Chapter 28: Trust Issues
Nina
“What happened to you?” Enzo said as soon as I closed the door, rushing over to me and taking my shoulders in his hands and looking me over. I shrugged him off and limped across the room, where I kicked off my muddy shoes and sat down at my desk to rest my injured leg.
“You hired a talking skeleton to be my bodyguard?” I whispered, keeping my voice low so Lori couldn’t hear me. Enzo folded his arms across his chest. ” Clearly you need protection, judging from your current state,” he replied.
I laughed. “I look like this because I was running from your bodyguard. You could’ve at least warned me.” “Yeah, well maybe if you hadn’t run away from me last night and the night before, I would’ve had the chance,” Enzo growled.
I rolled my eyes and went to stand, but a sharp pain shot through my leg and I fell back down on my chair with a groan. Enzo rushed over to me and kneeled in front of me. I pulled away as he went to put his hands on my leg and he looked up at me with an annoyed expression.
“Let me look at it,” he ordered. I hesitantly stuck my leg out, wincing as he put his hands on it. “It’s alright,” he whispered. “It’ll just take a moment.”
Sure enough, as he pressed his hands on my leg, the pain started to fade. The throbbing in my head faded as well, and soon enough I felt like I hadn’t fallen down a ravine at all; aside from the mud all over my body and my clothes.
“There was another monster out there,” I said quietly, looking down at my lap. Enzo looked up at me with worry in his soft brown eyes. “Where?”
“In the woods,” I replied. “I was running from your skeleton bodyguard and fell down a ravine. He showed up and fought it off. Said it was a… rogue?”
Enzo sighed. “Rogues… What are they doing here? You’re extremely lucky that Luke was there.” “Luke?” I asked. “You gave it a name?”
With a shrug, Enzo stood and paced over to my bed. “I don’t know what it is exactly, but something about you is drawing these creatures to the campus,” Enzo said. ” It’ll only get worse from here, and I can’t always be around to keep watch over you.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, standing, “I can take care of myself. Tell your skeleton bodyguard to leave me the fuck alone.”
Enzo suddenly whipped around and glared at me, his brown eyes now burning the bright red color that I had become so familiar with. “Why can’t you just accept that I care about you?” he said.
“Because you’re a monster, too, apparently! So how do I know if I can really trust you?!” I shouted, then immediately regretted it when I saw a pained expression flash across Enzo’s face. He frowned, the red fading from his eyes, and reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out two things: my old, broken phone, and a brand new phone in a box.
“Here,” he said, tossing them down on your bed. “You’re welcome.” Without another word, he stormed out and left me alone.
“wait, Enzo-” I said, opening my bedroom door and going after him, but he was already gone. Lori was still sitting at the kitchen counter, her mouth full of cereal, and she looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face.
“What was that all about?” she said. “I heard something about… skeletons?” I sighed. “It’s nothing,” I replied. “Just talking about class, that’s all.”
I could tell that Lori knew something else was going on, but she didn’t pry. I returned to my room and peeled off my muddy clothes before getting into the shower.
As the hot water ran over me, washing the mud and blood off of my skin, the events of the past few days swirled around my mind. Edward had tried to hypnotize me, but it hadn’t really worked… And now, I knew for certain that there was more to this world than I thought. My night in the woods solidified that. Between the talking skeleton bodyguard and the terrifying werewolf, I knew that there was a lot I had to learn.
Part of me just wanted to run away. I didn’t think I was out of the ordinary at all; surely these creatures weren’t drawn to me like Enzo said. Maybe if I just ran away and went home, it would all stop. My parents would kill me if I suddenly dropped out of medical school, though. How could I possibly explain to them that I had to leave because of werewolves and talking skeletons? They’d have me put in a mental institution; but maybe that was where I belonged. Once I was clean, I got out of the shower and sat down at my desk to do some research.
Of course, an initial search of werewolves only brought up basic cryptozoology nonsense on the internet. There were plenty of videos on the subject, however, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep tonight, so I grabbed my laptop and crawled into bed to watch them. Before getting into bed, I set aside the new phone that Enzo bought for me. Looking at it made my heart ache for what I said to him; I’d have to apologize and thank him later.
As I laid in bed watching cryptozoology videos, I learned a few things — all speculative, of course, since most sane people were of the belief that such things were only myths and fairy tales and definitely not real life — about werewolves.
According to folklore, the first werewolf was created by a witch who cursed a man for killing her daughter. She cursed him to turn into an animal on every full moon, during which time he would go on rampages and lose all 10 BONUS
humanity. What she didn’t expect, however, was that he would be able to transfer the curse through a single bite, which led to thousands of werewolves suddenly coming into existence. Those werewolves went on to breed and have werewolf children.
The curse eventually mutated over many generations, leading to what cryptozoologists today considered to be “modern werewolves”; creatures who could shift into wolves at will while maintaining an ordinary human appearance when they weren’t shifted. These people supposedly could possess any myriad of special abilities even in their human forms, such as night vision, teleportation, telepathy, foresight, healing powers, superhuman strength and speed, and more.
As I learned this, I thought about how my wrist had stopped hurting as Enzo touched it on the night that Justin attacked me, and how he had somehow healed all of my pain tonight with only his touch. It was starting to make sense, but I still didn’t want to believe that any of this was real.
I fell asleep at some point as I watched the videos, completely exhausted from my chase through the woods. I spent the night dreaming about strange creatures and the full moon shining overhead. I even dreamed that I was one of the creatures, shifting from my human state into that of an animal while Enzo gazed at me with his glowing red eyes. Was this some sort of omen? Was I truly out of the ordinary?
