Sometimes life deals some horrible cards. But keep hold of them, because one day you may be thanking your unlucky hand.

At least I, Florence Hackleford, found this the case.

I was born into the world on an exceptionally hot summer's day, or, at least, my mother would always claim it was exceptionally hot, perhaps the hottest day that Portsmouth had ever known, but I remember my father would always comment at this point that he did not recall that particular day being any hotter than any other day in mid-July. But, whether it was hot or not, it was my destiny to be born on that day, to two parents who would love and cherish their child, yet swear that they would never have any more.

Thomas and Susan Hackleford were perhaps two of the most well liked people to ever wander into our society, perhaps because of their great ability to integrate themselves within any social group that they may have found themselves in. They were respectable, well-to-do members of society, working in respectable jobs and leading respectable lives. They were always neat and ordered, fit and healthy, fresh and clean. Everybody liked them, and they liked everybody. And I, Florence Hackleford their daughter, was almost none of the above. Except being clean; I had enough decency to appear at least that. I was an only child, and although I found I was never subject to those negative traits to which only children often suffer from such as selfishness or spoiltness, there was a sort of inevitable social awkwardness that hung around me and followed me forever more.

My parents, worried that I would not follow in their footsteps of being everybody's best friend, had futilely attempted to squash this social awkwardness out of me by putting me through years of torment in extra-curricular clubs. But their attempts were in vain. In sports, I was assumed good, as I had quite a height that I inherited from my father, yet my feeble upper body strength and general athletic ability meant that my skills in sport could only be used so far. I was usually placed in a goal somewhere as a sort of barrier. In theatre, my tallness was again recognised, this time as an ideal at instantly becoming a tree or a lamppost, while other aspiring actors and actresses of six or seven years old became the dragons or the princesses. Music was something that it could be argued that I excelled somewhat in. The piano teacher commented on my admirable long fingers and (slightly freakish) ability to stretch to even the most adventurous of chords, which I think meant that I was good.

But alas! The moment I was proclaimed of good enough quality to play in a group, when I was but ten years old, the whole thing fell to pieces as I was ridiculed by the other members of the youth band for my inability to function in the social situation. Looking back at my past self with an older, somewhat wiser, perspective, I can clearly see the mistakes in which I made as child, and can think of hundreds of amendments that I could have made to my behaviour that would have had more positive results. But unfortunately, it is not likely to be possible in my lifetime to return to the past and amend my previous faux-pas. But then again, as my mother once told me; anything is possible.

When I was fourteen years old, and had applied myself with a small amount of success in the world of secondary school; excelling at my studies, but failing slightly at making friends and instead retreating further into the unsocial hovel that was my destiny, my parents decided that I had earned a treat, and we went on a back packing trip to the Lake District. If my parents had sat me down and asked me what I would consider a treat to myself, I was quite certain that a back packing trip to the Lake District would not have been it. Nevertheless, I had been brought up to do always what my parents (or other senior/member of authority in my company) told me to do, hence the continuing of the various torturous childhood activities, and so I threw on some walking boots and a rucksack and off we went.

When we were just three days into the trip, and my feet felt as though they were irrecoverably ruined with blisters, and tempers between my parents regarding map-reading were running high, we found ourselves and our tent pitched in a secluded spot, with the opening to a dense wood on our left, and the drop of a hill that we had climbed earlier in the day on our right. Night had fallen not long ago, and the dying embers of our campfire still glowed slightly as I sat, alone, outside the tent; my parents having retired to their sleeping bags following a further map-related feud. But the main source of light was not coming from the flickering fire anymore, but instead from the moon, that beamed above us, bright. It must have been a full moon, or thereabouts, for I was quite sure that I had never seen a moon quite so big and round before. While I was transfixed with the concurrent beauty and pity of nature, something much more unnatural, or perhaps supernatural, was taking place in the woods behind me.

The sounds of ripping canvas and my parents' screams, though sounds that would come to haunt me forever, came far too late for me to do anything other than to whip around just in time to see a large, no a massive, grey wolf standing amidst the remains of the tent and my parents. I was perhaps lucky that this horrific scene did not remain in my vision long, for the wolf swiped at me with a massive paw, and pain erupted across my left shoulder where it made contacts, and I fell, giddy with pain and shock and the most horrific grief, over the hilltop and tumbled down into irrepressible darkness.

x-x-x

When I was next aware of anything at all, the rich smell of earth was filling my nostrils, and my whole body was groaning in pain. At first, I felt disorientated, as though I had had a strange dream, and another strange dream was currently occurring. But my senses were far too awake for this not to be reality. I felt somewhat paralysed; rooted to the spot and unable to move. I opened my eyes.

It was perhaps not yet dawn, for light only stole around in patches in the sky. My view was obscured largely by the thick soil I seemed to be lying in, and I judged from the angle of the image that my body was twisted into an unnatural form. I tried to move, whereupon a shooting sensation rushed down my left arm, and the rest of my body moaned in protest, but I eventually returned myself to a recognisable seating position. Looking down at my shoulder, to where the majority of the pain was coming from, I saw that my shirt sleeve was completely covered in dry, crusty blood. My own. Peeling back the shirt, which was not difficult owing to the large number of rips in the arm, I lay eyes upon four large, deep scratches; starting where my neck met my shoulder and finishing somewhere between my shoulder and my elbow. They were a horrific, almost purple colour, and blood was still seeping through in some places. I stared, horrified, until the memory of the previous night's events came flooding back to me, and there was no words to describe my horror.

x-x-x

I ran up the hill as fast as my protesting, aching body would allow, gasping and sobbing as one does in such a situation. The scene that reached me at the top was one I hope nobody will ever have to witness in their lifetime. Blood, ripped tent canvas, hideous remains of my parents' bodies, and a sleeping naked man, a stranger, lying in the midst of it all.

The man stirred as I approached, desperately trying to retain the urge to vomit everywhere. On the man's back were four scars, large and purple still, and I was just puzzling over the similarities between them and my scratches from the wolf, and why on earth a naked man had appeared in this scene of desolation, when the man awoke with a start, and whipped around to face me. He had very short grey hair, but was not especially old, perhaps my father's age or thereabouts. His eyes were a pale green, and his face covered in a stubble that put my father's clean shaven face to shame. At the sight of me, his eyes widened in horror, and he leapt to his feet and began racing back into the woods from which the wolf must have come from.

Desperate for answers, for somebody to talk to, and not wanting the man to go the same way as my parents, I chased after him.

"Wait!" I called. "WAIT! It's not safe in here, there's a...wolf or something!"

But the man didn't seem to hear me or care what I was saying. He was running away as if there were no tomorrow. Have previously commented on my lack of athletic ability, despite the circumstances, I was impressed at my sudden ability to be able to keep up the chase. The pains in my body seemed to have vanished, and I was only left with the stinging of the scratches in my shoulder.

"Wait, stop!" I tried again desperately.

To my great relief, the man had reached a clearing in the wood that seemed to have no escape. He was trapped, and I was grateful for it.

"Please," I gasped, when I, too, had reached the clearing. "I just want to talk to you. And warn you. There's a wolf or something in these woods, it...it killed my parents. Or rather, it brutally savaged them, whichever you want to pick..."

The man wasn't really listening. He was twitching about, looking for a gap in the thick density of trees that surrounded us. He looked severely troubled.

"And why were you there anyway?" I asked. "Did you see the wolf? I need as much evidence as I can if I'm going to get any justice for my parents..."

The man suddenly looked at me properly for the first time. His eyes fell to my shoulder, where the dried red blood stood out against the white of the shirt. This seemed to trigger some sort of reaction. He swooped down on me suddenly, gripping my elbows.

"Look," he said, his voice low and rasping. "You have to get out of here. You have to get as far away from here as possible-

"What? What do you mean? I can't leave now! My parents, you..."

"How old are you?" the man asked abruptly, letting go of my elbows but not moving away.

"Fourteen," I answered.

This seemed to distress the man further. He sat down on a nearby tree stump, looking horrified at his own hands.

"Fourteen," he repeated in no more than a whisper.

I felt uneasy. "Look," I said. "I really think we ought to go and find some help. The wolf could be here at any moment-

I was cut off by the man standing up and gripping me roughly once more.

"Don't you understand?" he rasped in my face. "I am the wolf. It was me."

His eyes were popping about madly in his face and he looked quite barmy.

"But..."

The man let go, and turned around to show me the scars on his back. "I am a werewolf." The words were spoken slowly and defiantly, with emphasis upon each word. But it still took me several minutes before I could register what had been said.

"Y-You're a-a werewolf?" I stammered. "But things like that don't exist! They're not real, they can't be real."

"Oh they're real alright," said the man, darkly. "Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the lot of them. The supernatural world and the natural world don't often collide, but when they do, this happens."

I looked at the ground. Was this man actually completely barmy? Did he honestly believe that vampires and werewolves actually existed? And was he so mad that he thought he actually was one?

"But..." I started. "My parents...?"

The man shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not responsible for my actions when I'm changed, but that doesn't mean that I was not entirely to blame."

This was even more disturbing. This man actually thought that he had killed my parents, when I had seen the vicious wolf commit the act.

"But," said the man. "The real problem's not your parents."

"It's not?"

"No. You see, they're dead now, terrible tragic and all, but they don't have to go back into society like you do. Because, you see, I'm afraid that you're the biggest problem around here."

"M-Me?" How could I be the biggest problem? My parents had been literally destroyed, and here was a lunatic man speaking to me of werewolves and ghosts! I hardly seemed much of a problem with reflection.

"Yes, you." The man pointed to my left shoulder, where the scratches still stung and the arm still ached. "You see, you're a werewolf now too."

"W-What?" My heart felt as though it had dropped into my stomach.

"I'm sorry," said the man. "Really, I am. I would never wish this life upon anybody."

"But, they're not real. Werewolves aren't real."

"Believe me, they are. And come the next full moon, you'll be believing it yourself."

The man now extended a hand to me. "I'm sorry we had to meet in this way and part in an equal manner." He said. "My name is Finn O'Toole."

I shook his hand, numb with shock. "Florence Hackleford." I said, in no more than a whisper.

Finn O'Toole smiled. "Never stay in the same place for too long," he said, as the one piece of advice, before turning and disappearing through the gap in the trees, and leaving me quite alone.

x-x-x

That was five years ago, and the memory of which still haunts me to this day. My memories of the events following that day are not so clear in my mind, but I can still recall having to eat rats to survive and spending most nights alone in a forest somewhere. The most vivid memory would be the pain of the transformations, that came consistently at every full moon; spasms erupting through my body, and the fear when I woke the next day that I had savaged an entire village. But this never happened, perhaps because I lived in reclusive spots, steering well clear from humans. Although Finn O'Toole had warned me never to stay in the same place for very long, my sentimentalities that formed attachments to particular areas meant that I was not quite able to move about as much as I perhaps should have.

I often thought about Finn O'Toole and where he was and what he was doing. Though I did not blame him entirely for my parents' death, there was a sort of blind hatred that arises in such a situation. I didn't hate him really, but sometimes I thought I did. He had ruined my life entirely. At least, that's how I viewed it in the beginning, but then I realised that perhaps my life wasn't ruined, it was just changed; now running down a different path, a different destiny. The horrible cards had been dealt, but it was now down to what I was going to do with these horrible cards.

When I was about eighteen, and had been living the life of, there was no other word for it, a beast in the wilderness, for four years, I decided that it was time I tried to integrate myself into society and live alongside the human race once more. This was easier said than done, for the years in various woods had left me looking wild and quite inhuman. I found myself into the town of Southampton, and when I first caught sight of a reflective surface, I was quite repulsed by the beast staring back at me. I hurriedly threw the cloak I used for warmth over my head, and begged for a room in a local hotel. There, it took me a while to get used to the human ways that I had become quite unaccustomed to over the years. The streaming water of the shower frightened me, and the ticking of the clock drove me insane.

But, eventually, I began to feel vaguely normal, and was surprised when I next looked in the mirror to see a shadow of my former self. Of course, five years in the wild is bound to make certain changes to one's appearance that are not likely to be recovered by a simple shower. My hair, for instance, was so long and ragged, that actual knots had formed at the bottom. I took a pair of scissors to it, and cut it to my shoulders. My body was covered in various cuts and bruises, and there were of course the scars on my left shoulder. But all in all, I thought I could at least pass for an everyday citizen and not be mistaken for Frankenstein's monster.

But then a larger problem arose. I realised that I did not have any money. Not a penny to my name. The hotel would want payment for the room, I needed to eat, and I needed clothing. It was then that I thought perhaps I should just give up entirely, and return to my feral life, but my reflection in the mirror urged me not to slip back into my old habits. I was born into the human world, and in the human world I must now live.

In the dead of night, I wrapped the bed blanket around me like some sort of cloak, and stole from the hotel bedroom from the bathroom window, which was located conveniently only a few levels from the ground. My life as a werewolf had increased my strength and athletic ability, which was something that now came in handy as I lowered myself from the window ledge and jumped to the ground. When I was far enough away from the hotel to think that they would not come after me demanding their twenty pounds for the room, I settled myself down in a doorway, feeling that I would have to try and sort things out for good in the morning.

x-x-x

In the morning I wandered the streets, eating a piece of bread the baker's wife had given me in return for the baker pushing me out of his doorway and telling about "dirty vagrants". I don't know how he could call me dirty, when I had showered the previous evening. If he wanted to see dirty, I thought, he should have seen me twenty four hours ago.

The world, it seemed, had not changed drastically in five years of my abscence; people were still driving around in cars and wearing jeans. Well except me; I was wearing a bed blanket. I checked the streets of shops, gaining strange looks for my attire, until I found what I was looking for. A large department store, emblazoned with advertisements for 'this season's skinny jeans' and smart phones, whatever they were. I went inside. The smells were so familiar to me, that I was overcome with such a case of nostalgia I had to grip a passing man in a suit in order to remain upright. This earned me an exclamation and look of disgust, but I didn't care. One sniff of the scene inside the shop returned me immediately to the disastrous shopping trips with my parents, and the years of trying on school uniform that had been cut short...I went and had a little weep by the women's wedding hats to dispel my sudden rush of emotion. When I was finished, I returned once more to the task in hand.

I had never stolen anything in my life before, having been brought up to be moral and good, and being besides far too scared of the consequences of getting caught. But there's fear and morality, and then there's sheer desperation. I felt slightly nauseous as I shoved a shirt and some jeans into the folds of my blanket, and even more so as I made my way to the exit, which seemed an awful lot further than it had on the way over to the women's clothes.

I found myself laughing, giddy with hysterical relief, as I changed into proper clothes for the first time in years in a nearby public toilet. A builder wolf-whistled at me as I made my way to my next point of focus; the bank; but I think this was less to do with the idea that I had finally reached a state of attraction with my looks, and more to do with the fact that I had clumsily buttoned my shirt and it was consequently hanging open at the front. At the bank, I presented myself as Florence Smith (this was a new identity I was trying to establish for myself), the student, and after a couple of questions that I improvised the answers to (the years of drama class were finally paying off), I was allowed to take out a student loan. Money secured, I returned once more to the department store to repent for my earlier sins by buying some further items of clothing and some new shoes. I tried to over-pay for them, by way of apology for the earlier theft, but the cashier called me back before I could leave to give me my change. I ate a hearty meal in a local cafe, and then set about finding a hotel in which to settle down in.

This was how I spent the majority of my existence over that next year. Various lies tumbled off my lips to keep my economic position stable, and it was surprising how easily I fell back into the way of life as functioning human being. I moved around; London, Cornwall, Bristol, always finding some secluded wood for my transformations each month. As spring rolled into summer, and summer back into autumn, I found myself on Barry Island in Wales. Which I suppose is where the real story truly starts.