War of the Wolves

Chapter 4

                           I awoke to chirping birds outside my window. It was a little past noon, and all that I could think about was the new house. Anticipation filled me as I thought about all of the rooms I had yet  to explore. Groggily, I stood up. The air was definitely not as warm as it had been in Texas, but I hadn't expected it to be.

                           The sight of my room still felt too good to be true. I walked slowly, still taking in the past couple of days.

                           There were four other doors in the hallway, and then a balcony opened up over the living room. The downstairs in its entirety was red, I noticed from the balcony. The upstairs hallway changed to beige. I opened the door closest to my bedroom to find a bathroom. I ignored it and walked across the hallway to find another bedroom. The bedroom was painted purple, and the other bedroom on the hallway was navy blue with anchors and life saver rings hung up around the room. The last door on the hallway opened up to be a library.

                           I exhaled deeply.

“Oh. My. Gosh,” I whispered.

                           The library was huge. The walls were a golden yellow, and the bookshelves were a light colored wood. The shelves were filled with books as far as the eye could see. Towards the back of the library was a window seat with green cushions and a view that looked out over the driveway and the front yard.

                           I walked down the stairs to see the rest of the house and find my dad.

“Good morning,” Dad said quietly from behind his newspaper at the dining room table.

“Hey, since when do you read the paper?” I replied with a smirk.

“Since a tornado came through our apartment complex and nobody except for you, and Hannah, knew that it existed.”

                           It stung when he said Hannah’s name, and it hurt more to think that soon enough it would mean nothing more to me than someone who had once been my friend.

“What are you looking for?” I interrogated.

“Anything weird, stuff that people might assume to be natural but really isn't.”

                           I sighed. I could tell he still thought that the tornado had something to do with werewolves. My mind withdrew itself from the conversation that I was having and moved on to more pressing matters: where was my dad sleeping?

                           I stood up and began to explore a little bit more, but there was not much else to find. My dad’s bedroom was under the stairs, but don’t let that fool you, it was the size of the entire upstairs, minus the small part that turned into a workshop.

                           I resolved that I was finished looking around the house and decided that I should explore the outside now. The temperature was warmer than I expected, and I broke into a jog through the woods. The trees were close together, but there were a lot of clearings throughout. I walked through the short green grass for what seemed like hours until I came up to the creek that I had seen from my window.