Full Moon Hike - Julie Steimle (red queen free ebook .txt) 📗

sat down more comfortably. “Good. I’m glad you didn’t believe in them. We try hard to make stories about us myths. It makes it so there are less hunters after us.”

I blinked at him, peering at his face, which I could now see blood and hair of another animal stuck to it like he had caught a squirrel or rabbit and had eaten it raw. “You really are a werewolf. But you’re so young. How did that happen?”

Casting me another tired glance, he stretched his arms with visible pain, spreading his fingers even so that they were more like human hands. “Happen? Look, I was born this way. All werewolves are.”

“But I thought people became werewolves because a werewolf bit him or something.” But from his dry expression I could see already that it was one of the myths about them that obviously was not true, just like all the stories about vampire bites making someone a vampire. Things like that were always more complicated.

He said, “If a werewolf bites a normal human being, that human gets what we call werewolf-itis.”

It was my turn to share a look of disbelief. “Werewolf-itis?”

Shrugging, a smile cracked on his lips. Despite being very hairy, he was kind of cute, perhaps a year or two older than me. “Yeah, sounds funny. The technical term is something long, but my dad calls it partial lycanthrope, in short. There’s something in there about transmission and germs and toxins in the phrase, but basically anybody who gets bit and lives has a very violent reaction that reoccurs around the full moon. Mostly they just hurt a lot, become irritable and hairy. A lot of really decent people have been killed when all they had to do was eat a whole garlic bulb in one sitting and not barf it up. That’s the cure.

“A real werewolf,” he said, shaking his head. “Is passed on from parent to child. It doesn’t skip generations, but it is said that over time the blood thins out and one day a generation is born without the curse.”

“Curse? Is that how it started, as a curse?” I asked.

He was about to speak, but halted, one of his wolfish ears turning to listen to the air. He smirked and jerked his head to the tent door.

My brothers and sisters were silent outside, obviously listening in. Noticing the intent beating of their hearts, I unzipped the tent and opened the flap, looking right at them as they were all right next to the tent door. They pulled back but not all the way, each of them staring at the werewolf boy.

“Well, come on,” Travis at last said to him. “Was it a curse?”

The hairy boy turned and looked at me. “Are they really like this?”

I gave a shrug. “They grew up with me. Why? Is it weird?”

Chuckling, he then sniffed the air. I tried to smell the air also, but all I got was a whiff of his strange blood. For some reason it did not make me feel hungry like smelling human blood usually did. Perhaps because it was cursed that it did not have that effect on me.

“They’re gone,” he said and crawled out, or at least tried to. I grabbed a hold of his belt loop and shook my head at him, pulling him back in.

“Maybe they’re down wind,” I said.

He retreated back in the tent, nodding. “You’re right.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Travis said. He never was one you could steer from a topic.

The hairy boy smirked at his tenacity and sat back inside the doorway.  “Ok. What do you want to know? How a real werewolf is made?”

They all nodded.

Sighing, the boy leaned backward and scratched his head with his suddenly wolf-like foot. Realizing it startled them, he tried to straighten it out as a human leg again. “Sorry. On the three nights of the full moon it is really hard to keep human form. Where were we?”

“How werewolves are made?” Travis reminded him.

Nodding, the boy got back into his thinking posture, resisting the urge to scratch. “Ok. First off, it isn’t exactly a curse. More like…some witches were meddling with nature, and nature bit back.

“You see werewolves are second generation, born, not made. When a witch wants a quick and easy assassin, she sometimes lures in a wolf to do her dirty work. When she captures the wolf, she works up some nasty wicked spell that transforms him into a man. Then she sends the man off to kill whomever. The thing is, the wolf-man usually comes back after the kill, and the witch has about a ten second window to change the man back into a wolf or to kill it before the wolf decides to eat her too. We call that first creation a gore-wolf.” He paused to let it sink in. Dawn looked like she was going to throw up. He then continued with a nod to her. “Usually a gore-wolf seeks out a mate among human women, establishes himself in a job and has kids. Mostly the women don’t even know what he is until later when their kids grow up and start changing into wolves. That’s what happened with my mom; only I’m third-generation werewolf. My grandpa was a gore-wolf.”

They stared at him. He, however, looked to me.

“So, what’s your story? How did a vampire and an imp have a kid?” He shook his head. “As I said, I know a kid with vampire parents, but all they want is to bite him and make him drink their blood so they can be one big happy vampire family. And I have a friend whose mom had slept with an imp on Halloween and had him. Half-imp, he can see all kinds of freaky people with bat wings everywhere. But I never heard of such a thing as you.”

“Where do you meet people like that?” Dawn exclaimed before she realized she had said it out loud.

The hairy boy laughed. “In New York City. It’s a prep school for freaks, weirdoes, and people hiding from the mafia. My grandfather founded it.”

Both my brothers blinked at each other, thinking it had to be an outlandish lie. However, I could tell that he was saying the complete truth. I leaned in.

“Wow. A school for people like us?” It did sound too good to be true. “How did your grandpa manage that?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me how it is that you are here.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I told you my story.”

Shrugging, I cast my brothers and sister a look. “Oh. Well, I’m this generation’s vimp that comes every three hundred years, according to my History teacher who also happens to be a vampire hunter. According to some book he took from a witch, it says a coven of Egyptian witches had made the first vimp from the parts of a vampire and an imp they caught with the blood of some virgin for the intent to kill this group called the Holy Seven. With thirteen drops of their blood added to some spell, they made what I am, and every three hundred years one vimp is born to rid the world of these seven people, though personally I’m not interested.”

But I saw his face go white, staring at me. His heart almost stopped with a personal kind of shock. I blinked at him and peered at his face. “Are you all right?”

“You were conjured to kill the Holy Seven?” He murmured with disbelief.

I clenched my head, already shaking it. “Oh, crap. Are you telling me you know them too?”

“Too?” He tried to rise though he ended up dropping on all fours, turning into a wolf again. He backed up, his hackles raised. However he spoke with a wolfish growl. “Who else did you meet?”

I pulled away from him, detecting a certain degree of anger in his voice. Dawn jumped back, as did Will and Travis, all three of them rushing to get behind the fire.

“I met Michael Toms, the guy who claims to be the eighth of the Seven, though it still sounds pretty weird.” I then held up my hand, which had a faint scar of a sun on my palm since spring break. “He shook my hand and gave me this.”

The wolf that was the boy tilted his head, the hair on his back lowering a little. He transformed mostly back into a boy again, pawing at my hand and sniffing it. Then looking up at me, he formed more into a human, examining my face with wonder at the impossibility.

“Michael Toms gave you that burn?” He then leaned back from me. “Michael better not be hurt.”

“He was fine last time we emailed,” I replied with a shrug.

The boy laughed, choking on it as he continued to stare at me. “You email Michael?”

I just shrugged. “Don’t you email?”

Scratching the side of his head with the thick fingernails on his hand, he still looked baffled. “Sure, I do. Everyone emails. Why not? I’m sitting here in the forest chatting with a demon created to kill my friends, as she casually camps here with three ordinary teenagers without a bite on them.”

“Your friends?” Will walked around the fire to him, casting me a look first with the desire to take the werewolf aside for a private talk. “You mean to say that the Holy Seven are real people?”

The hairy boy nodded. “I sure am. Abey is my best friend. They call him Red.”

We just stared at him, and he blinked back at us.

“You mean, you really don’t know anything about them except that Michael Toms is number eight?” He then said to me. “So Michael didn’t tell you much about them, I gather.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t want him to.”

The hairy boy froze, staring straight at me. Then he slowly nodded. “I see. So, you still have that drive then….”

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” I said, rising to my feet.

He nodded to me as frank as a man who had seen enough of his own trials not to make light of mine. “I know the feeling. So you figure, out of sight, out of mind, right?”

I nodded.

Sighing aloud, he shifted back from me. “But what if one of them comes to your town, or if you meet them by chance? What then?”

“Then I’ll do what I did when Michael came around,” I said. “I’ll get away before I bite him.”

The hairy boy laughed, shaking his head. “I wish it were that easy. Even for werewolves, we need some kind of replacement to suppress the urges we feel. On the full moon we have to hunt in secluded areas away from humans. Otherwise we might bite one and develop a taste for human blood.”

“Eve has never bitten anybody,” Travis said in my defense.

Gratefully, Dawn remained silent on that subject, knowing full well when we were kids I had bitten somebody, though not much different than any irked child in a fight.

With a shrug, the werewolf merely smiled at us to say it didn’t matter. “But someday she might.”

Will cut in between us. “No, she won’t. Eve is better than most other people. More honest, kinder, and more selfless. I won’t believe that she’ll become a monster like you say. And as far as that curse is concerned, she still has a choice. She doesn’t have to do what some witch in Egypt built some freaky mummy for.”

“Curses are more powerful than you realize,” the hairy boy said, not arguing, though he did sound quite sure of himself.

Both my brothers stood firm, shoulders back, with the desire to stop any curse from laying hold of me and forcing me to act against my will. The werewolf watched them with growing admiration. He then turned to me.

“I am amazed. Until I met the Seven, I never knew any regular humans that would stand up for a monster like me. But you have a family of them.” He then shrunk back down into a wolf