Masked Mate

The Lonely Have to Stick Together

"Come on Madden! Try it again."

I gritted me teeth and narrowed my eyes at Jacob. "I've been trying for the past hour, I don't think this is something I can learn in one day."

"You kind of don't have a choice. We don't really have a Plan B." Blaine countered as he ripped open a bag of potato chips.

"Aww no that's just not cool. You have to share."  I held out my hand, Palm up, waiting for a fair handful of chips.

"Not until you get it right." Jacob interjected and I groaned.

I closed my eyes and focused on the place that had held some comfort in my childhood before the shit hit the fan and my family fell apart: the treehouse my father had built for me.

"Good." Jacob praised. "Remember to focus purely on that place and try to capture the exact feeling of it in your mind."

It was suspended between two towering pines, with a little rope ladder and skylight into the house.

"Now try and capture your favorite memory from that place." Jacob continued to guide me.

I was nine and I had just fallen off my bike. I was curled up in the corner of my treehouse, crying and holding my scraped knee to my chest. Then my dad popped up through the entrance of the floor with bandaids and Oreos. That was the last time he was in the treehouse with me.

I smiled at the memory, still crystal clear in my head. My family may be awful now, but it wasn't always that way, and I have strived to cherish the good memories of them over the years.

"Ok Madden. Keep your eyes closed and answer me this, if that memory had a color, what would it be?"

My brow wrinkled at his strange question, but I had an answer oddly enough. "Pale yellow, I guess."

"Alright. And do you remember what the sun rays were like that day? Were they soft? Or were they bright?"

"Soft. It was late afternoon so the sun was just about the set."

"Ok, Madden, you're done."

I opened me eyes. "I don't see how that could disguise my aura."

"It's kinda of difficult to explain, but, as we told you before, an aura is the very essence of your wolf's soul."

"Right?" I still wasn't sure how an old childhood memory would disguise my very soul.

"Well, certain special wolves, such as those with the double recessive gene, have the ability to disguise or completely hide their aura by tying a specific memory to them."

I nodded and took off the ring that they had given me. "So what does this do?" It was a simple silver band with the phases of the moon carved into it.

"That ring is made of wolfsbane that has been diluted so that it is not harmful to wolves, but rather would allow one to manipulate an aspect of their appearance." Jacob explained as he pulled a ring off his finger. It was a more complex ring than mine, though still silver in color, and it had tiny emeralds pressed into it. "My ring allows me to see beyond the regular aura of a wolf and detect their genetic coding for werewolf tendencies."

"That's kind of creepy, but I'm guessing that's how you found me."

"Right."

"I think I've heard of wolfsbane before. What does it do when it's not diluted?"

"It is like our kryptonite. Different forms of the plant can do different things. Every wolf has a natural instinct to avoid the plant when they come across it as the plant can be either debilitating or deadly."