Bronx
It’s called The Forbidden Forest for a reason, and that reason is that humans are just the fucking worst.
I’ve been tracking the woman from Storm Dawn for the last 24 hours, ever since Jed warned me there was a human traipsing around. He said she was carrying a backpack and muttering to herself, which made her easy to find. Jed doesn’t know what she wants or why she’s here. He just knows she was seen entering the forest near the path that leads to Storm Dawn and there’s only one reason humans from that damn town ever enter the woods.
Trouble.
She’s up to cause trouble, and I won’t have it.
Not when it comes to my pack.
No way. No how. No thank you.
I’m the Alpha for two reasons.
First off, because I’m the baddest motherfucker in the woods. No one messes with me: not the dragons, not the bears. No one.
Secondly, because I’ve proved myself repeatedly to be the best at what I do: guarding my pack.
Before I became Alpha, the pack was a mess. It was in shambles. We had shifters who were disorganized, sloppy, and careless. The last pack leader was old. He was near the end of his days and he was past caring what happened to the pack. As a result, no one knew how to fight. No one knew how to hunt. No one knew how to keep the forest clean and free from tracks and prints.
The woman pauses now and examines the print I left for her to find. Yeah, leaving that print wasn’t an oversight on my part. Not by any means. I’m not so careless that a little mud would mean I’d leave tracks. Not in the woods. Not when I know there’s a stranger roaming about.
No, “stranger” isn’t the right word.
Intruder.
I don’t like her.
I don’t like that some pretty girl thinks she can come traipsing through the forest. There’s a reason it’s off-limits to humans. For hundreds of years, shifters have owned these forests free from human invasion. I’m not about to let people just come wandering in now. Not when we’ve worked so hard to make this a safe place for shifters.
The world is a dangerous place when you’re not entirely human. When you don’t quite fit in, things can be difficult. There are poachers and do-gooders who want to harvest our blood. There are people who are just curious, who like the idea of keeping a shifter as a pet. There are bored billionaires and slimy scientists. This is why what’s inside the forest needs to remain a secret.
This is why humans need to stay out of it.
I’ve been stalking the girl for awhile now and Jed was right: she talks to herself. I don’t even think she realizes she’s doing it. She talks about a woman called Eva and she mutters about finding hope, but I don’t know what that means. At first, I thought she was just a lone camper who wanted a reprieve from city life. It’s not unheard of. Some humans like wandering into the woods. It’s not much of a problem in this part of the forest. We’re deep in the heart of it. Along the edges, though, where cities come up to the side of the trees, people sometimes like the idea of camping in the darkness.
This woman isn’t interested in camping, though.
She’s not here to find herself.
She’s not on some mindfulness retreat.
No, she’s here for a different reason.
She’s hunting something, and I think I know what.
Why she would want to find a wolf, I don’t know. I haven’t got the faintest clue. She’s loud and noisy and much too slow to ever have a hope of catching a wolf, but she keeps muttering about it, saying things that don’t make sense. This whole examining-the-paw-print thing puts the final nail in the coffin, and I realize that soon I’m going to have to do something.
She gets nearer to the pack’s home each day. I should scare her off or kill her soon. Otherwise, she’s going to get close enough to accidentally stumble across a cub or one of my pack members, and I can’t have that. These forests need to remain safe and off-limits to humans. They need to remain safe for my people.
She squats for a long time, just staring at the track. She looks around, but doesn’t see me lurking in the bushes. I’m too sneaky for that. Years of experience have taught me how to survive and outsmarting a little human isn’t going to be difficult for me.
My real question is why.
Why is she trying to catch a wolf?
She doesn’t seem to want to kill anyone. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have any weapons. If she does, they’re hidden deep inside her bag. If she wanted to kill us, any of us, wouldn’t she have a gun of some sort? I can’t imagine a “hunter” walking through this part of the woods without being armed.
Then again, it’s strange to see anyone walking through this part of the woods: hunter or not.
After a minute, the female gets up and starts walking again. This time, she doesn’t mutter to herself. This time, she’s silent. She moves a bit slower now, a bit more carefully, and I wonder if she thinks she’s close to finding what she’s looking for. Maybe now she’s decided to be cautious.
Oh, she’s closer than she was before, to be sure, but we’re still several miles away from the pack. I’m not too worried.
Yet.
*
At nightfall, she stops and sets up camp. The woman waits until she finds a little clearing, and then she pitches her tent, hangs her food in a tree nearby, and goes into the tent. I hear the zip as she closes it, and then I sit, watching her. A flashlight comes on in the tent and I can see her shadow. Who is this woman? Why is she here?
More importantly, is she reading a fucking book?
She is.
I can tell.
She’s reading a book.
I don’t know who would come into the woods to read a book or what they plan to do next, but I don’t like it.
I don’t like it one bit.
After awhile, I get bored of sitting in my wolf form, and I shift, leaning against a tree. I pluck a blade of grass and play with it, rolling it between two fingers. Sometimes, on nights like tonight, I really wish things were different between the humans and the wolves. I wish our relationships weren’t so tense and broken. I wish there was some sort of camaraderie between us, but there’s not. There’s only pain and hardship.
Things weren’t always like this between humans and shifters. Years ago, shifters and humans actually got along. When I was a kid, even, interspecies relations were solid. We all thought we were moving toward a world where things could be different: a world where we could safely interact with each other.
Then one political shit storm changed everything, and shifters were forced back into darkness.
The truth is that we probably could have taken the world by storm if we wanted to, but we didn’t want to. We didn’t want to go to war over this. None of us do. It’s better to live in darkness, in hiding, than to live in a world where we have to kill humans to survive. Maybe one day humans and shifters will be able to peacefully live side-by-side once more, but today is not that day.
Today is just a day where I’m sitting, staring at some girl in a tent, wondering what the hell she’s doing here.
Eventually, she turns off her flashlight and I wonder if she’s going to go to sleep. What do humans do while they’re camping in a tent? Do they masturbate? Do they stretch? Do they sing?
This human doesn’t do any of those things.
This human, instead, starts to cry.
I smell her tears before I hear her sniffles. Gradually, they turn into sobs, and I can practically hear her heart breaking. Whatever is troubling her is something big. I know that much. She’s hurting more deeply than anyone – human or shifter – should ever have to hurt.
My heart begins to sting as I listen to her sobbing in the darkness, and for a minute, I think about going to her. I should go to her. I should comfort her and promise her that everything’s going to be okay. No matter what’s happening, it’s going to be fine.
Everything is going to be okay, little human.
I could promise her.
I could console her.
I could hold her in my arms and whisper that no matter what danger or trouble she’s facing, I promise it’s going to be fine. She will be safe, and she will be taken care of, and she will be protected.
I can’t do that though.
There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’m doing something wrong, even though I know that this is the only way to protect my pack. As the Alpha, my pack comes first before everything else.
Before everyone else.
I can’t promise this human anything because in the morning, I’m going to capture her, and I’m going to find out what she’s really doing here.
In the morning, she’s going to be mine, and she has no idea.