by Angela Foxxe
The wolf was within inches of ending her life when John leapt onto its back. He grabbed onto it hard, pulling it away from Heather and bouncing with the wolf off the bed. Before the other wolf could gain its bearings, John sank his sharp fangs deeply into its neck. The wolf howled in agony as it struggled to get free.
The wolf managed to reach back and backhand John hard against the side of the head, sending him reeling back to the corner of the room where he once again clanged against the wall. He was amazed by how much punishment his body could take because he only felt the pain at the moment of impact and then nothing.
He launched back to his feet just in time to see the wolf leap out the open window that it had crawled into. John rushed to the window in time to see the wolf land on its feet twenty feet below and take off running into the darkness.
John was about to go after it when he heard Heather’s whimpering. The sound of the silent room filled with her wailing cries was all it took to bring him out of it. He instantly felt himself becoming calmer, his heart rate slowing down, his sweat glands drying up, and his body slowly shifting back to his normal, human self.
Heather noticed now through the haze of her panic that something was happening in front of her that she couldn’t really begin to understand. Within thirty seconds, John was standing there, his clothes ripped and his body caked with sweat and a bit of blood.
The other wolf’s blood.
“What is going on?” Heather said, her voice quivering with every syllable. She sounded like she had the world’s biggest toad lodged in her throat and she was just croaking the sounds out.
“Are you all right?” John asked. He started to come closer, and Heather cringed away. She was terrified of him.
“Okay… It’s okay. Let me explain,” John said.
He slowly walked back to the other corner of the room and began to tell her the story of how he had become a werewolf.
Heather’s eyes remained fixated on him throughout the entire duration. She didn’t blink once, but when he was finished, she was no longer crying.
Her face was actually calm and serene. John breathed a sigh of relief.
There was still a chance.
CHAPTER TEN
“Wait, so you were infected by this thing through a bite?” Heather asked.
She sipped her hot cup of coffee slowly. The two of them were now sitting at the kitchen table downstairs. John had brewed a big cup of coffee. He always felt that a good story went much better if you had a hot beverage to sip along with it. But this only worked for stories told by one person to another. It was akin to having popcorn at the movies. Real life people and real life stories deserved coffee. It was a fact.
“Yeah, it was my senior year in college,” John began. He had touched on the story briefly, but Heather wanted him to go into a lot more detail with it. He had only told Keith about this story before, and he hated telling it then. It was awkward and somehow embarrassing. He knew that it wasn’t his fault and he was actually a victim, but he couldn’t help but feel that somehow this made him less of a person. It was embarrassing.
“I went hunting on the first day of the season with my dad and my uncle, as I had done since I was ten years old. It was something we looked forward to every single year. It was early morning just before dawn, but the sky was still dark, and I can remember the most insane, bright, silvery full moon I had ever seen. It was so bright that I didn’t even need my flashlight. It was great.”
“Sounds like a good story so far,” Heather said with a smile. John smiled back. He couldn’t believe that he had been able to get her to calm down finally. She had been hysterical at first, but after she realized that it was just him and that it was real, her mind began to slowly come around to it. It had been about two hours since the attack. The first hour or so had been spent making sure that Heather was able to get herself under control. It was a truly life-altering experience to be attacked by something like that and your life almost snuffed out. He’d never really gotten over the experience himself. He still thought about it daily, and it haunted him.
“It gets better,” John said as he continued. “I was walking along on my own. We hadn’t had much luck as a group, so we each decided that we would split up and see if we could get luckier that way. I was just walking along when I first heard it.”
“What did you hear?” Heather asked.
“It was this low, guttural growling from the bushes close to me. I figured it was a coyote or some dog that had gotten loose from its home. But it terrified me. I knew that we were hunting in black bear country, too. We were supposed to be far away from there, but people did see the occasional bear that decided it’d had enough with restrictions and taken a healthy little jaunt to the human side of things,” John said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“I was too scared to run. I was sure that it was going to chase me and I’d be done. I clutched my gun tightly in my hand until I could feel my fingers going numb. I was shaking like a leaf. Every bone in my body was screaming at me to run. It was just screaming at me to get out of there right then. I often wonder if I’d listened if I would have made it or gotten it way worse.”
“So, what happened? What was it? The wolf?” Heather asked.
“Yeah. It lunged out of the bushes suddenly. The thing was huge. It looked like it was seven feet tall standing on its hind legs. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t have time to react before it lunged at me and knocked me to the ground, scraping and clawing at me. Luckily, I was still clutching my gun, and I was able to get a shot off into its side. The wolf howled as the bullet hit it in the side. It fell off me. I felt paralyzed, but somehow I willed myself to move quickly as I pointed the gun and began to fire rounds at it. But it was gone. It ran off into the wilderness somewhere.”
“Wow, do you think you killed it?” Heather asked. Her face was white as a sheet from the evening she’d heard. How she was able to form lucid thoughts and sentences at this point was beyond John. He didn’t know exactly why things like this worked, but he knew enough to follow protocol and do them when needed.
“No. I was using regular bullets, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, only silver will kill a werewolf.”
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you about werewolves after I was just attacked by one. It is such a crazy trip, right?” Heather said. Her personality was starting to shine through again. John couldn’t help but laugh at some of the enthusiastic things she was saying.
“Well, you’re certainly handling this better than I did when I first found out what was happening to me,” John said.
Heather took another sip of her coffee. “How did it happen? Was it a process where you started to discover what you were? Or was it something that you were unaware of for a while?”
“Well, within days, I started having these strange but vivid nightmares where I was running through the forest craving blood and searching for something. I assume I was looking for something living that I could kill. I always awoke in my bed caked with sweat and in the grip of a panic. It was often hard to breathe.”
“That sounds rough,” Heather added.
“It was, but it was nothing compared to the changes. About a week after the attack, I would start to partially change and then it would go away. I’d notice my fangs protruding from my mouth or my claws covered with hair and my fingers elongated with long, razor-sharp, knife-like nails. I began to do some research, and I slowly started piecing together what I was. At first, I figured I had to be wrong and there was some other logical explanation for it, but then the first real change happened.”
“What was that like?” Heather asked.
John looked at her. He was feeling odd about telling her all of this, and he was feeling odder still about the way that she was eagerly awaiting each response; she was heavily invested in it all. He wanted to explain everything to her, but he didn’t want her to think less of him. The thought that she might just decide that he was a freak and
never want to be with him again was too agonizing to bear.
But he didn’t see that when he looked into her eyes. He saw a woman who cared a great deal and who really wanted to learn more about him and who he was. Maybe it was just so she could make more sense out of what had happened to her, or maybe she really did want to get to know him better. Would that have been so bad? He had been wracking his brain so much lately, trying to think of what would happen if his secret was discovered, and now he was divulging all of it to this woman that he loved.
Love? That was the first time he had thought of that word when thinking of Heather, but he was certain when he thought it. He did love her. She was the perfect woman for him, and he hoped to God that one day she would love him just as much as he loved her, but he was once again willing to take it slow and let those feelings develop naturally within her.
“The night it happened was a full moon, and I was ready,” John said. “I had tied myself up in the basement of an empty house that was for sale. My mother was a real estate agent, and I knew that there was an empty house. I had a key to it that I took from her. I told her I was spending the night with a friend. I went there, and I sat down and waited for it. I thought I was tied up properly with a chain. The change came over me; I was powerless to stop it. It was painful the first time as my body shifted every which way, transforming me into some other animal. At some point, I lost consciousness. When I woke up to daylight, I was in the middle of a field somewhere.”
“That had to be unsettling,” Heather said.
“To say the least,” John replied. “I made my way back to town wearing tattered clothes that had ripped during the transformation. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to take them off first, but it was probably a good thing because walking back to town completely naked would have been a much weirder thing than simply walking back to town with ripped clothing.”
“How did you make sense of it? Did you know what had happened?”
“No, not at first. I had set up a video camera to record it just in case it really did happen. I had worked myself up into such a state of frenzy that I really believed it was possible that I was some sort of monster. And when I checked the video, I had my proof. It was all right there; I had changed.”
Heather sat there quietly enjoying her coffee, not looking at John at all. The silence was comforting, but he felt that her hearing the whole story of what happened to him might have been somewhat traumatic for her.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Heather said. “Your secret is safe with me always.”
John walked over to her slowly and hugged her gently. She allowed herself to be pulled in. The embrace felt so sweet.
“Thank you,” John said.
“What about the wolf that attacked me? Do you have any idea who that is?” Heather asked.
“No, I don’t. I have never seen or met another wolf or shifter knowingly. I realized that I am not the only one around, but other than the one who bit me—and for all I know that might have been it—I haven’t seen any shifters. They keep a low profile. I know there are more on this Earth than just me, but I hope they all find peace and happiness and whatever they are looking for. Because these are monsters, but they’re also people. That’s what we have to keep in mind.”
“Whatever attacked me was not a person. They might be flesh and blood most of the time, but it is just a mask. That thing was a monster, and it wanted to kill me. I don’t know why, though.”
“How did it get in? Do you have any idea?” John asked.
“I was coming upstairs to take a shower and get ready for you to come over. It leapt at me from the corner of the room. I never saw anything except a flash of hair, and then I was pinned up against the wall. It could have ripped me open right then, but it seemed like it wanted to play with me. If you hadn’t shown up when you did…” Heather began to sob.
John wrapped her in a gentle hug and kissed her on the forehead. “It’s okay. We’ll get to the bottom of this,” John said.
He waited for Heather’s sobs to slow down before hitting her with the next piece of bad news. He looked deeply into her eyes and looked at her, softly brushing her hair back with his hand. “Honey, there’s something else I have to tell you,” John said.
Heather looked alarmed as she braced herself for what else could be causing a problem. “What is it?”
John told her all about Michelle Patton and the questioning of the two detectives in Cincinnati. “They think you had something to do with his? You couldn’t have— Wait! It has to be him. It has to be the werewolf that attacked me,” Heather said.
“It’s possible, but we don’t have any proof. Although that does make a lot of sense,” John said. He hadn’t really thought of this idea until just then when Heather mentioned it.
“Of course it does. That has to be it. We just have to find out who that is, and we have the killer,” Heather said.
“Yeah, but I have no idea how to track that thing down, and besides, no one is going to believe the werewolf story,” John replied.
Heather received a text right then as she walked over to the counter to pour another cup of coffee. She looked at the time; it was almost midnight. She told John that her dad must have been staying overnight with his “friend.” He did that occasionally, and she didn’t ask or question him. She just hoped he was healthy enough to not have any problems. It was nice to know he was feeling better.
John was a bit concerned about the hour and the fact that the old man wasn’t home yet. Heather didn’t seem concerned, so he was able to let it go as well.
Heather looked at her phone right then at the notification. She opened the phone and watched about thirty seconds of what sounded like a video clip. John wasn’t paying too much attention to it, though, as he was wrapped up in his own thoughts about who could have wanted to kill Heather. Was it just some random incident involving one of the few other shifters in the world? He wasn’t sure what guidelines these guys followed when they decided to bring someone into the club, but he wasn’t so sure that they did extensive background checks or anything. He really believed it was as simple as whoever was lucky enough to survive the attack.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Heather said.
John walked over to see what she was looking at, and he almost fainted.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The image on the screen was terrifying. It was John. He was transforming into a wolf in the cage at his house back in Arizona. Keith was sitting in front of the cage reading a book and not paying him any mind.
This was what Michelle had been talking about. This was her footage.
He was terrified when the police mentioned that Michelle had been spending every second working on something on her computer. He wondered where the computer had been and if any of the video was on there, but then he remembered that the cops most assuredly would have checked that already. They would have been all over it, searching for any little thing that might have lead them to a break in the case they were so desperate to solve. When they learned that she was working on something, the computer would have been seized and they would have examined every inch of it. But nothing had been mentioned. In the back of his mind, John wondered why the hell the cops hadn’t said anything to him about it. Was it possible that Michelle was bluffing about where she was keeping the video? He had to think that if she wanted something like that to stay hidden until she decided otherwise, then it would have been expertly hidden. Michelle struck him as the kind of woman who was good at keeping secrets but also bad about spilling secrets about people who didn’t listen to her.
She was one to get her way, one way or another.
So how had the footage been leaked? It hadn’t happened before she died or he would have been made aware of it before now. It had to be something that had happened just within the past few hours. The video clip was going viral. The headline on the video she was watching was entitled “Going Wild!” It was all over YouTube and already had eighty thousand views. He was going to
have a lot of explaining to do.
“Oh, Jesus,” Heather said. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know; I might not do anything. It will blow over,” John said. He was trying to act cavalier. The last thing he wanted to do was upset Heather. She’d been through enough tonight, and she didn’t need this worry any more than she needed a hole in the head.
“I don’t think it will. Your secret… it’s out,” Heather said. Her eyes were misting up with tears once again as she tried to hold it back, but the emotions were starting to overtake her. She had been through too much. She just needed some time to decompress.
“But is anyone really going to believe it?” John asked.
The clip finished playing, and it came back to a few news reporters who were looking at each other in shock. They glanced back and forth a few times before breaking out into a laugh.
“Well, now you’ve seen it all!” joked Mark Levinstein. “I never knew that the Wild man John Wild had a sense of humor like that. I wonder how he pulled that off.”
“I don’t know, Mark,” replied his co-anchor Judy Garonson. “But some people are saying that this is really happening and that it is a total hoax, while others are saying that they absolutely believe it.”
“You have to be joking. This is obviously some sort of a media stunt. I think the Wild Man is starting to live up to his name,” Mark said.
“I won’t argue with that one, but let’s show a few of those clips that are currently circulating around the web right now, and you will see that some people are taking this very seriously.”
John waited with baited breath as he witnessed another clip pulling up. This one contained a group of men who were all dressed in extreme outdoor survival/hunter gear. They had a look in their eyes that said they aimed to shoot whatever they could get their hands on and kill it dead.