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I decided that I am going to update this story once a week, lucky for you guys; I gave you two this week! I will try to make it at the beginning of the week, but I can't promise anything. It is so much easier to type when you have a book to go by.
I would also like to say that for all of you that noticed my little epilogue error in the last chapter, I am really sorry. I freaked out once I got the first review about it!
Anyway on with the story.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. I read a wonderful book by Annette Curtis Klause and a series of books from J. K. Rowling. Put them together and you get this!!
"Mom, you have been fighting again." Hermione glared at her mother.
Diane Granger lolled in an easy chair, one long slim leg thrown over the armrest. She refused to stop grinning. A gash in her cheek still bled slightly.
"You look awful," Hermione said.
"Yeah, but you should see the other bitch," Diane answered. She scratched her scalp luxuriously with her hands, tousling her dark brown hair.
Hermione sighed and came over to dab at her mother's cheek with a tissue grabbed from the box on the coffee table. She would ruin her beautiful face. "Can't you and Alice leave each other alone?" It had been like this ever since they'd moved here from West Virginia, over a year ago now. She hardly knew her mother anymore. "Can't you?" she repeated.
"Draco called for you," Diane said, ignoring the question.
Hermione rolled her eyes. That was all she needed. Couldn't he take a hint?
Diane sat up and looked directly at her daughter. "I thought that's where you were, with Draco and the others."
"No, I wasn't." She bristled at the thought. The five young males who were her only age-mates were likely to get the rest of the pack killed if they kept going the way they were.
"So where were you?"
Hermione turned to leave the room. Since when was her mother so worried about where she was? "Down by the river, at the rocks," she said over her shoulder.
"What were you doing there?"
"Nothing."
As she left Hermione heard her mother growl softly in frustration.
Why did Diane always have to bring up the Five? Couldn't she get it through her head that Hermione didn't want to be with them?
The familiar knot in her gut formed hard and tight. The fire last year had been the Five's fault… and Dean's. She slammed the door to her room. The inside face of the door channeled her claw marks. She grew her nails and ripped another row.
Dean had to go and lose it and kill that girl.
Dean had been acting wilder and wilder last spring, and talking crazy stuff. She heard him and the Five boasts about midnight visits to the town where they stalked humans in the shadows and scared them silly. What they did sounded funny. Hermione made them take her, too. But rumors started going around school. People were getting nervous. When Hermione said maybe they should cool it, Dean and the Five only laughed at her.
Then Dean began to go off by himself, and something seemed wrong to her. He didn't talk to her as much. It drove her crazy.
I was half in love with him, Hermione thought as she took off her stockings. Draco thought that I was his girl but I would have dropped him in a second for Dean. She sniffed in disgust. Caring for Dean made me stupid.
She had seen their behavior spinning out of control, and she hadn't done a thing. She should have told her father what they'd been up to, even if that meant she would be in trouble herself. But you didn't squeal on your friends, did you?
Then on the night of the Valentine's dance Dean went to town alone and killed a girl in back of the school.
Hermione still felt the heat of anger when she thought of what he had done. She couldn't help thinking he killed for some petty reason, like t he girl turned him down. He could have had me, she though bitterly.
He must have been changing back when a classmate saw him crouched over the body. Before Dean knew he was there, the boy took off and named him to the police.
The Five decided to help. They killed another girl while Dean was in jail. They didn't let Hermione know their plans; they must have thought she's object. And I would have.
"How could a boy be covered in fur? How could a human inflict such wounds?" the family lawyer pleaded for Dean. The new killing while Dean was locked up proved that there was a wild animal on the loose. Dean had merely discovered the body, then had panicked and run. The case was dismissed.
But someone from the town believed the boy's tale of a wolf that turned into a boy, and lat one night the inn and outbuildings burst into flame in six different spots, and black acrid smoke hid the moon.
Since the 1600's her ancestors have been on the move. They fled from France to the New World and landed into Louisiana. In the nineteenth century, they blew their cover and ran to West Virginia, where they joined a German pack. Last year, the curst of their appetite stuck again, and the pack to flight from the hills that had been its home for one hundred years and arrived refugees in the Maryland suburbs. Five families plus assorted others crammed into Dumbledore's run-down Victorian house. With luck no one would follow them here; they could mark new trails.
The house on Sion Road had emptied out gradually as the others found jobs and places to stay, until it held only Hermione, Diane, and Dumbledore. Hermione had thought by this time they would have made plans for the future, but now the whole pack seemed to crazy, herm other included. With more than half of them dead, no one knew his or her place anymore. There was constant squabbling. Survival depended on their blending in while they organized and decide where they would move and settle for good, but at any moment the pack was likely to explode in a ball of flying fur. They needed a leader badly, but no one could agree whom.
Last summer she had hid in her room and slept, not bothering to eat anything. Most nights Hermione would hear her mother crying inconsolably by her open bedroom window for someone who would never come home again.
By the time her last year of school started, however, Hermione begun eating almost regularly, and Diane found herself a job at the Hogs Head, a local bar. She began to make it through the day.
She started to look longingly at the groups of kids laughing together around the flagpole after school.
As first she though, Why would I make friends with people who would kill me if they knew what I was? What if I give myself away? But the yearning continued. It was then she realized that she didn't know how to make friends.
She had always had the pack around her, the pack that now had separate dens. There were always pack kids. She had never had to reach out for company, company was always there. The Five were still around, of course, but now she couldn't bear to be with them, and they could never be just her friends. They all saw her as a mate, be nice to one and the others would sulk and snap. Fight, fight, fight, that's what paying attention to them meant.
I want other friends, she thought. But no one seemed to want her.
She stood in front of her closet mirror in her shirt and twisted around. What's wrong with me?
There was nothing the matter that she could see. She was tall and leggy, like her mother, with full breast, small waist, and slim hips that curved enough to show that she was female. Her skin was golden; but it was golden sun or not, and her brown hair was thick and long and wild.
So why was it that groups of girls stopped talking when she approached them at school and answered her openings with terse words that killed the conversations she tried to start? Was she too good looking? Was that possible? Was that the threat they say? She was a beautiful loup-garou, she knew, the Five howled for her, but what did human eyes perceive?
The boys nudged each other when she passed; she'd seen them out of the corner of her eye. They noticed her. And she could understand why one or two might blush and stammer if she talked to them. There were always shy boys who would die if any girl noticed them. But where were the bold ones?
Male or female, they resisted her. Could they see the forest in her eyes, the shadow of her pelt? Were her teeth too sharp? It's hard not to be a wolf.
I don't care, she though twirling around. I don't need human, I still have the pack, and we'll be moving on soon. But she did care. The pack was in shreds, and in the midst of these humans she was wolf-kind, loup-garou, this made her an outsider and unwanted. But they would like me if they got to know me. They just don't know me.
"I am strong," she whispered. "I can run with the night and catch the dawn. I can kick a hole in the sky." And she struck a foot out as if to prove it. Then curled into a ball.
She missed her father; his advice, his comfort. She bared her teeth at the familiar pain.
From where she lay, she could see the unbroken wall she'd cleared and the mural she had started to console herself with and to make this room hers.
Her wall was painted with wolves in the moonlight. In the center of mural was where she would become part of the night, where she would run with the pack. But now, whenever she picked up a brush, she couldn't go on.
She became obsessed, she created dozens of smaller paintings and sketches of the pack she knew so well. They lined her closet, were stacked in piles on the floor. They helped her hold on to the past. They kept her from going crazy.
The art teacher thought that she was a punk artsy type, but that didn't stop him from pushing her into letting him enter her drawings to the school magazine. She grabbed the magazine from her bag and started going through it. She found her print and devoured the sheen of it, crisp and stark.
She hadn't even bothered to see whom she shared a space with. A poem was on the page opposite hers. She looked at it suspiciously. A crappy poem would lessen what she'd done, make it cheap.
The title startled her, "Wolf Change."
Corsair of the wood
Discard your skin
Your pallid, wormlike
Vulnerability.
Corsair of the wood
Exchange your skin
For the pelt of dun
And bindle luxury.
A pentagram is burning
In your eyes
And soft, pale twists
Of wolfbane
Squeeze your heart.
A grinding pain
Is writhing in your thighs
The crunch of bones
Proclaims the change's start.
Pirate of the flesh
Throw back your head
And part your jowls
To sing a lunar song.
The forest paths are dark
The night is long.
She shivered in delicious shock.
He knows! He knows what is in the picture! Anger edged out the excitement and her eyes narrowed. Who was this Ronald Weasley? Why should he know forest paths?
But she was intrigued. Maybe she should seek him out and have a look at this person who wrote of the crunch of bones, see if she approved of him.
And what if she didn't? Set the Five on him? She laughed softly, baring her sharp white teeth.
Those of you that read the book know that this is basically exactly how the first chapter went. And the next one might be the same way. I need to give everyone the details before I switch it up a little bit.
Have any of you figured out who all of the characters are? Let's see, Hermione is Vivian, Harry is ? Ron is ? Draco is ? So many questions!! Don't worry answers will be in the next chapter!
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