She was the first one up in the morning, the sound of her dad's snoring sounding out from the room across the hall.
Malandra made a noise of irritation, glaring at her pale pink walls.
They weren't that thin.
Her dad only snored so obnoxiously after he'd had one too many drinks before going to bed. To celebrate the weekend, he had gone out with a bunch of the men from the station and come back extremely late. As the man of the law that he was, another one of the men had been picked as the designated driver for the evening, so her dad was able to come back very drunk. He had done the routine one too many times to need any help, so she had ignored him when he came bumbling up the stairs, and had tried to get some sleep.
Her sleep had been much better than the previous nights. Although it took her a while to get there, her mind unwilling to shut off, once she fell asleep, she stayed that way until morning light poured through her curtains.
She was also relieved that she hadn't woken up in half-form, knowing that there were only so many bloodied sheets she could hide from her father before he noticed.
Grabbing her laptop and phone, she padded softly downstairs, making her way into the kitchen. She placed the devices on the counter and opened her laptop up, making herself a cup of tea and some cereal while she waited for it to turn on.
Her plan was to do some more digging, search for any extra information on Auden, and then see if she could go down to the reserve around mid-day. Considering her father was sleeping, undoubtedly still recovering from the previous night's escapades, she decided to go on her own rather than disturb him. The pain of shifting to full-form was bad enough, he didn't need the aggravation of a hangover on top of that.
Her tea finished brewing and she placed it next to the laptop, grabbing a spoon out of the drawer on her way.
Instead of doing what she knew would be another pointless google search, she opened up her browser history and went back to the first article she had found on Auden: the one on the dodgy conspiracy page.
Shifter Revolt dot com.
Mala rubbed a hand down her face.
It was one of those sites loosely affiliated with the shifter supremacist groups, many of the other articles on the page filled with hazardous propaganda, trying to pit shifters against humans and vice versa.
If it wasn't bad enough that the mass media already perpetrated shifters as violent and untrustworthy, this website was calling its followers to treat humans as the enemy.
You were born to be stronger, faster and more intelligent than humans. You were here before them and you'll be here after they're wiped out. So don't try to hide your strength and size from them. Don't dull down your instincts in order to pacify their flimsy emotions. They fear you because they're jealous of you. They want what you have and they'll resort to violence to get it. Use whatever measures necessary to-
Mala stopped reading that particular article, clicking on another one that was linked below it: The white man's attack on the Male Shifter.
Mala laughed, oh this will be good. She thought to herself, sarcastically.
She read through the list of ways that the 'white man' tried to emasculate the male shifter population.
Perpetrating male shifters as a hazard in the workplace. Bullying us out of jobs so we can't provide for our families.
She frowned to herself when she realised that it was actually a true statement. She had noticed it herself and had commented about it many times to her father: that the news loved to paint shifters in a negative light. The males definitely had it worse than females in that respect. Job-wise, that was why humans dominated the higher pressure professions, many employers not willing to take the risk with testosterone charged shifters. She wouldn't say it had anything to do with the 'white man' but rather all the humans in government.
Paying us less money than our human counterparts in order to institutionalise poverty in our communities. Over 50% of shifter families live below the poverty line. More than 75% of shifter males in that group are unable to enter higher education because of their inability to get funding from the bank.
Her frown deepened, a line forming in between her eyes. Back when she was in university, she had researched into the ways that poor communities were often a breeding ground for crime. She had seen the statistics with her own eyes and knew for a fact that the last figure was actually 75.6%. It was true that shifters were one of the poorest communities in the country- only really thriving in areas such as film and sports. The places where they were allowed to put on a show.
It is their goal to break up the shifter family, force our numbers to decrease as our women are forced to remained unmated or worse, mix with humans and dilute our blood.
Male shifters make up more than 63% of the UK's prison population, serving harsher and longer sentences than their human counterparts. New shifter-only prisons pop up every month, their populations growing at an alarmingly fast rate.
The frown almost slipped off her face as she read the first part. It was practically impossible for a human to be born from a shifter-human relationship- simple genetics confirmed that.
It was difficult for human and shifters to conceive in the first place, but when they did have a child, shifter genes always came out on top. Conception was much more likely when the human party was female, partly as shifter sperm was more potent than human sperm, and also because even in shifter pregnancies, once the female had a pup in the womb they were stuck in human form, unable to shift until after the baby was born. Thank God the baby didn't shift in the womb either, Mala couldn't begin to image how painful that would be.
Then she read on a little further.
The agenda of the white man is clear in cases such as the Burtrick Walters kidnapping case and the Auden Ovilio murder and drug trafficking case, both of which took place in the winter of '08. Both men were under twenty-one when convicted and sentenced to life in prison even though a month before, the human nineteen year old, Bobby Henderson, was tried for multiple counts of premeditated murder, possession of illegal firearms and grievous bodily harm and only sentenced to ten years.
These prisons are nothing more than government run murder camps, a sick ploy to capture innocent shifters and eradicate them from society.
Mala snapped her laptop closed with a shaky exhale and gulped down the rest of her lukewarm tea to calm her nerves.
All she could see in her head was the word innocent.
The rational part of her brain spoke up from below the chaos, reminding her that she had been shown the report- Auden Ovilio had pled guilty on all counts.
The loud and irrational part of her brain, the section that she was choosing to cling on to, told her that the legal system had failed Auden. He should have been served the same sentence as Bobby Henderson and finished with his ten-year sentence.
It was too late to go back to the courts though.
She slipped on a pair of shoes and walked out of the room, not bothering to change out of her night clothes before jumping in her car and driving down to the reserve. There was no point in getting changed into everyday clothes when she was going to have to get naked to shift. She also belatedly remembered that she'd forgotten to brush her teeth but it was too late to turn back.
Twenty minutes later she arrived at the reserve and got out of her car, taking a look around at the small groups of other shifters who decided it was also a good idea to come out. She walked through the gates and into the reception, ignoring the strange looks directed to her choice of outerwear as she made her way to the man at the desk. It took almost no time at all for him to sign her in and get her a key for a locker, handing it over with a smile.
There was a woman giving out free disposable towels, so she grabbed one before heading in to the changing rooms, grateful that there weren't many people inside. The changing room was nothing special. It was small and it smelt slightly mouldy so she rushed to find an appropriate space to rid herself of her clothes.
In record time, she stripped out of her nightie and placed it inside her designated locker, quickly wrapping the towel around her body before she hurried outside.
She wasted no time in finding an isolated area, dropping the towel and starting her shift.
Her last thought, before she felt the first bone crack, was that she hoped she didn't have to shift again for another two years after it was over and done with.
Another bone cracked, somewhere in her leg, the appendage snapping forward and triggering her hip bone to split down the side.
A blood-curdling scream left her mouth and echoed into the forest.
She wasn't the only one.
Other screams of pain, child and adult alike, reverberated through the trees, broken yells turning into howls as some finished their transformations and others just began. The sound was haunting. The stuff of nightmares.
She couldn't survive this.
She vomited blood as something in her stomach twisted, other bones snapping and rearranging in some type of sick domino effect. All the knuckles on her fingers dislocated at the same time and her knees gave out, sending her into a contorting heap on the forest floor.
She fell face first into the dirt and smelt rotting pine- her brain, amidst the pain, recognising the scent as being partly associated with her mate.
Auden.
For some deranged reason she managed a smile before her jaw broke, teeth pushing through gum until the pink flesh was torn and bloody, dripping from her chin and soaking into the forest floor.
She passed out just as her skin began to peel away from severed muscle.
When she came to, it was dark, the sun having set hours ago.
That meant she had been out for at least seven hours, lying in a pool of her own blood and sweat.
She felt disgusting.
With a delayed wail, she realised that the shift had been her worst one yet. Two years was too long to stretch between transformations and her body had paid the price dearly for it. She was going to have to shift more often if she wanted to avoid blacking out in the future.
Her wail came out more like a bark and she noticed that she was still in full-form, a pup no older than ten staring at her from the tree a couple feet away. She flashed her eyes at them and huffed, letting the small child know that she was alright before standing up on shaky legs.
The child was only in half-form and shifted back into a human, quick as lightening, "it's a good thing you're okay. I thought you had died." The little girl said, running closer.
Mala huffed again and nudged the girl with her nose, snorting as she squealed and jumped backwards.
"Ew, you're all bloody." She complained, keeping her naked skin away from the wolf. "Okay, bye now. I need to find my mum."
The girl ran off and Mala walked around the reserve alone, stretching her new body until the aching faded away, her accelerated healing finishing off the job. It didn't take long for the adrenaline to kick in and she took off running, following the compass in her chest that told her to go east.
She knew exactly where she was going, the surrounding trees becoming scarcer and scarcer until she was moving through the outskirts of the city. She made sure that she was hidden at all times, running across roads and through trees, behind residential houses and small town shops until she reached her destination.
It wasn't exactly where she wanted to be, but it was close enough.
Crouching down as low as she could go, she peered over the hill towards the back of the penitentiary, on high alert for any movement.
She was too far out to be spotted, way too far to even see any details on the building, but her nerves were highly strung anyway. The whole perimeter of the prison was lit up with bright lights, a beacon in the darkness of the surrounding area.
Her mate was somewhere in that building and she was going to have to figure out a way to break him out.
There was no doubt about it now.
She was done debating.
With one last glance, she turned around and started the long run home.
---
Her dad was up waiting for her when she walked through the front doors.
He held up her mobile between her fingers and cocked his brow questioningly, "is there a reason you've been gone all day and have only come back at... what is it now- three in the morning?"
She groaned quietly, softly closing the door behind her and hobbling over to the couch. She had barely managed to drive home after shifting back, bruised skin still shrinking down after the intense change. All her joints hurt and she had lost a few toenails in the process although they were beginning to grow back.
The metallic taste twanging in her mouth made it hard for her to respond, "I was at the reserve. We were meant to be shifting today, remember?"
He furrowed his brow as if he didn't understand, "you didn't mention that to me."
"I didn't?" She shook her head and instantly regretted it, her neck clicking with the movement.
"Either way, I heard when you left the house this morning, it was only nine o'clock. You've been gone for eighteen hours, Malandra."
She sunk further into the couch, feeling boneless. "It took a while, okay."
She didn't want to tell him that she had been an unconscious mess for almost half of those hours, or that she had run all the way to the other side of the city to search out her mate. She didn't want him to worry or send her to the nearest psychiatric ward.
Her father gave a wearied sigh and she could hear him scratch his head, "I'll talk to you in the morning."
He turned off the light and walked away, the sound of his footsteps ascending up the stairs reaching her ears a second later.