The Rejected Bloodline

Chapter One:First shift

Rowan left the garage a little later than normal that evening. The last customer had taken longer than expected and by the time he locked up the sun was already low over the rooftops of Ridgewood, throwing long orange light across the empty street. He pulled his hood up out of habit, more from the chill in the air than anything else, and started the walk home the way he did almost every day of his life, past the hardware store, past the closed bakery, past the old fence line that marked the edge of town before the trees took over.

Ridgewood was a small place. Everyone knew everyone, or thought they did. Rowan had lived there his entire life and still felt like an outsider most days, though he could never explain why. He kept his head down around people, not because he disliked them, but because something in him always felt like it did not fit quite right next to everyone else. His mother used to tell him he was just quiet by nature. He used to believe her.

That evening the walk home felt normal at first. The wind moved through the trees the way it always did this time of year, and the sound of his own footsteps on the gravel road was the only company he had. He was thinking about nothing important, maybe what he would eat for dinner, maybe how tired his arms were from work, when the first wave of pain hit him without any warning at all.

It started deep in his chest, a burning that did not feel like anything he had felt before. He stopped walking and pressed a hand against his ribs, certain for a second that something was wrong with his heart. The burning spread fast, down through his stomach and out along his arms, and his skin began to feel too tight for his body, like it had shrunk around him while he was not paying attention.

He tried to keep walking, thinking maybe if he kept moving it would pass, but his legs betrayed him almost immediately. Pain ripped through his spine and he dropped to his knees behind a row of bushes just off the path, gasping for air that would not fill his lungs the way it was supposed to. His back arched on its own, pulled by something he had no control over, and he heard a sound come from deep inside his own body, a crack that should have terrified him more than it did, because by then the pain had taken up all the space his fear needed to live in.

He tried to call out but no human sound came from his throat. His hands were the first to change. He watched, horrified, as his fingers curled inward and dark fur pushed up through the skin along his knuckles. His jaw stretched forward with a pressure that felt like his whole face was being pulled apart from the inside. His spine bent and lengthened. His clothes tore apart around him as his body kept growing, kept twisting, until he was no longer standing on two legs at all.

He was on four legs now, low to the ground, covered head to tail in dark fur, his heart pounding somewhere inside a chest that no longer felt like his own. Panic took over completely. He tried to run, but his body did not move the way he wanted it to, and he crashed through low branches, blind with fear, with no idea where he was going or what he had even become.

Then a voice cut through the panic clean and steady.

Stop moving, she said. You are only making it worse.

A girl stepped out from between the trees ahead of him, and she did not look afraid of him at all, which confused him more than anything else that had happened so far. Her hair was dark red, pulled back tight against her head, and her eyes stayed locked on his without flinching. She moved slow, careful, the way someone moves around something they respect the danger of but are not scared of either.

Breathe, she said. Slow. In and out. Let your body catch up to itself.

He did not understand how her voice reached him the way it did, but something about the steadiness in it cut through the chaos in his mind. He forced air in through his nose and out again, over and over, the way she told him to, and slowly, painfully, he felt the direction of the change begin to shift. His bones started pulling back toward their old shape. Fur receded from his skin. It hurt just as much going backward as it had going forward, but this time some small part of him understood what was happening even without knowing why.

When it finally stopped he was on his knees in the dirt, human again, chest heaving, bare skin exposed to the cold night air. He grabbed the remains of his torn shirt and pulled it against himself, more out of instinct than modesty, and looked up at her with wide, exhausted eyes.

What did you do to me, he asked, his voice rough and unfamiliar even to himself.

I did not do anything to you, she said. That was already inside you. I only kept you from hurting yourself while it happened.

That is not possible, he said. People do not turn into animals.

She almost smiled at that, but stopped herself before it fully formed.

You just did, she said.

He opened his mouth to ask her name, but she was already stepping backward into the shadows between the trees, unhurried, like she had somewhere else she needed to be.

Go home, she said over her shoulder. Talk to whoever raised you. They know more than you think they do.

Before he could get another word out she was gone, swallowed completely by the dark trees, as if she had never been standing there at all. Rowan stayed on his knees a long moment, torn shirt clutched in his hands, his whole body still trembling, trying to convince himself that none of what just happened had actually happened.

But somewhere underneath the fear and the confusion, a part of him already knew it had.

He stood on shaking legs a while later and started the long walk back toward town, moving slower than before, his mind circling the same impossible questions over and over with no answers waiting for him anywhere along the way. The trees around him did not feel the same as they had that morning. Nothing around him did anymore.