"Ian, calm down! That's impossible, she's human." Michelle said, trying to comfort her older brother.
"I thought so too, but I'm telling you, she has to be one of us! Her scent... It's like nothing I've smelled before, and when our eyes met..." Ian trailed off, getting lost in his thoughts.
"Ian, werewolves are born, not made. She wouldn't have just gone her whole life not noticing shifting at least once a month, or hearing her wolf talk to her. AND, she doesn't smell like a wolf. Not to sound creepy or anything, but I checked her scent when I was changing her. I'll give you this though, she doesn't smell like any other human I've smelled before." she said.
"There are ways to check. Maybe she found some way to disguise her scent from other wolves, I don't know. Wolf or not though, she IS my mate." he replied.
***
Bella was trying, and failing horribly, to fall asleep. After having what felt like a whole bucket of adrenaline dumped into her body, sleep was basically a pipe dream. She sat up and slid over to the side of the bed. Well, if I can't burn any of this energy off, then I may as well check out the view from up here, she thought.
The room was on the third floor of the house, which from what she'd seen so far must have been really big. Carefully standing , she limped/hopped/wobbled to the sliding glass door that lead to the balcony that looked out over the ocean outside. Stepping out and balancing herself on the railing, she quickly found what she was looking for:
The moon.
It was beautiful tonight, casting itself over the gentle ripples of the ocean. Almost completely swollen now, she was sure tomorrow it would be completely full. She got lost in it's white depths, studying every single cliff, crater, and cragg that dotted it's surface. The night sky's so much clearer here than back in Buffalo, she thought. There were no city lights to bleed into the sky out in Alaska. You got the real thing when you looked up at the stars.
Staring at the moon was therapeutic for Bella, all of her worries left her mind when she gazed at it. She had no idea why, but she'd always been obsessed with it.
Slowly, subtly, she felt another presence push forward to the front of her mind.
"Shit..." she whispered out loud. "Cmon, not now, please not now..." she continued.
"Relax, it's just me", a cheery female voice said to her in her mind. "The moon looks so beautiful tonight! I had to come see it." It was strong and hopeful, and Bella knew it better than her own.
"You can't 'see' anything, because you aren't real." Bella replied to the voice, trying to push the other entity back into her subconscious.
"You can keep telling yourself that, but it'll never come true." the voice said, a tinge of sadness apparent in it's tone. "Why can't things be like they used to Bell? We used to be best friends, until those people turned you against me."
Bella sighed heavily. She was only 6 when the voice first started. At first, her parents just thought she has an imaginary friend, but within a year, her father started to take her to every doctor in the city. By eight, she was so heavily drugged she could barely stay awake during the day. The voice never left though, and when her father couldn't medicate it away, he tried beating it away.
At any mention of her friend, Dasani, her father would chain her to a pipe in the basement, and whip her with his belt, stopping only to occasionally grab another beer now and then. After, she'd be left chained down there for hours on end. Her mother was despondent at best, complicit at worst. The only real difference between the two was that her mother preferred wire coat hangers over belts. Eventually, she began to resent the voice for the pain their friendship had brought her; the wounds were so serious at times that even now, nearly two decades later, she continued to bear the scars on her back.
"I know Dasani, I remember. I can't let you out though, not after what happened last time..." she replied sadly.
"They killed Him."
"I know."
"They were going to kill us next."
