Prologue
I'd heard rumors of others like me, but I never knew they were true. My whole life, I'd thought I was alone, the only freak girl with wings in the world. The wings I could stand, if I had just been born with them and raised as a normal person with a normal family who just had a pair of wings to hide under clothes. But I wasn't in a normal family and I knew wouldn't ever be. In fact, if it weren't for TV I probably wouldn't even know they existed.
I'd broken out of the freaking torture-pit of a research facility where I was created two years ago, and let me tell you, living on my own had been no picnic. All you teenagers out there who've wanted to run away and think that it's no biggie, try doing it while being hunted down by wolf-human hybrids called Erasers. If you're picturing Taylor Lautner running after me, you've got another thing coming. Erasers can shift into their more wolfy form, yes, but they're not fully wolfs. It's like something from a nightmare, giant hulking wolfs running on two legs after you, their yellow eyes hungry and crazed with long fangs ready to tear out your throat. They're fast too. Really fast.
For the first year or so (I'm not really sure because I had no way of telling), I lived in treetops, drinking from streams and bathing there too. I learned how to make a fire and how to use said fires to cook squirrels and whatever else I could catch. For you sissies in the back going "Ewww!", you try almost starving to death. Bambi begins to look more and more like food. In a way you could say I turned wild in that time, learning to survive like a full bird of prey. But you see, I'm only two percent avian, ninety-eight percent human. How is this possible you say? Ask the mad scientists that created me. One of them got the bright idea to graft avian DNA into a human embryo and look what happened.
If it sounds anywhere close to cool, you've got it all wrong. Scientists aren't nice people. They're power-crazed, selfish, sociopaths. Every day spent in the Institute for Higher Living was Hell. It was... I remember... blinding lights, that overwhelming antiseptic smell... I spent my life either strapped down to an operating table, performing some brutal test, or in a cage. I can't even think about it without my heart racing and feeling like I'm about to throw up.
Anyways, after a while of surviving all alone in the forests of Pennsylvania and then later Virginia, I found out it was possible to live with other people. It was actually easier, because the Erasers seemed a bit more reluctant to change in front of crowds, giving me a chance to run for it if I had to. The problem was finding a place to be without attracting attention. Like I thought I'd hit gold when I found out I was in a fairly populated Virginia city that happened to be next to a huge national park called Wolf Trap (I snickered, picturing an Eraser getting his foot clamped on by a trap if he tried to come after me). It was only after I flew over the town that I realized the houses were HUGE and there was no way I could ever fit in there. Can you imagine a girl that lived in the woods trying to blend in with rich people? Needless to say, I flew on to the next town.
Eventually I decided on Lynchburg. It was perfect; lots of people, not too wealthy, but not too many hobos, and it had many parks, as well as access to the river and mountains if I needed to escape. It's here that the real story begins.