Kissed By The Moon

CHAPTER 22: Monster

I'm lying in bed with my mate in my arms and I feel ecstatic. My fingers trace my mark on her neck and she lets out a satisfied moan. The concerned part of me that wanted to wait to mate until after this vague "change" takes place is long gone and I'm just happy we gave in. Truth be told, there wasn't much of an option. I felt the pull to her tonight more than I have at any other time and if she had not ended up at my door, I'd have gone to get her myself.

The diaries mentioned that a change will take place on the first full moon after meeting my mate, but none of them went into detail about what that entailed. I guess we'll have to see, but I know nothing can top or ruin this night that I've had with Charlotte. She's become everything to me, and I know that I love her with all my heart.

I lean down to trail kisses on my mark, pleased at my work and happy that the fact that she's mine will be discernible to anyone that comes across her. At first she's receptive to the kisses, then she pauses.

"Have you always had this?" she asks, tracing something on my upper back.

"Had what?" I say, sounding a little absent minded as I enjoy the electrifying trail her fingers are leaving.

"This tattoo, of a crescent moon with all these stars around it," she explains, confusing me further. I can't get tattoos. Unlike other wolves, I heal far too quickly for anything to take effect so the moment the needle touches me, my body is already healing and ejecting the ink. Even more traditional tattoos that go deeper into the skin don't work either.

"I don't have tattoos," I clarify.

"So this white one here just appeared out of nowhere then?" She asks, amused, "It's crazy, I thought it was impossible to have white ink show up on dark skin, yet alone this brightly, it's almost luminescent." She remarks, and I decide to get up and go check it out myself.

I turn to the side in front of the mirror in an attempt to see my back, and as awkward as the angle is, I see enough of this mysterious marking to know that, firstly, it's definitely there, and secondly, it's exactly the same mark I saw on Eres in my dream.

"You really didn't know you had that?" Charlotte asks, understanding dawning on her.

"Yeah, I've only seen this once, and that's in my dream. Eres bowed and I saw this mark on her back, then my back began to sting. Have you noticed anything there before today?" I investigate, trying to pinpoint when exactly this mark showed up.

"Now that I really think about it, I don't even know if it was there earlier tonight," Charlotte replies, looking deep in thought, as if trying to remember.

Suddenly, I start to hear all the mind links again. They sound distant and undiscernible, but I can't turn them off. I stop being able to hear Charlotte, whose lips are moving with no sound coming out. The mumblings become lounder, and that feeling the mind links first opened, comes back and I hunch over, covering my ears that have started ringing.

I feel Charlotte standing beside me, rubbing my back and saying something that I can't quite hear. Slowly at first, then with a vengeful intensity, my whole body lights up in excruciating pain. A distantly familiar pain. A pain that feels like what I went through when I shifted for the first time. I rise to my feet and make my way outside, Charlotte behind me, chasing after me and calling out what I think is my name, but I can't focus on anything.

I just about make it outside, when the pain becomes too much. I fall to the ground and feel, just as potently as I hear all my bones cracking and reshaping themselves. I'm shifting, and I don't know why or how to stop it. I have never felt a pain this severe in my life, silver bullet included. After what felt like an eternity, the pain stops and I can feel that I've completely shifted, but something feels different.

The noise has finally stopped, and I feel like I have control now. More of it in fact. Eres and I then remember that Charlotte was trying to tell me something, so, alarmed, we turn around to look for her. We spot her staring at me. Eyes wide, fear evident, if not on her face and demeanour, then in what we're sensing from her. She is terrified. We look around assuming there is some danger close by but we don't see anything suspicious.

We try to approach her and she backs away, so quickly in fact that she falls back. We instinctively try to help her but she cowers before us and we take a pained step back. We catch the reflection of some white beast in the house window and when we turn around to confront it, that's when we realise. It's Eres.

We step closer to the glass and see this large creature we had never been before. Her black fur is completely gone and she's white all over, matching my hair. She is much bigger than she was before, with her paws the size of a human face with claws that look like they could cut through metal. Her back is arched a little and her mane is so long it makes her look much bigger. Her eyes, her once beautiful silver eyes, have turned into a glowing, blood thirsty crimson. If she weren't me, I'd fail to recognise her. In short, Eres was a terrifying monster.

It's no wonder Charlotte is cowering away. Even she cannot love a beast like this. I mean, after the incident, I always felt monstrous. Even after all the therapy, I could never forget what I did, what I was deep down. But at least no one could look at me and guess it. At least with how beautiful Eres was and how unintimidating I looked, the monster I was, could remain hidden deep down. But to look at our reflection and see Eres become the thing, embody it even, was too much. It was like looking at my inner self. An inner self that six years away failed to erase. I was monstrous, and my darling Charlotte was afraid of me.

It's too much to bare. We can't be here, looking like this, being like this, feeling like this. We turn around to run, at first its aimless, but then a childhood memory comes back to me and we know just where to go. We run as fast as our legs can take us, which is apparently very fast, since we can sense that we're almost there. We can sense everything, actually. Despite the dark we see beyond clearly. This monster we'd become is a better, faster, stronger wolf than we'd ever been. We arrive at the spot and we sit besides the silent lake, looking at our reflection in the water with the bright full moon reflecting above us.

Eres, what are we?

We are the Selene.