Primal Summer

Chapter 1

I stood in a crowd of werewolves, werecats, werebirds, and pretty much every other kind of shifter you could find in Southern California. If I was a human 13-year-old kid, I might have been nervous at being surrounded by beings who were stronger, faster, and nastier than the average member of Homo Sapiens. Fortunately for me, I wasn't a regular human boy. I, too, had an animal biding his time inside me. I called him Torngarsuk after the Inuit sky god, or Torn for short.

 Torn was usually restless when we were in the city. The cars, the buildings, and especially the electric scooters irked the hoary old creature that lived inside me. Right now, surrounded by the tall pine trees in the middle of the San Bernardino National Forest, he was content. Not happy, this still wasn't Torn's natural domain but he much preferred trees and fresh dirt to street lights and Starbucks. I would have thought that Torn would have been uncomfortable being surrounded by so many strange shifters but I guess he didn't consider any of them to be a threat. He wasn't fidgeting like he did whenever I was around a member of my adopted family.

 As I was looking around at the kids around me trying to guess what kind of shifters they were, the door to the large log building we were gathered in front of flew open and a tall African-American man wearing a brown bat on the top of his head walked out into the sunlight.

 You would think that the sight of a man wearing a bat on top of his head would cause a commotion in a crowd of middle schoolers but it seemed as if most of us knew what it meant to see a human and a wild animal together. Mage. A human born with the ability to pull wild magic from their environment and store it inside themselves, like a magical battery. The small brown bat was probably the man's familiar, a magical animal partner summoned by the mage to help him wield that raw magic safely.

 The murmurs in the crowd started when we saw the man headed straight towards even with his eyes totally covered by the bat's wings. The mage jumped up on a tree stump, faced straight ahead, and waited patiently until we quieted down.

 "Good afternoon, campers. My name is Head Counselor Hawkins. I'd like to welcome all of you to Camp Janus. Now I'd like to tell you that you have a fun three months ahead of you filled with sing-a-longs and toasted marshmallows but I would be lying. You are all here because you have trouble controlling your inner animal. Now I'm not a shifter and I'm not going to pretend to know I know exactly what you're going through but I do know what it's like to have something wild and dangerous inside of you. I also know what it's like to face challenges." The murmurs started again when the bat took his wings off the mage's face revealing that his eyes were just a large mess of scar tissue.

 "Over the next three months, you're going to be taking a variety of different classes in subjects that have been scientifically proven to help improve self-control and self-regulation. Everything from pottery to yoga. That's for later though. Right now? You guys are going to run."

There was dead silence in the group as we tried to process what Counselor Hawkins had just said. Finally, a tall girl wearing a turquoise Members-Only jacket over retro white jeans raised her hand in the air.

"Yes, Ms. Tori Torrence? You don't mind if I call you Toto, do you?"

"Oh, you already know my nickname. That's kind of frightening actually. Did you just say we're going running? Seriously?"

"Yes, Toto. Seriously." The bat on the mage's head nodded sternly at the girl.

"Counselor Hawkins, I've been stuck in the back of a Honda Civic for the past five hours just getting to this place. My back hurts and I'm so hungry that I could eat the leaves off these trees. You really expect me to go on a run now?" Toto said, her face red from the diatribe.