26

You give yourself far less credit than you deserve. You have within you the gift of transformation. With it comes the power to heal. The power to wield nature as you see fit.

“I know. It’s what they call being a latent wolf. Except, now it’s too late and I haven’t ever learned how to turn or anything. I think I’m better off dead,” I said.

But what of the loved ones you leave behind? He mourns. What of your mother when she finds out? The anguish shall make her adjourn.

“You’re not making this easy on me.”

Such is life. Never meant to be easy. Not for the faint-hearted.

“I shall go,” I said.

Wise choice, child.

“Hey, do you know my dad? Briar Hawkins?” I asked in a desperate attempt to make sense of things.

The wolf did not respond. He disappeared in smoke. The water beneath my feet dried up, leaving nothing but pitch black beneath me. I looked up and saw that the moon had dissolved into nothingness.

14

Brandon

How could I have been so careless?

How could I have completely forgotten about the DOPC? It was all my fault that Alice lay lifeless, riddled with bullets. It was her vision that had foreseen this. Had I been a little more careful, had I listened to what she tried to tell me when she told me of her vision, none of this would have happened.

The soldiers were all retreating. In my frenzy, I had overwhelmed them, becoming a blur of speed and claws. Their injured ranks took to the woods while the rest surrounded the hut.

I could not leave Alice lying there on the floor, bleeding out. There might still be a chance that I could save her. There was still the Ritual.

I knew there was little time. I had to make a choice. Continue fighting the soldiers or save Alice. If I didn’t fight them off now, they would only come back with reinforcements.

What I could not understand was how they had discovered us in the first place?

As the gunfire simmered down, I raced over to where Alice lay and dragged her body inside the hut. The hut wouldn’t hold for long, this much I knew, but at the very least it would give me some time to try the Ritual.

She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even breathing. My heart sank in my chest as I battled with the concept that it might already be too late, that she might be dead.

I lied her down on the floor. I ripped the bed off the floor and propped it against the window. I jammed a chair against the door. That was good enough for now.

Seeing her lying there, bullets wedged in her body, her clothes drenched in blood, broke me. Tears came to my eyes, clinging, stinging, as I sat down beside her. I took her wrist in my hands and checked for a pulse.

“Baby, please, don’t you give up on me just now. Don’t you die, dammit,” I said as I began performing the Ritual. Around me, even though I did my best to ignore the sounds, I could hear the soldiers forming a perimeter. They had the hut completely surrounded. Any moment now, they would attack. They would lob a grenade in or ram the door. Or they’d simply decide to unleash their bullets into the walls of the hut. I doubted that the aged wooden walls of the hut would provide much cover.

I began the Ritual.

First, I took my tears and placed them on my fingers.

“Tears of sorrow, given in grief.” I placed the tears on Alice’s forehead.

“Blood of her mate, bled in brief.” I sliced my palm open and let a drop fall on top of the tears.

“Blood of her own, akin to an autumn leaf.” I took some of Alice’s blood and smeared it on her forehead. Already, the mixture of my blood, Alice’s blood, and my tears had begun glowing. It could mean anything. It could mean that the Ritual was working. It could also mean that Alice’s soul was departing her body.

“A kiss from a wolf unto a new wolf, a promise of life.” I knelt and kissed Alice’s cold lips.

“Rise, therefore, relent against the strife.” I crossed Alice’s arms against her chest and pushed deeply.

“CLEAR!” came a scream from the other side of the window. It was just as I had suspected. They had lobbed in a grenade. Before I could get up to throw it back, the grenade had already made its way across the room.

It would explode any second.

Before I could see if the Ritual had worked or not, I landed on the grenade, picked it up and lobbed it back through the small clearing between the window and the bed I’d propped against it.

The wall of the hut came crashing down in the wake of the blow.

There was nothing between me and the soldiers anymore. From the looks of it, their reinforcements had arrived. It had all been for nothing. As I shifted into my wolf form for one final battle, I noticed something out of the periphery of my vision.

Alice was moving.

This spectacle alone was so astonishing that it stunned the soldiers in their steps. They stopped advancing, the sights of their guns fixated on Alice as she moved.

The Ritual had worked.

It was the way she was moving that had thrown off the soldiers. She wasn’t sitting up or shifting. She was actively writhing and convulsing. The bullets that had been lodged into her body were flying out of her. The bullet holes were filling up. The blood on her skin was disappearing with each passing second.

Seeing someone’s first-time transformation was always a privilege. A privilege I had never had.

Alice rose into the air, her body contorting as she shifted. She grew in size and length as each limb went from being a human being’s limb to that of a wolf. Fur magically came out of nowhere, covering her in the majesty of her new form.

The Ritual was meant for latent wolves. When I learned that Alice was one, I went to the elders to teach me how to perform it. There were twelve different iterations of the Ritual, depending on what occasion it was. The Ritual that I had performed on Alice was known as the Ritual of Loss, meant to be performed only when a latent wolf’s life was in grave danger.