Angelina

I used to go into the woods in the past. My grandmother had a farm, and I used to go there with her to pick apples or mangoes. But the fun part was when I was still a child and was still being trained to use my abilities. My grandmother would take me into the woods, and together we would practice. She taught me how to differentiate scents. Rabbits smell differently than snakes. Skunks were the easiest to detect, and grasshoppers had the most horrible smell.

So, as Collins and I began to walk around the woods, we tried our best to detect smells and speak our minds.

“If you smell something dangerous you don’t understand, let me know.”

“I think I can tell the difference. I am good with animals, you know.”

“Okay. I am just saying you should keep your eyes down and tell me when there is something you don’t understand.”

“Sure… How do you think we are going to find him?”

“Well, you are in the best position to answer that, not me. You brought us here.”

“Alright. Well, we would just keep looking, I guess.”

We kept walking, trying to be as noiseless as possible, but the dry leaves cracked under our shoes as we walked on. We kept moving anyway. He was about 6 meters to my right. We needed the distance to cover more grounds and access more scents. If we were lucky, if the alpha wanted us to find him, he would give us clues only werewolves could understand. It could be howling or running among the trees. It could be a warmness on our skin as we get closer. Some scents blew past my nose, and I stopped for a second. It smelled like lamb blood and rotten animals.

I remembered what my mother said about how werewolves were captured in the past. The ancient Americans used different types of techniques to capture werewolves and execute them. Silver guns were used for shooting, wolfsbane for making them weak, and bear traps. The most difficult to detect were bear traps. Humans usually set them down where wolves were likely to have fun. They would cover them in dry leaves with signs you could recognize as humans if you were not running or hopping around like werewolves.

“Why did you stop?”

“I need you to watch out for bear traps,” I said.

“Don’t you think this is a bad idea? That we should go back.”

“I don’t think so. If there are bear traps for werewolves, then we should come here regularly. We might find him.”

“Okay. What if we can’t?”

We saw a couple of flashlights in the distance. It spiked through the woods, came to us, and then went away, looking at the other parts of the woods. I stopped walking and hid behind a tree.

“Hide,” I said. “I think some humans are coming.”

“Done,” he said. When I looked at his side, he was standing behind a tree but still not as frightened or hiding behind a tree as I did. He was still looking out of the woods and monitoring the movement of those humans. I shut my eyes. We might have to run for our lives. This I had never done before. I could just step out and pretend I was human. I was a lady, after all, and if I pretended well enough that I was attacked or running from something, I could get sympathy. But I came here with a real wolf. Would they believe that I wasn’t a wolf? What if they tested us? Grandmother’s mother said humans used wolfsbane to run these tests. Most wolves and werewolves would change form when they smelled wolfsbane. I opened my eyes.

“If they caught us, you should run. I will hold them off. I will pretend I lost my way.”

He was quiet and looked at me as if I was saying gibberish.

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“They are humans. We can outrun them. We can see better. We don’t have to be afraid of them. They wouldn’t find us,” I said.

I looked at the leaves up on the trees and smiled. I glanced at him and smiled again. Finally, he had come to terms with his inhuman abilities. I felt proud of him, so I laughed again.

“I’m proud of you, Collins. You’re accepting the truth.”

He nodded and looked down at the leaves. “Actually, I have accepted since we were at the top of that mountain. I experienced what it’s like being a wolf that night.”

“Still proud of you.”

“Thank you. I just want to be like you. We can then live together like fated couples.”

“Sure, we can work on that.”

The flashes of light again. They were coming closer, but they had stopped coming in our direction. They had turned right and headed into another part of the woods.

“They are kids,” Collins said. “I can hear them.”

I peeped from the tree and stared in their direction. I tried to listen to them, but I couldn’t hear.

“I can’t hear anything, but I can see them,” I said. Two boys and a girl. They were walking, and the girl was leading them somewhere.

“They want to become werewolves. The girl is the boldest of the lot,” Collins said.

“What?”

“Yeah, that’s what they are saying….”

I shook my head and took a deep breath. I had kids who shared the same enthusiasm when I was younger. They wanted superpowers and forgot about the burden attached to being one.

“Should we still continue searching? Knowing there are humans in these woods,” I asked. “Well, I don’t think an Alpha would come out with those kids looking for him.”

“We could try. We have more chances of finding him than they are.”

“We are not sure he’s even here.”

“We could try….”

I took a deep breath and lifted my body off the tree. Then we started walking but maintained our tracks so we wouldn’t walk too fast and run into those kids.

The woods became a lot quieter and darker as we continued walking. We could still see through, but the trees at the top formed bigger shades on top of our heads. We could hear the sounds of our feet on the dry leaves. My eyes were still yellowish, and I tried to notice every scent and sound that came past us. Raccoons were the best I had gotten, even though I couldn’t see any of them around. When I still used to hunt them for practice along with my grandmother, my task would be to bring one raccoon to my grandmother. It was such a fun exercise, running, and playing. The pride in my grandmother’s eyes when I returned after fulfilling her wish was the best of it all.

We heard the rustling of leaves, the wind blew, and some leaves dropped from the tree tops. In that instant, Collins and I stopped walking. Right then, we could smell the scent of something stronger. Mightier. The scents of an Alpha. I had never known what it was like, but it was here. At first, it was strong, like I had sniffed some drugs. I shook my head and turned around in circles.

“Is he here?” Collins asked.

I frowned and looked through the woods, straining my eyes. I couldn’t see anything dangerous, just endless woods, bushes, and butterflies making their way to the top of trees following the smell of flowers.

Something dropped down heavily. When I looked back, someone was standing behind Collins. I couldn’t see his face. Collins tried to fight, but it was useless. The person took a step back and grabbed him by the throat. I couldn’t watch and let him snuff life out of him like that, so I shut my eyes and turned to a more werewolf form with longer nails, taller ears, and a hairy body. Then I charged towards the alpha.

He saw me coming and ducked in time when I tried to hit him with my nails. Then he got up and grabbed me by my throat and squeezed tight. He squeezed mine tighter as if he wanted to kill faster than he would kill Collins. His hands were strong, and I couldn’t stop him with all my force. I continued fighting to get free, but I was losing my breath. My eyes began to have blue hues at the corners. My mind wandered to somewhere I had never been before, a cloudy, misty place with so much cold that I began to cry. In the last seconds between life and death, he flung me into one of the trees, and I crashed back to the ground, holding my lungs and trying to get as much air as possible.

I watched him as he held Collins. He wasn’t squeezing him as he did with me. He was holding him in place. Then he placed his hand at the back of his head and dug his nail into him.

Collins howled loudly. Then he began to turn gradually to more human-like — a werewolf. He had a hairy body and could stand as all humans do. He could run and jump with just his two legs.

I was in pain, but I tried to laugh.

Collins knelt before him and bowed his head.

“What are you guys doing here?” The alpha asked, looking into our eyes. While our eyes were yellowish, his was a ton darker in yellow.

“We were looking for you?” I said.

“You both should leave. It’s too dangerous.”

“We need your help….” Collins spoke not with his mind but with the muffled voice of a wolf.

We began to hear voices and someone corking a gun. The kids were coming in our direction, and they were actually more than we had thought. There were seven of them, and four of them had guns — and silver bullets.

“Run, now. I will distract them,” he said.

He started running between the woods. When he got far away, he howled loudly, and the kids in the woods turned in that direction and started running after him.

I lay down on my back and wished he had listened to us. Slowly, Collins returned to being a wolf. He stared at his own body for a few seconds, then looked in the direction the alpha had run. Turning around, he began to stroll back through the path had followed here without looking back.