A Luna's heart

GREY'S POV The alarm clock woke me promptly at 4 a.m. To tell the truth, I couldn't tell if the alarm clock or the nightmare had woken me up. I lay still, looking at the dust motes dancing around the dim and flickering light bulb. I swallowed. My throat felt sore. I must also have screamed too. I guessed it was a good thing that my apartment was close to the main road, and that the occupants of this apartment block believed in playing loud rock and roll songs at all hours of the day and night. The music or the constant sound of traffic must have drowned out my screams. My body was drenched in sweat. My heart pounded like I had just run a marathon. I tried to bring the dream into focus. Already I had begun to feel the dream evading my efforts to remember it, like it always did. If I could remember what the dream was, it wouldn't seem so scary anymore, and it wouldn't haunt my dreams every night. Squeezing my eyes shut, I concentrated on remembering. I got vague glimpses of what I could only describe as a wolf. This wolf was bigger than any I had ever seen. It was huge. I felt instinctively that this was no ordinary wolf. I sensed that someone was trapped in the wolf. Almost like telepathy, I could feel the wolf's mind splitting, disintegrating, torn between human and beast. I could feel fear, shock and horror. But most of all I could feel pain. The pain was terrible, greater than any physical pain I had felt with one exception. Memories of my childhood were hazy, but I had felt something like this when I was ten. (I blocked that memory out. The nightmare was preferable to that.) At this point in the dream, something began to change. A realization began to dawn on me and as it did, my mind shied away from the truth, the truth that.... The shrill notes of the alarm clock intruded on my recollections. I felt a wave of anger and irritation course through me. I was closer than I had ever been to recalling the entire dream. I must have accidentally hit the snooze button instead of the stop button on the clock. Almost without thinking I reached for the alarm clock at my bedside, grabbed it and squeezed. I heard the sound of protesting metal and all at once I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my palm, then warm wetness. The clock I had held in my hand now looked like a shapeless lump of abused metal. A large shard of glass had pierced my skin. Dime size drops of blood fell slowly on the sheets. I opened my hand and let what remained of the clock fall to the floor. I slowly sat up and swung my legs out of bed. Carefully, I pulled the glass out of my palm. It came away slowly. I turned my palm the other way. The glass had passed through my palm and had come out of the other side. It was almost as if I had been crucified. I chuckled. It was either chuckle or go crazy. How could I have that much power to crumple metal without having being aware I had done it? For the last couple of weeks, I had been aware I was becoming unnaturally strong. I padded barefoot into the bathroom, turning sideways to get through the door. It was so small, but so was the rest of the apartment. I turned on the faucet, put my injured hand under the flow and let the water run over the wound, watching it flow into the rust spotted sink. I looked at myself in the cracked mirror above the sink. Strands of grey had begun appearing in my hair again. There were a lot of them this time. They had increased this last couple of weeks, and now outnumbered the black strands. To think that I wasn't twenty years old yet. Perhaps that was why my parents had named me Grey. I frowned as I thought about it. My parents couldn't have known though. In the pictures I had seen of myself as a baby, I had been a chubby dark haired kid. Perhaps the grey strands in my hair were another symptom of the sickness I had had to live with all of my life. Taking off my shorts, I climbed into the shower, and turned it on carefully.The icy deluge of water hit me, relaxing my muscles. Getting out of the shower, I hesitated then put a band aid on both sides of my palm. The holes in my hand would disappear before nightfall. That was another sign of my disease and the freak that I was. Before the wound healed, I would get stared at walking around with two visible holes in my hand. Calling attention to myself was what I wished to avoid the most. It was why I had come here to Lair Falls. I cleaned up the room, carefully cleaning up the blood with the soiled sheets, which I would wash later. Hurriedly, I put on a hoodie, sneakers and sweatpants. Heading out the door and locking it beside me, I ran down the stairs taking it two at a time. I met no one on my way down. All I could hear was the constant stream of music from various apartments in the building. The cubicle where the janitor was usually found was empty. Stepping outside, I quickly put up my hood, warming up for my morning run. “Grey,” someone called. The voice sounded hoarse and cracked, but familiar. It was dark outside. The streetlights here were all damaged. I couldn't see inches in front of me. Turning toward the sound of the voice, I saw at a little distance a bright red glow, like a crimson eye in the dark. I took a step towards it.