The feel of the crisp night air brushing through my pelt was both exhilarating and relaxing. My paws tapped soundlessly against the cold dirt as I dashed through forest playfully. I had to admit that this was my favorite part of being a werewolf. To be able to race through the forest with such stealth and care was something that a human would never understand; feeling a rush of excitement every time you took down a fresh kill, running miles and miles with no destination in mind, and to be able to watch the glorious sunrise through the reflection of dew drops g a werewolf felt like.
The muscles in my legs were burning from excretion and on top of that I was panting loudly from not being able to catch a proper breath. Completely exhausted from running all day I slowed down until I was at a more leisure pace. As luck would have it I found that a small pool of water was only a few feet away and despite my tired muscles I made my way over to it. After forcing myself to run for miles for such a long period of time my legs felt heavy and the rest of it felt sluggish. I literally had to drag myself over to the pond. Once there I dropped my muzzle downwards and licked the surface of the water. The fur on my back rose slightly at the feeling of cold water hitting my tongue as I lapped it up, as soon as my thirst was quenched though the burden of being alone resurfaced.
I had been born form two rogue wolves so that meant that I hadn’t grown up in a pack like other pups had. The only other wolves I had ever known were my parents and what made it even worse was that once I was old enough to take care of myself they left me. The pain of being abandoned like that stung the center of my chest making me whine. Of course in my mind I knew that I was overreacting, especially since it wasn’t the fact that they had left that trouble me but because no one else was with me to keep me company. At first I had assumed that that was what all wolves went through until they found a mate. It wasn’t until I had turned fifteen that I realized that wolves were meant to be in packs.
My eyes met with the dark brown ones that were reflected on the water. I judged the image of the wolf starring back at me just as harshly as the pack I had once encountered had. The dark brown coat was dull meaning that they weren’t getting enough fat in their diet, small muscles meant they lacked good hunting traits, and the small body frame would mean that they would be easy to take down in a fight. My lips drew back until I was snarling down at my own disappointing image. The only pack I had ever encountered had said those same exact words to me.
The flash of the memory played inside of my head; a young fifteen year old pup stumbling along in the woods in the middle of the night. The smell of smoke and the sound of laughter had caught my attention but it was the presence of other wolves that had drawn me in. I could see myself poking my head through the nearby bushes so that I could catch a glimpse of them. At first I had thought that they were strange the way they sat around the fire in their human skins.
I mean my parents had taught me that our human forms were weaker than our wolf because they lacked claws and sharp fangs so to see other wolves choose to be in human form was very strange to me. What amazed me about the pack was the way they interacted with one another, one would laugh the others would follow, one would speak and the others would either listen intently or join in. I remember listening into their conversation longingly and wanting desperately to be a part of it, almost immediately after realizing that I revealed myself to them.
That hadn’t been the best idea. The Alpha of the pack thought that I was threatening them and started growling at me, and then he realized how small I was and started interrogating me as to why I was here and what I wanted. When I had told him that I wanted to be part of his pack he had laughed in my face. He pointed out that they had no need for a weak pup like me slowing them down.
After meeting that one pack I had yet to come into contact with another. Five years had passed since then and still I am a small wolf with no pack or mate to call my own. I looked away from my reflection with disappointment. Why was it so hard to find wolf packs and why was it even harder for me to join one?
I lowered myself down to the ground and rested my head over the side of my front legs. My thick brown pelt shielded me from the bitter cold of the mid-winter air well enough. Slowly the lids of my eyes started to droop. There was no point in trying to ward off sleep so I simply let it come. I accepted the darkness that flooded my vision and the dreamless sleep that soon followed.
***
The sun wasn’t even up yet when a growl startled me awake. Instinct took over at the sound of a threat and I instantly found myself shooting up to all fours. Fully alert and a little scared as to what was going on I surveyed my surroundings in search of what the growl had come from. When my gaze crossed a pair of glowing gold eyes concealed in the nearby brush I felt my blood turn to ice. The deadly beautiful golden globes held a murderous shine to them making me tremble with fear.
To show the other, probably large wolf, that I wasn’t a threat to him I instinctively flattened my ears to my head and lowered it substantially in a very nonthreatening manner. If I was trespassing on his territory he had every right to be mad at me but if he was simply looking for a fight to show his dominance than I was in big trouble.
His growl intensified as he slowly emerged from the darkness of the thicket. The small sliver of moon that was left in the night sky provided an eerie glimmer of light and the menacing looking wolf walked right into it. The fact that he was bigger than me should have come as no surprise but I hadn’t been expecting him to be the size of a tree either. His thick broad chest was double my size and his sickening height was that of an oak. Pushed on by fear my eyes focused in on his chest, noting the thick deep scars that marked it. Those scars told me multiple things about him like for one he had been a lot of vicious fights and two, that he had won them all.
My stomach tightened as he continued to growl in my direction. It was pointless to try and out run him and even more so to fight him. I lowered my soft underbelly down to the ground and prayed that he would realize that I was of no threat to him. My weak excuse for a body trembled with fear when his sudden roar filled the night sky. Before I could so much as yelp he barred his deadly white fangs and leapt towards. Not wanting to see my own bloody demised I shut my eyes.
The ground around me shook as he landed on top of me without actually touching me at all. I blinked at the feel of his tail touching my nose. What was going on? Another higher pitched growl emerged from behind me and a new fear gripped my already racing heart. There was another wolf. I twisted my head to the side and caught a glimpse of another blackish looking wolf with his hackles raised; challenging the grey one that was hovering over me.
Slowly the two of them inched their way closer to one another until something between them snapped. Not wanting to get caught up in their throw down, I scrambled away from them until stopping along the edge of the pond. Every part of my animal instincts were screaming for me flea while I had the chance but for some idiotic reason I felt the need to stay. I watched as the two strong wolves fought. The cool night air that had once been silent was now filled with snarls and howls. The two separated for a moment only to smack back together with bone cracking force. I had no clue who was winning the fight because they looked like a giant blur of black and grey, all I could manage to see was the bright red blood dripping down from the two.
I lowered myself to the ground and watched cautiously. They were pretty equally matched in size but the grey one was faster in maneuvering his body. He reared his head up with his fangs gleaming and bit down on the black ones neck. Before the black wolf could even howl out at the sudden pain there was a loud deadly snap. For a moment they were both frozen in that position and the night turned back to being silent.
Then the black one dropped to the ground in a bloody dead heap. His mouth stayed wide open as if he was still snarling but his eyes would forever be burned in my mind. Those cold black eyes were filled with fear that would forever be frozen in that moment. A shiver ran up my spine at the sight.
The grey wolf’s chest was moving at a rapid pace as he stared down at the dead body. The way he was looking at it made my own body tremble. It wasn’t the look of surprise or horror like a new pup would have, but one of someone that had killed before. He looked proud. He turned his cold yellow eyes to me and I froze. Why had I insisted on watching this fight? Why hadn’t I ran when I had the chance? The air around us grew dense until it became hard for me to breathe. Was it my turn to die?
He stared at me for a moment longer as if he was secretively throwing the fact that he had just killed in my face. Just when I thought he was finally going to snap and turn on me he did something completely unexpected. He turned around and walked away.
At first all I could do was stare mindlessly back at his retreating hide thinking that maybe it was just a trick, that there was no way a killer wolf like him would leave an easy kill like me to just live! Then the grey wolf disappeared into the brush that he had come from, leaving me unharmed and alone. Shocked by his urge to leave I found my ears perking up. He wasn’t going to kill me?
Before I went completely insane over that huge fact I needed to have some kind of a reason. I found myself replaying what had happened in my mind. I thought about the way he had stood over me as he growled at the other. Had that been in a protective manner? Slowly I looked back to the dead body. Had this been the wolf that I should have been afraid of? Maybe it hadn’t been me that he was initially growling at but rather the black one behind me. The wolf inside of me accepted that conclusion without any further questions but my human half wasn’t so sure.
Since my wolf form was more dominant than my human I did what it told me to do. Before I could even think twice about it I raced off in the direction that he had gone. I expected him to be a bit further ahead of me so I leaped through the bushes as far as I could. As luck would have it he was only a few feet away and I nearly ran into him. My heart was pounding against my chest as he slowly turned his head in my direction. To my surprise he didn’t growl or even snarl at me but rather turned back and continued walking.
I was so shocked by his lack of anger that I just stood there frozen. That fact that he hadn’t growled at me or anything else confirmed my theory. He had protected me. My chest felt warm suddenly as I watched him move away. I couldn’t help but watch him in admiration; he had protected me for no obvious reason and had asked for nothing in return. My heart was racing in my chest but this time it wasn’t from fear but rather something else entirely. Cautiously at first I started to trial behind him, I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt the need to follow him but something in me was demanding that I’d better.
I couldn’t help but feel a little excited over seeing him despite the fact that he had just killed another wolf. I hadn’t seen another werewolf in five years and now I met two in one night. What were the odds of that happening again? As I stalked after him I felt my heart rate spike up, so this is what a dominant male looks like. His pelt wasn’t as grey as I had originally assumed. It had a dark grey upper coat and then slowly faded down to a white on his underbelly. I watched in awe as the large muscles on his back tightened and released with each step he took. If he was part of a pack I believed that it would be safe to assume that he was Alpha male status.
I looked more closely at the scars the marred his flank and upper back. When I had first seen them I had clumped them together with his powerful demeanor but now that I looked more carefully at them I felt saddened. With the large amount of scars that he had it looked as if he had been fighting for a long time, maybe even his whole life. It was then that I noticed the slight limp on his right side. I angled my head to observe that side of him and what I saw made me pause. His greyish pelt was stained with blood and small dried chunks of it clung to his fur. There was a rather large gash on his front leg and it looked really deep and painful.
The pit of my stomach dropped at the sight of it. The cut was so deep and gruesome looking that there was no mistaking the pain he had to be in. There was no way that a cut like that didn’t hurt. I found my pace quickening until I was along the side of him. I knew that he had to be looking down at me but for the moment I didn’t really care. The smell of blood was thick now and it turned my stomach in a strange way. Blood was still seeping out of the wound at a steady rate. He shouldn’t be walking around like this, at least not until it healed.
A whine formed in the back of my throat. He paused at the sound and looked down at me. When my eyes met those brilliant golden one this time I was filled with amazement, how could someone so fearsome possess such beautiful eye? Now that I wasn’t afraid of him I was a lot bolder in my actions. I reached up my muzzle and slid it gentle underneath his. His fur was surprisingly soft against mine and I couldn’t help but relish the feel. He jerked back away from me with a startled expression and before I could do anything else he changed.
I watched carefully as his thick pelt retracted into his skin and his bones cracked into new positions. In a matter of seconds the transformation was over and in front of me sat a large naked man. Everything about him was different, instead of having grey hair he had brown, and instead of yellow eyes he had green. Then again not everything was changed. He was just a muscular in this form as his wolf and his eyes were still frightening in a dominant way.
The scars that had marked his wolf form hadn’t disappeared in the mist of the change. His chest was riddled with the crisscrossing scars as well as both of his arms. As for his arm the transformation had made the large gash on it worse. The hot blood oozed out of it and dripped steadily down his skin.
Automatically I made my way over to him with my ears flattened and my tail tucked down; showing him that I was not a threat. A low whine escaped my mouth before I pressed my tongue to his skin and licked away some of the blood. His body stiffed then he turned his neck to me and my head shot up to look at him.
“What are you doing?” His voice was so deep and commanding that it sent shivers down my spine. It wasn’t natural for a man like him to have such a husky voice like that.
Hesitantly, I rubbed my muzzle under his chin. The feeling of his skin touching my fur made me feel all tingly inside and when he lightly touched his hand to the side of my head the feeling spread. He pushed me away forcefully and stared sternly into my eyes.
“Will you stop that?” His eyes flickered into something heated. Was he angry? “Just because I protected you from that other wolf doesn’t mean that I need to be thanked, so you can just take your cuddling to someone else.”
Embarrassed by his comment I averted my eyes and looked down at the ground. Truthfully the thought of thanking him hadn’t even crossed my mind and now that he mentioned it I felt slightly ashamed. How rude I must seem to not have thanked him for saving my life. Instead I had been more concerned about his injure than anything else…well that and the fact that he was the first wolf I had come into contact with in a long time.
Cautiously I looked back up at him to see him glaring. His eyes flickered again as he raised his uninjured arm up and pointed behind me, “I said go!”
My body jumped up at his command and I sprinted into the direction he had pointed. I had only made it a few feet away before I slowed down and looked back at him. Even at this distance I could see that something other than anger had emerged there, something that I recognized. I stopped walking when I realized what it was. He was lonely.
I could feel my heart sink in my chest at the thought. If he had been part of a pack then they would have been with him by now but instead he was lying against the tree injured and alone. Slowly I turned in his direction and laid down on the cold dirt. I knew that feeling of loneliness and pain all too well and to see someone else feeling the exact same way changed something inside of me. It at that moment that I had decided that no matter what I wasn’t going to leave him alone.
His eyes hardened at the sight of me lying down and I imagined that he was a little unhappy for me not listening to him; however, he didn’t say another word. He just got comfortable against the tree and rested. It didn’t surprise me one bit that he had decided to rest. For one thing he was injured and probably needed to sleep off the wound and another thing was that he had just killed the only other threat around. Obviously he thought I was too small and weak to even be considered a threat. I tried not to take it too personally given that the man had just saved my life.
I looked up at the night sky and figured that it would be a few more hours before the dawn so I might as well sleep a little bit too. My head was fitted comfortably against my front legs and I easily drifted back into a sound slumber. When I woke up I was a bit startled. I hadn’t been expecting him to be back in wolf form when I awakened but there he was with the dim sun rays painting colors on his fur. The sight of him was quite breathtaking. He didn’t just attract my gaze but rather demanded it without even trying. In fact when he started walking away I felt as if I should have been worshipping the ground he stepped on. I hadn’t even been around him for a full day yet and already I was thinking of him as my Alpha.
I shook my head back and forth as I picked myself up off of the ground. We started walking to some unknown destination and every once in a while he would look back at me. Almost every time he looked at me I would flip my ears down and lower my head to the ground in a submissive way waiting for him to growl at me but strangely enough he never did. He would just glance back at me and then continue on as if he hadn’t even noticed that I was following him. We walked through the forest for hours before he finally came to a stop.
A familiar feeling passed over me and automatically the hair on my back stood up. I lifted my nose to the air and took a quick sniff. The smell that filled my nose made me gag instantly making me wish that I had never sniffed it in the first place. The air was filled with gasoline and different kinds of chemicals which could only mean one thing; we were close to the city. I shuddered at the thought. The city itself never really bothered me besides its awful smell but what lived there was an entirely different story.
A human form might be weak compared to a wolf but a human pack was something to be scared of. At least that is what my parents had told me. They said that the humans could mask their scents with strange odors, command other animals to do their bidding, and even create deadly weapons.
I looked back at the wolf to see that he had already changed into his human skin and was dressing himself with their cloths. Where had he gotten those? I wondered and then noticed the tan leather bag that was hidden besides a fallen tree trunk. Something about seeing that bag and him dawning on their cloths made me feel nervous. He wasn’t actually planning on going in there was he?
I whined over in his direction as he slipped into a grey hoodie. When his face popped through the hole of it he looked over at me and smirked.
“Don’t get all pouty at me. I told you to leave awhile back.” He looked down at the ground as he slipped on a pair of denim jeans followed by tennis shoes. “It’s your own fault for being stubborn.”
Not wanting to take another step closer in the direction of the city I started pacing back and forth. What was I going to do? Going into unknown territory was a big no for me but I didn’t favor the idea of being left alone again either. .
He picked up the bag off the ground and then stared at me for a moment. I stopped pacing in that moment as well and stared back. His expression reminded me of the one I had seen after he had told me to leave the first time. His jaded greens eyes were steady and completely focused on me as if he was etching my picture into his head or even worse…saying goodbye. My chest tightened painfully, I didn’t want to say goodbye to him. He had saved my life and for a short time eased the burden of loneliness off of my shoulders. It was too soon for us to part ways, too soon to return to being lonely.
The moment between us was over when he turned his back to me and walked away. My paws were frozen to the ground shaking as I watched him leave, watched his grey hoodie disappear behind a row of shrubs and trees. He had entered into their world and left ours leaving me on this side…alone. My whole body was suddenly shaking with the pain of being alone again. This isn’t what I wanted. This is what I wanted. The phrase repeated itself in my head over and over again until I was frightened.
When I had been around him I had been scared by his dominance sure, intimidated most defiantly, but alone? No, I hadn’t felt alone, not even for a moment by his side. I needed him. My legs were already moving in the direction that he had disappeared to and in that instant I knew that I feared being alone more than I feared the city. I jumped through the shrubs and trees that divided our worlds and my vision was blinded by what I saw.
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Yea I know the paragraph's are really long. Trust me when I say however that the story speeds up a lot once you get to the chapter three. This is a really great werewolf story I promise if you only give it a chance. Thank you for reading, commenting, and voting :D