Isabelle let out an exasperated sigh as Ash stood in front of her. Ash was a tall girl but she had poor posture, and today her brown eyes looked tired. Her shiny black hair was tied up in a bun on top of her head, making her look like a matron.
"You look like hell, Boots. What's wrong with you?"
Ash smoothed her hair back and moved to rub her eyes. Isabelle slapped down her hand.
"Hey!" Ash yelped.
"Don't do that, Ashy! Your hands are dirty from the oil in your hair!"
"Sorry, My Lady!" Ash said, rolling her eyes.
"You keep calling me 'My Lady' and I will slap you right across your dumb face!"
"I would love to see you actually slap someone, Izzy. It would be hilarious. Saint Blaise himself would rise from the dead to see that."
"You are the most blasphemous person I have ever met, Ash Parker!"
"Clearly, you don't keep the company of many blasphemers, Your Ladyship." Ash laughed.
Isabelle rolled her eyes at Ash. Ash laughed at her friend.
Prior to meeting Ash Parker, Isabelle Valois hadn't been the type of girl who rolled her eyes. She had grown up prim and proper as the sheltered second heiress of the landed Count Valois. Her older brother Jean bore much of the responsibility for being Count Valois's sole male heir, which left Isabelle with very little to do growing up.
Isabelle had been her mother's favorite and she had spent an idle childhood in a rich estate where she was waited on hand and foot by servants who would not look her in the eye. The pageantry and isolation became stiffling for Isabelle. She found little pleasure in the trappings of her royal life and wanted nothing more than to live somewhere else where nobody knew her name.
Ash Parker had been the first person in the entire school who had not known who Comtesse Isabelle Valois was. For what seemed like endless days, Isabelle had endured her classmates keeping a polite distance from her, as well as her teachers who, despite not using her official title as recommended by the school, still managed to speak her name with such reverence that the title "Comtesse" was implied anyway.
The scrappy scholar had been at the Academy for less than a week when she won Isabelle over with her warmth and good nature.
Most of the students in their year had kept a respectful distance from Isabelle because of her family background. Unfortunately, her close friendship with the orphan scholar further alienated the pair from their classmates.
The elites in particular saw no benefit to befriending a poor nobody on a full-ride scholarship.
Of course, most of the powerful families had their pet charities and various causes which they supported, but most of them also used these philanthropies mainly as tax shelters and reserved their outpouring of generosity for positive public relations. They were already throwing money to the poor; it was too much to ask that they also befriend them.
"Good morning, ladies!"
Celia had made her way downstairs while the girls were talking. Just as they turned to look her way, she flipped her hair over one shoulder and gave them a languid side-eye.
Isabelle raised her perfectly shaped eyebrow approvingly at Celia.
"Lovely coat, darling," she said.
Ash nodded in acknowledgment.
Celia cocked her head and smiled back: the green coat had the group's approval.
"Hey, uhm . . . " Celia started, suddenly turning serious.
"What?" Izzy asked.
"Ashy had that dream again."
"What do you mean?"
"You know, the little girl one. The first snow dream."
Isabelle immediately threw her arms around Ash. Ash didn't even see the hug coming and just awkwardly had her arms up with her palms facing out. She looked wide-eyed at Celia, as if she wasn't sure what to do next.
Celia lightly touched Ash's face with her fingertips. She went around the two girls and took both of Ash's upturned palms into her own hands and bent down to press her forehead into Isabelle's hair, forming a three-person hug. Ash gave in to their collective warmth: she closed her eyes and rested her head on top of Isabelle's hair and squeezed lightly on Celia's fingers.
When Ash was around 5 years old, she had been found alone in a mountain lodge at the beginning of winter. Someone had called the police to report a disturbance in the woods. An investigation was conducted and it was concluded that a woman had been mauled by a large wild animal. There were traces of blood and signs of a struggle, but the woman's body was never found. The woman was Ash's mother.
Ash's father had disappeared around this time and was eventually logged as a missing person. Ash was taken into custody, and having no other living relatives, she was put in an orphanage and she became a ward of the state.
Everyone at the Academy knew that Ash was an orphan and the rumor was that she had been abandoned by her parents as a child. Her friends were the only ones at school who really knew the official story.
Ash's little girl nightmare was a traumatic memory from when her mother had been killed. A child psychologist had suggested that based on the dream imagery perhaps Ash had been abducted around the time of her mother's death. That theory had been ruled out by the police; besides Ash and her mother, there had been no evidence to support the presence of other people being at the lodge.
Ash tightened her hold around her two friends. She wanted nothing more than to go back to her room and be cuddled back to sleep by them. Going back to sleep wasn't going to change what happened in the past though; that part of her life happened years ago and she chose to live in the present.
It wasn't a hard choice to make. The present was easily better than the past: the present was where she had her friends around her.
"I love you, guys." Ash whispered. The other girls nodded quietly.
She looked up from their huddle.
"I'm okay now, guys. Thank you."
Nobody responded.
"This hug needs to end because it's starting to hurt my back. You're both putting your weight on me."
The other girls giggled.
"Sorry, Gramma!" Celia teased as she broke from their group hug.
Isabelle wiped a tear from her eye. Despite her ice princess facade, she had the softest heart in the group.
"Come on, you dorks. Let's not get into it too heavy in the morning. It's a school day! Let's eat breakfast, okay?" Ash said with a smile. She had a rough way of saying things, but her heart felt full of love.
Ash felt the dull pain in her back all throughout breakfast. She felt it in the back of her neck as she bent down to bring spoonfulls of food into her mouth. She felt it shifting through her organs as she laughed with her friends. She felt it spread from her back to her legs as she walked to class and felt it in her arms as she shifted the weight of her book bag from one shoulder to another."Ash, you don't look well. What's wrong?"Isabelle looked at her friend with concern.Ash smiled widely, but even the effort of smiling made her face muscles ache."Don't worry about me, Mom. I think I might just be catching a winter cold or something. I always feel a full body pain before I get the flu.""Mom?" Celia laughed. "Don't mock the Comtesse, Ashy. She may just well adopt you. She has connections, she can totally do it." she joked.Izzy looked pointedly at Celia before turning to look at Ash. Celia may not have meant anything by it, but Izzy wa
Aside from that morning's minor incident, the rest of the school day was uneventful. Ash had gotten over her embarrassment quickly and by lunch time, she had already allowed Celia to earn her forgiveness by buying her an extra plate of chicken wings.As Celia and Ash used their hands to dig into their lunch, Isabelle looked at them, her face scrunched up and looking judgemental."What, do you want to take a picture so it lasts longer?" Celia asked, sarcastically."I know it's normal for you guys to eat like barbarians, but I'm still not used to seeing it up close." Isabelle said as she sliced delicately at her salad and chewed carefully."Come on, Izzy, we've seen you eat a burger. That's not exactly fine dining." Ash replied."Yes, but that's outside of school, in a restaurant that sells hamburgers. That's only appropriate, especially when I'm always outvoted by the two of you at dining choices," Isabelle said, primly."It's not about fine
"Hey, I'm going for a run later, are you coming along?" Celia asked the girls after class."I have a fencing class later, but if you go before that I can do a quick jog around the field with you." Isabelle said."Uh, yeah, I'll go too. My back's been hurting all day. Maybe I can jog it out, stretch my muscles.""I don't know, Boots. If it hurts, maybe you should go lie down. It's a little cold out."The girls were walking back to the dorms to put their things away. The sun was still out, but the wind was cold.Ash pressed her thumb to her lower back and traced along her spine, massaging the sore spots. She'd felt a slight pain in her back for days now, but today the pain was sharp. Not only that, she had felt her joints aching all day. It was like someone had thrown her body in a washing machine and set it on high."Maybe she just needs a massage. I bet she'd like a Swedish massage, wouldn't she, Cece?" Isabelle said playfully, looking to Ce
As soon as Ash got inside her dorm room, she dropped her book bag on the floor, tossed off her overcoat, stepped out of her leather school shoes, and flopped face down on her bed. She didn't even bother to change out of her uniform.Celia looked on from the doorway. She shrugged and quietly picked up her friend's discarded book bag, setting it on the floor beside Ash's study table. She balled up the crumpled coat and set it on top of Ash's book bag. Then, she put away both of their shoes, nudging aside Ash's strewn pair with her socked feet, and put her own book bag on her own study table, just beside Ash's.Celia quietly changed into a pink velour Adidas Originals tracksuit and put on a pair of pure white Adidas trainers with gold accents. She knew that some of the students made fun of her for being noveau riche and ragged on her alleged lack of good taste, so she made it a point to double down on her flashy street-style aesthetic at school. She knew what she liked an
Hunter had noticed the change in the color of Ash's ears as he passed by the girls that morning, just before class. He had been genuinely amused by Celia's accidental insult of her friend's mental capacity (Celia had accidentally called Ash "retarded" earlier that day) but he felt a little guilty that Ash had been embarrassed by it. He had no doubt that Ash was smart. And it wasn't because she was a scholar: the SBA scholarship's only conditions were that she didn't violate any of the Academy's rules and that she pass all of her classes.Despite that minimum standard, Ash had made the effort to perform well in school. She maintained her academic standing in the upper 10 percent of their level every year since she started at Saint Blaise's Academy. While she didn't exactly top the class, she always ranked third or fourth at every term and received minor commendations at the end of every school year.Hunter admired Ash's tenacity. She didn't have the advantage of exclusi
Hunter bounded swiftly into the woods. He had been aching to shift since lunch time: he had felt the surge of animal energy coursing through his veins and the wolf's hunger had been clawing away at his insides. He needed to channel his urges into a hunt, otherwise, he would have gone crazy.When he was far enough away from the fence, he chose a safe spot under a tree. The half moon was cradled in the tree's branches as he looked up: he deemed it a good sign.He let go of his human mind and began to shift. His spine lengthened and his muscles grew to accommodate the increase in his height. From his human frame of nearly 6 feet tall, he grew larger to an impressive 8 feet from his head to his new hind legs. His bones shifted all over his body and his muscles and tissues expanded to cover them, all the while his organs moved, resizing and reorganizing inside him. As the surface of his body increased, his leather costume was swallowed into the expanding mass of his new ski
Hunter took stock of the tattered uniform in front of him. He knew from the scent who it belonged to, but it didn't really give him much to go on.Thinking was hard. It was especially hard when the aroma of a fresh kill was still wafting in the air and the enticing scent of a possible mate was within immediate mating vicinity.Hunter left the pile of tatters and returned to the deer carcass. He ate the leg that Ash had dropped, fed on the entrails, and tore apart the deer's front legs. When he had finished with his meal, it looked like a pack of wolves had descended on the poor deer. He would leave the rest for the scavengers to find.If a forest ranger were to pass by, the carcass would just be another hard piece of evidence for predation in action: another prey animal succumbing to a carnivore, just another day in the wild with Mother Nature.He turned his attention back to Ash, eager to sniff at the new werewolf up close.When he found her, she
"You know, I saw you at lunch today, and---"Hunter cut himself off mid-sentence: he noticed Ash's eyelids were twitching. It looked like she was about to come to.[Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,] he thought, panic rising in his chest.She was still haphazardly dressed and propped up on his knee. He would have wanted to put a modest distance between their bodies (making room for the Holy Spirit, as the teachers called it) especially considering her state of undress, but that would have meant putting her back on the cold ground.He settled for cradling her shoulders: it seemed like a reassuring thing to do for her (human contact after passing out and all that) but more importantly for him, he could at least keep her from slapping his face the moment she opened her eyes."Heeeey, Boots. Wassup?" he said.[Wassup? Where the hell did that come from? That sounded so lame!] he thought to himself, cringing inwardly.Ash slowly open