(
Warning: This story contains violence and difficult themes such as death and murder. If that is not your cup of tea, Laura said it's okay for you to choose another of my other
stories. You can find my other stories in my
Storytelling label.)
Revenge: Best Served Under The Full Moon
It’s a funny thing. Dying, I mean.
First there’s the shock, the whole: “Oh no! I’m dead”. (Insert explicative after explicative.)
The next part is when you realize that you’re not in Heaven, or Hell. No, you’re just a spirit, looking down at your dead body that's lying in the middle of the woods.
That’s when you find out how you died.
How did I die? Oh. I was murdered. You know, a big tragedy. My ex-boyfriend, that asshole Trent, his weird brother, and his best friend, stabbed me to death. So many times, in fact, that I looked like Swiss cheese in that ugly white sweater that I wanted to throw away, but mom insisted I kept it.
And then I died in that ugly sweater.
I remember it clearly. My death, I mean.
Trent did the stabbing. His weird brother had smashed my skull in, and Trent’s best friend? He watched the entire thing. Sure he said “stop” a few times--wide-eyed and mouth agape--but he never stopped them. He never called the cops.
What did I do to deserve this death? Not a thing. Nothing.
The only thing I was guilty of was a terrible taste in men, clearly.
But that’s not the end of my story. No, just the beginning for me.
I looked down at my body, and that’s when I saw something glow. I looked up and saw that the Full Moon--big and yellow--was shining down onto my body.
The next part is kind of a blur, but I was back in my body again. My wounds healed, and I was back to life.
But as soon as I started to get up, I doubled over. I felt like I was dying all over again.
Bones cracking and crunching. I wanted to claw my skin away, it felt like it was rippling over thin and moving muscles. That’s when I looked down and saw paws, claws, and white fur.
I had turned into a wolf.
I felt alive in whole new way. I ran through the woods, wild and free. Eventually I tired out, and fell asleep on the forest floor.
When I woke up I was human again.
At first I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell the cops, after all, I was murdered. I did die. But by some miracle under that moon, I came back, stronger and more alive.
How do you explain that anyway? Go to the cops and say, “Yeah, so, um, Trent, his weird brother, and his best friend killed me, but I came back, and now I’m a werewolf.”
“Yeah, okay, crazy person!” They would say--and then shove me into a mental ward for life.
So that was out of the question. But then I thought of a deliciously devious idea. But was it really devious to plot to kill your murderers?
I found the clothes I was murdered in, dressed in them and found my way home, and I acted like nothing happened. Not a thing at all.
“Mara, what happened to your sweater?” My mom asked me as I walked through the front door. Not even a, “Mara, where have you been all night?” or “Mara, are you okay?”
She wasn’t worried about me--she was worried about the sweater.
I pulled the sweater up and over my head. I looked her straight in the eyes as I tossed it into the trash.
A side effect of dying and becoming a werewolf? You grow a pair.
***
I went to school, walked by The Murderous Trio, and flashed the biggest grin at them.
Trent screamed various explicative after explicative, his brother probably peed himself, and his best friend? Cried.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I went home after that. Another side effect of dying and becoming a werewolf? Apathy for school.
I waited until nightfall, waiting to turn into a wolf, but I never did. I guessed that it was true then what they say, that werewolves turn under the Full Moon.
I guess that’s also how I turned into one in the first place. There may not have been a God or a Heaven, but there sure as Hell was that moon shining over me.
I went to school everyday, just to walk by The Murderous Trio, and everyday I scared them. But they only knew half of my plan.
***
Finally after a month, it was the next Full Moon.
“I know what you did to Mara,” I wrote on a note, and left it in each of their lockers. I also said, “Tonight, go to where IT happened, or I’ll tell the Police.”
So, I went to the the woods. The Moon, full and shining, rose up to the sky. My bones cracked, and skin rippled, and I turned into a wolf again.
I howled in the distance and ran to the spot that I had died at. Sure enough Trent, his weird brother, and his best friend stood, shaking in their shoes.
I will spare you the gruesome details, but I chased them, and then I attacked them as brutally as they attacked me, and I didn’t stop until they were dead. I pulled them out of the light of the Full Moon, so that they wouldn’t come back from the dead.
They never woke up.
The next day it was all over the news: “Three teenagers attacked by a wild animal.” Along with their innocent faces from their school pictures, and…cue the crying parents! (Really tugs on your heartstrings doesn’t it?)
I laughed while they cried.
After all, would they have cried over them if they were actually convicted of my murder? If they were sentenced for life? If they were sentenced to
death?
No one knew what really happened, and no one would ever know that that they had murdered me. No one even knew that I had died.
But that didn’t matter. I didn’t care.
“Such a tragedy,” they said on the news.
Hah. What a joke. It was my
triumph.
Author's Note:
This is what watching too many Law and Orders, reading
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (the author who also wrote Gone Girl,) and reading Young Adult Urban Fantasy (with vampires, shape-shifters and such) will do to you. (And Halloween is coming up soon, as well!)
The wolf idea specifically came from "
The Wolf Man" in the
Blackfoot Stories. In that story a man turned into part-wolf--with a wolf head and wolf hands. But my mind thought:
werewolves! And thus, I set out to write a story about werewolves this week!
I knew I wanted to write a story about a teenage girl turning into a werewolf, so I looked up myths on how people turn into werewolves. I found two interesting myths on
Werewolf.com that you can turn into a werewolf by having the Full Moon shine on you, and then another where you can turn into a werewolf from being brutally murdered under the Full Moon. I combined the two and ta-da!
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