Shun

The others couldn't seem to quite understand that I had no clue what was going on. Several times I had to explain that I didn't remember what happened from when they woke me up, to when I found myself in that alleyway. They knew about as much as me though. When I asked them everything that happened, they started to explain up to the point when I supposedly ran from the hospital.

By their description and story, I shouldn't have been able to climb out of the window and run halfway across the city. If I had done that, then it was probably a good thing that my room was on the first floor. Or else I might have hurt myself without ever knowing it. Murucho had told me when they first brought me here in the morning, they had taken some tests.

I asked, "What did they find out?" The test results could have been something of use to me and jog my memory back. A grave look fell over on everyone's faces. I looked at them and let out a short, humorless laugh. "Come on guys, it couldn't have been that bad." Dan started and said, "The doctors think it's just an infection that slipped past the antibiotics. But-" He cut himself off.

By Dan's grim expression, the next words I'd hear wouldn't be good. I had almost wished that I didn't ask what my tests revealed about my health. I was listening intently as I waited for Dan to finish the rest of his sentence. I could see by his face that he wasn't going to though.

Murucho then stepped up and said, "I've got this, Dan." Dan nodded his head and silently thanked Murucho. How bad could this really be? What was so wrong with my tests that it had my friends all emotional about?

Murucho pushed his glasses up and said professionally, "The doctors think that there's a possibility that you might have cancer." At that moment my world slowed down and all I could say was, "What?"

Murucho quickly added in, "But they seriously doubt that you have it. It's just a speculation for now until they can justify whether you do or don't. No need to get too uptight about it right now, Shun." I picked up on the sad tone in his voice.

They actually thought that I had cancer, even though they were trying to tell me that odds were I didn't. It wasn't very helpful knowing that my friends were already assuming that I had a deadly disease. Thanks guys. The nurse who about an hour took blood samples from me, walked in the room and said, "Visiting hours are almost over."

I found it odd that their visiting hours were past midnight, but somehow I think they gave my friends some leash since I had just been found a little while ago. The others stayed a few more minutes before finally being run out by the nurses, who kept nagging to them about the hospital's hours.

Once they were gone, a nurse flipped my room's light out and left me in the dark. Now I had a chance to think. I laid back in my bed and stared up at the plain white ceiling, and sighed. Cancer. I shook my head to try and get the echoing word out of my mind.

I didn't know really how the disease worked, so there was a possibility that it was the reason I didn't remember anything. It could have been the reason I ran off too. If I did have this disease though, was it caught early enough to be treated?

I guessed it all depended on what kind of cancer it was and how far along it may have been. I let out a stressed yawn. I wasn't physically tired, but my mind didn't want to live through this day any longer. Sleep was its escape for the time being, and I wasn't going to deprive it of it.

I shut my eyes, and was in a halfway awake and asleep state. I could hear what was going on around me, but was out cold. A dream started up, and all I could see was trees flying past me. I was running through the forest that was on the edge of the park, but all I saw were the plants in front of me.

Nothing to my sides or behind me. I couldn't even see myself. Why was I running? I was calm, so nothing was chasing me as far as I could tell. I was startled out of my dream by a creaking sound, followed by a clicking on the tiled floor. Now waking up, I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

The first thing my eyes fell on was my window. It was wide open, and letting in the chilling night air. I raised an eyebrow. Had a nurse opened it up while I was sleeping and forgotten to close it? I heard the clicking noise again and turned to my left.

I almost fell from my bed out of shock. In my hospital room, was a wolf. How had it opened the window and gotten inside? My heart sped up, and I started to feel ill again. As weakness began to overcome my body, I was unable to hit the nurse call button for help.

The before my eyes, the wolf's form turned into the outline of a human. It had hands, legs, everything. My heart was going ninety miles an hour, and the faster it went, the sicker I felt. In the dark, I saw the 'person' pull out a syringe like diabetics use, and he took the cap off and stuck it into my leg. I cried out, not knowing what in the world he was doing to me.

He yanked the needle out and threw it away in the little biohazard box, then flipped on the room's light. I got a good look at him now. Brown and black shaggy hair, blue eyes. His build was much more than mine, and he was clearly taller than I. I was trying to regain my breath when he said calmly, "Chill."

I snapped at him, "What did you inject me with!" He pulled out another syringe like the one he threw away and said, "Cortisol. It's a hormone that works the opposite of adrenaline. I couldn't afford you shifting in this place." Was this guys insane? Or was I insane?

I had just seen this guy turn from animal to human right before my very own eyes. "Sh-shift? What are you talking about!" I then realized that my heart had slowed down, even though I was still panicking in my mind. I also didn't feel sick anymore. What else was in that syringe other than that cortisol?

The guy told me again, "Relax. I'm going to explain everything to you in a moment." I didn't want an explanation. I wanted this guy to leave my hospital room before he stabbed me with something else. He walked over to my bedside and picked up my right arm and looked at where my bite marks were slowly fading away. "Rayden bit the fool out of you, didn't he?"

Rayden? Did he mean the wolf that bit me? He kept talking and said, "Usually the bites are fully healed by now. Your's is just starting to." My brain didn't want to comprehend anything any longer. I had been told I might have cancer, and now I was seeing people turn into wolves.

I'm going crazy. I'm going crazy. He then sniffed the air and looked at me intensely. "By the smell of it, you shifted not long ago." There he went again throwing around that word. I begged him, "Please just tell me what your talking about and what's going on. I can't take anymore mind games."

He closed the open window, and I felt a rush of relief as the cold air stopped coming in. "I'm sorry. I should have explained everything before I went on and on about something you don't know." Please don't let any of this be real. Please. I wanted to just wake up. I didn't care where it was; the hospital, Murucho's, my own home, or the alley.

I just didn't want to be going through this any longer. The guy placed his hand on his chest to point to himself. "My name's Wesley. The wolf who bit you was my cousin, Rayden."

I shook my head, trying to deny his words. "But you're a human. At least, you look human. How can you have a cousin who's a wolf?" Wesley smirked and said, "You look like a human as well, but you're not. Not anymore at least. You're just like me and Rayden. Different."

All I could stutter out was, "Wh-what do you mean different?" I was only registering half of everything going on. I would pick up some of his words, and then my thoughts would drown out the rest of them. Wesley said flatly, "You're different, because you're a wolf now. Like me."

Shun

I officially diagnosed myself as completely insane. This guy, who broke into my hospital room, turned from a wolf to human, stabbed me with a needle and injected me with something, was telling me that I was a wolf. Yeah, a wolf. Four legs, fur, tail. The whole nine yards.

I laughed and said, "You're insane. Either that, or I am. You might just be a figment of my imagination brought on by a fever or something." My voice started to waver from its slight humor to complete and udder denial. The doctors would seriously put me in a psyche ward if I told them, "Hey, I was told by some stranger last night that I'm a wolf." Wesley said to himself, "Why can't they be easier to explain to?"

He then turned his attention from himself and back to me. "You noticed that you started to feel sick after Rayden bit you, right?" I was going along with the whole Wolf's Name Is Rayden thing, and nodded my head. But how had this guy known that I started feeling sick after my wolf bite?

He hadn't been around me when I started falling ill. Unless he was some kind of stalker, which made me feel kind of violated. Wesley then said, "That sick feeling you got was your body trying to reject the new wolf in you. It's happened to all of us. Your body sees it as a virus, and tries to attack it like one, thus giving you that ill feeling."

Insanity had fried my brain, and I didn't argue back with this guy. I just listened. For some reason, I sensed a bit of truth behind his words. I should have been screaming for somebody to come and take him away, or me to the mental ward, but I didn't.

He said to me, "Until your body quits fighting it, you're going to feel sick every time you shift. Which again, I can tell happened to you not too long ago. By your smell, it was possibly earlier this morning when your shift started." I didn't know. If this was really true, then I didn't know.

It seemed irrational that I had turned into another species and ran around the city. Then again, I didn't remember anything. "Odds are since you're still an unstable new wolf, you won't have much recollection of the time you spent as one. But try and think back to something that you do remember."

The one word I registered was unstable. I asked him, "Unstable?" He nodded his head and told me, "All new wolves have the inability to control their shifts for sometime. They eventually gain control, and when they do they are able to hold onto some of their memories while they were in a new form."

I stared at him with what I guessed was a blank expression. He rolled his eyes and said, "I should probably tell you how the shifts work so you understand what I'm telling you a little better. We shift uncontrollably when first turned into wolves, but slowly gain control. There are other ways that the shift can be triggered. One case is intense stress, and another is increased heart rate. That's why I gave you that cortisol. It counteracts the adrenaline that was causing you to shift, and kept you in this body."

I saw things coming together very slowly. When I woke up in the alley, I felt a pull towards the forest in the park. If there was a wolf in me now, had it been trying to get there for safety? I then remembered the way my heart sped up after the police car almost had a wreck, and how I started to feel sick again.

Quickly, I had calmed down and felt better. Then there was when this guy showed up in my room and my heart had sped up, followed by the familiar sick feeling. All of it went away after Wesley stabbed my leg with that syringe. There was a muffled howl outside that was barely audible through my closed window.

Wesley said, "Looks like I'll have to finish up on giving you the rest of the introduction later. Here, take these with you." He dug into his pocket and pulled out about five syringes like the one he stabbed me with. "These are more doses of cortisol. There only for when you have adrenaline kick in, and are about to shift. They should stop the shift, but they won't stop your random shifts. Use these when only necessary, because you might not get anymore for a little while."

I looked at the orange capped syringes, then saw Wesley pushed open the window again and jumped to the other side. I could still see him. He turned around and closed the window back. His form and shape then started to change, and I heard the faint sound of four feet pounding the earth underneath them.

My eyes fell back to the syringes. This. This couldn't be my life and future now. I might wake up. It might all have been a dream. But everything felt as real as the needles in my hands. The reality of everything slammed down on me, and I passed out.

i almost wasnt able to get this up early due to threat of being dragged to Wal-mart. i've won though. ^^ my dog's scared the crap out of me. they heard thunder outside and barked, and i jumped and typed a whole sentence like; hdu;ashfa;hsfua. o.o i then proceeded to yell at them profusely. o.o read, review, and other things. ~Copperpelt~