Tori
It was cold on the plateau. Everyone thought that Arizona was warm all the time, but the nights were cold up high. I had always loved camping, getting away from the city, staring up at the wide expanse of stars. Three of the times I’d run away had been just because I needed to look up at that endless night sky and know that there was so much more to the world than the cruelty of kids and adults alike.
“Nobody likes you Tori,” a voice in the dark. I looked, sitting up in my sleeping bag near the campfire, but I couldn’t see anyone. “Nobody’s ever going to like you, you’re weird.”
The man nearby spoke, stern tones. “Vicky, lay down and relax.”
I hated that name. But several “dads” had called me that. Glancing over before I laid back down, I was confused. He had the hairy arms of one of the foster parents I had along the way, but the hair color and style of a different one, the mustache of a third… did they all have those hard eyes?
His wife grumbled quietly next to him, I couldn’t see her as I laid back down, I could only wonder if I’d recognize her, or if she would be every woman who said they’d care for me and didn’t.
This isn’t right… something isn’t right…
I didn’t want to be back in this night, even though it had been when my whole life changed for the better.
The air was still, brisk, though I couldn’t see my breath. And it was quiet, far quieter than a night of camping should have been. And in that moment, I realized I had a chance to change things - I didn’t know why I was here again, but this time I had a choice.
Another voice in the dark called, a boy’s voice, “You smell weird Tori.” Another taunt, another callous comment. I didn’t know then why everyone pushed me away.
I sat up again, trying to see the man’s wife.
“Victoria.” He sat up in response. “Lay. Down. You asked to go camping, you begged to go camping, we’re here. Neither of us like camping, so just… make this easy. Lay down, go to sleep.”
Her hair was long, the style of one woman I remembered, one of the few who had actually been nice to me - Jennifer - but the color was wrong. Her hair had been beautiful waves of sandy, multicolored blonde. This woman’s was dark, dark brown. I knew by this point that most people couldn’t determine colors in the dark, but I could.
I knew what was going to happen next. I knew how they were going to die.
What would happen if I warned them? If I begged to get in the car and go home? Would they even listen, or would they spitefully stay because they were “giving me what I wanted”. I had heard that one so many times.
“This is what you wanted. Be grateful.” It wasn’t the man speaking, another memory from the darkness. The man was giving me a hard look, not quite a glare.
The sleeping bag was warm, the smell of the fire was welcoming, and the pillow under my head again felt good. And when the tall, slender woman with the dark red hair and yellow eyes stepped out into the light of the campfire, I knew what my choice was.
Seventeen years I’d been listening to people tell me to try harder, do better, fit in, stop being such a problem. It didn’t matter how hard I tried. It didn’t matter that the words of the adults hurt even more than the words of the kids.
The woman was naked, breasts hanging free, her russet bush, her leg hair, her armpit hair all in defiance of human decency, of everything I had been taught. But what stood out, far more than her nakedness, was the way she walked. Without fear. She strode over to the sleeping bag, the man’s wife crying out and shaking him.
The man stood, angry, saying something I couldn’t follow, couldn’t understand. And the nude woman walked forward and dropped him to the ground with one solid punch to the face. The laughter that came from the shadows was cut off by the scream of the man’s wife.
I sat up and watched as the naked woman became larger, uglier, angrier.
I knew how this would go. The wolf would kill the woman first, quick, and then the man more slowly.
But this time, I didn’t get up to run away. I wasn’t held by the grungy, hairy man from the shadows and made to watch. Would she kill him the same way? If she didn’t see the bruises? If she didn’t know to make him pay for every bruise on my body?
The naked woman lifted the man into the air by his throat, but instead of screaming, he looked at me, right in the eyes and said: “This is why no one will ever love you.”
◐
I woke feeling like shit. Hung over. My eyes wouldn’t focus right, my mouth felt dry and hairy inside, my head was pounding. I'd only had a hangover once, when Alpha had decided I needed to find my real limit and we drank bottle after bottle of whiskey.
This was worse.
Wolves burned through alcohol and other poisons, they had to be potent and plentiful to do more than slow us down - Alpha said that was another gift of the Wolfmother, went with the healing...
But that wasn't stopping the fact that I hurt like hell. And the Wolfmother’s fucking healing wasn’t doing anything for the spot burning on my face. The palm of my hand burned similarly... and as I looked down to see an angry, red blotch limned by white, I remembered what had happened.
Gwen had shot me with some kind of tranquilizer. I sat up, groaning... and saw that I was in a cage. Fury lit up every neuron in my brain and I pushed myself, forcing my body to take the brute's form again...
Pain shot through me instantly, from my neck. Another burn. Intense pain speared me and I yelped involuntarily, my hands going to my throat, to the thick band of metal there...
"No... no no no!" I pulled and was rewarded with more pain. If I could shift, it would fall off - the chains always fell off when I shifted, the reason I stayed chained up when Alpha did it was because I knew she'd make it worse if I shifted out of them. I tried once more... and again the pain was too much, too sharp - I couldn't shift. The spot on my neck where it was shocking me smelled of cooked meat and it throbbed. The second shock hurt more than the first… the third was agony.
Trapped. Pulling myself up on the bars, I yanked with everything I had - I was still stronger than a human even in my natural form... but they were too much. I couldn’t so much as bend a bar the smallest amount. Gwen knew what she was doing, whatever she was.
I slumped back to the soft surface of the bottom of the cage, my leg brushing up against something plastic. Water. Greedily, I unscrewed the cap of the first bottle, wincing at the pressure on the burn on my palm.
That burn was on my dominant hand, from me grabbing her doorknob. She had cast a spell on it or something, a hex to keep people away. I had underestimated the woman at every turn, and now I was paying for it. Dearly.
I studied the room around me. A flight of stairs leading up. Green walls. Books. Couch. Chair. A large TV opposite the seating. An array of odd boxes, a few bricks stacked up and a few cinderblocks with them. A door in the far corner from the stairs, closed. The ceiling looked like it came from an office building, soulless lights softly screaming in the panels. A soft-looking rug on the floor near the couch and chair.
And a workbench, in a disarray of boxes and tools. A tall, metal locker next to it.
If there was a weapon to be found, it would most likely be on that workbench.
Without a window, without the sun, without a clock or a phone or anything to measure the passage of time, it felt like an eternity. I relived the moments at the market again and again, thinking about what she said, what I said, what I could have done differently. Wishing I had just run home to my pack. Wishing I hadn’t burst into her house, that I hadn’t let myself get swept away.
A million what-ifs, wishes, and regrets. Over and over.
I was scared. I was angry. I was defeated and helpless and tired. But mostly… mostly I was angry. And it was getting stronger, the longer I sat here. I spent some time shouting, calling out to her, I spent some time searching every square inch of the cage for a weakness.
I was ashamed.
Angry tears streamed down my face, making me feel even worse. Foolish. Stupid. I was the runt, I couldn’t handle a witch, all I had to do was run. When Alpha found me, she’d never let me live it down. And that thought made the tears of frustration darken to sobs of shame and self-loathing. I hated being the runt, I hated being weak, and I hated needing help.
I had no idea how long I spent crying. My tears dried, I drank the other water.
And I waited.
When the door at the top of the stairs opened, when those legs started walking down the steps, I forgot everything I had planned to say.
"Glad to see you're awake, Victoria. I'm sure you have a lot of questions. Where do you want to start?"
She was so fucking confident. So collected. Fury burned inside me, sweeping away the worst sense of helplessness I’d felt since the change. Since that last camping trip. I pulled my legs up to my chest, crossing my ankles and wrapping my arms around my knees, covering my nakedness as best I could.
The woman was still in the same clothes, so it was probably the same day. Her braid was tossed over the other shoulder, but the jeans looked the same, and though she had ditched the heavy coat, I had caught a glimpse of a light blue button-up shirt under it, which is what she was wearing now. She was carrying something, a folding chair, which she popped open and sat down near the cage.
She was strong and sure and confident, and here I was, naked, humiliated, and weak.
"What the fuck are you? A witch? Some kind of demon?" I knew that we weren't the only supernatural creatures in the world, but Alpha didn't tell me anything. I had to earn it, she'd tell me when I was ready. And now I had no idea what I was up against.
“A witch?” Gwen looked surprised, one eyebrow raised over those brown eyes. Realization seemed to hit and she answered, “I can’t say no with absolute certainty. I’ve been told there’s a lot of creatures out there. A lot of folks probably have something in their bloodline without knowing it. I’m fairly sure I’m human though.”
That made it so much worse. Again, shame washed over me, heating my cheeks and stinging my eyes. I had been captured by a human. Alpha had told me to leave the hunting to Fang and Spike, that I was good for fetching and blending… but I was tired of being told I was weak, I was tired of always needing to run for help. I wanted to prove myself.
And now I was caged.
"I'm sorry I broke your door. I just wanted my bag back... you can have it, just let me go. You'll never see me again."
She sighed, looking at least somewhat regretful. “Hun, I know all about your kind. I’ve spent my summers with a pack for years, and I met my first werewolf when I was twelve. What I’ve never come across is a wolf making as many grievous mistakes as you have. You shifted in public, you’re willing to attack others and that makes you too dangerous to just let go.” Gwen shook her head, eyes showing a steel that wasn’t there a moment ago. “You need to be taught how to behave. And I’ll be the one doing it.”
I stared up at her, horrified. She had been testing me. A human. I gritted my teeth, my vision going red at the edges.
"Fuck you! This is your fault! If you know so goddamned much, why didn't you just look away. I don't attack people! You challenged me!"
"Because it's my duty to assess the danger a newcomer might cause. Either you have a den somewhere and were going to hang around a bit, or you were headed somewhere that might not have someone like me there." She stood, grabbing a bottle of water from a small cabinet near the couch, taking a drink.
I snarled at her in response, “What and you’re the fucking werewolf police?”
"A werewolf willing to challenge a human making fun of them, willing to shift to try and win, is dangerous. I don't have this problem with Where the River Crashes Upon the Rock's pack. You need to be taught how to act right."
I was on my feet in an instant, smacking my head against the top of the cage with a grimace. "Fuck you! You're not even a wolf! You can't teach me shit. You humans are fucking prey stinking up the land." I gripped the bars of the cage tightly, shouting my fury at her.
When she turned her back on me, it was too much. I screamed in frustration. She sighed, walking over to her bookshelf and plucking a ratty old book from it, bookmarks and post-it notes poking out of so many pages.
“Victoria.” She sat back down, completely ignoring my outburst, which was frustrating. “This place has been here a long time, dedicated to helping wolves like you.”
“Helping!? This is helping!? How the fuck is this helping?”
She turned the cover of the book toward me, a beaten and worn cover, with hand-written fancy letters on it.
The Dire Affliction.
Dire was the form between wolf and human, closer to wolf - like the brute was closer to human. It wasn’t an affliction, it was part of who we were.
“There was an illness that targeted your kind, trapping you in what you call the dire form… and it drove them mad. I know you don’t have that, but this book is going to help me help you. It’ll help me work with you.”
"You're not going to work with me! You can't keep me locked up here!" I tried again to bend the bars, but it wasn't happening. Alpha was right about me. I was too small, too weak. It was unsettling that this woman knew so much about my kind, humans weren't supposed to know about us at all.
Alpha was going to be pissed when she found out that this River's pack was buddy-buddy with someone who could trap us.
"Look, not to sound like the villain here, but who’s going to stop me?" She took a sip of her water before staring me right in the eyes again. "You're using your ID so I'm guessing you're not a missing person. Or not recently missing. The ones that fake their deaths tend not to be brazen enough to use their old ID. You're an adult wandering on your own. No cellphone in your bag so you aren't in contact with anyone. I don't think you have a choice but to work with me."
Her words were a punch in the gut and I screamed in helpless fury, dropping to the ground and punching the floor impotently.
She just sat, watching quietly. After my outburst, I crouched there, panting, weighing my options. I could threaten her with Alpha, tell her that my pack would come for me and tear her to shreds if she didn't let me go... but she was cocky. She stared me down at the market and essentially won, as humiliating as that was. She might decide that she could hole up and take them on, lay traps and fight back.
If I threatened her, it gave her time to prepare. She thought I was a lone wolf, which meant she didn't know as much about my kind as she thought. A loner didn't live long. Alpha had drilled that lesson home.
"If you know so much about wolves, you know we're proud," I snarled, deciding to give Alpha the element of surprise. "So allow me some fucking dignity. I'll listen to your lessons, but I want this collar off. I'm not a dog."
“No.” She didn’t hesitate, but she also didn’t raise her voice. She just kept eye contact and said it like it was a fundamental truth of the world. “It’s a safety measure to keep you from transforming, and it will be a reminder to behave.”
"Behave!?" Outraged, I roared at her, feeling a vein in my neck bulge in the process. Finally, she broke eye contact, turning and walking toward her workbench. "I'm not a fucking dog! I'm a wolf! Fucking respect me!"
My chest was heaving as she walked back calmly and sat back down. She had something in her hand, the book in the other.
She had a spray bottle.
“Don’t you- “
Before I could get the words out, she squirted me right in the face several times, saying, “Bad. No screaming.”
Red, furious, pulsating red spread across my vision, consuming everything. She had squirted me like some misbehaving pet. Pain shot through me, agony through my whole body, and the next thing I knew, I was snapping and snarling in a blind rage, slamming my dire wolf body against the bars again and again, with everything I had.
“I’m not going to entertain tantrums.” She stood, setting the water bottle in her chair. “I’ll give you a few hours to calm down and maybe we can try again.”
And she fucking walked away from me.
I sat back and howled. It was an unsettling sound for humans, the dire howl - there was the faintest hint of a human voice in that howl.
And mine was saying that I would kill her.
I howled of blood on the ground, I howled of torn flesh and broken bones. I howled of death and gorging on the corpses of those who would harm me.
For the first time ever, it was easy to speak in the Wolftongue.