom door and leaned her forehead against it. Another full moon, another visit from her gray-eyed phantom. She couldn't understand why she kept dreaming about it, and why she felt a strange longing in her her heart.

She still refused to tell her parents about her dreams, or else they would spout the usual 'soulmate' drivel and how she was supposed to love that one person for eternity. She scoffed at the thought. 'One true love' only exist in fairy tales. After all, her Dad found love again and married Lupe after her real mother died giving birth to Samuel.

She glanced at her window and saw the full moon. There was still a few hours before daytime, and her Dad will not be back from his 'moonlit stroll' until then. She stared darkly at the moon as she remembered its role in her family's cursed existence.

It was a good thing that they managed to escape to the city and put as much distance as they could from that rural community in the forest. Mere proximity from it seemed to trigger the damned curse.

Thankfully, she and her brother had never morphed, which meant that their constant denial and rejection of their heritage have been effective so far. Her Mom had stopped morphing a few months after arriving at the city. Her Dad however, still had obligations toward the damned pack and cannot avoid the pull of the full moon as well as the occasional morphing to communicate with the Alpha.

She slowly made her way toward her bed and prepared to sleep. Avoiding gray-eyes didn't work tonight, so she might as well hit the sack.

Before she closed her eyes, she glanced at a peacefully sleeping Louis in his cage.

Don't worry buddy. Forget Thelma. You'll get to have a second chance. There is no such thing as 'one true love'.

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Edited 2015-February-02

A/N: So folks, what do you think of Samuel and Samantha's relationship? How about the gray-eyed phantom?

Please don't forget to vote if you enjoyed it! :)