Entre deux feux

When I was a little girl, I always thought I was just like other girls my age but that turns out that wasn’t true. The truth is, I’m a werewolf. The first time I had gained any knowledge of my true nature, I was twelve years old. That was the first time I turned.

I can remember the event as if it were only yesterday. The moon was shining, deadly silence filled the bayou where I lived. The broken corpses of my parents lie in front of me just a few feet away. I was sobbing and holding my mother’s lifeless hand. That’s when she emerged. The entity I would come to know as my wolf soul — Stella.

One minute I was a helpless and fragile girl, the next I was an adolescent wolf. The light of the full moon illuminated my pale blue eyes and thick, dusty colored coat. I was now towering over my parents, staring down into their lifeless eyes. I don’t even remember much about my first transformation, other than the fact it was painful. The sadness blocked it out. I just remember what happened next.

A large, onyx wolf emerged suddenly from the clearing. His luminous golden eyes were fixated upon me, staring deep into my own like he was trying to search for some secret I might have been keeping. Again, I was a little girl. I didn’t have any secrets. At least that’s what I thought.

In the next moment, his expression changed and a violent growl came from deep within his throat. The wolf’s eyes darkened as he crouched down like he was going to pounce on me. It was then that I turned and ran out of there. By the look on his face, he wanted to kill me. I didn’t know why. I hadn’t done anything. I was only a little girl. I didn’t even know I was a werewolf.

I managed to escape from him by running deep into the bayou that I had called home for so many years. Stella carried me to a house that I recognized as my mother’s sister’s. My aunt Rosette. I knocked on her door, naked and afraid. She took me in and clothed me, gave me a hot meal. It was through her that I learned I was a werewolf. A gene passed down to me by my father. I also learned that I was only half. My mother and her side of the family were all human. Again, that’s what I thought at the time. I wouldn’t be as strong as purebreds but I was okay with that. I was twelve. I didn’t need to learn how to fight.

Rosette thought otherwise though. She wanted me to train so I could at least protect myself from the wolf that tried to kill me. So, she introduced me to her friend Julien, a purebred werewolf. He spent years training me after that, in every type of combat there was, in and out of my wolf form, which he also taught me how to shift into on command. That had been an agonizing process but it just made me that 

When we turn, it feels like every bone in our bodies breaks at once. The wolves who are not usually fighters avoid having to rely on this form, instead depending on their superhuman strength in combat. However, if I was going to defend myself from any threats, I needed to be proficient in all forms of werewolf combat.

Almost six years have passed since that night. I am all grown up, just a month away from my eighteenth birthday. Today is the day I return to the pack. The one I was born to. The alpha who tried to kill me has since passed away, defeated by another alpha in battle. The ones who had wished to see me dead, gone with him to the afterlife. However, that didn’t keep the nerves at bay. It has been a long time since I’ve been home.

I wonder if I’d even be welcomed by anyone there. I look out the window and stare at the moon, silently praying to the Moon Goddess to let me redeem myself for whatever sins my parents had perished to pay for.

And it would be on this night that I would have my first experience with the whispers of the ancestors passed. They would whisper the name my parents blessed me with at birth...

... Elodie.