Chapter 31: Pity Party
Nina
I knew sleeping with Enzo again would have been a mistake. He didn’t even care about me enough to stay for the entire duration. Clearly he got what he wanted and realized that I wasn’t worth his time, so he bailed. When I got dressed and left the cabin, I didn’t see him anywhere at the party; he must have run off.
I jumped down the stairs and started to walk back toward the party so I could find Jessica and Lori and tell them that I was going home, but stopped when I overheard two of Lisa’s friends talking.
“Have you seen Lisa?” one said. “Yeah,” the other replied. “She walked into the woods a little while ago. I just saw Enzo go that way, too.” “Ooh!” the first girl said excitedly. “Do you think they’re getting back together?”
The second girl giggled. “Obviously. Have you seen the way he’s been looking at her lately? Clearly he regrets messing around with that weirdo Nina and realizes that he’ll never do any better than Lisa.”
I didn’t want to stick around to hear any more as tears started to well up in my eyes. I just wanted to go home.
I ran down the trail that led back to campus. I kept running until I could no longer see or hear the people at the cabins. The waning moon was just a crescent in the sky, no longer illuminating the forest like it did the other night, so I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight so I could see.
Eventually, I heard footsteps behind me and whipped my flashlight around to see Luke approaching. “I figured you’d follow me,” I said annoyedly, turning back in the direction I was going and continuing to walk. “I couldn’t let you walk through the woods alone,” he replied. “There could be-”
“Werewolves, I know,” I interrupted. Luke was silent for a moment before speaking again. “Not just werewolves. Other shifters, too.” I paused and pondered what he said; admittedly, it made me a bit curious. We walked in silence for a bit.
“What other sorts of shifters are there, anyway?” I asked eventually, just wanting to not think about Enzo and Lisa together. “Oh, all kinds,” Luke responded. ” There are low-tier shifters, which are less evolved; like rogues. Those are the most common.” “What do you mean by ‘less evolved”?”
“They’re like the original werewolves. They’re like regular humans, but at night they shift and go feral. When they wake up in the morning –if they wake up– they won’t remember anything. Most don’t even know that they’re cursed.”
Luke paused for a bit as we stepped over tree roots and started to climb a small hill, then continued. “The next tier are those who can willingly shift into animals, but just regular animals. They still have a conscience while in their nonhuman form, but no powers. Believe it or not, many cats, birds, and rodents in the human world are actually shifters in their animal forms.”
I thought back to my childhood cat, Mimsy. Was she a shifter? She was very clever, and would sometimes disappear for days on end. My parents always said she was just exploring, but now I wondered if she was off somewhere in her human form doing human things. “What’s after that?” I asked.
“Shifters like Enzo,” Luke replied. ” People who can shift into much larger, more powerful versions of animals. It’s not just that they have the ability to shift, but rather that there are two beings inside of them: their own human conscience, and their animal conscience.” “Like split personalities?”
“Sort of,” Luke replied. “But both can be conscious at the same time, and talk to each other telepathically. Usually, when a shifter of this caliber comes of age, their animal appears to them, and they share a soul. Their animal — like Enzo’s wolf — can give them some or all of its power.”
“So it’s a spirit animal.”
“Exactly.” Luke and I finished climbing the hill and came to a small clearing. From here, we could see the campus down below. It looked so small. I was silent for a while as I took in the view, but then cleared my throat and asked another question.
“So… what are you? Are you a shifter?” Luke was silent for some time. He looked down at his feet. I couldn’t see his face, not that it would make a difference since he had no face, but I wondered if my question made him sad.
“I’m not much of anything,” he said. ” Just a guy who fucked up and was cursed to live for all eternity. But not in a cool, sexy way, like a vampire. Just cursed to slowly rot and erode. Eventually I’ll just be dust, when these bones start to disintegrate in millions of years.”
“That sounds… lonely,” I said. I couldn’t explain it, but I was starting to feel genuinely bad for this strange talking skeleton. He shrugged. “You get used to it. That’s why I decided to hang out in that anatomy lab. I like seeing all of the students come and go.”
For some reason, the skeleton’s words made me smile. It was strange to think that a talking skeleton might be becoming my friend. We didn’t speak for a long time after that. Eventually I started to feel better as we sat together on the hillside, and started to think to myself as I sobered up that maybe it was a good thing that my sex with Enzo got interrupted. It would have been a bad idea and I likely would have regretted it in the morning. Even now, I was regretting even letting it start.
If Enzo wanted to get back with Lisa, she could have him. Alcohol really makes people do the craziest things!
I returned home that night around midnight and decided to do some more research on my own. If there really was a whole supernatural world out there like Enzo and Luke claimed, I wanted to gather information from more sources; I guess you could say it was the academic in me coming out.
I sat at my computer with the lights off for hours, scouring online forums and websites for any traces of information that seemed even relatively plausible. Most of what I found was either obviously made up or purely speculative, and 1 was beginning to think that I should just give up when I found an interesting link several hundred pages deep on G****e.
The link led me to a forum post on an extremely obscure cryptozoology website that looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1999. Most of the forum threads had been abandoned for years, and most of them seemed like utter nonsense.
There was one in particular, though, that caught my eye. The title of the forum post read: “I’m a werewolf hunter and I have PROOF.” Furrowing my brow, I clicked on the thread and opened it.
“I’m not sure if anyone will take this seriously or even bother clicking, but to hell with it. I’ve been hunting werewolves for twenty years on the eastern coast of Canada and I have actual proof that they’re real. If you want to give me a chance and see what I have to offer, email me at the link below. I swear that what I have to show you will rock your entire world.”
There wasn’t anything else to the post aside from the email link, and there were no replies. It could have been a scam, but something in me told me to click the link and reach out just to see what would happen..
I clicked the link and typed out my message. “I saw your post. I believe that werewolves and other cryptids may be real, and I would like to discuss it with you. -N.”
Taking a deep breath, I sent the email. I went to close my laptop, figuring that I would never get a reply, but before I did, my email dinged. My hands shook as I saw that the anonymous forum poster had replied within moments.
“Hi, N. I’d like to talk. Let’s meet up. K.”
