Fangs ⊰ d. hale ᴮᴼᴼᴷ¹

⊰twenty-one⊱

When I came into consciousness again, I felt a strange coolness against my bare back. I still felt pain flooding through me as my eyes flew open and I started coughing violently. I tried to sit up, but a slick hand was placed on my shoulder and then I saw Scott's face appear in eyesight.

"Don't get up yet, Sarah. You're okay but you gotta lay still," he assured me. 

"I've given you something that should...speed up the healing process," a new voice said. I slowly raised my head and saw Deaton.

I felt something damp dabbing my skin and the heavy scent of my own blood reached my nostrils, my senses waking up slowly after the ordeal my body had gone through. 

My eyes danced around and I recognized the inside of the vet's office. That's when I also noticed that my shirt was gone and I was laying on this table in front of two men; just wearing my bra and a bare of skinny jeans.

I groaned, in too much pain to do much else. "I thought you were a vet," I huffed out, addressing Deaton as he dabbed and cleaned off the blood around the bullet hole in my stomach. 

"That's what I said," Scott chuckled at me. 

My head rolled back and my eyes faded shut again.

⊰⊱⊰⊱

Did they think I couldn't hear them?

Their whispers flooded through my ears, ringing and stacking on top of one other. It was hard for me to make out what was being whispered as I walked past—and it was harder to pretend like I couldn't hear every single whispering voice.

"She said a wild animal attacked them."

"They didn't find any animals in the area."

"So was she lying?"

"Did she kill him?"

I flinched subtly and kept walking. I felt like I was in fucking high school again, before I met Paige. People used to whisper about me back then, too.

The only difference was I couldn't hear the whispers in high school.

I pushed passed a group of undergrads, who were whispering and creating conspiracies. They were freshman and had no idea what had happened the year before—my first year as a grad student on campus.

But that didn't stop them from listening to the rumors and boiling their own theories.

I pushed open the doors to the girl's bathroom and disappeared into a stall. I was a stupid freshman in high school all over again who spent her free period reading comics in the library and hid in the bathroom stall to cry or to eat my lunch. 

I was the talk of the school. No one could mind their own business and because I was a werewolf, I could hear all the whispers, all the theories, all the fingers being pointed in my direction.

The spring semester had only just returned, winter break rolling to an end and students returning from their posh vacations to fancy ski resorts or their country homes bigger than my hometown.

And the whispers returned with them, my prayers over break left as dust in my dreamcatcher above my bed.

I couldn't take the whispers, the stares. I was treated like a leper. No one wanted to be friends with me anymore, the ones I had deciding that they didn't want to be tainted by my presence after the following year came to an end.

I pulled my laptop from my backpack and sat in my lap as I sat criss-cross on top of the toilet seat in the stall I locked myself away in.

I was 24 for crying out loud. I shouldn't have to run from my problems like I was about to do, but I saw no other option. My studies were hindered by the whispers, my ability to focus lost because classes were spent with students constantly whispering around me or staring at me, scuffing their chairs so they could get away from me.