Page 113 of His Hungry Wolf

“Oh no. No, no, no, no, no,” I said in a panic.

As I bound up the stairs, the world around me drifted further away. I needed to lock myself up. I couldn’t believe this. It had been years. Why now? Why here?

Approaching my dorm room door, I smelled the last thing I wanted to smell or expected. Lou was home. Why was he home? Didn’t he say he had a date?

I didn’t want him to see me like this. I didn’t want to terrify him with the truth of who I was. I didn’t want to accidently kill him.

Was this how my mother died? Had I lost control and ripped out her throat? I was too young to remember. But a three-year-old child and a three-year-old wolf are different. If I let it, would the beast inside of me hurt another person I cared about?

No, I couldn’t let it. I had to get behind closed doors as quickly as I could. Scrambling for my keys I flung open the door and charged in.

“Aren’t you supposed to be out finding yourself a date?” he said as I rushed by him for my room. “Quin, what’s wrong?”

As my bedroom door closed behind me and I searched for the padlock for the latch I installed, I finally lost control and did what I prayed for years that I wouldn’t do. The feeling was torture. It all came rushing back.

A prickly feeling washed over me igniting every nerve in my body. My muscle clamped into the worst cramp you could imagine. And as my muscles pulled apart and ate itself, my bones snapped under the strain of it.

Mercifully, that was when I passed out. This was how it happened when I was a kid. At least it started that way. Because as a kid, I would black out in one location and wake up naked and covered in blood somewhere else.

My father often tested the blood to make sure none of it was human. It never was. But, every so often pictures of missing cats would end up posted around our upstate New York home.

Our neighbors knew what I was so they had their suspicions but they would never know for sure. The only person to ever see me shift was my father. And it wasn’t until he determined that I, and my wolf, weren’t a threat that we moved back to Manhattan.

This shift wasn’t like any I had had when I was a kid, though. This time I woke up in my room in the dark. It felt like one of those instances when you wake up to learn that you can’t move your body. I was conscious, fully conscious. But I was pacing in my room very close to the ground and it felt like I was being taken for a ride.

As much as I tried, I couldn’t stop myself. My dresser whipped by me in rapid succession and as I entertained the sounds around me, I heard a wild panting. Oh no, I was in it. I was the monster.

The only way I had been able to come to terms with who I was was by convincing myself that I wasn’t it and it wasn’t me. I wasn’t the one who killed my mother. It was. It was dangerous and brutal. I was not.

Yet, here I was disproving everything I held onto for my own sanity. I was awake, though not in control, and I was experiencing the world around me as if it were my own.

“Quin, are you alright?” a faint voice said just outside my door.

As if set on fire, my wolf went wild. It bulleted to the door and attacked it as if fighting to break through.

“Oh no, the latch. I didn’t lock it,” I remembered flooded with dread.

As soon as I said it, my eyes turned towards the door handle and it clawed at it. It heard me and it was fighting to get out. If it got out it would kill Lou. I was sure of it. It would kill everyone in its path until someone put it down or it ran away.

This was my greatest nightmare come true. It was why I locked myself away never wanting to come out. It was everything I had feared.

Wait! It heard me! That’s how it knew to go after the lock. If it heard me say that, then…

“Stop it! You will not attack my friend. You won’t do to him what you did to my mother!”

As if frozen in place, it stopped. Standing still, sadness washed through my mind. It wasn’t me feeling it. It was the wolf. It was thinking about what it had done to my mom.

Regret filled it. Somehow I knew it hadn’t meant to. And as if calmed by the tragedy, it slowly backed away from the door and whimpered.

My wolf was crying. It knew as well as I did how much it had lost that day. It also knew that it had been his fault. Both of us had grown up without a mother because of it. Death hadn’t been my wolf’s intention. It had acted impulsively and unexpected things had happened.

Without asking it to, the wolf walked in front of my full length mirror. It was dark, but the wolf’s eyes were more sensitive than mine. I could make out his reflection clearly. I was 20 and just approaching adulthood. The wolf staring back at me was much older than that.

I had only seen video of it before. Back then it was of a much younger wolf. This one looked calmer and maybe even a little wiser than the one pacing back and forth in my father’s safety room. Was it different than the one that had terrorized my world all of those years ago?

Maybe it was. Maybe I didn’t know this wolf at all. Maybe I didn’t know myself. Who would I be if I wasn’t so scared of what I would become?

Chapter 2