Hours later, time taken for lunch with Barbie and a little painting, I took a rideshare back to Dante’s Inferno and went up to the guest room. Slipping past everyone in the main room and Calliope trying to tell me Andrew stopped by with the calmest brush off I could manage. Instead I focused on my objective: changing into a pair of jeans, a black shirt, my father’s old jacket, and leaving most of my other things behind, including my items from the store.

  Going back outside, I barely had time to ask to borrow someone’s car and got tossed a pair of keys from one of Vergil’s coworkers. The brief instruction of “bring it back in one piece” following the toss, which I was rather glad was the only issue.

  Climbing into an old station wagon, I drove the relatively short distance out of Richmond and into the Greater Richmond Area. Off the main roads, onto rural ones, and eventually pulling into a gas station a short walk from the quarry. Better to get a little exercise in rather than risk blowing up another person’s car.

  The Burning Grounds, as the local supernaturals called it, was a large hole in the ground as all quarries were, surrounded by a good chunk of trees and down a deep slope. Not perfect by any means, there were still businesses close, it muffled screams well and The Lady kept it abandoned at night.

  A place for executions, it was somewhere The Lady could set up a stake and some gasoline, gather a small crowd, and burn someone alive with little chance of people hearing. Have everything loaded into a truck after, turn the gravel and dirt up to cover up the burn marks, leave no human the wiser. Not the strangest place for someone to ask for a meeting, it was relatively neutral ground, would be hard for either side to surprise the other, and would make fighting discouraged.

  I was also about to show up in the worst way possible to avoid a fight.

  No me, or at least me as a guy, nobody with me, nothing except my fucking word and a jacket. Pulling a cigarette from my pocket, I figured smoke them if you have them and slowly made my way down the quarry’s slope wondering why I thought this was going to go well. They were either going to believe me or they weren’t, and either way I needed to say a lot more than I wanted to. The off chance I did manage to get five words in without someone blowing my head off feeling rather distant, and weirdly not worrying me.

  I was still trying to think of how to fucking start this off when I saw two people already waiting for me alongside some heavy machinery left laying around for the night.

  In the light of the moon I could barely make the figures out, and with a blink I let my eyes turn to a wolf as uncomfortable as it was to hold. They might have been too far away to smell, but that didn’t mean I wanted to just go in relying on silhouettes. One man I didn’t recognize, holding an assault rifle, and the other man sticking out almost depressingly well with only the most fragile resemblance to my memory.

  A half-one in his early forties, with messily cut light brown hair and a stubbled face that was starting to show some gray. Even in his jeans, flannel, and heavy canvas jacket, one could see his skin was scarred heavily, some the marks looking like they had never properly healed, and a chunk from the top of his right ear torn clean off. His face a memory of a memory of what he’d looked like when I’d last seen him; everything the same and everything so much older. He carried a revolver he aggravatingly waved through the air, and on the hand holding it I could see a new to me ugly tattoo of a bird, that wasn’t hard to guess what it was supposed to be.

  “You came alone,” My father barked, sounding ready to shoot me without another word as he cocked back the hammer of his gun.

  “And you only brought two people, or should I assume Percy’s up on the edge with a rifle?” I asked, knowing what the man was good at. He’d always been the better one with a scope, no reason to assume he hadn’t gotten better.

  My dad snorted at that, and with a shake of his head ignored my point to spit out, “where’s my son, where’s Hawk?”

  Right, moment of fucking truth, no fucking evidence.

  I closed my eyes, attempting to speak once and finding the words stuck in place as they at first refused to leave my throat. A knot in my chest, the feeling I was going to throw up, and I could only shake my head as I weakly croaked out, “it’s me. I’m here.”

  They looked confused, I couldn’t blame them, and the man I didn’t know lowered his rifle a moment as my dad asked, “what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “I lied about everything, because… well, what the fuck else was I supposed to do?” I explained, almost snapping the last words even as my dad almost raise his hand before I hastily spit out, “I’m Hawk, or I…I’m not him, fucking hate that name, but I’m who you used to call that. I’m trans, you have to know becoming a werewolf can change your appearance, it was just…drastic in my case.”

  “You’re fucking lying,” my dad snapped, raising the revolver once more, his aim shaking wildly, “you’re a fucking Purist, my son wouldn’t fucking join your kind. I fucking knew this was too good to be true, just like your fucking kind to go lying at me with that fucking face. What, you fucking torture him for what information you could, kill him? Or should I be lucky enough to think that’s all you did?”

  “I’m alive, I’m here,” I stressed, my vision blurry as I took a few nervous steps back, the taste of vomit on my tongue, “look, ask me anything, I can answer whatever you want. You gave me this jacket when I started high school, you were going to take me out on my first hunt a month before I left, you-”

  “My son wasn’t a fucking monster!” Martin roared out, his finger on the trigger, tears in his eyes, “you could have forced him to tell you all this, maybe he’s still fucking alive and there was some truth to what you said, but he’s not with you willingly. I’m never gonna believe a lie like that from you.”

  I shook my head, my head spinning, this wasn’t going to plan, he didn’t fucking believe me. My voice shaking, eyes blurring with tears, I tried to tell him, “I’m working with The Lady, you can ask her if you want. My mom was a Purist, she told me that, you had to have known there was a chance I’d be a werewolf.”

  The man I didn’t recognize lowered his rifle, confusion turning to genuine horror as he asked Martin, “what’s she talking about?”

  My dad ignored the question, and instead shook his head as he told me, “I’m sure your fucking mother could have told you that one, you look exactly like the monster. Her jacket, her face, fucking Purist tattoos along your torso, you’re just like her aren’t you? What, is she trying to keep the bloodline pure, is that it? Still has some grand delusions about nobility?”

  He was going to kill me.

  “Ask The Lady.”

  “So I can fucking get killed while I wait?!” Martin asked, heaving in anger as he aimed for me, “I don’t-”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The man I didn’t recognize fell down, a crack of thunder ringing through the air, and Martin was distracted for only a moment as I turned and ran. Stripping off my jacket, my shirt, kicking off boots, sliding off jeans and nearly falling flat on my face, all as I dived behind a large vehicle. The air a sudden cacophony of gunfire, gravel and dust shot up around me, and I forced the transformation along as fast as I could.

  Bones creaked, twisted, snapped, reformed, moved from their sockets, twisted and turned on themselves. Hair grew and turned to thick fur, my spine extending into a tail, my jaw dislocating and relocating into an elongated muzzle. Agony, only made worse as I forced it along like I was trying to work every piece of my body at once. Muscle and flesh a liquid moving along my bones, twisting and turning on itself, until they were one on the other, and I finished the process as a wolf.

  The transformation wasn’t over more than a second before I sprinted full speed towards the slope out of the quarry. Gunshots following my tail the whole way, from cover, from cover behind me, and I forced myself to not pay attention to how close they were as I ran full sprint. As fast as my body could carry me, even a wolves legs and torso burning with effort as I turned hard into the woods, blindly running in a wide circle until I nearly ran full force into a new figure.

  For a moment the familiar scent on my nose was a comfort, and it was only a second later the nature of that familiarity hit me.

  Percy stood in front of me with his rifle raised, barrel barely managing to stained trained on my head with shaking hands, and in a nervous tremor he barked out, “stop! I don’t want to shoot you, please.”

  I froze, the wolf wished to attack, and I held in a growl as I forced the transformation back to human. The same agonizing pleasure as before, sped up too fast, and all the while Percy looked on in disgust as I came to two feet. My hands raised in front of me as soon as I could manage the balance, “Percy, you don’t understand. I’m-”

  “Please don’t make me do this,” the man interrupted, the reflection of tears on his cheek suddenly coming to my attention in the moonlight, “I just want my friend back.”

  “I’m me,” I said, still crying as I shook and tried to resist the wolf’s urge to run, “I’m Hawk, I used to be, but I’m Mary now, I-”

  “Please,” the man croaked out, the tip of his rifle dropping to the ground, looking ready to drop to his knees and plead, “I just-”

  Someone yelled for my name, and without even realizing I was about to move I ran towards the voice. Barely a few feet before I was on the ground once more, face down in the dirt, head ringing, ears ringing, a dull sensation slowly turning to a burning fire on the side of my face. My hand shooting up to grab the wound, a silent scream escaping my throat that I realized soon after was a throat killing call of agony. My vision barely able to focus even as I looked up to Percy stood above me with eyes wide as dinner plates. There one moment, looking to ready to drop his rifle in shock before another explosion rang out and he crumpled across me.

  A new scream escaped me, and I grabbed at the man, rolled him off me, my padding attempts to find a wound ruined as a pair of arms dragged me away. My feet in the air a moment as I kicked and screamed, the wolf growled and twisted, and I was held tight and pulled deeper into the woods. My attempt to escape only paused as I turned to see Andrew stood there with a pistol as he yelled back, “just got him in the shoulder, he has friends here, he’s going to be fine!”

  He sat me on the ground beside him, and I sobbed the whole stumbling run through the woods as I finally noticed the bloody river making its way down into my shirt. The newfound tears burning my right eye as I rested a hand over it in a vain attempt at comfort, trying to blink out the blood that blinded it. Unable to even see my own hand through the viscera and tears, I clawed at it feebly trying to force out the red until I was suddenly lifted and forced into the bed of Andrew’s truck.

  The wolf screamed as I tried throwing myself out, frantically clawing at the sides, and Andrew held me in, looking behind him in fear until a second figure came running out of the woods with a rifle on his back. My body crouching low ready to pound until they were close enough my blurry vision and panicked mind could vaguely process the sight.

  “She got shot, you have the shit to take care of her?!” Andrew yelled, stepping aside as Samuel hopped in the truck bed and pulled open a duffle bag I’d not noticed back there.

  “I got her, don’t worry about it. Get us somewhere quiet, I’ll tell you where to go from there,” Samuel muttered quickly, gripping my shoulder as he tried to order me, “Mary I need you to calm down, I need you to let me look at this, looks like it was silver and I need to care for that.”

  “He tried killing me,” I sobbed, the wolf’s fight dying as it curled into a ball on the bed of the truck. My mind vaguely registering the truck being to move even as I sobbed and repeated, “my dad tried to kill me.”

  “I know, I was there, you’re fucking lucky Andrew was there when you arranged this,” Samuel muttered, preparing bandages and bottles, “how bad it is? You’re alive so I’m guessing it’s a graze.”

  “I can’t see,” I muttered, still clawing at the wound, rubbing at it, desperately trying to clean out my eye as I sobbed out, “I have something in my eye, I can’t get it out. I can’t see out of it, there’s something in it.”

  “Let me see it, I’ll clean it out.”

  “I can’t see,” I muttered, sobbing even as Samuel rolled me onto my other side, my body too limp to resist and the wolf not even managing a growl. Shaking my head the whole time I kept my hand pressed into the wound, only fighting off Samuel’s touch as he grabbed at my wrist and tried to force it away.

  “Mary, I need to…I need to be able to see what I’m doing to help you, please,” Samuel muttered, his voice weak as he moved his hand to gently brush my cheek. “You’re going to be okay, I promise. You just need to listen to me, and I’ll keep you safe, okay?”

  I nodded, the words only enough of a comfort to slowly move my hand even as I winced in fear of what he’d see, how bad the wound would be. The blood flowing freely once more, uninhibited by my hand’s pressure and guidance, a warm sheet coating my cheek and mouth as I sobbed for it.

  Samuel remained silent, and I held myself tight even as he softly swabbed my cheek, cleaned the cut. After a time all I could do was ask, “how bad is it?”

  He hesitated to answer, and after a long moment could only tell me, “I’m going to give you something pretty strong, it’ll knock you out for a few hours. Is that okay?”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I’ve seen a lot worse,” Samuel comforted, his voice almost methodical as he went about pulling items out vials and equipment. The wind whipping around us in the speeding truck, I could barely hear what he was doing, and I couldn’t see anything but a little bit of the truck bed and side. Samuel seemed to know this, and didn’t let me rest in silence as he asked, “how did your date go?”

  “What?” I asked, confused enough to stop sobbing a moment as I turned to see him.

  “Oh, I talked to your friend Sigyn, she mentioned you had a date last night,” he said slowly, cursing a brief moment as he fumbled with something before he tied a band around my arm, slapping it a few times. “Going to feel a small pinch,” a brief pain as the needle stuck into me, “what did you two do?”

  I froze, not sure what to do at first and only after a minute answering, the taste of my own blood on my tongue, “we went to the Fine Arts Museum, the one in Richmond. She’s an artist, she liked it a lot, I learned a lot about different artists and all that.”

  “Oh, that’s a great place, I took your mother there once — she was bored out of her mind — learn anything interesting?” Samuel said, obviously forcing a chuckle as he brushed hair away from the bullet wound. The feeling of my hair being pulled to the back of my head, a fucking pony tail of all things in this situation, he quickly secured somehow.

  “Andy Warhol’s overrated?” I said, letting out a nervous laugh, “she spent a while talking about that.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like an artist,” Samuel chuckled, shaking his head as he rested a hand on my cheek, his thumb brushing a tear off, “she drew you yet? One of my pack members set me up once, one date with this chick who sketched for fun. She did this cute little caricature of me while we were waiting in the restaurant, one of those things you see at amusement parks, said it was a fun exercise.”

  “She’s painting me for a class, but we’ve just done the sketch part, where she uses charcoal. It looks a lot like me. She did a few pencil sketches of me while I was sleeping, and while we were waking up,” I muttered, a weight feeling like it’d come across my entire body as I laid perfectly still. Not even sure if I could speak for a moment, I told him, “I feel tired.”

  “That’s the drug kicking in, don’t feel like you need to fight it,” the man said, and through the haze I thought he might have kissed my forehead, “it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay. Do you have any plans for your next date?”

  I thought I answered, though I couldn’t have been sure as it felt like my mouth refused to move like it was supposed to. My eyes closed, my body went limp, and a moment later there was blessed nothing.