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HEART OF THE DRAGON

I am unsurprised 😂 Amen gives me dragon energy and I love writing were-creature stories, so I'm having a lot of fun with this. In a realm comprised solely of magic factions, there's always a war going on. In order to fund his current one, the werewolf king has traded his daughter Eva as collateral for a trunkful of gold from the dragon king. Amen, the dragon king's top (and most brutal) hunter, is grounded from a wing injury and forced to act as Eva's bodyguard. Blah blah blah, enemies to interspecies boning.

Once the room emptied, Amen sat and watched Eva breathe, slowly and evenly in her sleep. Furious as he was with her, he hadn’t wanted to do what he'd done. He tried to simply order her to comply with the healer, but she never did as she was told. It was an infuriating and insurmountable flaw. Truly, it was her fault that he’d been forced to use the sleep draught on her. And yet, a strange emotion passed through him, one that took him a moment to identify. Regret. He was unsure how to conquer such a feeling. Everything Amen did was with intention. He knew every move that needed to be made and he made them without hesitation. He didn’t look back. But that was before Eva. Odd how his life felt segmented. Before Evthys. After Evthys. And after Evthys, everything felt… off. Not just because she’d nearly knocked him unconscious with bath implements and had called him names he didn’t think a backwater rogue would use, let alone a werewolf princess, but there was something else. Something about her that made him itch all over. Tightened his skin like a blistering sunburn without oil.  He hated werewolves. He wanted to hate her. And yet. Eva grimaced in her sleep and released a quiet whimper of pain as the poultice drew the poison from her wounds. Agonizing wounds she’d successfully hidden from him for a double fortnight.  Without thought, he leaned forward and brushed the curls off Eva’s face. Stubborn, his dragon said. Beautiful. Strong. Ours. The word was a hiss, sibilant and stretched until it was more like a lick of fire than a sound. Oursssss. He tensed, his body drawing up so tightly his shoulder began to throb. Panic settled into his chest, and he reared away from Eva like she'd been the flame burning him and not the word his dragon had so recklessly spoken. She wasn't theirs. And she never would be.

I know I should have made Eva a witch to make it truer to the source material, but I like writing werewolves, so here we are 😂

guess who’s baa-ack?

https://www.wattpad.com/1328953318-gold-eyes-book-one-appearances-chapter-two-tatiana

its that time again *book slowly fades in* https://www.wattpad.com/1308219239-gold-eyes-book-one-appearances-chapter-one-tatiana

forgot to mention its got some werewolves in it and its an alternate timeline of our earth where werewolves exist, and everyone knew, but think only two species survived (le cat-people also guess what doesn't exist in anime, and dragon people, who are just peaceful and want to exist in the world) sorry about that

so i been writing a book and im thinking i should post it here, and while its going to eventually turn to very much whump (there may already be some little bits up) so i just wanna know who would be interested. It will be called Golden and Silver

Meeting

Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.

Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes

Tatiana

--- I felt a little empty. Like always.

Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.

I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.

I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me. 

I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.

She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible. 

I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.

She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her. 

“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”

She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”

I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance. 

Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”

“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”

Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.

Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”

She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”

He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.

“You can collect them at the end of class,”

She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag. 

“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’

Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.

I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.

As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.

Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them. 

We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.

We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.

When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon. 

She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.

Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.

They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”

Three months.

“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”

“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”

Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.

We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.

We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.

When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.

They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.

Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.

I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.

Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?” 

Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”

“So, what are your interests?”

“Medieval history,”

“Anything else?”

“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”

“Never heard of any of those,”

She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.

I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.

Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”

It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.

My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.

She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”

“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.

“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”

“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”

Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”

“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”

She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”

“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”

“Oh, cool,”

Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.

The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.

We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.

The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.

I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.

He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”

“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”

“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.

“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.

The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.

Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.

Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.

Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.

“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”

Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.

“At least your name?”

“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”

“Thank you, Cami,”

She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.

When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.

Cami

----

I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.

Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.

“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.

Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”

“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”

“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”

I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.

Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet. 

I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”

“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”

She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.

I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.

Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.

He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.

I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.

She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.

We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.

“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”

She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.

“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.

“We were twelve-!”

“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.

Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.

We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.

I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.

She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.

Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.

“Thank you,” I croaked.

I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”

I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”

“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”

“Too far,” I confirmed.

She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.

A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.

The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.

The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.

Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.

“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.

“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.

“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.

I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.

I decided to act at that moment.

I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.

I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.

“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.

“Relax,” I said. 

I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.

He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.

Hunter didn’t chase them.

“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.

I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”

He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.

“Shut up,” he snarled.

I nodded.

He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.

I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.

He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.

---

Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”

At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.

One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag. 

I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.

Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.

I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.

Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.

I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.

I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.

Meeting

Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.

Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes

Tatiana

--- I felt a little empty. Like always.

Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.

I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.

I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me. 

I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.

She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible. 

I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.

She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her. 

“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”

She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”

I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance. 

Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”

“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”

Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.

Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”

She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”

He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.

“You can collect them at the end of class,”

She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag. 

“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’

Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.

I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.

As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.

Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them. 

We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.

We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.

When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon. 

She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.

Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.

They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”

Three months.

“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”

“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”

Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.

We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.

We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.

When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.

They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.

Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.

I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.

Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?” 

Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”

“So, what are your interests?”

“Medieval history,”

“Anything else?”

“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”

“Never heard of any of those,”

She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.

I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.

Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”

It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.

My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.

She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”

“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.

“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”

“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”

Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”

“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”

She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”

“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”

“Oh, cool,”

Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.

The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.

We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.

The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.

I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.

He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”

“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”

“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.

“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.

The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.

Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.

Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.

Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.

“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”

Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.

“At least your name?”

“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”

“Thank you, Cami,”

She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.

When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.

Cami

----

I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.

Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.

“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.

Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”

“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”

“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”

I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.

Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet. 

I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”

“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”

She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.

I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.

Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.

He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.

I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.

She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.

We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.

“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”

She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.

“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.

“We were twelve-!”

“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.

Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.

We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.

I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.

She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.

Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.

“Thank you,” I croaked.

I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”

I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”

“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”

“Too far,” I confirmed.

She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.

A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.

The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.

The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.

Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.

“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.

“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.

“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.

I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.

I decided to act at that moment.

I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.

I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.

“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.

“Relax,” I said. 

I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.

He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.

Hunter didn’t chase them.

“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.

I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”

He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.

“Shut up,” he snarled.

I nodded.

He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.

I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.

He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.

---

Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”

At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.

One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag. 

I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.

Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.

I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.

Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.

I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.

I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.

masterlist

finally motivation prepare to get like seven chapters of this story (me months later: well that was a lie (except on AO3)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

bleeding and a run

CW: blood (as per title) guns, hospital whump, being really high on morphine in said hospital, slavery mention, asassination mention, ecoli mention, mild swearing,

Tatiana

----

Several people were at my door, a girl with olive skin and a very tall redhead girl that I had to look straight up to meet the eyes of, and she carried a passed out, bleeding-in-many-places Cami in her arms. Cami was almost dwarfed in comparison to this girl. Almost. Cami was about a foot shorter.

My mother and I let them inside, then conversed for a minute in Portuguese to figure out what we’d do, when my mother recognized something about the tall one.

“Wait- are you Night- Claire Malkom’s kid?”

“How do you know her name?” the redhead asked. Her voice had lowered by about an octave.

“You’re little Magdalena? Oh my God, last time I saw you you were so little!”

“I- don’t know you,”

She backed away.

Cami’s eyes slowly blinked open, and she mumbled, “Cuz, where are we?”

“That’s Airi- Ariana’s kid?” Lara said.

Magdalena nodded.

The ambulance arrived, and Lara said, “I’ll call Ariana, okay Magdalena?”

“Okay,” she replied.

Magdalena and the other girl took Cami to the ambulance and didn’t return.

Lara took out her phone and called someone, speaking very rapidly in French. I didn’t speak French, so I didn’t get much out of it, but when she hung up, she said, “We’re going to the hospital,”

We went out to the car, and my mom drove us there, then parked and hugged a tall red-headed woman wearing a knitted sweater and sweatpants. Not ideal for August.

My mother introduced us, and Ariana smiled at me. She seemed ancient, though she looked about thirty. My mom’s age.

A man with dark hair and pale skin, holding the hand of a girl with white hair, extremely pale skin and a red and white cane in her other hand approached us and gasped, “Any update, mom?”

Ariana nodded and said, “She’s in the ICU right now, awaiting surgery,”

She hugged him and said, “Don’t you worry Jon- Xoya, she’ll make it,”

We entered the hospital, and a few hours later, Ariana was told she could go to her daughter’s room now.

We went to Cami’s room, and she lay in the bed, an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. 

In and out, in and out.

Her wrists had IVs in it, with blood in one, some fluid in another. She had patches on her eyebrow, a bandage peeked out from under the light blue hospital gown. Her hair and the blood were the only colors in the room.

Her eyes blinked open, and I saw liquid gold for a moment, then her eyes dimmed and she went limp again, her arm angled oddly to the point it would be stiff when she woke up.

Ariana moved her arm back to a comfortable position, and she rolled to the side and mumbled, “Mommy, where am I?”

Ariana kneeled close to her and whispered, “Hospital,”

“Really? Did I get ‘im?”

“Get who?”

“Hunter,” she mumbled, “Did he finally realize he needed to leave me alone?”

“I’m sorry, Cams, no,”

She didn’t notice, and squinted up at the ceiling.

“Polaris’s really bright tonight,” she mumbled.

“Cams, we’re inside,”

“Oh, really? Cool,”

—

Cami didn’t come to school for the next week, then returned in a wheelchair. She had bandages on her leg, and she looked terrified of Mr. Simmons now. I couldn’t see why, he was strict, but he was kind and gave us an extension for her not being there.

Not being at school didn’t stop her from working.

She wheeled next to me and leaned on my shoulder, then said in her forever quiet voice, “So, how’s the project going?”

“I have a bunch of photos and info now,”

“Yay!” She sounded slightly louder here.

She hugged me and said, “So, do you think Ms. Delano will be fine with me missing a week of rehearsals and showing up in a wheelchair?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty nice about things like that,”

“Thank god, last teacher I had got mad at me when I was hospitalized with E. coli O157:H7,”

“What?”

“E. coli on steroids,”

“Yikes. My mom told me about an E. coli outbreak when she was eight that killed some of her friends,”

“Damn,”

“Yeah, my mom said there wasn’t much access to hospitals at the time,”

We went back to work and I realized, I had no idea where my mother grew up or lived before here. Just that she grew up in a communidade, or favela if said by the upper class people. The places where the descendants of former slaves ended up because the government failed to provide for them.

I texted her about it when I got out of Mr. Simmons’ class, and she said about an hour and a half later, an entire other class passing, ‘It's a complicated story, one I’ll tell you someday.’

Someday. A nice promise, although non-definitive.

After Chem was over, I went to lunch, and Moon brought her friend Marina over. We tolerated Marina, not some of Moon’s other friends who’d annoyed all of us, and certainly not Kira, who enjoyed spouting slurs and getting scolded by everyone else about it.

Even Moon barely tolerated her.

Kira decided to come over. She had dyed snow-white hair to match her white ears and tail, and at the time, she wore all dark colors, an odd contrast.

She slammed her hands in front of Cami and hissed at her, and Cami ignored her. 

“I’m talking to you,” Kira snapped.

Cami looked up with a bored expression and said, “Could’ve sworn you weren’t talking,”

Kira’s left ear twitched and her lip curled into an animalistic snarl.

“Shut up!” She snapped.

“You’ve done most of the talking,” Cami remarked.

Kira’s hair and tail bristled, and Cami looked up at her for a moment, and I saw a golden glow for a split second.

Kira opened and closed her mouth, then hissed, “How dare you?”

“How dare I what?” Cami asked, her tone just as gentle as when she started talking.

“You know what I mean!”

“I really don’t,”

Kira snarled louder and called her an awful word. 

Cami’s expression hardened, and she snapped, “You’re lucky I can’t stand right now,”

I heard rain above, even though the weather could normally be seen for miles, and there was no trace this morning. Lightning struck right outside the school, and I jumped when I saw the burning almost-white light hit a tree. Murmurs of worry echoed through the cafeteria, and at our table, all but Cami looked spooked. Cami, instead, looked exhausted and tilted to the side with the next lightning strike. She stayed upright because of the wheelchair’s seatbelt, but we weren’t sure what to do. As the storm continued, her breathing slowed, and eventually, just as quickly as it began, it ended, and she opened her eyes and gasped for breath, almost choking.

Almost, thankfully. She was fine after a moment, just- off. She didn’t know what was going on until we filled her in.

Then she wheeled away, took out her phone and texted for a moment, then returned.

The bell rang, and I tried to ask her what happened, and she blew me off and said, “It’s nothing, I have… narcolepsy,”

Liar.

But I didn’t press.

I didn’t change how I spoke to her, either, it was her business, not mine.

When class went out for the day, she went straight to the theater after giving me a hug, and I went to the bus.

Cami

----

“So, what happened?” Addy asked.

“I got shot six times,” I replied.

“Oh.”

I wheeled myself to the edge of the stage, tried my hardest to hop up, only for pain to shoot through my arm, and I fell back down.

I got back in the chair and wheeled the long way, through the back. Thankfully, there was another way, through the chorus room.

I had to be careful wheeling down the ramp in the room and wheeled backstage.

Eli was doing the first scene. The play we were doing was an old classic from back during the first Civil Rights movement, a love story suggesting that shifters get equal rights as well. Most involved in the movement agreed, but the humans in charge at the time sucked and said no. The vice president at the time was actually assassinated by a member of congress for pushing for a shifter rights bill in 1968. So we waited for twenty years for the second movement, and that one, humans finally relented and now the kenomi and dragon-folk had rights. The dragon-folk often lived in the packs, however, and often didn’t care. Olivia was one of the non-traditional dragon-folk, both physically, as a more unique thing that couldn’t fly, and mentally, she had a dream, and she longed to make sure that no one would ever forget it. She wanted to make it safe for all of us to return as ourselves. 

Eli shifted as the script said and a voiceover would allow them to speak on the show night. Many shifters couldn’t speak in our animal forms. I wasn’t one of them who couldn’t, I just didn’t enjoy doing so, it felt weird.

When they got off the scene, they high-fived me and said, “How’d I do, Critura?”

“Great!”

I looked at my book as I wheeled onto the scene, in the middle of the other’s monologue as the book told me. Seeing my wheelchair, it threw my scene partner, Sebby, off a bit, but he quickly stopped his surprise and continued the scene. I got to tell his character off for being an ass, as I’d adopted Eli’s character, Jenny.

It was really fun.

He stood there, character dumbfounded for a moment, and we exited in opposite directions. Me, stage right, him, stage left. 

I didn’t have to go back on ‘til scene four, an ensemble scene in which people were gossiping while I told Eli’s character to go straight to the press about the mistreatment at work. 

Eventually came four o clock, and we all had to go, and I wheeled out when Xoya called me. They and their girlfriend, Winter, were in Xoya’s SUV, and Winter looked in my general direction, smiled, and greeted me when I got in the car.

We didn’t talk much of the drive, though I wanted to tell them everything that had transpired.

Don’t worry, Cams. Xoya’s mental voice touched my mental form. 

“Don’t do that,” I said, “Its weird,”

“Well, if you bothered with the exercises I gave you, I wouldn’t be able to,”

I threw up a wall of my magic internally, solid rain dust, almost like what littered the ground after that storm I’d accidentally caused. That beautiful dust didn’t always come, but when it did, you could tell exactly where I exploded.

Xoya dropped me off at the gravel path, then started their journey back to theirs and Winter’s shared apartment. I walked up, then got inside and went into my room, and lay back on my black and navy-blue bed, the only orderly part of my paint splattered walls. All had meaning, yet to most, it looked eccentric.

My closet was black, the color black helped me to calm down. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my calming, black leather jacket anymore because of the amount of times I was shot in the torso the week before. My ceiling was navy blue. The color for sleep.

I’d go over the rest, but I wouldn’t have the energy to write all that, so just imagine an abstract painting of all colors. And I do mean all of them. Every color I knew.

I peeled off my shirt and traced the old scars that ran down my torso to my thigh. The long gone pain that made me feel as I made my former friend feel.

I missed Hunter. I wondered if Marina missed me, if Hunter told her. I wasn’t about to ask, on the chance she got scared and stayed away.

I pulled myself onto my bed and shifted. I got off and walked out the room, and I walked through the woods. I was strong in this form, and I needed to stretch my legs.

—

I lay down on an angled log and ate some termites and probably decimated the population while I was at it, but I couldn’t help it. It tasted like wood grilled meat, although I wasn’t sure what kind.

Someone approached me, and I looked up and saw Lyorna and Lizzie, about three hundred feet away. Lizzie was so excited and kept bouncing up and down, but I wanted to be alone.

I stood and padded away, and heard Lizzie following after me, despite Lyorna’s protests about how it was probably a bad idea to touch a wolf.

The Critura of the Snowdrift pack eventually managed to lead Lizzie away, and I decided to return the favor. I stalked them for about an hour before the wind changed, and Lyorna looked right at where I was in the shadows and giggled.

“Lena, what’s up?”

“Just thinking,”

I emerged and let Lizzie touch me, as she so clearly wanted, then I continued on my walk, laughing.

I lay in some sand and rolled around, when I tasted human on the air.

I went underwater, then rolled until my dark patches were on top, careful not to let out my oxygen. I occasionally craned my neck to poke my nose out, breathe out and in, and lower it again.

Something grabbed me, and I twisted, kicked, then swam to deeper waters. My feet couldn’t touch the ground in my human form, I doubted what grabbed me could. A fish passed by, and I resisted the temptation to eat it as I kicked to stay above water.

On the opposite shore, I saw several people, but I have pretty bad vision. But I recognized the scent of them and swam towards them.

Masterlist

If you want to be added to the taglist, ask me and I'll get to you as soon as possible

Truth

CW: gun, swearing, violence, attempted murder, seizure mention, morphine mention, (magical) poisoning, knife, hospital whump, slavery mention, death mention, gag whump

Tatiana

----

Shit, shit, shit. The wolf was swimming toward me.

I backed away and it stopped and tilted its head. I could see its legs churning water, and someone on the opposite shore had a gun pointed at it.

“Shit,” Moon breathed.

I tried to chase it away by splashing water, it only approached even closer. Why? Why would it do this? It was supposed to be scared of people. Unless… 

It jumped out of the water, then sank to its knees and lay on its chest. There were little nubs on its shoulders, threatening to explode.

Ashley kneeled next to it and whispered something in a language I didn’t know, and it responded.

Bramble kneeled next to it as well, twining their tail around the wolf’s front right paw.

“Defend her,” Ashley ordered.

I nodded and got to the very edge of the shore, standing in front of it.

The person with the gun fired a warning shot, and then shot around me, hitting the wolf.

It howled, and practically exploded into the blue dust that had littered the ground after that weird storm. Moon had been spared from the blast, but Ashley, Bramble, and I had been covered in blue, and it cut a bit into our skin and swimsuits. Trees all around us had been covered as well, and small plants had been leveled. 

The wolf stood and ran away, its leg shaking, when it looked back at us and said something to Ashley.

Ashley immediately got into the water and most of the blue dust came off, all but the stuff stuck deep in her curly dark fur and hair.

I got into the water after her, and the person with the gun left, thank god.

The dust came off surprisingly easily.

My phone was on a rock on the banks and lit up.

I got out once I’d gotten all the dust I could, and dried off before checking the text.

‘Hey, you alright?’ Cami had texted me.

‘Yeah. Just saw a wolf! It kinda covered me in dust tho-’

‘Cool. Anyways I got shot again so I’m off to the hospital, yay /s’

‘Again?!’

‘Just can’t stay out of trouble, also someone does have a vendetta against me so…’

‘Who?’

‘Hunter,’

‘Why him?’

‘He blames me,’ she wrote. Then, after a minute, she wrote, ‘We were attacked by a big wolf, and I told him to run and he blames me. It attacked him, not me,’

‘What?!’

‘He’s stupid,’

‘Agreed,’

‘See you in school, I’ll probably be better tmrw. Oh also apparently all my bones are pneumatic lol,’

‘What?’

‘I have bird bones essentially, meaning, if i had wings, i could fly for a short distance!’

‘Cool,’

‘I’m also at risk of osteoporosis but probably not my mom is the exact same,’

‘Osteoporosis?’

‘Brittle bones stuff, its all medical nonsense to me,’

It didn’t seem that way.

‘Well, see you tmrw,’ I texted. Cami replied with a thumbs up, and we didn’t text again that day.

—

I had a strange dream of a giant wolf and a white haired girl, and when I woke, it still confused me.

Cami

----

I hated lying to her. I hated hated hated it, but it was to protect her.

My mom came home the second she found out I’d been shot again, and now I was in a hospital room on recovery, barely thinking, just watching something on the TV. The shot hadn’t pierced bone, just my squishy wizard tissue. 

Doctor’s words, not mine...

…I think.

Tatiana came to visit me and I have barely any memory of it, but she gave me a little gift, a still-hot tin of something she called feijoada. Black beans, pork and rice.

“Thank you,” I think I whispered.

I ate it when I got hungry, and had my tail been out, it would have wagged ceaselessly. Or as close to ceaselessly I could get without my muscles hurting and then some.

“Like it?” I think she asked.

Then came the one part I know I recalled correctly, since I looked it up. About twelve times in two hours because of morphine, according to the search history.

She explained its cultural meaning to her and I listened and told her that I would remember. Lo and behold, I did.

She eventually left, and I felt tired and shut off the TV, but sleep refused to come.

Probably to my advantage.

After a bit of lying on my back, I heard my door open and seven sets of hushed footsteps, then felt something over my face. I struggled and kicked, then calmed a bit and went limp.

They, thinking I was dead, kept the pillow over my face for a few moments longer. My lungs burned and burned and I felt the pillow come off, and opened my eyes as I shot up. Gold reflected on the tiled floor, in one of their eyes as I looked at him and he collapsed. Gold in the reflective blue dust that exploded from my fury.

I screamed as the other six grabbed me, and one made the foolish mistake of covering my mouth. I bit down and he screamed, then collapsed in a seizure. A storm boomed outside, likely my doing, and with each lightning strike, I felt weaker, until the world went black.

Surprisingly, I woke up in brightness. Still in the hospital.

A kenomi man stood over me, his tail puffed up. My eyes were still golden.

I let the gold fade with breathing exercises, before whispering with clear, angry words, “What happened to the people who tried to murder me,”

It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

“They were arrested and charged with first degree attempted murder, assault, vandalism, and trespassing,” the kenomi replied. “Are you alright?”

I nodded and said, “I’m fine,”

I heard a weak, tiny cry for help from someone in my pack, a little girl named Irene, and stood. I didn’t mind the pain. She needed the help more than I needed rest.

“Chamomile, stay seated,” the kenomi ordered.

He grabbed my shoulders and sat me back on the bed.

I struggled against him and eventually snarled, “One of my packmates is in trouble. Let me go, please,”

“No. You are staying here, whether you like it or not. You need rest,”

I groaned and lay back down, then whispered, “What if she dies? She’s only a child,”

“Really?” the kenomi asked, raising an eyebrow. “How old is she?”

“Seven,” I whispered.

“Go then. Four hours. If you’re not back by then, you’re not going anywhere for the next two weeks,”

I nodded, shifted, and squeezed out the window, and jumped down from the second floor. I rolled when I hit the ground and bolted. A car pulled into the parking lot, and I dodged it and bolted to the woods.

About half an hour later, a roar from Thea. A ‘where the fuck are you’ call, if you will.

I howled in response to her roar and bolted to where she was. The pack’s encampment. I was there in two minutes.

A human girl kneeled in the center of the clearing, her wrists bound behind her, blindfolded, and gagged. Her left arm was covered in black and purple spikes, Irene sat on her lap, and Alex held a knife to her back.

I shifted back and looked at the girl, then boomed, “What the hell is this?”

Thea pulled Alex away and glared at him with her cold eyes. “I told you she wouldn’t like this,”

I undid the girl’s bindings, and she immediately blurted, “Don’t kill me! I’ll do anything!”

She broke into racking sobs.

“What happened,” I barked.

“Irene was caught and this one was going to kill her, but decided against it. Silvia killed everyone but this one,”

“And her arm?”

“That was my fault,” Irene admitted, her lip trembling, “I was scared and bit her and the poison that was out did that to her,”

I lifted the girl’s arm, and she winced.

“Can it be undone?” I asked Irene.

“No cure, just prevention,” I heard Silvia reply. The hunter shrank into herself and I saw her eyes bubble with fear.

“I’ve seen this with Helix when he would torture humans before turning them. There’s no cure, and to stop its spread, we either kill her or turn her. Otherwise she’ll be dead within two days. And you’re the only one in the pack who can turn her,”

I swallowed and asked, “Do you want to become one of us? It will be painful, and I assume the hunters won’t be all too pleased,”

Unless they’re the faction working with Helix.

Three factions, one worked with Helix, the Critura before me, and wanted to enslave all of us, one tried to find a way to save werewolves and turn them human. The people who came back from them weren’t ever right, and wasted away with Viper and Olivia and James for weeks to months to years of screaming and begging for everyone to let them die, though they weren’t injured physically, before finally being granted entrance to Voltrip’s domain. Death.

The other one killed mindlessly. The factions were all part of the same group, but it was strange.

“Please. Pleasepleaseplease,” she begged. “I don’t wanna die,”

Her voice broke and she went back to sobbing. 

“Okay,” I said. “It will hurt, but you won’t remember until the full moon, okay?”

One week.

She nodded and swallowed, “Do it,”

I lifted her wrist to my mouth and bit down. She screamed and kicked for a moment, then started shaking in a seizure.

I regretted all the pain I caused, but it was so she would live. She deserved to live.

“Get her to Viper,” I ordered. “Try to dull the spikes so she doesn’t hurt herself. Bye!”

I shifted and ran off, when I saw Tatiana. She was sitting on a rock with a sobbing Moon and trying to offer comfort.

She hugged Moon close, and I shifted into my human form and limped over to her, though it hurt quite a bit. I could spare the time, it took me an hour to get to camp. 

Tatiana gasped and Moon looked at me.

“Oh. Uh- hi Cami,” Tatiana said.

I didn’t expect such a calm response.

“Thought you were in the- the hospital,” Tatiana said. I saw her reach into her pocket and pull out a flimsy knife. 

I raised my hands and said, “I had something to attend to, I’ll be on my way,”

Winter came out of the trees and grabbed me, then pulled me away and started scolding me.

“Showing yourself to humans? You know not to do that!”

And Tatiana had followed us, then threw her knife. Winter threw up her arm and the knife bounced off a wall of solid ice and the blade broke. Winter looked pale and fell, like she rarely used her magic.

“Cami! Who is that?”

“My sibling’s girlfriend, sorry,”

I sat her up and said, “I gotta go back to the hospital so bye!”

I shifted and ran, not minding that Tatiana chased after me. I quickly outpaced her.

She called my name, and I stopped.

“I- you’re a werewolf?”

I dipped my head in a nod, then said, “Gotta get back to the hospital,”

She hugged me and ran her fingers through my fur, and I decided to let her on my back, if she insisted so much.

She declined, hugged me again, and went back to her probably confused friend.

I ran back to the hospital, and still had two hours to spare as I wriggled in through the window.

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CRACK-UP

Your mother always told you to stay away from wolves, wolves like the Logan family who always seemed to be up to no good. It was only natural as a local farmer, you had to protect your livestock. Farmers just weren’t in the company of befriending werewolves. 

TAGLIST: @thecurlycaptain, @oh-adam, @givemelifeorgiveme

At school you did your best to avoid the Logan boys, Jimmy loud and boisterous was easy to stay away from. But Clyde on the other hand, he always seemed to surprise you. Too busy worrying about one Logan you ran right into the other, dropping all of your books. Being the polite boy that he was Clyde kneeles to help you pick up your stuff, giving you an awkward smile of reassurance as you tried to recover yourself. 

“Sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going,” You looked down. 

Clyde frowned, and you still wouldn’t look at him even now. Just once, what he would do to have you look at him. “Here,” He sighed, handing you the rest of your stuff. You quickly shuffled off, he could just hear your heart racing. If only you’d give him a chance, but no doubt your parents told you to stay away after their last incident with the Logan family. He wasn’t even involved in that scheme, your family still resented his ever since Grammy got into a few of your cattle on a full moon. Sometimes, Clyde really hated the curse. Farmgirl, don’t you know I won’t hurt you?

The day that you got handed down the family farm was the day that you made a promise to your mother to never trust a “no good Logan”. It was your only condition really, other than that you were free to run the farm how you wanted to-a gift passed down to you after your college graduation. You had dreams for your humble little family farm, so you accepted.

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