The Secret

INTRODUCTION

My name is Kacela.  I am twenty-one years old, and I am a werewolf hunter.  And I have a secret. 

I am a werewolf.

I was raised in a family of werewolf hunters.  My father, mother and older brother are all werewolf hunters, and I made my first kill when I was twelve years old.  I am trained in weaponry and hand to hand combat as well as other skills that I use in the field, like tracking.  I’m also exceptionally good at finding werewolves who don’t want to be found using a variety of techniques, but mostly common sense and computer skills.  It’s a family business and it keeps us well employed and financially stable.  We move around a lot because of it.

The day before my sixteenth birthday, my mother announced that she and I would be taking a girl’s only weekend trip.  I was really excited, and I remember packing my favorite trainers, skinny jeans and crop top thinking I was all that.  Instead of the fancy resort with pedicures and massages I was expecting, mom took us to a cabin in the woods that she had rented for the weekend.  She popped a DVD in and we spent the day watching rom-coms and eating junk food.  It was a good day but wasn’t exactly the day I was expecting. 

That night I shifted.  I started feeling weird after the sun went down and I didn’t know what was happening.  My mother looked terrified, not knowing how to help me since she wasn’t a werewolf.   My bones broke, healed and then rebroke, and my body contorted in ways it had never done before.  At the end of the night, I lay on the floor in front of my mother, exhausted having no idea what had happened to me. 

The next day we sobbed together, and she told me that she had met my father, my biological father, in the woods one day while she was hunting and had fallen instantly in love with him.  They had met several times, and each time she had the intent of breaking it off, but it never happened.  He finally explained to her that she was his mate.  Even though she was human, she could still feel the mate bond and that’s why she felt so in love with him.  One day she was going to meet him, and she felt an indescribable pain.  When she got to their meeting place he was not there, but her husband, my father, was.  He had killed her mate.  He never found out about her affair.

She made me swear not to tell my father about my wolf, telling me that he would never be able to love me anymore if he knew my terrible secret.  I promised, not wanting to tear apart my family and feeling intense shame and anger towards what lived inside me.  We returned from our weekends, subdued and resolute.  I took up my part of the family business with gusto, never feeling guilt for killing what was now my own kind.  In fact, it was an obsession.  I needed to kill as many werewolves as I could to atone for what lived in me.

I was eighteen when I met my mate.  I was tracking a werewolf and I had intel that he was at the local high school.  I enrolled myself as a new student and went in, intending to locate him and then eliminate him.  Turns out he was the one that was my mate.

I told my family that he had left the school and moved to a neighboring state.  I continued to attend the school, acing my math classes and spending as much time as I could with David, keeping him a secret from my family.   I had warned him that my family was hunting him, but he wasn’t worried.  We made plans to leave and run away together and to find a pack that would take us both.  He reintroduced me to my wolf, Dali, and taught me not to be ashamed of that part of me.  And then my father killed him.

We had made our plans and we had finalized them.  I had gone home to pack some things and pick up the money that I had stashed away.  I borrowed my brother’s Prius and was driving down the highway when the most intense, awful pain hit me.  I pulled over, curled into a ball, and cried from the pain.  I thought I was dying.

When I got to our meeting place a half hour late, I realized why I had hurt so badly.  David’s wolf was laying on the ground, my father’s arrow through his side.  The pain I felt was the pain my mother described she had felt when she lost her mate.  It was the pain of the bond breaking, a piece of my soul dying.  I cried, buried David under a tree and grieved with Dali.  Then I went home.

I returned quietly, saying nothing about my plans to leave and pushing Dali to the furthest corner of my mind, refusing to speak with her.  I resumed my werewolf hunting with a vengeance, doing penance for going against my family and our business.  I went after larger and more dangerous wolves, perfecting the art of werewolf hunting.  I pushed myself, not caring if I lived or died, and wanting to destroy the werewolf in me in the process.   

I trained hard and worked harder.  Within a year I had requests all over the country for my services.  I broke away from my family, forming my own business, hunting, capturing, and killing the world’s most dangerous and elusive werewolves.   I was the best.  The best werewolf hunter.  And that still wasn’t good enough for me.