CHAPTER 5

And just like that, it was gone. She caught a glimpse of it falling away, making it look like it had just fallen down the stairs. Minerva's ears detected some kind of faint splash, like something small falling into water a ways away. She waited a minute, not moving, in case this even was an immediate foreshadow of what was to come presently, but nothing happened.

Minerva toed close to the edge of the stairs, peering down below, but saw only grass. She resolved to remember it, and confide in her compatriots later, but decided it didn't warrant concern at present. She thought back to what she had just told Sunny. Had she sensed that thing before becoming fully aware of it? If anything required bright light for just a few seconds, this was a great candidate.

Not yet though. Time to just keep an eye out.

**

A door slammed in the distance, and Cassandra was brought back instantly. The memory had been hanging over her head for a while since this week happened, but she felt she couldn't hold it back anymore, and it just blasted full into her mind.

**

It was an unfamiliar house, but it reminded her of the only permanent house she'd ever really had. Her parents' house. More than that. The house of her pack. Some 20 of the People in number.

Not anymore.

She was here, but no one else was.

She was curled up on the ground, on a bit of her own clothing. Slowly the memory of the death of her pack came back to her

Tears sprung into her eyes. But not before she saw a note on the table in the sparse room. How had she even arrived here? Who had brought her here? She remembered climbing a tree after they'd told her to run and she couldn't hear them anymore.

Before she read the note, she went to check the source of the slamming door and maybe, the cold.

She found the front closed in front of an inch of dust, with a wide pattern where it was dust-free, where the door had slammed and disturbed it. Well, that solved that. Although, she could still hear the wind howling from the other side of the house. Cassandra headed in that direction, moving against the wind that was now flowing freely through the house, making papers fly here and there, rattling window casements, and blowing bits of dirt and leaves past her face, whipping her hair about.

Cassandra made it to the other door, which was wide open. She pulled and pulled on it, and it eventually moved. It was like her uncle had always said, the People were a lot stronger than they looked. Cassy especially.

It was morning from the light that streamed in, and all she could see was the Forrest. Well, not her Forrest. A Forrest. She could tell that the wind would tell her so much about what was nearby, but it going by too fast for her to get a good breath of it.

Doing this was like trying to dance around in a circle real fast and pay attention to what you were seeing, it was just too much.

Little flecks of water jumped off of her eyes from the wind, flying out of sight behind her. She pulled the door past the halfway point, let go, and dove back into the house. The door slammed behind her and she felt a bit of a twinge of happiness that she was that fast. She imagined her uncle's eyebrow going up, impressed.

Then she remembered the way she had last seen him, fighting, bleeding from silver-tipped crossbow bolts, caught in a silver net, as she ran and ran and climbed a tree.

She fell onto her tailbone, wincing, and leaned against the wall as the images overwhelmed her. They were all gone. First her parents, then her pack, her family.

Why not here too? She closed her eyes but the scenes of the hunters catching everyone were still there.

**

The next day, the wind had died down, and Cassandra was desperate to get outside. She hadn't been able to get comfortable at all on her bed the night before, she couldn't do anything but think about her pack, and her family.

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Her family had been followed by the men that eventually got them for a while. On the attack before the last, they'd had to leave the gear behind.

“The gear of men,” her uncle had said with a dismissive laugh.

He pointed to the wolf ears Cassandra had left out on accident.

“We are men, but we are something else too.”

And with that, though without food, tents, and other gear they had brought, her uncle and the rest of her family had taught her about what the wolf nature of the People gave them.

They dug holes into the side of hills, each big enough for an adult and a child or two. They had changed forms and hunted game, easily bringing down animals. Deer for the adults. Cassandra had caught a rabbit.

Remembering, Cassandra had left the house they gave her, not even remembering the note, and began dragging leaves and sticks into the house. At first, she'd tried shifting and digging a hole in a hill, but she thought begrudgingly that it was likely safer in the human house. It was cold outside, so nothing was living in what she brought, she could smell it.

She pushed furniture into the bathroom, since it was near water, just like she had been taught, putting sticks over it like wolves would in front of the holes in their den. She covered over the top with leaves, and finally, when it wasn't working great, heavy blankets she found. She put a big pile of leaves on the floor, but then added pillows to it for more support, again, begrudgingly.

After a bit of work, she got the feeling that she wanted, but also more comfort from the human, and access to water and everything she needed.

Cassandra smelled the lightly decaying leaves she laid upon and was instantly brought back to the den they slept in, before the last attack. It made her cry a little, but she felt safe, and slept, imagining her uncle's scent nearby, like it was in that den.

They had turned into their normal animal form to have enough space in the den so they didn't have to build it so big it would collapse. Uncle had told her it was unusual for wolves to build dens for pups as old as herself, but then again, they weren't wolves. Same with dragging leaves and moss in for bedding.

“We aren't wolves,” He had told her. “We're the People.”

Transferring to her animal form, she curled up there, with it dim inside with some light outside the leaves rustling beneath her. She tried not to shiver with fear and cower from the memories that kept repeating again and again.

She lay in her bed for hours, though it was not close to dark yet. Her uncle's wolf form had dark fur with white spots, and he smelled confident and calm. His eyes were a cool blue color but had a warmth to them, like melting ice.

It was at that moment when she had picked up another scent, strange but familiar- humans that smelled like blood.

The sequence started again, and she cowered and put her paws over her ears to try to make it stop. Finally, she leaped over the tub area, and then reached up to carefully grab a stick that held up her canopy of blankets,

She managed to get it out without causing a collapse by nosing it out of the way and then rubbing it with her teeth gently.

At that point, she leaped right back into the further part of her den in the tub, all the way in the back, sat down, and began gnawing on it to try to work off some stress.

It was still hard to even think about what had happened, like having a crick in your neck and it hurting when you tried to turn and look in a certain direction. The little werewolf tried to get herself to do something else, to look around for food even, because she was hungry, but found she couldn't get herself to do anything but chew on her stick. She needed the comfort too much.

Presently, her stomach started growling. She'd managed to avoid digesting any wood since that never seemed to help very much, so reluctantly she let the biting stick fall out of her mouth, and hopped out of her little den, and the place that was also a bathroom tub, onto the tile floor. Her wolf-form claws clicked onto the tiles as she padded onto the soft carpet and suddenly stopped.

As she was leaving the bathroom, she looked back at her den. A cornucopia with a wooden coat hanger, high chairs, leaves, grass, and sticks, a mix of human and wolf, just like her.

She took a few more steps into the hallway. Suddenly, Cassandra felt dizzy, since this was one of the areas with the most airflow in the entire house, given that there were many widows in the room with the main door, there was a vent over her head, and even more windows beyond on the way to the kitchen. Currently, it was all flowing over her on the way to the kitchen in one direction, rather than flowing in opposite directions which would've been even worse, but it gave the sensation of taking her away on a river of scents.

She could tell that there was food nearby, but not sure where. However, there was so much more! One of the windows wasn't quite secured, and she smelled animals of all kinds through it, and the scents of the forest, humans, vehicles, and almost an infinite amount past that.

There was one that stood out far from the rest though.

A wolf.

He smelled like he could be her brother. The wolf smelled more like her than any she had ever caught the scent of outside her own family She forgot herself for a moment and smashed through an open window screen in the second story before she even knew what was happening. Shifting back to humans to open doors would take too long, and she was able to lock on to a few branches to break her fall on the way down.

The screen cut her a bit, but not too bad and besides, she healed quickly, but the point was -

She couldn't lose his scent! He was far away and it was getting faint!

Cassandra took off at a dead run through the wind, her legs unfolding and folding beneath her at a rapid pace, almost leaping over every obstacle.

She awkwardly led the other wolf into the house after shifting human to open the door and then back again. He seemed confused by the conflicting scents, backing away cautiously, but then she playfully bit at him and he immediately followed her, likely from pure instinct. She trotted into the house but soon was racing when he started following her full tilt.

Instantly, she changed where she was going, and raced around the living room, breaking some of the soft wooden furniture like that thing table. It was made from trees but wasn't nearly as durable! It was a joy to go full speed with another wolf at her heels, and she kept up the game, biting at him lightly but only getting bits of fur.

Finally, she realized she was still hungry, and there was the scent of a rabbit in the air, so she raced after that, knowing he would follow. Out the open door, they went, and she completely forgot about leaving the door open. Her family had said before that she shouldn't do that since it was important to humans. But in wolf form, she barely cared. Caves were always left open, weren't they? And-

Rabbit!

In no time flat the odd wolf was beside her, racing side by her side now, she was no longer the quarry.

They were chasing the new quarry together. She spared a glance for the young kind-of wolf as they raced through the forest. The way he would slow down here and there to sniff at the air. He had the scent now. He knew fully what was going on.

A short time later, he had the rabbit in his jaws, and this time Cassandra was the one following him. He tried to veer off one way or another, but she playfully tried to pull it out of his jaws whenever he did that, and so she was able to herd him towards the house. He was so excited, and the house smelled like her anyway, so she didn't have too much trouble getting this to go the way she wanted, fortunately.

He ran back inside her house, and they raced around again, him playfully keeping the rabbit away from her. Eventually, though he was a little “slow,” probably on purpose, and she grabbed half of it.

In a short while, they had both consumed half of their catch, oddly egalitarian for wolves, and her suspicion was nearly complete about what he was. But- he acted so wolf-like-

Still, she knew. He was like her.