Mum had always said lycanthropes came in all shapes and sizes, be it from birth or from their creation. Julee remembered how she first learned the fact back when she was just a little girl not unlike Chester, who was still as pink as the day he was born. Splattered with mud and skinned on both knees from crashing down on them too many times while wrestling he was no different than any other boy who went to play in the woods with his trusty canine companion, only this companion stood on two legs and wrestled back, and she giggled each time he cried foul when she took advantage of her status by grabbing his shirt’s sleeve with two rows of pointed fangs and pulling him into a bear hug before toppling the pair down to the earth. When they were up again, he looked so out of place as the two of them traded insults while one chased the other. No one would have suspected he would turn out just like the little girl who managed to lick him one way or another.

Watching the two reminded Julee of growing up back in the homeland. No one would have suspected the same when she was just as young. Ten years old and oblivious to the truth, she never could have pictured herself becoming a werewolf, but she had sure wished she could become one when little Thomas McGuire berated her family at school each day.

Ireland had been full of old myths and stories about what lived out in the moors. There had always been monsters just out of everyone’s eyesight, hidden away in the forests, deep within caves, or camped out in the rocky lands that seemed uninhabitable by man or beast. A few sheep culled, chickens found shredded on the ground in the first hours of daylight, or any other strange occurrences had all been blamed on the supernatural. Nessie was just a tourist attraction on the island — she was nothing compared to what else was out there to go bump in the night. In Dublin, the rumour had been that these creatures gave you a friendly wave and welcome during the day.

“I know what your family really is,” Tommy had shouted out to her, trailing her by a few metres. “Me mum’s told me all about it. Bunch of freaks, your family. Your mum and da are freaks. Makes you a freak, you freak!”

Maybe she had been wrong about nobody ever suspecting, maybe someone had been keener to the truth than she, or maybe she had just made herself an easy target for an angry young boy’s hostilities. Whatever the reason, it had become a weekday ritual. The McGuire’s farm had been down the road from Julee’s home, and Tommy was always at her heels when the final bell rang at school and they were free to go home. Ever since her friend Kyair McCaul had disappeared from the area, Julee had opted to walk instead of riding the bus back home no matter what the weather. The drizzle that graced her during the kilometre trod back to her house had been good for cleaning off the traces of her scuffles with Tommy and his friends during recess at school.

Her mind would wander to Kyair when she hoofed it over the worn, mucky trail of an otherwise grassy road’s edge. It was just the two of them against a busload of tactless grade-schoolers, who had pointed fingers and gossiped about whose family did what. The two had been forced to become kindred spirits, fighting off the masses that jabbed at them and called them names. Of the two, Julee had the shorter fuse, and when she left her muddy footprints by the front door long after the bus had already gone by her mother never had to ask why she was late: a meeting between a fist and some poor bugger’s jaw was always the reason she would reach a premature stop.

It was Kyair who had come up in her mind when it all happened. After enough days of having Tommy on her trail she had learned to tune him out, and he was nothing more than white noise, drowned out in the steady patter of rain on the ground, on her jacket, and on her head as the cool dampness soaked into her hair, and the wet slosh of mud parting way and then gripping to her boot with each step. The sudden strike between her shoulder blades gave her a painful shock, ripping the drone of Tommy’s words back into the front of her attention. He let out a laugh as she stumbled, and she turned around to see him tossing a stone up and then catching it with a hand.

“Listen to me, freak,” he said, beaming with a painfully twisted, upturned smile. His hand jerked back, and she flinched as it appeared he was going to let this other rock go towards her like the first. There was another laugh, and his body relaxed. The grin remained emblazoned on his lips as he said, “That’s more like it.”

“You little shite,” she growled out, dropping her backpack in the muck of the roadway. Little girls were not supposed to swear, mum always told her. Little girls were not supposed to get into fights. Little girls were supposed to follow all the normalcies of socially acceptable behaviour. What mum should have told her was little girls never turned into werewolves. But with little Thomas pinned under her furry, snarling mass that would have just been another one of mum’s rules she would have ended up breaking.

Tommy was screaming, and he left a mark of his stench behind to be washed away by the rainwater when she finally let him go. He was short on words as he fled. She never had Tommy to worry about after that.

How she had gotten home without being caught still remained a mystery to her. A mud-caked little girl with a tail stumbling alongside the roadway should have fallen into the category of the utmost unusual incidents, but no one seemed to notice. Even Missus McDermott, who had been busy rocking on her front porch, had failed to notice anything unusual as she stumbled by and had called Julee by her name.

She always had suspected that there was something unusual about the McDermott family. Later on, one of the grandchildren had a half-year stay with the pack, and as soon as Julee opened her mouth the girl started to chatter on about her grandmother Florence who lived in what she referred to as the “old country.” Missus McDermott had been a very perceptive old woman, but back then Julee chalked her up as little more than a blind, old biddy.

She fell into her house after she finally made it to the front door, leaving puddles with her sodden fur as she tracked mud across the hardwood foyer. She stank like wet dog, and she dropped her soaked cloak by the doorway, where she failed to pause. Taking off her shoes to set them aside was no longer an issue, as she had lost both them and her socks along the roadway, but the rest of her clothing had managed to remain intact. With a plaid skirt clinging to her damp fur in the same fashion that the coat stuck to her skin, and a formerly white short sleeved shirt that fit her more snugly than before now taking on a much darker grey colour she shakily carried herself towards the den.

Stopped for a confrontation with the family’s golden retriever, she was met with a growl and a series of barks that caught her attention and forced her to a standstill, and she felt her ears lay back as she shouted out for her mother.

She had been so terrified about what would happen when one of her parents first caught sight of her. To be shooed out the door and chased out with Belle, the family’s dog, nipping at her heels, to hear the screams of horror as her mother threw the contents of the living room at her only daughter, or to have her father look down the barrel of his shotgun at his flesh and blood: each fear that popped into her mind had been worse than the last.

However, even as wide-eyed as her mother had become when she first came around the corner, there never was any recoil from her daughter’s appearance, no trace of fear. The one thing Julee remembered most about the night was falling into her mum’s arms, which were opened as she took an awkward number of trembling steps towards the woman, and she suddenly felt safe again.

She was a werewolf, and back then she had been one who had been in desperate need of a warm bath and a seat beside the fire. Mum and dad had been in disguise, hiding a great secret behind starburst eyes for their own daughter’s sake. They had wanted her to live in the real world, to live life as just another girl who went to grade-school, but the truth had opened to one more member of a whole family of lycanthropes living on a farm in the midst of Dublin. The rocked foundation of their lives had to be uprooted, and they had to disappear for Julee’s sake. It had been time for her to learn about who and, more importantly, what she had become.

In Rome, or at least New York’s version of it, and in the middle of untouched wilderness and camped out under the stars only a stone’s throw away from what some called the Capital of the World she had found where home really lay. Before, she had thought she understood community, but she had only seen it through her parents, and it was only when she arrived at home that she was able to see all the traits that the people in her parent’s community shared with those in the pack. As a child, young, innocent, and not even knowing herself, she would have never imagined the future that had become a part of her daily life.

What did Chester’s future hold for him, she had to wonder, being born into the acceptance and open arms of a community whose, for lack of any better term she could imagine, humanity was its greatest shared trait? He seemed more innocent than she did with the world on the outside of a bubble that had not yet burst as it collided with the ground. He only knew Arianna as a wolf, but the little girl had never been completely human in the same respect that Chester had never been a wolf: neither of them had taken to the turn yet. He only knew Julee as a wolf — even during the occasional moments where she reverted back to her birthday suit he treated her just the same as always. He even knew Kyair, who would never be anything but a grown up version of the girl on the bus to Julee, as a wolf, and the woman was rarely seen outside of a human form. To Chester, they were all the same.

Still, as she watched the scruffy boy, whose only patch of fluff was the unkempt mop of red atop his head, meld momentarily with a girl, whose dark and downy fuzz covered her so well that the only discernable flesh tone on her was hidden in the shadow of the hollows of her ears, in a friendly embrace, she thought that maybe Chester had it all figured out better than she could ever hope.