The next couple entries are written by a friend of mine. For obvious reasons, he has asked to remain anonymous.
I don’t remember much of how I got
bitten. Mostly, I go by what people told me happened, but it’s strange, you
know? It’s like everything before the bite was somebody else’s life. Didn't know how good I had it. But whatever.
I was camping with a bunch of
friends, up on the cliffs of Flaming Gorge. Three days into Spring Break, it
was a blast. Next thing I knew I was in the hospital. They told me I’d fallen
off the edge of the cliffs near our campsite, and somehow managed to catch onto
a ledge twenty feet down. I was treated for a couple bruises, nothing too bad.
They told me I was lucky.
Up above me, in the campsite,
everyone else—they were all dead. Killed, slaughtered by some animal. I’m glad
I never saw that. Later that week we had a group funeral. John, Harris, Amanda,
Colby, Sammy, and Terrance all together. It was closed casket.
They figured what it was pretty
quick, but it was weird. Werewolf attacks don’t happen every day, you know. Not
in Durango. They figured it was probably some tourist slipped through airport
security, that kind of thing. Anyway, they called in some specialists, a shaman
and a guy with yellow eyes, and then this other guy, normal looking kid around
my age. The shaman said they could use me to track the first wolf. They could
already tell I was bit, you see. Showing the signs.
What are they? Oh, you hear how
silver burns the skin of a werewolf? Not true, doesn't do any good unless he’s
already shifted. I can still wear silver rings, piercings, or whatever if I
wanted to. The way to tell is a lot more subtle. There’s a difference in the
aura of course, but mostly that changes with the moon, so you can’t tell much
less it’s close to full. Then the canines are a tad longer, temper is shorter.
Huge craving for red meat. Also, I smelled different. Animals didn't like me
anymore, if they could smell me. The real test was when they scanned me with
this special ultraviolet light. My bite was the first thing to heal up on me of
course, but they found the traces left, like a ghost scar on my left leg. You
could tell I really got tore up.
The man with yellow eyes smiled at
me and shook his head. He was the one that did the little light thing. For some
reason he kept glancing over at the kid that was with them. Told me his name
was Connor, told me a lot about “my condition”, he called it.
There’s no cure. They have a couple
options to deal with it. I could be locked up in a special facility every full
moon, I could take special pills that would make me asthmatic and weakened for
the rest of my life. Or I could join the Pack. It was no choice really. The
Pack would never stand for another predator in their territory. If I’d tried
the lock up, the pills, they would have killed me anyway, and it would be
better.
