The cancelled Full Moon celebration obviously made Elliott curious. Dad had talked to the Elders about the cancellation with a client’s death as a reason. While it was true, he didn’t say anything about hunters and such. Elliott called me when I was busy at school. I had to go out of the gymnasium to take his call and it only just full of him trying to dig deeper into the ‘reason’ that apparently didn’t satisfy him. He wasn’t this nosy when he was a kid, but it really wasn’t a surprise for me. “Is it because those hunters?” He asked after I refused to give him a clear answer. “Come on. I don’t think Elder Whitlock is that paranoid. He’s one of the strongest wolves I’ve ever met.” “He’s not an Elder anymore and he’s not paranoid,” I sighed. “He just feels like it’s not the right time to celebrate when he’s mourning.” Another thing I didn’t tell Elliott was Dad’s client who died was one of the hunters we saw back then. I would trust 10-year-old Elliott

I was waiting for Olive to come when Dad arrived from the Sheriff’s office. He was holding a brown paper bag with a frown across his face. “Are there any news?” Mom who was just came back from the laundry room to take my jacket looked worried. Before he replied, he looked around. “Where’s Nathan?” “He already left with Selene,” I replied. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he would leave me alone even though Olive and I could fit into his car and we could go to the school together. “The Sheriff confirmed that the bullets in Rick’s rifle were indeed silver,” Dad notified. “The good news is he didn’t seem to have any idea what were they for. He just thought that Rick liked to experiment on hunting.” “There’s nothing good comes out of this,” I whined. “Dad, he was a hunter—a werewolf hunter. It can only mean that the man who was with him was a hunter as well. God knows how many more of them out there.” “Yes. It was probably Sam Johnson,

After I had my first transformation, it wasn’t exactly rainbows and unicorns. My life as a full wolf had just begun. The first few months, shifting was the most painful. The wolf part of me took the dominance as soon as the Full Moon appeared. Dad said I had to let it out because it would just hurt me inside out if I kept holding it in. The thing was, I always fought against it. Even when I learned to shift whenever I wanted, I just couldn’t take full control of me, which was why it always resulted in a big pain. Nathan told me the only way to have a smooth transformation was to make a deal with it and make it a win-win situation for both of us, otherwise we would lose at some point in this inside battle. Seeing Wolf Ronny in front of me with an uncontrollable fury and pain in front of me took me back to those days. I was only a kid, but I had to go through it to win. It seemed like Ronny was unfortunate enough not to have someone like my dad to train me. If

The mention of the worst species of werewolves sent the room into a frenzy. “There is only one Beast that we know of,” Nathan recovered himself from a shock, “and he died hundreds of years ago.” “I’m not talking about the Fallen Beast. I’m talking about its descendants,” Dad clarified, and then he glanced at me, “and I think your friend is one of them.” A hard gasp came out of my mouth. I still could not believe that Ronny was a werewolf, and now Dad said that he was the descendant of the vilest and most brutal creature of Lycanthrope that caused the biggest war in the history? “If such creature existed, we should have known. Even Thea could have sensed it," said Nathan. Very smooth. Nobody realized that he was belittling me with those words, except me, of course. It happened all the time that everybody would normalize setting Thea as the lowest example. "It was called 'Fallen Beast' for a reason. He was an exceptional Lycan who showed differe

At the moment, I almost screamed, “What the hell?! Are we some kind of cleaning service now?!” After the nightmare drained me, I had no energy to proceed a complain. Had I known about the job details, which included doing tiny little errands, I probably wouldn’t have signed up with the homecoming committee. There’s no way I would do this again for the proms next time. My voice croaked, “Noooooo!” as I laid myself back to the bed and took another pillow to cover my face, but Olive, being the annoying early bird that she was, snatched it right away. “Just so you know, Thea. I had to go home with those boybands because the school area had to be sterilized!” She whined. “To repay all of that, you have to be with me until we’re done cleaning up.” I groaned indignantly. If I didn’t know better, I could’ve growled loudly to make scare her away, or at least, to make her step down from my bed. “You went home with Jim last night. Eleven-years-old you wo