Page 58 of Twisted Ties

My skin rips, my bones grind, harden, reform. I snarl. My fingernails now claws, scraping at the ground, my feet now paws. My skull snaps as it lengthens and I lose it all. My mind plunges into a blackness I won’t wake up from for hours.

I only hope I’m far enough away.

I ripout from the boy’s body. Free at last. No longer confined by a prison of flesh and sinew.

I land on four paws, stretching my limbs, tight and stiff from the months of ill-use.

The boy has grown stronger, better adept at holding me back, even though it brings a cost to himself.

He does not trust me. He fears I am the monster I most certainly am.

I curl my long tongue around my lips and taste the air: dank, wet, organic matter.

I drag my tongue over my fangs and my incisors, the edges as razor sharp as they have always been.

I lift a paw, then another and another, shake out my thick dark fur from the crown of my head to the tip of my tail. Then I flip back my head and howl. A noise that will have them shivering in their beds. As they should do.

I have no constraints like the boy. No concerns for the feeble lives of humans. I would as easily snap my jaws through the neck of a child as I would a rabbit’s kit. Why should I care? It is they who keep me bound. Hidden away. Causing the boy a misery he can’t describe. A burden they won’t let him release.

It should not be this way. It was not this way in the past. We should be as equals, flicking between our two forms as day flicks to night and night to day. Two halves of the same globe. Dark and darker still.

The sound of my howl knocks against the ghostly trunks of the trees, alert and trembling in my presence. The sound amplifies, echoes, warning all the living creatures that I am here now.

I listen for a response. A call in return. And as always there is none. There are fewer and fewer of our kind now. Constrained and incarcerated. Hunted and persecuted. Wiped from the Earth.

He does well to keep me hidden. Even though it costs him dearly.

I prod at the ground with my front paw. Soft and doughyfrom the rain. I sniff the air and there is the faintest trace of it. That scent. That of the girl’s. The one that has driven both of us to distraction.

I growl lowly. The noise so sinister even the leaves on the trees, far above my head, tremble and fold in on themselves.

Then I run, racing through the forest at the speed of lightning, the fur on my head and my shoulders whipped back with the force, my paws barely pounding the ground as I speed through the trees.

I am going to find her.

I care not what the boy thinks. What he believes.

I care for none of it at all.

20

Rhi

By the endof the day I feel like I have a raging case of PMS. My skin is irritable, I can’t sit still and I snap at Pip when he starts slobbering all over my leg when we return to our dorm after dinner.

Winnie side eyes me.

“What?” I say, hand on my hips.

“Nothing,” she says, reaching down to tickle Pip’s ears. Pip throws me a disgusted look, then busies himself lavishing Winnie with licks instead of me.

“I just don’t feel like having pig slobber all over me tonight, okay?”

“She doesn’t usually mind, does she?” Winnie says to Pip, scratching the spot under his chin that makes him dribble with delight. “And she doesn’t usually throw a hissy fit when the meat is overdone and the potatoes soggy.”

“It tasted like shit.”

“It always tastes like shit.”