"Little girls, this seems to say
Never stop upon the way
Never trust a stranger friend
No-one knows where it may end
As you're pretty, so be wise
Wolves may lurk in every guise
Now as then, 'tis simple truth
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth"
Charles Perrault, (Little Red Riding Hood)
Ever since I was a child I have always been infatuated with the darkness, of the wicked tales my grandmother would tell me to warn me of the dangers of the forest and the monsters that lurked there. She never knew though, my grandmother, that her tales were real and the monsters she warned me about existed and I had seen them. To my grandmother monsters were nothing but fairy tales, to me and my kin though they were as real as the air that you breathe.
"Silver- are you listening child?" My grandmother snapped, her attention wavering from her knitting. I gazed at her with curiously mismatched eyes and she scowled at my pretence of innocence. "Silver is good for werewolves-"
"I thought silver killed werewolves grandma?" I asked returning my attention to the book on 1001 uses for fungi.
"For crying out loud girl, let a woman finish what she's saying before you go interrupting her. Must be your mother teaching you manners like that, I raised our Theodore to be a proper young man and-"
"Mum!" My father interrupts my grandmother's tirade. My grandmother never liked the idea of my father marrying my mother, she thought he'd get over it like a flu or something. She thought him going away would change his mind about all that "funny business" as she liked to call it but he didn't and here I am.
"As I was saying, Theodore, Silver is good for werewolves- good for killing them." She grinned, her skin stretching out and for a moment she was one of the monsters she warned me about. "Or Monkshood, wolfs bane in the vernacular I believe. Some say crosses but that's for the undead dearest, so you best remember that. There was a time when I was a girl they said to cut off a man's pen-"
"Agatha!" My mother forced her hands over my ears muffling the words my grandmother continued with. My father grabbed my hand and lead me out the room whilst my mother and fraternal grandmother started to argue, again. It's the same every week and I don't know why my mother continues to invite my grandmother over if they are going to argue every single time.
My father took out the slender stick he has been hiding in his jeans pocket all day, for all my grandmother might confess that my father is the perfect man- he is a complete slob. Picking me up my father sets me down on the sideboard so I can watch him make the ordinary into something more extraordinary. Magic. Like I said fairy tales are real in my family.
"Nothing up my sleeve," my father says rolling back the sleeves of his smartest shirt, revealing the not-quite-so respectable tattoos and scars. Twirling the wand elegantly in his hand my father summons the teapot and tea and boils the water all with a simple flick and swish. I watch him, whilst swinging my legs back and forth, turn our mismatched dining set into something more respectable for darling grandmother. "Magic."
I grin at him but my attention is beyond him and outside our kitchen window where five dark figures have appeared. All of them carry the tell tale stick in their hands and I smile wolfishly at my father.
"Wizards."
A/N: Heavily inspired by a great film called "The Company of Wolves".
Any takers on who the girl is?
-Octavia x