Chapter Four
Dean
My hostess, Jillian, had prepared me some pancakes and left them near the fireplace to stay warm. There was no syrup or butter, but she also left a jar of berry jam. I smeared some on each hotcake then rolled it up and ate it, savoring the bright sweetness. I could have eaten more, but I had a feeling food was scarce for this woman who lived in the forest. And, grateful for her assistance, I had no intention of costing her any of her precious resources.
And I also had to push any thoughts I had of how beautiful she looked in the firelight out of my mind. She had such cute freckles and her eyes held both a history of pain and an innocence I’d never seen in any of the college girls I knew. My heart twisted just thinking of her. I needed to get my feet under me and leave before I got too attached.
I’d met some extraordinary women in my previous life...it was a previous life, wasn’t it? Everything had changed. But no one had affected me this strongly. And I could tell Jillian had enough going on in her life without taking on a man whose current life was a confusing flux.
Everything was upside down and inside out at this point, and I didn’t know what to do. Or...where I even was. Last I remembered, I’d been sitting in a psychology lecture at the small college I attended. I’d felt a little off, somehow, not in a way I could define, but as if my chair in the theater-style auditorium no longer fit me.
I thought I might have gotten up and gone out for fresh air, but that part of the memory was curiously fuzzy. With everything past that point even more confusing. A blend of colors and lights and pain. So much pain.
Rumors of shifters were common in town, but I always equated them with rumors of Bigfoot in the forest or vampires sleeping the days away in their basement coffins. Mermaids… Urban myths and fairy tales. But what had just happened to me made all of those things sound run-of-the-mill. I mean...I assumed that if there were any kind of out-of-the-ordinary beings floating around, they came to it naturally. From birth. Like...say you were born on a planet in Ursa Major. Of course you’d have two sets of wings and a single eye on the back of your head if you came from a different planet where that was the norm.
But me...an average guy raised by average middle-class parents in suburbia? No way could anything more unusual happen than say getting a thumb in a can of baked beans. The kid in my third-grade class who somehow always had all the gross scoop to share told us about that happening once, and as a child I had insisted on checking each container of beans before being willing to eat them. My parents deserved an award for tolerance.
So...a kid with a fear of severed thumbs in canned goods, who never went off the high dive in summer camp, was a pretty ordinary sort of fellow who took life carefully one step at a time. How the heck could I be something that I’d have said wasn’t real just...yesterday?
And what triggered it? Was there maybe some kind of recessive gene that hadn’t shown up in our family in generations and somehow came to me from both sides? We’d talked about such things in biology class. Not of the werewolf variety…
I moved toward the small window opposite the hearth and looked outside. The wintery landscape held no snow, but it was chilly outside. The thick glass, something that must be as old as the cabin itself—at least a century—gave everything a wobbly, out-of-focus appearance, so at first, I thought what bounced some branches of a nearby copse must be a deer or something, but when I traded locations, and opened the door a crack, I was less sure of the source of the motion.
The whisper of voices carried to me, two males I thought, although they were far enough away now to blend into the rustle of leaves and make me doubt what my ears were telling me. We were way out in the middle of the forest, so far as I could tell, and the only person I expected to see was the person who lived here. Although I didn’t really know where I was. At all. Or who might show up.
The werewolf idea was beginning to grow in my mind, and I was studying the trees, looking for anyone who might be out there. Anyone who might want...what? What if there were others like me and they were territorial? Wasn’t that something in the stories? The woman, girl who helped me was so attractive, even if she doesn’t speak. Surely someone would have claimed her as their own by now.
And that someone wouldn’t be happy about me staying over? Seemed logical. The longer I stared at the trees and brush, the more nervous I got. What if someone attacked me in wolf form? Could I respond in kind? When I saw no more signs of anyone, if they ever had been there at all, I decided to try and see if I could change into a wolf again. At will.
I was standing in the yard, about to try, when it occurred to me that my clothing was borrowed, and while I wasn’t sure what happened to clothes when someone shifted, I certainly hadn’t had any on when I became human again last time.
So, I returned to the cabin and undressed then, blushing head to toe at the idea someone might come across me, I ran into the woods, hoping the trees would shield me from any unwelcome discovery. I closed my eyes tight and tried to find my “inner wolf.” If I’d done it once, I should be able to do it again. What had triggered that first change...and had anyone on campus seen me do it? If so, what had they thought? Everyone had a camera with them all the time, right? Their phone...so were there pictures or, even worse, video floating around campus of me becoming an animal? What would that look like?
I tried again and again. Wishing. Praying. Demanding a change. I might have even said “Abra cadabra” at one point, all to no avail, and by the time I recognized the futility of my efforts, the sun was getting low in the sky and I, in what was rapidly becoming a habit, had managed to wind up deep in the forest with zero idea of how to get back where I came from.
And I was naked.
And so cold!
The outside temperature was hovering somewhere above freeing but not too far above, and the miracle was more the fact I hadn’t recognized that sooner. I mean, I had earlier, but as I’d stumbled through the trees, I had been, if anything, on the warm side. But now I was shivering and if I didn’t find some kind of shelter before it got much later, I feared I’d be hypothermic before morning.
I didn’t see any other buildings at all or anything else, but I managed to dig out a shallow pit against a low hill and covered myself with dried leaves from nearby. Shivering, I fell asleep, too exhausted to stay awake any longer.