Fur

ii | Whatever She Is

Leila had sat in her room listening to the violent wind outside for nearly two hours until she heard voices through the walls. It was her father and her grandfather speaking in the hall.

"Have there been any signs?" Her father asked.

"What do you think?" Was her grandfather's snapping reply.

A growl of disgust came from her father's throat. She could imagine him shaking his head, as if that would make the shame he felt for her fall away.

"How did this ever happen?" He asked, half rhetorical, half desperate for an answer. "The first two are fine, but the third..."

Her grandfather offered him the proposal she'd heard plenty of times before. "Nine months before she was born... How often did Suzanna leave your sight? And when she was out of it... how high is the likelihood that she visited some human civilization?"

Her father's growl was harsh. "She's dead in the ground and you're still intent on slandering her name?"

"She left behind an invalid child, what else is anyone to think? Two werewolves make a werewolf, not a—a—whatever she is! A blank slate!"

"She isn't!" Her father shouted, "She can't be! She has to shift, she's just a late bloomer. We'll keep working with her and it'll be forced out eventually."

Her grandfather's voice was low, sympathetic but self-satisfied all at once. "Your hopes and wills won't change the blood in her veins."

"She has Ardeneux blood," her father snapped back, "Suzanna didn't do what you're accusing her of. Just watch and see."

Their quickened footsteps started moving, coming closer. By the time they stopped outside of Leila's door, she had lurched the window above her bed open, allowing the forceful winds to come whipping in. By the time her father turned the knob and threw open her bedroom door, she was gone, scaling down the side of the manor and already halfway to the ground.

She ran from there. She ran like she did have four legs instead of two, like she really was the werewolf she should've been and not the useless humanoid she really was. She had no destination, no path marked in her mind.

Her only objective was away.

She could never truly get away. She knew that. She knew that she would die here where she was born, likely with her life in between having been all for nothing because, for a reason no one knew, she wasn't able to play the role she was given.

But the rain pounded down around her, on her, and the ground was turning slippery with muck. She slid in it, though her bare feet dug in to maintain her footing and she charged on. Her clothes were soaked. They clung to her body and made any type of agility more difficult.

Leila ran until she came upon the crest of a ridge, where she was forced to slide to a stop, grabbing hold of a tree for good measure to act against her inertia. Below, the woods were swimming in water, the current wrapping around tree trunks and carrying with it fallen logs, ripped up bushes, and masses of collected dead leaves. The water flowed like an uncontained river through the wooded valley, and in the midst of it, completely submerged up to the chimney, was the cabin her brother was meant to have led one group of the Belfiores to.

It was not where she had taken the uncle, aunt, and cousins and the grandmother, being the matriarch, would have been given a much more luxurious cabin of high esteem. That left one last dot to connect to, Leila concluded, and it was that this was the cabin of the mother, the father, and the son named Zakai.

Her heart pounded like the rain, like the dangerous pulse of the flood.

She began climbing the tree she'd used to stop herself from tumbling off the ridge. She recalled the boy's near-catonia, the feeble looking state of his body, its lack of muscles and prevalance of skeleton. Would he even be capable of escape? She wondered. And an ugly voice in her head also wondered: Would his father even let him?