Willing Sacrifice Read Free

when that heavy static feeling washed over me. I turned on my heel to face the sound of a low growl. “I see you.” I whispered before leaping onto his back and fighting him for all I was worth. I poured all my fear and resentment into every pound of my fists. I screamed and cried and he simply took the beating without fighting back. Just like that, the violence of my nightmares stopped, but he didn’t leave me alone. He couldn’t hurt me anymore, but I felt him waiting… he knew there was a chink in my armor and he had all the time in the world to find it.
    Outside the warm glow of the sun was cresting the hills of the eastern horizon. Instantly it felt as if all my fears melted away with the nighttime shadows. I used to laugh at people who feared the dark. I always reminded them that anything in the dark was also there in the light. That was of course before my visits from a very vengeful ghost. Now sun-up was the absolute best part of my day.
    I got dressed and pulled on my hiking boots before I thumped out onto the small covered porch. A nearby squirrel twitched forward a few short inches before freezing in his tracks and deciding stillness was better, his dark brown fur a stark contrast to the blinding white of the fresh snow. His little nose vibrated, his whiskers trembling. He smelled a predator – me. We stood there for a second measuring one another before he chanced it and made a mad dash up the porch support and onto its leaning roof. I didn’t eat rodents, but he didn’t know that; he smelled a wolf.
    The sun’s brief visit was cut short as it rose above the low hanging clouds that blanketed every inch of the sky. It was so gray: the clouds, the snow, the black pines and bare trees, all in various shades of gray and black. I felt like I hadn’t seen a blue sky in months and the end of winter held on stubbornly. The cold wet air still smelled stale and frozen. The snow from the night before was slowly turning to slush under a steady drizzling rain, bringing a chill that was bone deep… it was perfect for a wolf to go on a run.
    I took off at a dash, sprinting through the old abandoned skidder trails around my property line, from a time when logging still made money. My circuit was a large circle if I doubled back by the lake, maybe twelve miles in all. If I was good at anything it was running. I felt like I could run forever, dodging the low branches of pines creeping onto the ancient hidden paths, jumping over the jutting rocks and roots that turned my morning run into an obstacle course. It was the one thing that made me feel like myself again, but it was also a sad reminder that I was a werewolf without a pack who couldn’t change into a wolf – not anymore.
    The only sounds besides my steady breaths were the creaking of the ice-coated branches of the trees above my head and the ravens in the distance. It was eerie here on the best of days during the summer but in the dead of winter when the only sounds that accompanied me through the woods was the whistle of the never ending wind through leafless trees. Sometimes I felt like the chill of winter wasn't the only thing chasing me on my daily run but whatever it was, it felt just as cold and deadly.
    I slowed as I rounded a corner near the still frozen lake and watched a group of ravens fighting over the meager remains of a deer that had died during the long hard winter. The ravens in this forest were really something to behold. They were easily as big as eagles and twice as smart. The flock fluttered into the air at the sight of an approaching fox, their pitch-colored wings giving the hungry animal pause before deciding he would wait his turn at the dinner table tonight. Once their screeching and squawking reached exponential levels over something that looked suspiciously like an eyeball, so I pushed on.
    I didn’t stop running again ’til I was at my door; it was open, the cheap metal handle crushed and the lock twisted against its will.
    I smelled