04

Surprise echoed among people, but the man merely moved his eyes to me. The golden glow seemed to turn red for a quick moment, but I did not pay attention to this fact, as I struggled with fear and faced the risk.

"Listen here, you Neanderthal, I'm an asthmatic with serious problems of arrogance. I studied for years of my short life to get to this point: where I find an answer. People are dying. There is hunger and fear where I come from. If I will be enslaved at the end of this day, at least I demand to know what is there inside this barracks so that the stars would send me here."

"Stars don't speak," he said, arching an eyebrow.

"They spoke this time."

The stranger just watched me for too long, so he gave a snorting giggle. The sound gave me goosebumps, but it wasn't out of fear.

"Your stars sent you to the wolves den, sweetie. There's nothing in there but us."

"No medicine?"

“No.”

"No weed?".

“Nothing.”

I felt frustrated and shocked. I let go of the stranger's arm and looked at the sky. There was still a long way to go until dusk. It would still take hours for me to check the stars and coordinates of that point again because maybe the next one wouldn't take me to anything either. And I was already dead with those strangers around me, I couldn't risk finding something that wouldn't give me time to explain myself at the next point on the map.

"For what I'm looking for?" I asked the bluish emptiness of the sky.

"For death, maybe," replied the stranger. And again I focused my attention on his beautiful face. One of his hands appeared in my throat and sharp nails protruded against my skin. My scream stuck in my throat. "But you found her very quickly."

"How long can a human resist without air?" He asked for a female voice.

"This one seems to me to be lasting too long," replied another woman.

The man who held me by the neck had taken all my air, but he could very well have broken my neck without the slightest effort. He wanted to torture me, he wanted to see life leaving my eyes. And I was almost at my limit when my backpack fell off my shoulders and all my belongings fell to the ground.

I doubted very much that the map, the camera, a few packed sandwiches, and a flashlight would have made enough noise to bother the stranger, but whatever the reason, he suddenly let me go.

I collapsed on my knees, coughing to recover my air. The burning of that man's big and heavy hand on my skin caused tears to jump out of my eyes. And for a moment I thought the man was bending down to attack me differently, but he simply searched between the items in my backpack and took one of them. My necklace.

The moon pendant shone when he raised his closed fist around the chain. Suddenly I was aware of how weak and useless I was in front of that man because my necklace looked like a mere line inside his long fingers.

For a moment, silence fell on those people, and I was aware of how tense they were. It was as if killing humans wasn't part of the routine. As if I was disturbing something that was about to happen in the barracks. Then the man indicated the necklace with a wide chin and asked me:

"Why do you have this?"

"Because it was a gift."

I sat on the floor since my knees were hurting a lot. The stranger watched my face, slightly tipping his head to the side. He looked at my brown and stained hair with a red strand that started on my bangs and ended in curly ends. He seemed to be looking for my characteristics in his memory.

"It's a silver necklace," he found.

I shrugged.

"All our jewelry is made of silver, this is common."

"This kind of jewelry is not common," he insisted, this time in a slightly more altered voice. "It was lost a few years ago when humans like you thought they could enslave us or use us in their experiments."

He didn't need to say anything else. For a mind-blowing moment, I imagined that the blood of those evolved people could be the salvation of my race. And I was determined to die if that would mean taking some samples to the laboratory. However, if others tried this and got close enough to rescue a relic... then it was in vain.

"My father gave it to my mother when she got pregnant, and that's why I study the cosmos and the stars," I formally explained, even though I felt the imminence of death in the eyes of that cruel man. "I have a connection with the moon since I understand myself by people."

"It's the witch's curse!" Someone moaned in the middle of the large group of people.

"Break the neck of this human, Alpha Randall, protect us," begged someone else.

I frowned. Curse of the witch? At the very least it was an obsession that I nurtured for heaven. And I didn't understand anything about spells. I even doubted that witches existed, but I also doubted overdeveloped humans and werewolves, and I would never believe that the two could mix so perfectly. So I decided to swallow my opinions and try to understand the dread of those people.

With a sound very similar to a growl, Alfa Randall made everyone shut up. With one hand, he lifted my chin and kept me still. Somehow, I couldn't remember having legs and arms to get rid of him. The golden eyes turned completely red and I had the slight impression of feeling claws scratching my chin.

"Her smell is familiar and disturbing," he said, semi-closing his eyes. I didn't notice that I made the same gesture, completely dominated by its magnitude. "You have ten seconds to explain who you are, what you are looking for, and how you can have come this far, without lying about stars, before I pull out your spine with my claws."