My paws thrummed the dirt, the wind whistled past the pair of ears settled high on my head. They twitched back and forth, picking up the stirs of startled sparrows and rabbits. A hoot of an early-rising owl echoed through the branches from above and I bounded over the heap of pellets that had collected at the base of an oak. A squirrel darted out in front of me, almost underfoot to the point I stumbled a bit. Regaining my balance, the easy rhythm of my paws like music, I charged on. I pushed faster and faster, feeling the muscles in all four legs starting to burn.
There was a spot in my path, one I was expecting, that changed my pace. Boulders created a blockade right as the hill became a mountain. After I scrambled over the boulders, the pace never returned to how it was, the terrain was too steep. The pine trees now protruded from the slope (before they were growing normally from the soil). Their roots were long, spindly fingers, gripping the rocky soil in desperate efforts to stay in place. Their trunks grew bent at an angle that seemed very unnatural for a tree, so that their tops could fight each other for sunlight. It was beautiful to me, the way nature existed to adapt to its environment. Those same trees, had they been planted on a flat surface, would have grown straight and tall; normal.
Now I bounced from tree to tree, launching myself to each tree trunk—the part that was flat, right before it curved up towards the sky. I knew where I was going, I had taken this path a hundred—maybe thousand—times since I had shifted two years ago. It led to my favorite lake.
I slowed my pace as I reached it, panting so hard my tongue lolled and flopped about. Saliva flung out in front of me as I trotted evenly along the path. When I reached the lake, I sat on my rump and stared, catching my breath. It never got any less amazing, no matter how many times I came up here.
It was situated in a valley, where there were peaks on all sides. On the north side, I could hear the roar of what I knew to be a waterfall as it poured itself over the cliff edge. I had never been over there to see it myself, the roar had gotten too deafening the one time I tried. It frightened me; I was afraid my short limbs wouldn't be able to stand against the current and prevent me from plummeting over the edge. So, I avoided it.
The very tops of the mountains had snow running off down the sides, thin white streaks that curved and kinked and followed the path of the rocks around it. That would mean that even now, in the beginning of August, the water that rippled about in front of me would be bitterly ice cold. Still, I waded in just far enough that my paws were covered. A shiver traveled from my ears to my tail, but I didn't mind. The numbing almost felt good.
Tilting my head down, I stared at my reflection—slightly distorted from the small current of the pulling waterfall flow. Despite the ripples, I could make out my erect ears, pointing straight forward; my narrow snout, with a nose that twitched at every smell, every breeze; beady eyes that stared right back, swimming in a mottled brown: the color of nutrient-filled soil—the kind a crop-farmer could only dream of. Around my eyes was a mask of orange, looking like I was attending a masquerade ball or something. The inside of my ears were also that fiery orange, but wisps of silver made it look mottled, striped even. The rest of my face was silver too: the backs of my ears, the sides of my head, and my neck. Once it got to my shoulders, it became marbled again, mixing with the orange in sections all the way to my tail, which was fluffy and oval-shaped. The tip of my tail and the area from my midnight-black nose to under my chin was white.
I had never seen a fox in the wild that looked like me.
Commonly, we would spot the typical red foxes. The ones with a white muzzle and black tipped ears and black seal points. We're not sure why I was silver. Actually, we weren't sure why I was a fox at all.
I was larger than the wild ones too. Not by much, but enough to be noticeable. Werewolves were also bigger than their wild counterparts, so I supposed it made sense. But nothing else about it did.
For one, I never had to worry about wasting clothes when I shifted. They never shredded. So, when I returned to the pack house—once the sun had disappeared and the stars had begun to glitter in the sky, reflecting back at me across the lake—I could just stand on my hind legs and morph into my human form, returning to the red one-piece swimsuit I had been wearing all day. The only thing I couldn't save was my phone, even if it were securely in my pocket. I tried it once, when I got curious after finding out that my clothes didn't shred. Both times—once when the device was in my hand, and once in my pocket—it merely dropped to the ground next to me, never damaged or scratched or cracked, just appeared there in the dirt.
I experimented with other items too, like scrunchies on my wrists, or bracelets, or necklaces, or even earbuds in my ears. Necklaces stayed with me—not appearing on my fox form, but they were there when I shifted back—and so did bracelets or scrunchies on my wrist; it counted as clothing I assumed. But headphones or earbuds? They dropped to the ground just like my phone. I had yet to try other items, but it seemed pretty straightforward to me: anything attached to me stayed, anything I was holding or carrying dropped like a stone.
While I had been exploring what I could do with my fox over the past two years, I still didn't know everything. I figured out what could be determined by trial and error— such as the phone thing—but questions like where I came from, why I wasn't a wolf, how I wasn't a wolf. . . those couldn't be answered that simply.
My parents had dug around, explored the subject, researched about me, but it only got us so far. We had gone through the Werewolf Information Volumes—the books the royals had provided to all of the Packs of the Moon—cover-to-cover several times over. They, too, only got us so far. Still, I liked to read them through for fun, maybe for comfort too. Even though they didn't give me the information I sought about myself, they explained a lot about packs and the hierarchy and how they run. It brought me a sort of peace.
That was where I headed now: up to my room—located on the 3rd floor, the Alpha Floor—to shower, climb into bed, and flip through one of the volumes.
It didn't take long for me to skim through it, to relax. That one talked about the royal pack and how they were different from the rest of the packs. I knew it was outdated, though, because it mentioned that the Menai Moon pack was located deep in the heart of Alaska, buried in the forests for protective seclusion. Now, everybody knew the royal pack was thriving in the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia. And that our current Luna was Queen Natalia, daughter of Anne Livingston (who was the last royal born in the Alaskan palace). I heard that a few years ago, Queen Natalia lost her mate and had to appoint some kid to be her heir. He was related to her mate, but still. It was a little upsetting that the royal line wouldn't be carried on by the Livingston's bloodline.
Another reason it could be fun to move East: I could possibly get to know the royal pack. Even just being that much closer would be cool. I had heard rumors that the royals were magical. Like, that they possessed certain powers. Though, I wasn't sure how much of that I believed. I mean, we were already born with the ability to morph into an entirely different species, how much more magical could it get?
I closed the book and pushed it aside, reaching for a different one. This one wasn't an official information volume, it was just a book on the mythology of shifters, all kinds from all over the world. I was never sure how much I believed in these myths and legends, but I mean I existed, so it was always a shot.
I started with foxes, my eyes breezing over the words I had read so many times now. Basically, the myth stemmed from Asian folklore and portrayed the foxes with often having nine tails. They were mischievous and cunning, shifting into beautiful women for the purpose of seducing men.
It made me grimace. While being a shifter didn't mean the animal had its own voice, name, and personality, I still knew that what this book described was not who my fox was; who I was. Still, I read.
That folklore claimed the foxes could live to be up to 900 years old, one tail for each hundred years of life. But they couldn't shift until they reached 500 and those tails stayed attached, even in human form. The book explained that these shifters weren't as powerful as wolves, but more magical. I wasn't sure what that implied. As far as I knew, I didn't have magic in me at all. According to the Information Volumes, only royals possessed such magic.
Ugh. All that information on wolves, but hardly anything accurate for non-wolves. Am I the only one? There had to be more, whether they were foxes or tigers or bears for all I knew. For all any of us knew!
I slammed the fox book shut and grabbed the next one off my desk. That one about Tigers.
Originating from Indian mythology, they were more commonly males than females. That book mentioned that the moon had no effect and the bite of the shifter was not contagious. But of course, neither is the werewolf's, despite popular human belief.
I skipped down a few paragraphs, where it started talking about shifting. According to this legend, tigers didn't shift like wolves, they merely projected their essence into a tiger form while the human counterpart slept. They acted as a guardian, a protector for their human.
I read and I read. Over each letter, each word, each paragraph, each page until they all started to blur together and I could feel myself slipping. I needed to blink several times in between paragraphs to keep myself from submitting to the black wall closing in around my eyes. Suddenly, the words were gone and instead were they replaced with images of foxes like me, tigers like the myths, and even jaguars and hyenas, and a dragon.