First Change

Written March 22nd. Story of my werewolf Kitty's First Change. Kitty is a character from Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is � White Wolf, Inc.

 

Kitty loves her yard.  She loves to dance across it, barefoot at midday or dusk or even dawn, feeling cool grass against feet hot from stepping on the tar road.  She loves to lie on it and read or sing, very quietly, and only when everyone is inside.  She camps out with her friends sometimes, pitching tents in the field at the back, sleeping beneath the stalks of grass. It’s not a yard like she’s seen in the suburbs.  Kitty lives in the country, not the suburbs.  Cows graze across the road; a horse lives next door.  She has a bigger backyard than any of her friends, and an alligator used to live in the big pond that spreads out over part of the property (though the pond is fake, man-made, while they only wished that the ‘gator had been). Kitty loves it.  She loves her Louisiana house and yard and pond.  And she loves running over the yard, confident in the knowledge that her father got rid of the fire ants last summer—just a year ago now, as she is doing now. “Kitty!” her mother yells again to her daughter, who has just left the old-looking dock on the pond. Kitty arrives, breathless, a minute later.  She has had practice with this particular run, and knows the quickest way from the dock to the back patio.  “Yeah?” she asks, already recovering. “I’m fixin’ to start dinner in a couple minutes,” says Kitty’s mother.  She is approaching middle age—she is in her late thirties, with short blonde hair and laugh lines, and shares her dark blue eyes and freckles with Kitty, though not her white skin.  “Anything special you want?” Kitty considers this for a moment.  “I like bacon,” she offers, a smile itching at the corners of her mouth, Her mother nods.  “Bacon, then,” she says.  Both turn—her mother to go back inside, and Kitty to run back out to the dock to search for the fish her father put in the pond just last week. As she runs, and skids to a stop by the dock—the dirt is muddy from yesterday’s rain—her mind drifts away from the fish and to last night’s dream. In all her thirteen (nearly fourteen, protests her mind) years, Kitty has never had dreams quite like the ones she has been having over the last three months.  While her dreams have always been strange, lately they’ve gotten worse.  Kitty doesn’t particularly like waking up screaming nearly every morning, or looking down at her hands when she does so and wondering wildly, for a moment, why they aren’t covered in blood anymore. She kneels on the dock, not minding the wood that cuts into her knees, and stares down at the water, searching it for a fish.  They can’t all be gone yet, she thinks as she pushes back a lock of dark brown hair that has somehow managed to escape from her ponytail. But whether they’re all gone by now or not, none are showing up, and Kitty stands up and sticks out her tongue at the water.  “Stupid fish,” she says, and turns away. She walks back slowly to the house, eyes moving constantly as she observes the backyard.  She can smell the bacon as she gets closer; her mother left the sliding door open, and the scent is strong. She twirls around once she’s on the patio, and then jumps through the sliding door.  Her feet hit the brick floor of the living room with a slap, and her mother calls from the kitchen, “Is that you, Kitty?” “Yeah,” says Kitty, walking into the kitchen. “Dinner’s almost done,” her mother tells her without turning around.  “Go tell your dad and Lauren.”  Kitty complies, heading to her father’s little office and then to her sister’s room to inform them that dinner is about ready.  Her father waves her off with a “I’ll be there in a minute”, but Lauren jumps to her feet from where she was sitting on the floor and reading, saying something about a growling stomach. Dinner is over in just a little longer than half an hour, and the sun is only just starting to set when Lauren pushes back her chair and asks to be excused, right as Kitty was going to. The sisters leave, leaving their parents still at the table, and go to Lauren’s room.  Lauren is talking excitedly about something she wants to show her younger sister.  Lauren is home for the summer from college; she goes to Tulane, in New Orleans, but rarely makes it back up to Gonzales to see her family.  She’s been working on genealogical stuff while she’s been away for her freshman year, and Kitty assumes that whatever Lauren wants to show her is related to the family tree she’s been trying to put together.  It’s a difficult process. But what Lauren has to show her sister today is unrelated to the family tree effort.  She brought home a movie based on a short story by Angela Carter, A Company of Wolves, and wants to watch it with Kitty.  So they sit on Lauren’s bed, the laptop in front of them, and watch.  It is basically about werewolves and a sort of Little Red Riding Hood, and Kitty finds herself liking the movie—though there’s a strange draw to the wolves.  She doesn’t think much of it, though. When the movie is over, it’s dark outside, and Kitty gets up and stretches and asks Lauren if she wants to go out for a walk.  Lauren, closing the laptop, declines.  “Annalyn’s coming to pick me up in half an hour,” she tells Kitty. Kitty shrugs.  “All right.  See you,” she says, and leaves the room. Her parents are in the living room watching some news show on Fox, and her mother asks where Kitty is going.  “Outside, to walk around some,” Kitty tells her. “Be careful,” her mother says, not taking her eyes away from the screen. Outside the temperature has become cooler.  It’s still hot—it is June in Louisiana—but less so now that the sun has set.  Still humid, though; the air feels like a light weight on Kitty’s almost-bare shoulders.  It’s dark, but Kitty has memorized the land, and it is not so dark that she cannot see anything at all. Kitty walks around the pond, stepping carefully.  She’s put on sandals, but it still wouldn’t do to step on anything pointed; you have to be a little careful at night.  She observes the water as she goes; the dock is her base, the place from which she will measure her distance, even though it is across the pond. She thinks as she walks, recounting her dreams in her head.  At least, she tries.  One of the most troubling aspects of these dreams is that, try as she does, she cannot remember them when she’s awake.  It’s impossible.  She has always had a good memory for dreams, so this unsettles her, and makes her wonder why these terrible dreams are so different.  The worst part is that these are the only dreams she has now. and that upsets her even more. So wrapped up in thoughts of her dreams is Kitty that she doesn’t fully notice when she walks past the pond and toward the field behind it.  So wrapped up in her dreams is Kitty that it takes her a moment before she registers a shadow moving toward her.  So wrapped up is Kitty that it takes her a moment to remember to scream when the shadow leaps toward her, and she thinks she sees metal in its darkness. She yells and runs, dark hair streaming out behind her as she bolts.  But the shadow is faster than she is; it tackles her to the ground after only half a minute of running, and she is more surprised than frightened at first. The shadow grabs her wrists and drags her into the field with surprising strength, and Kitty screams again: “Let me go!” she yells, kicking and trying to twist out of its grasp.  Her legs are getting scraped up; the ground is rocky here and she’s wearing shorts.  She doesn’t care, though; she’s more focused on freeing herself and getting back to the house than on the pain. But then she sees the flash again, and something in her knows that it’s a knife.  She panics.  havetogetawayhavetogetaway— And then Kitty changes. Kitty regains consciousness hours later, at dawn.  She finds herself sitting on the ground, knees to her chin, staring at something.  She squints, and recognizes a shape—and a smell. She doesn’t know why it is suddenly dawn, and why she can suddenly smell blood, until she looks down at herself.  It isn’t really herself, though: she seems taller, bulkier…furry.  Oddly, this doesn’t induce panic; this seems perfectly normal to her. Then she looks at the shape, and her mouth opens but won’t close. The mangled body of a young woman lies in front of her.  At least, Kitty thinks it’s a young woman; the body is so…so that she can’t really tell anything about it.  One thing she knows, though—she sees the silver knife next to the body, and she recoils at the sight.  This was her attacker.  This woman tried to kill her—and she tenses up, as anger of an intensity she isn’t used to fills her, and feels the overwhelming urge to kill the woman—but she already has, from the looks of things.  There is no way the woman survived. And suddenly, all Kitty wants is out.  She wants out of this weird new shape, she wants out of the responsibility of killing someone, she wants out of what must have been, and is, just a crazy dream.  She gets her first wish—as she stares at the body, she feels a shift, like her bones and muscle and fat are rearranging themselves.  Just a moment later, she is herself again, the dark-haired and dark-skinned and blue-eyed girl known as Kitty, the thirteen-year-old who has said so many times that she’d never hurt a fly—but it looks like she’s hurt something bigger. The moment Kitty hits human again, she vomits.  She is on her hands and knees, and as she faces the ground she notices a lack of the feeling of clothes on her body—and indeed, when she sits up and wipes her mouth, feeling disgusted and dirty, she sees that she is naked.  What would Mom think? Mom.  Panic seizes her again, and she stands up, averting her eyes from the body.  She reaches down and grabs the knife, though, feeling dried blood against her fingers as she holds it as tightly as she can.  The panic intensifies, and Kitty starts to run.  She heads back, through the field, racing towards don’t-know-where.  Kitty doesn’t care where she goes, what people will think or do if they see a naked teenager running nearly as fast as wind through the country.  She doesn’t know what happened, or how, or what will be done about it.  She just needs to get out of here, as far away from her sin as possible. And as she runs, thinking of her family, she knows one thing without needing to be told: she can never go home again.

Reviews

[H]

I love the way this was written. It's so simple, and yet, it doesn't need to be any more detailed than it already is. I was sad when it ended. I wanted to keep reading.