I love monsters. It’s one of my (many) things, and one of my favorite monsters is the werewolf. These creatures have been romanticized in recent years, and I won’t say that I haven’t leaned over to that way myself from time to time, but I prefer the scary, hairy, rip-out-your-throat-style werewolf, and one of my favorite things about this particular brand of monster is the transformation. The movies, TV shows, and books about werewolves that I love the most are the ones that show the transformation as being a horrible, painful, frightening thing. Does that make me a little creepy? Bah.
So today I want to share a scene from a short werewolf story that I wrote. It’s not something that is ever likely to be published, but I had fun writing the transformation of the female character. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!
Minutes passed while Aya waited to die. She’d managed to turn her body over so that she was laying on her back, looking up at the moon peeking through the trees. The rain poured into her wounds, but she didn’t care because she couldn’t feel them anymore. She couldn’t feel anything except the ache in her heart, knowing she’d found and lost love all at once, and was about to lose her life as well.
She lay for over an hour, just staring at the moon.
Then, strangely, her wounds began to sting again. She wondered at this. Did people get one last shot of physical pain before passing on? That seemed cruel and unnecessary.
As she thought this the pain came stronger. Suddenly she found herself hissing from the agony of the rain dropping onto her open flesh. A moment later she found the energy to roll over, and soon after she had pushed herself into a kneeling position with her fingers clenching at the ground for support.
She only had a few seconds to reflect on this strange end-of-life burst of energy when her entire body was thrown into violent spasms. At first she couldn’t even scream, the pain was so intense, but soon enough she found her voice and her shrieks sent night birds flying off through the trees.
Every inch of her skin was burning and freezing at the same time, every muscle twitching, every bone stretching as though it was about to crack in two. She had an almost uncontrollable urge to tear her skin from her body. It felt like there were bugs crawling beneath it, like it was shuddering of its own volition. Could this possibly be what it felt like to die? No, no, it couldn’t be. This was something entirely different.
When her jaw cracked and she felt her canine teeth suddenly jabbing into her lower lip, all at once she understood.
Kaleb’s last kiss. He’d bitten his lip a moment before. She hadn’t even registered the coppery taste of his mouth.
Blood. Werewolf blood.
She couldn’t keep track of all the thoughts rushing through her mind at once. She wasn’t dying! She was going to live! She was going to be a werewolf, but she’d still be alive! And she could be in Kaleb’s life, if she could rescue him somehow… She had to find a way to save him! If only she could get past this excruciating pain!
The flow of thoughts was cut off, as was her breath as she began to choke from the agony. She felt as though she was being stabbed by a hundred flaming swords, like her bones were trying to escape her body. Was it like this every time a werewolf transformed? It couldn’t be; it looked so flawless when the others did it! Was it just her? Was she broken somehow? Rejecting the change?
She couldn’t scream, couldn’t move. She simply fell to the ground and trembled, twitched, gasped in horror.
A long time later, when the pain finally subsided, Aya was no longer Aya. She was something more, something different, something wild. She didn’t think about who she was, where she was, or how she’d gotten there. She simply rose her nose to the wind and took a long, deep sniff. Her mind was muddled, confused, feral, but one thing was clear: she could smell them on the wind, the ones who had hurt her and taken her mate away from her.
She let out a long, loud howl toward the high moon and burst off into the woods as fast as her four legs could take her.
No Page Left Blank 