EDIT #2: Okay guys, thanks for all the reviews, but I've entered this into the contest now so it's a bit late to go back and add/fix things. However, feel free to review if you want, because maybe I'll turn this into an actual novel - that way I won't be hampered by the "short story word limit" and I'll have much more freedom to write in all your suggestions. (they're very good!) I couldn't be very descriptive and add as much "character development" into this as I'd have liked, because as I've said, there was a word limit.
Hey everyone, this is an entry for a short story contest I'm entering. Please review it for me and I'll gladly review one of your works back! Thank you so much!
As a side note, the required limit for the story is 3,500 characters, but I've already got the OK from the judges to make it 3,508 (which is how long it is currently.)
----------------------------------
My whole body was bone-numbingly cold. As I slowly came to, I became more and more aware of my teeth chattering together. It felt as though I’d gone swimming in ice water. Of course, that made no sense, since I was perfectly dry. But then, the fact that I was shackled by cold steel restraints to a chair made no sense either..
Shackled to a chair?
I forced my eyes open as soon as I realized this, though that didn’t help me to assess my situation – it was still pitch dark in the room. Trying not to panic (though of course I still was) I craned my neck in a desperate attempt to see more of my surroundings.
So far I was getting nothing. My eyes were useless in the dark. And was I ever cold. How had I gotten here in the first place? I couldn’t remember where I’d been before now, or what time I had left my house this morning. I mulled over the idea that perhaps I’d been kidnapped, but I knew that few people who were kidnapped were ever heard from again, and so I did my best to dismiss the theory to avoid panicking myself further. There had to be some reason for my present state of captivity. Some perfectly sound, logical reason…
Frustrated, I decided to just go with the information that I did have and avoid worrying about being held captive, as irritating and frightening as that was. There had to be some way out of this.
I struggled with the restraints, grunting with exertion and trying my best to slip my hands through them. I was a slender girl; other people frequently commented on my dainty “fairy hands.” It was my hope that they’d be of some use to me now, but whoever had shackled me had been very thorough in making sure that I was not going to escape. I groaned after another failed attempt to get free and slumped in the chair, left with nothing but sore wrists as a result.
As I closed my eyes, my other senses became sharper. I focused on the sounds and smells coming from the interior of the dank room. There was a faint howling of the winter wind echoing from outside…perhaps there was an open window nearby that was letting in the chill? Tapping my foot against the floor, I discovered by the hollow tapping noise it made that it was made of wood. Most likely, I was in somebody’s cellar. Straining my ears, I also could make out other noises filtering down from above. They sounded garbled at first, but I soon distinguished them as two individual voices talking with one another.
“…Not for you to decide,” the first one said in a deep, but not quite baritone voice.
“And why not?!” the other argued. “It’s my fault she has to be locked up down there!”
I gasped in shock. That voice. I knew that voice. Hearing it now was like listening to a ghost come back from the grave.
It had been two months now since I’d witnessed my brother, Cyan, arrested on charges of witchcraft. The whole thing had happened so fast…one minute we were talking a walk by the brook as we frequently did, and the next minute the angriest group of people I’d ever seen came at us from the trees, rambling on about a murdered goat that was missing its heart. Cyan had been walking by the house that was the scene of the crime on his way to town that day. He’d had nothing to do with the killing. Nothing. In fact, livestock deaths were becoming oddly common as of late, and instead of blaming wolves or coyotes the villagers had turned to the next possible explanation – witchcraft. There had been an explosion of fear about the whole thing in our little Massachusetts town. People no longer trusted each other as they had. The pastor kept spouting nonsense about the need to weed out the devils from our society every Sunday. And worst of all, as if the mad, superstitious way everyone was acting wasn’t enough, countless village girls – and yes, sometimes boys - were being rounded up, subjected to short, one-sided trials, and promptly hanged. The one fear on every villager’s mind was constantly, “I could be next.”
So it was with great shock that my brother’s voice reached my ears. My brother, who was supposed to have been hanged along with the others. How was he still alive? Had he been set free, only to be banished from coming into town? And most of all, why hadn’t he come back to at least tell me?
I could bear it no longer. I had to, HAD to see his face for myself.
“CYAN!” I yelled as loudly as I could. In a matter of moments, I saw a panel of light from upstairs as the cellar door was thrown open and he rushed down to meet me, his heavy boots clomping with every step.
“Lennore?” he smiled at me, and it was like a ray of sunshine had entered the darkness of my cellar prison.
“You’re alive,” I said in disbelief, feeling tears spring to my eyes. “Cyan…”
I could think of nothing else to say. My voice had been lost to my utter confusion and shock. My brother was alive.
“Len, I’m…I’m so sorry, I swear I didn’t mean…”
“What do you think you are doing?!”
A much less gentle voice, the one I’d heard Cyan talking with upstairs, boomed angrily. Whoever the voice belonged to was definitely older, and I envisioned what he might look like as his footsteps stormed down the stairs.
Tall. Heavily muscled. Dangerous.
But when the man stepped into my range of sight, I wasn’t at all prepared for what I saw. Rather than being a gruff, surly man of the woods, the stranger was only a half-foot taller than Cyan, with dark brown hair that hung low over his left eye. And it was his eyes that I found most intriguing of all his features. They were a rare, bright green. I was right about one thing, though…the man looked dangerous. He gave off an unmistakable aura of power that I couldn’t quite understand.
“I told you, she’s still unstable,” he said to Cyan warningly.
Cyan growled at him. “She’s my sister! And I did this to her!”
“Did what to me?” I asked, confused by their arguing. “Shackled me to this chair?”
The two of them ceased talking to look at me purposefully. The second man, whose name was still unknown to me, nodded meaningfully as he looked at my right shoulder.
I turned my head to look at my shoulder as well, wondering what on earth was so interesting about it. And then, I really began to panic. My sleeve was ripped to shreds, and underneath the shredded cloth was unmistakably the bite mark of some huge animal. Blood still stained my ruined blouse, and I vaguely wondered why I hadn’t felt any pain from the awful wound earlier. From the look of it, someone had already cleaned it up.
“What…happened to me?”
Cyan stepped back away from me, staring at the floor with a haunted expression on his face. I had expected he would be the one to answer my crucial question, but green-eyed man cleared his throat.
“It was a mere accident,” he said slowly, “But an irreversible one. Lennore…you have been bitten by a werewolf.”
I couldn’t help it. I stared at him blankly.
“…I see…” he sighed, “That it will take a bit more persuasion than that.”
Just as I was about to ask him what he meant by such a cryptic sentence, the man doubled over, groaning. Cyan was at full attention now, watching him with as much focus as I was, but he seemed to know what was going on whereas I was completely in the dark about what was happening. Then, a loud gasp escaped me, for even in the dim light I could see the man was beginning to change.
His skin was rippling as though there was boiling water underneath, and his whole frame trembled with some unknown energy. Dark brown fur, the exact color of his hair, began growing at a rapid pace to cover every inch of his body. But most horrifying of all, his limbs and face were changing at an alarming rate until they resembled those of a terrible clawed monster. He looked up at me, and the final stages of his transformation were complete as his lupine jaws snapped together, encasing rows of sharp canine teeth. His green eyes looked at me more hauntingly than ever, for they were now the eyes of a wolf. A werewolf.
My scream pierced the air like a knife.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In time, I remembered what had happened to me that morning. Perhaps it was the shock of watching a werewolf’s transformation that jogged my memory…I can’t be sure. But I knew that, just like my brother before me, I too had been accused of witchcraft – accused and subjected to what the townspeople of Massachusetts called “a fair trial.”
My hands and feet bound, I was thrown forcefully into the river, despite the fact that it was winter and if I didn’t die of drowning, the effects of the cold, icy water would surely kill me. The idea was that if I sunk, I would be pronounced innocent, while if instead I floated to the surface that would prove me guilty of being a witch. It was pure madness. But then, so was the fact that it had been a werewolf to rescue me from the raging river as the current carried me rapidly downstream.
Remembering the events that had transpired this morning was painful. But not as painful as hearing out what Brink, the name of my savior, had to say after his shocking transformation.
He calmly explained to me the reason for my being shackled. As a newly bitten werewolf, I was temporarily unstable and unpredictable for the first few hours. Even though I had been unconscious, Brink had no way of knowing when I would wake up or how violent I would act, so he’d taken every precaution to assure that I was not going to mutilate him or Cyan. Being held prisoner had only been for the safety of us all. However, that bit of news was not the painful part of Brink’s explanation.
Cyan, who I had believed to be dead until this day, was also a werewolf.
His first transformation had been a shock even to him. The day of his arrest, on the eve of a full moon, his captors had been moving him from one prison to a larger, more spacious one on the far side of the city. He, along with more of the accused, made up such a large group that the local penitentiary just couldn’t hold them all. That night, as he was being forced into a cramped, barred carriage just before the trip could take place, something inside of him snapped. Part of it was, of course, the animal within him, which would sooner die fighting than be forced inside a cage. The other part was obviously the full moon shining overhead, the call of which no werewolf could ignore. Within moments, the cries of dying men could be heard echoing through the still night air as Cyan’s transformation became complete.
After that, he ran. He sought solace in the woods, figuring he would live as the outcast he was. But he hadn’t been counting on meeting Brink, who as the alpha of a nearby werewolf pack took it upon himself to teach him how to control the beast within. All this time, Cyan had been roaming the woods right under everyone’s nose…including mine.
But even with Brink’s guidance, he apparently hadn’t been able to stop himself from biting me as the alpha pulled me from the river this morning. The scent of fresh prey was overpowering for him, and he couldn’t control the beast even to stop himself from harming his own sister.
“He…bit me…” I breathed, as though trying out the words for the first time.
“Yes,” Brink nodded. “You are as much a wolf as we are.”
I should have felt scared. Horrified. I know I should have. But in place of those emotions, I felt something else – a strong, fierce sense of excitement and urgency that rose up like wildfire into my mind.
“But then,” I replied, “You know what this means, don’t you? Do you know what we’re capable of together?”
Brink narrowed his eyes curiously, while Cyan, still wearing a slightly guilty look since Brink had told me of his attack upon me, looked utterly lost for words.
“What, Lennore?”
I grinned. A wild, almost savage grin that stretched across my face as the realization of what I could do with this new power – this gift - hit me like a glorious epiphany. Too long had I lived in fear and doubt among my neighbors. Too long had we been watching our backs constantly, shying away from those we thought to be “cursed” or suspicious, who I now knew must have been just as innocent as I. Too long had this plague of superstition been a ruler over our lives, and it was with great satisfaction and joy that I knew…it was our task to put an end to all of the unnecessary madness and suffering.
“We will end the tyranny that has made us outcasts,” I said to my new comrades, “And go down in history for liberating the oppressed from the fools that stood in our way.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You’ve taken to this new life rather well,” Cyan commented. I had been released from my prison in the chair so that I could prepare for my first transformation. It was a full moon tonight, and Brink wanted me to be as ready as possible before we went through with our plan. At the moment, he was standing by the river, staring into the trees.
“I just don’t think I need to fear what can help me and so many other people,” I replied.
He nodded. “You always were a tough one to scare,” he said. “I’m just glad you don’ t have to go through it for your first time alone. Brink wasn’t around when I first changed…”
At that moment, Brink turned around and approached us. He looked a bit tense. “In a matter of minutes, the moon will be completely visible,” he informed me. Right now, the sky was dusky, and thick clouds were covering it. “Be ready.”
I nodded. I didn’t need him to tell me that – I was waiting anxiously for the clouds to dissipate.
And then, they did.
The full moon shone down on all three of us, lighting up the snow covered ground eerily. At once I felt a wild excitement course through me. Brink and Cyan were already changing – Brink was better at it so his shift was relatively quick. The dark brown werewolf stood watching while Cyan changed into a reddish brown one, shaking his head as if to clear it from the strain of the transformation. Then their eyes were on me.
I felt no pain, which came as a surprise to me. All my misconceptions about the creatures I had once believed didn’t even exist quickly vanished as I became one of them under the light of the full moon’s glow. In a minute or two it was over, and I closed my eyes to breathe in the scents of the forest and the two other werewolves near me. I looked myself over curiously - my silver grey fur was almost metallic against the pure white snow, and if I could have smiled with my new canine jaws, I would have.
Then, Brink threw back his head and let out a howl. The hunt was about to begin.
The three of us ran together as one, in mind and body. I succumbed to the thrill of the hunt, the pull of my instincts dominating my every move. Brink, the alpha, ran in front with Cyan and I following close behind. Thundering through the woods, I had never felt so free and alive. Surely, there was no creature anywhere who could match our sheer speed and power, and I growled with anticipation for the hunt that lay ahead.
The accused villagers were being held in the prison that Cyan would have been taken to, had it not been for his violent escape. It was an old building, but sturdy, and built with only one intent: to keep anyone from getting in or out. Although we had the cover of darkness, our dark fur stood out starkly against the white snow, so we had to be extra cautious in order to avoid being spotted. Cyan snarled in frustration as we waited for Brink’s next order, sitting just next to the tree line and blending in with the shadows the forest cast. Brink gave him a sharp warning look and he lowered his head apologetically. The guards weren’t deaf – we needed to be more careful.
“Split up,” Brink said. To anyone other than a werewolf his voice would have sounded like growls and strange barks. “I’ll go first and create a path.”
I translated this to mean he would break a gaping hole in the prison wall and cut down most of the guards.
Cyan and I nodded our consent. Get on with it already! I thought impatiently.
And get on with it he did. No longer giving thought to the need for stealth, Brink charged forward and directed his attention at the tall, wrought iron gate surrounding the prison. Snarling as if glad for the challenge, he gave a sharp tug at two bars next to each other and pulled them far enough apart to create an opening. The iron bars groaned terribly as they were bent, then snapped in half. The prison door stood even less a chance against his tremendous strength.
And then, it was our turn. I surged into the opening Brink had made with Cyan hot on my heels. As soon as we had entered the building, my brother gave me a look that I interpreted as both “good luck” and “be careful.” I nodded at him assuredly. Judging by the screams and cries of horror not far ahead, Brink was having no problems at all.
I ran directly to the cells, smelling out where the prisoners were being kept. They all gave me looks of terror, but I ignored that fact and set to work snapping the iron bars as I had seen our leader do earlier. I then stepped back, giving a gruff snarl and nodding towards the exit where Cyan was keeping watch in case any more foolish guards should come running.
At first, all the prisoners did was to stare incredulously at their monstrous savior. But all it took was another growl from me to send them running, running out of their cages and into the winter night towards sweet freedom.
I smiled. Our work for tonight had been completed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The rescue may have been a success, but the work was still not entirely complete.
All that week, reports of the gruesome murders of the judges of the witch trials began flooding into the newspapers like the plague. The men had been found dead in exactly the same fashion as each other: torn and mutilated, as if they had been savaged by some kind of animal.
Animal. How ironic that they referred to us as the animals, when their hands were just as covered in blood as our fangs. They, who had subjected me and my kin to torture and unspeakable pain, rounding us up under the sheer mad notion of evil lurking in our hearts. Yet all they would have had to do to see the true terror of our village would be to look in a mirror. And as relieved as I was that our act of revenge had been completed, there was still one question lurking in the back of my mind.
“You both can no longer stay here,” Brink told us a week after the prison break, “For the safety of others, not yourselves.”
He was right. It was only a matter of time before we would be chased down, and then we would be forced to defend ourselves. Not only that, but the secret of our kind’s existence must be kept secret, for the good of the humans.
And so, we took up the alpha’s offer: to join him and his pack. Our new family. We had saved our friends from death, but in so doing had become outcasts from the very place we had sought to save.
Still, I had no regrets. After all, since the day of the rescue, the witch trials of Salem were never to be heard of more.
