Leila's father always cried when he beat her. Cried because it didn't work, because there was something wrong with his child, because there was question over the love of his life's loyalty and she might be the walking manifestation of betrayal, because everything was so wrong that he was beating his child to fix it.
But it didn't fix it.
It didn't make her love him. Didn't make him love her. Didn't make her shift.
Of course he tried other things besides beating her. He tried tests. Many, many tests, all of which singled out one aspect or another. One of them involved Leila sitting in a chair, her hands and feet chained in place, her eyes blindfolded, her ears stuffed with cotton and candle wax. To prepare for this test, she had been starved for two days.
It began on a human level. Her father carried food into the room, a platter of roasted and seasoned venison whose aroma reached Leila's nose. Her stomach growled audibly to all but herself; her mouth salivated.
Thus it was concluded that she had, at minimum, a human's sense of smell. The test proceeded.
The room's door was left open so as to prevent any telling swoosh of air if it swung. Pack members came and went through the room, one by one. Leila could not hear or see their arrivals or their exits. But she could smell them, could identify their scents like a bloodhound.
Every time her father came into the room, without fail, he hit her. When her grandfather came in, he shook her chair violently. When either of her brothers or any other pack member entered the room, they did nothing.
And so it was observed that when her father entered—when she smelled his scent—her whole body tensed, her every muscle solidified itself in a brace for impact. At the presence of her grandfather, her fingers tightened on the armrests, clinging to the chair so as not to be shook out of it. At the presence of everyone else, she would become tense in anticipation, but only if they neared closer—if their scents neared closer.
Thus it was concluded that she had a sense of smell so flawless, so impeccable and sensitive, that it could belong to none other than a werewolf.
Further tests must be conducted.
~~~
Another test consisted of Leila being blindfolded—as so many of them did—as she stood with her back to the edge of a cliff. She was to hold her hands level with her shoulders, palms facing outward.
Her father's hands met hers. They pushed. She toppled backward, her feet leaving the ground, her body slicing through midair until she slammed into the ground below with all the force of her deadweight.
And so this process repeated: hands up, hands touch, push, fall, hit, pain, be hauled back up the cliff slung over her father's shoulder.
By the third time she hit the ground, she was desperate not to again—not so much to avoid the crippling pain, but because she was unsure if she would survive a sixth, a fifth, a fourth.
The fourth time her father's hands touched hers, she shoved him back, shoved with every fiber of her being, every muscle fascicle she possessed.
She did not fall.
Thus it was proved that she possessed strength no human child could... Strength characteristic of a werewolf.
Again, more tests were necessary.
~~~
The tests were always conducted in series, always repeated consecutively. For one week or more these tests would last. For that week, or weeks, Leila would experience the presence of none other than her test administrators: her father mainly, sometimes her grandfather, sometimes a random pack member they ordered to assist them. She would sense them in one capacity or another only during an active test. The rest of the time, she would remain in a single, windowless room, left alone with her own body and her own thoughts.
It was her family's hopes to trigger something. That these harsh conditions might give her the push she required. That isolation would provide the rumination she needed to garner control over herself: mind, body, and soul.
They never did; it never did; she never did.
~~~
Leila didn't see the boy named Zakai again for two weeks after the night of the flood. She was occupied. The flood ended and her testing began.
Whilst Leila hung from her feet in the windowless room, the blood rushing to her head to wobble her vision and nauseate her stomach in preparation of her test, Zakai was bedridden by his healing ribs. As she was being swung like a pendulum to and fro, he was thinking about the girl who saved his life. The last he saw of her was her father dragging her away whilst his parents clamped tight to him. In the following weeks, his parents would say nothing of her or that night when he asked.
Leila was taken into the forest, kept upside down and blindfolded on the short journey there. They dumped her out and removed her blindfold. Through her spinning, doubled vision she saw a cage that housed two feral dogs. They had been caught wandering through the pack's territory three days ago and had been fed only the raw and bloodied flesh of fresh game since their capture, until the third day. The third day they were fed nothing.
As Leila had hung upside down in the room, her father had made a cut on her forearm, had pressed a rag to it momentarily. Leila watched as that rag, red with her blood, was teased in front of the dogs' noses. Both dogs clamped their jaws over it at once. A fight broke out between them, snarling and snapping until the rag ripped in half and was swallowed down by each as if it were as good as any meat.
And then her father looked at her and she at him. A dire understanding manifested there. His hand rested on the latch.
He said to her, "Run."
Immediately, she did.
She hoped her two legs could outrun their two sets of four. Her father hoped she would gain two more. Fight or flight instinct, adrenaline, stress response, desperation to survive... one of these things had to trigger it, had to give her the final push over the edge to shifting. It had to. It had to.
~
The dogs caught Leila. Their teeth were sharper than she thought they would be; and she did think they would be sharp. They ripped her clothes and into her flesh, but they were lightweight and malnourished and she kept herself upright by grabbing onto the tree nearest to her in the very second when those teeth sunk in and their jaws latched.
She bear-hugged the tree. She had no claws to stab into it's bark, thus she was forced to rely on brute strength. She inched up the trunk in a tedious battle of maintaining her hold on the tree whilst enduring the pain of her leg and side being torn open, a set of canines clamped down at each location. Eventually, she had crawled high enough up the trunk that the dogs could no longer hang onto her. Gravity pulled them off, though they took chunks of her with them in their mouths.
She reached the first branch and, exhausted and bleeding, draped herself over it lengthwise. Although the bark was rough and abrasive, in that moment it was the softest thing she'd felt in her life. She laid her cheek gently against it and closed her eyes. She fell asleep to the rhythm of her own breathing—finding comfort in the fact that she still was—the persistent dripping of her blood against the leaves, and the agitated, urgent barking of the dogs below.
~
Leila awoke to the quiet. The dogs were gone. Her blood was dried. The chewed up places on her leg and side where bites of flesh had been removed were filled in and remodeled. She already knew she had a werewolf's healing capabilities: that was one of the earliest tests, and one of the most repeated.
It was growing dark now. The test had began this morning. She had been left here rather than taken back to the room. This meant that her tests were over again, for now.
She climbed down from the tree and headed back to the manorhouse.
~
As she approached, she stopped just before reaching the front porch steps. A boy stood at the door, tall, gangly, and thin. He was named Zakai, she knew. Zakai Nicoli Alfeo Belfiore.
"Hi," he said. He took a hesitant step forward where he stood on the porch. Unsure. Uncomfortable to be here. Maybe he wasn't supposed to be. Maybe his parents didn't know he was. "I wanted to say thank you. You know, for..." He didn't want to say saving me. He didn't want to be someone who was rescued. Those very words had been avoided in his household since.
Leila nodded. "It's okay."
He nodded back, in acceptance of her acceptance.
Then, his green eyes scanned over her. "Are you okay?"
Her clothes were ripped, muddied, and bloodstained. Her hair was a ragged mess of leaves and chips of bark. Her eyes were hollowed. How she had been living the past two weeks was written all over her, though never had it been read.
She didn't answer his question.
"Do you want to go in the woods?" She asked him instead. "I have a treehouse."