Chapter 7: Other people like me?

The deep forest isn't a place I'd go lightly. I haven't been out here since I was a pup, running wild with Frank through the woods and pretending we were hunters seeking after prey to bring back to the pack to feast on. I still remember a few things we used to practise, the way we would track marks left by larger creatures, how to look out for where someone moved by and where you needed to avoid.

It serves me well now as I perch high on a slippery rock, holding my breath. A lot of no-souls in were territory are thrown out of the pack. They'd go rogue if they had powers, but without anything to protect them they often end up prey to the bigger and nastier things to come from the Becoming.

Maybe a were or a vampire might win against a Crystal Beast, but that's not for sure certain. They're lean things, cat-like usually, and instead of fur and bones they are shifting crystals that grow out from their organs.

They live on blood, I've heard, and their bite is deadly whether they eat you or not because your leg or arm will turn just as crystal as they are but your heart isn't going to take the change.

There's one just below where I am now. I heard it coming in the forest, heard the soft metallic shifting as it moved through the underbrush and if there's one thing to do when you're being hunted it's to try to get rid of your scent. I couldn't go through a river but I leapt up high on a tree and then hopped onto a rock a little way off so there was no scent trail leading to me.

It's beautiful. It's dark bronze and it moves with grace over the woodland floor, bright green eyes scanning for me as it smells the air. Light catches it a hundred different ways, making the fragments of crystal that form it look almost like shifting fur and gold at the same time.

I see it and I understand why there are a few out there who have gone to their deaths happy and glad so long as they could touch a beast like this.

I hold my breath, my grip getting tired, and I thank the goddess and all her mercies when it turns and moves away. Falling on a Beast is not my idea of starting my life fresh.

I'm not too far behind the Goddess now. My father made sure I was kept back to a disadvantage, sure, but she's moving in a big caravan of people and they need to stop more often. The tracks I'm following get fresher and fresher and despite my aching bones and my normal regular lungs that can't push me further and faster like my pack's can, when I see a still warm campfire in the dawning light of day, I know I'm close.

It's only a few more twists and turns before I find them, traveling a deep and secret road that the Goddess is forming before them and closing up behind so as not to disturb nature too greatly.

There are laughing wolves and vampires riding and walking and running with packs on their backs and carts full of supplies. It's bright and colorful the way my pack never is, as we need to blend into the forest to hunt and they have no need to. I feel myself overcome with a sudden fear that I will be turned away.

It's so sudden and so powerful that I'm turned around to go home before I know it. I have to physically force myself back the way I came. I can do this. I can. I was invited.

I approach a were first, more scared of being eaten than of my kind's scorn. "Sir, I -"

"Food travels up front," the vampire near him says with a roll of her eyes and I flush and bite my lip and then remember other biting.

"I'm not food, there's a school and I was told I had to -"

"Oh, one of her ladyship's pets." The werewolf and the vampire share an exasperated but fond glance and he gestures me forwards. "You should be in the middle. Don't you know how fragile you are? Traveling back here could get you killed."

It's a little like being treated like a small and rather stupid child, but I'll take it over beatings and bruises. I bob my head eagerly and hurry on, quickening my pace to try to get to the middle of the caravan. The people I pass barely spare a look at me, they're too busy going about their days.

I hear songs that would make the most rowdy of all the hunters blush like a virgin, and the laughter is without malice or cruelty. It's pure. I realize as I listen to it that I haven't heard anything so lighthearted in a long time. In my pack there is always someone watching. Even the wolves.

Just past the tallest vampire I've ever seen, glistening with a faint sheen of sweat as he leads five ox on one lead and seems to sway with their movements, I see a little open cart with people gathered together in it. They aren't colorful like everyone else, their clothes aren't as fine and they aren't singing. I hurry forward before my nerve can fail me for a second time. This is it. I'm finally going to meet other people like me.

A boy with sandy gold hair spots me first and his freckled face breaks into a small cautious smile. "Ah another friend to join us," he says and reaches a hand down so that I find myself scrambling up into the cart itself before I've even said my hellos. "I'm Sam. Sit in here with us, it's easier on the legs."

"It's a better view, too," a small thin girl with flat dark hair says and there's a little laughter as the others glance over the cart at the vampire soldiers marching just ahead of us, all beautiful and fair.

"I'm Ella," I say cautiously. "The goddess said there's a school..."

"It's a training camp," the girl says firmly. "It's going to help us find our souls."

"No one said that, Rachel," Sam says, helping me settle at the edge of the cart near a plump girl who might be the most beautiful woman I've ever seen except the Goddess, and a little boy who couldn't be more than a year or two beyond his gift ceremony. "I heard it's where we'll be given a chance, and that's it."

"They say we could die there," the little boy says, looking up at me. His expression is very still but his eyes glitter like little black rocks and I notice that he's wearing a hat with devil horns on it. "They say that most of us do."

"Better than being out there," another boy says softly and we share a glance. It's the first time anyone has understood that. Anything is better than being us and being out here. I open my mouth to say something comforting when a strong hand loops around my wrist and I'm being pulled bodily out of the cart and onto the ground.