CHAPTER 05

Sorry for the late upload, was super busy today.

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It has been over a month since the boy and the girl started living with Satomi and those that were still present in her pack.

At first it was quite hard for the family of werewolves to properly communicate with them and that was due to various reasons.

First being that the boy had next to no impression on anything. He had a little understanding of English so the communication between him and the rest of the pack was okay and he had recently started to respond back, only a few words, but that was progress in and of itself. 

Second was the girl, Malia, as they've come to learn. She was quite as reserved as the boy but she was pretty violent if someone got into her space. Satomi had said that it was due to her still not being used to controlling her emotions and luckily for her, she was in the best place to learn something like that. 

Another thing was how glued they were to each other. 

Everyone could see how she had most likely imprinted on the boy and the boy had done the same. While he was not supernatural or animalistic in any way, it was still clear that they both had a high level of dependence on each other. 

It was a surreal experience for the pack to see a human learning how to be a human from a pack of wolves. So far, all what he'd learned before meeting them could be attributed to mainly instinctual responses like knowing that fire burns because you touched it – the boy was just too blank. They couldn't even call him innocent because he wasn't, he just didn't know what bad actions were. 

"Arghh! That's not it, Tristan." Brett almost felt like pulling off his mutated ears but unfortunately, the target of his frustrations only looked at him with confusion. 

Tristan, the name chosen for the boy as they couldn't just keep addressing him as 'boy' and 'you'. Not surprising for the pack, Malia had been the one who strongly advocated for the name after they had pitched over twelve, each of them having their own choice. 

The reason for Brett's frustration came from the fact that Tristan still thought, even after all these while that transforming to an animal form was something all of them could do, and by all of them he meant himself too. 

Brett wasn't the least bit amused by the path his development was straying on as Tristan, for some unexplained reason, thought that Malia of all people was someone to be taken as a role model. The girl was brash, crude, rude, outspoken, no decency for tact, aggressive and every other thing he could think of that made the girl a problem to deal with. 

The older members of the pack could easily understand where the girl was coming from and could tell that her emotions were rather raw, more so than the normal adolescent teenage wolf. It sometimes made them wonder how the boy could be so natural in her presence and she his. 

Most of Tristan's and Malia's time of the day was spent meditating. Satomi's pack was a rather hermit one as they all kept to themselves and meditative practices was one of the things they always did, either as a group or in their privacy. 

Tristan, like always took the training as something normal, a very good mindset to have, and was quite accomplished at it, even though he didn't know the importance and benefits or the practice, while his other half – Malia – was having quite the hard time at it. She wasn't one for subtlety and sitting still in a room in silence with legs crossed was a very daunting task for her, even if Tristan was there with her. 

The level of dependency that was shared between the both of them was too high for it to be healthy, something that even the youngest members of the pack took note of. It was weird to see a human reflecting the action of an animal's imprint, in Tristan's case, that he would growl at anyone who hurt the girl, even during her self control exercises. Even Satomi was forced to step in at some point to make sure the boy would not be mauled to death by an irritated member of her pack. 

Out of all of them, the people the duo were closest to was Brett and his sister, Lori. Or rather, in Brett's case, they were the two people Malia decided to bare her fangs on, something which irritated the male werewolf to no end. 

Lori on the other hand was quite cool with Malia, being able to talk to the girl without drawing a negative reaction from her and was also someone who could be called her closest friend, after Tristan that is. 

The reason she was close to the boy, to the point of it being dangerous, was made clear to everyone after her first full moon as human werecoyote. Satomi had personally seen to that event as she was the one who brought them in, and also due to the fact that she was the pack's Alpha and something like a first full moon transformation was quite special to any were-supernatural. 

Due to her being trapped in her coyote form for years, Malia had never experienced what it was like to live through her first full moon in her human form and considering that this would be her first, it was imperative that she at least got the basics down. 

The other young members, even some of the older ones, had locked themselves inside their room as they prepared to live through the night without even shifting a hair, which left only Satomi and Tristan with Malia. 

Malia sat cross legged with her fingers intertwined together and took in deep breaths as she felt the draw of the moon. She felt her baser instincts being rattled and battering against her barriers, barriers she had put up to stop her from tearing at anything she found unpleasant. It was flimsy at best but it was all what she could manage given the one month timeframe. 

She took in deep breaths as she felt her entire mind drown in turmoil and the building rage that came with being a werecoyote on a full moon. 

"Listen to my voice, Malia. What you are now is nothing. The pull you feel is nothing. Your mind is nothing." Satomi's voice echoed in her ears and she couldn't help but be drawn to it. 

"Right now, you are at your most peaceful. Every distraction around and within you is reduced to nothing. Worry about nothing… Three things cannot long be hidden…"

"The S-sun, t-the moon, the truth." Her brows creased as heated rage flowed through every part of her body, slowly devouring her in its fiery embrace. 

"Repeat it."

"T-three things can-n-not long be h-hidden; the sun, the moon, the truth." She stammered out feeling that she was a few breaths away from losing herself to her instincts. "The sun, the… m-moon, the truth."

"Malia focus!" 

She heard Satomi's voice but her emotions muddled any reaction she could express. Her inner mind couldn't even feel what was outside any more as red took her vision. 

She tried finding her anchor, what she could hold on to in her most dire state and panic gripped her soul when all she felt was void. 

She was alone, cold. The feeling of tearing through flesh assaulted her senses and made her drown in the sensation. She felt despair. 

She remembered flashlights and the silhouette of a woman and the next thing she knew was her vision tumbling over… and then she smelt it. 

Blood. 

Fear. 

Despair. 

It was like a sumptuous meal spread before her and before she even knew how it happened, it was all that was in her senses. The world became more vibrant and the colors more pronounced. 

She crawled towards the source of the blood and the next thing she felt was the wind against her body as she ran through the forest, faster than was humanly possible. 

Until her senses caught the smell of two people. 

Without even thinking, she lunged at the object of her senses and went straight in for the kill. 

Satomi let out a sigh as she saw the young girl succumb to her animal instincts. Looking at how the girl seemed to have lost her sense of self, she knew she would have to double her efforts and try again on another moon. 

'It looks like I'll have to put her down for the night.'

She was getting ready to stop the assault when the boy stepped in front of her and obstructed her from Malia. 

She would have easily stopped him but her curiosity won her over and watched as the rabid girl pounced on Tristan and brought down her fangs on him only for it to be wedged against her mouth. 

She forced him down to the ground and brought her claws out, ready to mutilate him, which was a nice way to put being dead, but she stopped. 

"Urgghhh!" The boy groaned in pain as her fangs crunched on his bone, staining her mouth and his face with blood. 

The rabid light in her eyes dimmed as she saw the victim of her outburst and his groan of pain she had inflicted on him. Reluctantly, or maybe in shock, she dislodged her mouth from his hand and took a faltering step back as the implications of what she had done finally set on her. 

"Trist, I..I..I so-" Her words immediately died down only for it to erupt in sobs as she felt his pull that forced her to collapse on his legs only for him to start petting her hair. 

Shame gripped her hard that even her cries couldn't escape her throat making her gasp for air but the boy just continued rubbing her hair soothingly. It was a harmonious scene of a distraught girl crying her eyes out while she held him tight. Her little beacon, one she almost destroyed in a fit of emotions. There were no words of explanation that she could give that would assuage the fact that she had hurt him and consequently almost killed him. 

"Malia…" He only spoke that one word but all what he wanted to say was conveyed. There was no need for plenty of words between them because only they knew what they meant to each other, at least had an inkling of what it was. 

They were important to each other – that much they knew without anybody needing to tell them or point it out. 

"Trist, I'm sorry!!" She bawled out again and held him tighter to the point that his bones rattled but he didn't let out a wince of discomfort. 

He was her anchor, and her actions had been the equivalent of throwing him away at the turbulent sea without any rope connecting them together. He had more than enough reason to be scared of her even if he didn't fully know what fear was. The fear of death was the patron to advancement and yet even in the face of a possibility, he still held her close.

"I'm sorry!" She was but a little girl who had lost her family, killed them even, and had turned into an animal. The only thing she didn't hate or feel guilty about was the boy currently holding her close. 

"Malia." He called her again and this time drew her up. He didn't know what he was doing but she'd done this numerous times to him in a bid to cheer him up. He held her in a hug and muzzled her hair with his chin and kept at it until the full moon was over and she fell asleep. 

He picked her up, not minding the blood he'd lost and took her to their room, an arrangement that was met because she couldn't sleep without her pillow, him, and he liked how warm she was. 

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