Wolf Blooded

CH 1 - An Emptiness

CHAPTER ONE – AN EMPTINESS

Ever have those days where you just can't imagine why you got the hell out of bed? Days that seem to bleed into the next? Days that mean nothing and amount to nothing?

Welcome to Cassi Wakeland's reality.

Cassi sat at her desk, eyes heavy and half closed as she stared at the little clock in the corner of her computer screen.

Seconds passed as she waited for those numbers to change, for the dreaded four to change into a five. Five meant it was time to go, to head home, dump her messenger bag on the floor, sink into the couch and pretend the next day wouldn't be an exact carbon copy of today.

There it was. Like magic, the four became a five and Cassi was on her feet and out the door. The office she worked in was tiny and cramped, the oxygenating house plant in the corner doing little to keep her from feeling as though she were suffocating throughout the nine-hour day.

She typed up spreadsheets all day in her empty little office alone. She worked for a company that churned pens out into the world. That's right, pens. Blue, black, and red. Those were the colours of the pens. They had lids. They wrote on paper. End of story.

Cassi hated her job.

Working at the small branch of the pen company called Inkers had been a thing for four years since Cassi moved into the little village of Costell at the age of twenty.

She hated it at first sight.

The building itself was the blandest shade of grey she could imagine. There were no trees lining the concrete path that led to a glass sliding door. The grass alongside the path was dead despite the efforts at resuscitation by the sprinklers.

Inside the building, the story got worse. White walls devoid of pictures glared back at Cassi. A sticky leather couch took up one side of the reception with a dead plant beside it. Foliage didn't seem to last long here.

Across from the sad scene was a white desk that almost disappeared amongst the matching walls. Behind it sat one of the very few workers at that branch of Inkers. Her name was Sally. It was a bubbly and bright name for a woman who wore a perpetual frown on her face and looked as though she might have killed the plant with her stare alone.

Cassi hated Inkers with a passion from that first day onwards. Sally was as mean as she looked, the boss was a creep who stared at Cassi's breasts for half a minute before introducing himself, and the office she would be confined to for nine hours a day, five days a week, was the size of a shoebox.

But, as they say, a job is a job... and Cassi needed a job.

Costell was a small village on the edge of a thick forest. There were less than one hundred people living in Costell and everyone knew everyone. They were a friendly sort, sure, but only to each other. Cassi was new to their little family and was, by default, the black sheep.

In four years since moving in at the edge of the village, Cassi had made only one friend. Her name was Tash and she was the manager of the only place keeping Cassi sane.

The nature reserve.

Nestled in the woods behind Cassi's house was the Costell Nature Reserve. It stretched on for miles, covering most of the woods. Inside it's boundaries, the dwellers of the forest came in all forms. Birds that serenaded all day and night, deer that roamed during the light of day, wolves that stalked the night...

Cassi loved them all and every moment not spent at work was spent in the Nature Reserve. It was the one place in Costell where she truly felt at home. It was little surprise to Tash, then, that at five-thirty on the dot, her best friend Cassi was waving to her through the small window set into he door of her expansive wooded office.