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Blood and Chocolate Shugoed Version

Misummer Moon 1

"Mom, you've been fighting again."

Amu glared at her mother

Midori Hinamori lolled in an easy chair, one long slim led thrown over her arm. She refused to stop grinning. A gash in her cheek bled slightly.

"You look awful," Amu said

"Yeah, but you should see the other bitch," Midorianswered. Scrached her scalp luxurously with both hamds, tousling her thick brown hair.

Amu sighed and came over to dab at her mother's face with a tissue grabbed from the box on the coffe table. She would ruin her beautiful fae. "Can't you and Saaya leave eachother alone?" It had been like this ever since they'd moved her from West Virginia, over a year now. She hardly new her mother anymore. "Can't you?" she repeated.

"Kukai called for you," Midori said, ignoring the question.

Amu rolled her eyes. That was all she needed. Couldn't he take a hint?

Midori sat up and looked directly at her daughter. "I thought that's where you were, with Rafe and the others."

"No I wasn't." She bristled at the thought. The five young males who were her only age-mates were likely to get the resy of the pack killed if they kept on going the way they were.

"So where were you?"

"Nothing."

As she left, Amu heard her mother growl softly in fustration.

Why did Midori aways have to have to bring up the Five? Couldn't she get it through her head that Amu didn't want to be with them?

The familier knot in her gut formed hard and tight. The fire last year had be the Five's fault- and Yoru's. She slammed the door to her room. The inside face of the door was channeled with claw marks, She grew her nails and ripped another row.

Yoru had to lose it and kill that girl.

Yoru had been acting wilder and wilder last spring, and talking crazy stuff. She heard him and the Five boast about midnight visits to town where they stalked humans in the shadows and scared them silly. What they did souned funny. Amu made them take her, too, But rumors started going aroung school. People were getting nervous. When Amu said maybe they should cool it, Yoru and the Five only laughed at her.

Then Yoru began to go off by himself, and something seemed wrong to her. He didn't talk as much. It drove her crazy.

I was half in love with Yoru, Amu thought as she stripped off her leggings. Kukai thought I was his girl, but I would have dropped him in a second for Yoru. She sniffed in disgust. Caring for Yoru made me stupid.

She'd seen their behavior spinning out of control, and she hadn't done a thing. She should have told her father what they'ed been up to, even if that meant she'd be in trouble herself. But you didn't squeal on your friends, did you?

Then the night of the Valentine's dance Yoru went to town and killed a girl in back of the school.

Amu still felt heat of anger when she thought of what he'd done. She couldn't help thinking he killed for some petty reason, like the girl turned him down. And he could have had me, she thought bitterly.

He must have been changing back when a classmate saw him crouched over the body. Before Yoru knew he was there, the boy took off and named him to the police.

The Five decided to help. They killed another girl while Yoru was in jail. They didn't let Amu know of their plans; they must have known she'd object. And I would have, she thought, but she wasn't sure.

"How could a boy be covered with fur? How could a human inflict such wounds?" the family lawyer pleaded for Yoru. The new killing proved there was a wild animal on the loose. Yoru had merely discovered the body, then had panicked and run. The case dismissed.

But someone from town believed the witness's tale of a wolf that turned into a boy, and late one night the inn and outbuilding burst into flames in six different spots, and black acrid smoke hid the moon.

In the late 1600s, her ancestors had fled from werewolf hysteria in France to the sparsely settled new world, and by the end of the century was settled in wild Louisiana. In ninetenneth century New Orleans the Verdon broke the ban on human flesh and the pack moved to West Virginia, where they were joined by the remnants of the German pack from Pennsylvania. Last year the forrbiden appetite had won again, and the pack took flight from the hills that had been its home for one hundred years and arrived refugees in Maryland suburbs-five families plus assorted others crammed into Uncle Rudy's run-down Victorian house in Riverview. With luck, no one would follow them here; they could mark new trails.

Thehouse on Sion Road had emptiedout gradually as the others found jobs and places to stay, until it held only Amu, Midori, and Uncle Rudy. Amu had thought that by this time they would have made plans for the future, but now the whole pack seemed to be crazy, her mother inclued. With more than half of them dead, no one knew his or her place anymore. There was constant squabbling. Surival depened on their blending in while they prganized and decied where they would move and settle for good, but at any moment the pack was likely explode in a ball of flying fur. They needed a leader badly, but no one would agree who.

Blend in, she thought. If only I could

Last summer she had hid in her room and slept mostly, and in early hours of the morning, the time when wolf-kind come home to shed their pelts, Amu would hear her mother crying inconsolably by her open bedroom window for someone who would never come home again.

By the time her junior year started, Amu had begun eating almost regulary, and Midori had found herself a job as a waitress at Sazuki's, a local dive. Gradually it wasn't so hard to make it through the day. Amu was no longer exhausted when she walked in the door at three-thirty, and schoolwork began to make sense.

She started to look longingly at the group of kids laughing together around the flagpole after school.

At first she though, Why should I make friends with people who would kill me if they new what I was? What if I give myself away? But the yearing continued. It was then she realized that she didn't know how to make friends.

She always had the pack around her, the pack now hid in their seprate dens. There were always pack kids. She never had to reach out for company, company was always there. The Five were still around, of course, but she couldn't bear to be with them, and they could never be just her friends now, anyway. They only saw her as a mate-be nice to one, the others would sulk and snap. Fight, fight, fight, that's what paying attention to them meant.

I want other friends, she thought. But no one seemed to want her.

She stood in front of her closet mirror in her T-shirt and twisted this way and that. Whats wrong with me? She wondered

There was nothing the matter that she could see. She was tall and leggy, like her mother, with full breasts, small waist, and slim hips that curved enought to show she was a female. Her skin was gently golden; it was always golden sun or not, and her pink hair was thick and long and wild.

So why was it that groups of girls stopped talking when she approached them at school and answered her openings with terse words that killed conversations she tried to start? Was she to good-looking? Was that possible? Was that a threat they saw? She was a beautiful loup-garou, she knew the Five howled for her-but what did human eyes percieve?

Theboys nudged eachother when she passed; she'd seen them out of the corner of her eye. They noticed her. And she could understand why one or two might blush and stammer if she talked to them. There were always shy boys who would die if any girl noticed them. But where were the bold ones.

Male or female, the resisted her. Could they see the forest in her eyes, the shadow of her pelt? Were her teeth to sharp? It's hard not to be a wolf, she thought. She missed the slopes where humans were far apart and the pack was close, and she hardly ever had to pretend.

I don't care, she thought, twirling around. I don't need humans. I still have the pack, and we'll be moving out again soon. But she did care. The pack was in shreds, and in the midst of these humans she was wolf-kind-loup-garou-and this made her an outsider and unwanted. But they would like me if they took the chance to know me, they just don't know me.

She flung herself onto her bed and streched her legs into the air to admire their sleek curves, holding her hips to brace herself aloft. She streched as hard as she could, toes pointed, fingers reaching, muscles in sweet tension, almost as sweet as the change to fur. "I am strong," she wispered. "I can run with the night and catch the dawn. I can kick a hole in the sky." And she struck out with a foot to prove her words. Then curled into a ball.

She missed her father-his advise, his comfort. She bared her teeth at the familer pain.

From where she lay, she could see the unbroken wall she'd cleared of furniture and the mural she'd started to console herself to make this room hers.

Jagged, thick blacks made the forest a wild thing, texture on texture; the painted moon shone fiercely. There was red slashed into the dark-eyes, blood.

Loup-garoux ran through the pooled midnight on a night in her ancients past. The stories said that by ritual, sacrafice, and sacrement, they opened their souls to the forest god, the hunter who took shape of the wolf. To reward them for their devotion, his mate, the Moon, gave them the gift to be more than human. They could throw aside the pelts of hunted animals and grow their own, abandon their knives of flint and use their teeth. Their children's children's children still carried the beast within, and all sunjects to the moon.

In the center of the mural was where she would become part of the night, where he would run with her ancestors. But now whenever she picked up a brush she couldn't go on. She couldn't see herself there. She had a dream about a painting that kept comin back. She was surrounded by darkness and couldn't see the muzzles around her. She was running, running trying to reach the open night, but all around huge forms crouded close and abraded her skin with their harsh thick fur as they thudded and jostled her. And she couldn't grow her pelt. It was always their fur against her skin, and she'd wake up crying.

As if to counteract the dream, she had become obbssesed for awhile and had created dozens of smaller paintings and sketches of the pack she new while growing up. They lined her closet and were stacked in the space between her dresser and the wall. They helped her hold on to the past. They kept her from going crazy.

The art teacher thought she was oneof those punk artsy types and raved about power of expressionism. Great Moon, he's shit a brick if he new my subjects were real, thought Amu gleefully. He'd talk her into sumitting a few prints to the school lituraray magazine. She'd laughed at first-but why not? And now, to her suprise, there was one of her prints near the center of the Trumpet. Amu smiled. And no doubt those humans thought her work was the too-cool vision of the terminally hip and dangorous.

Thought of this small acceptance pushed back the gloom, and she bounded up to fetch her backpack and have another look. She should leave the magazine open on the kitchen table for mom to see tomorrow before she went to work. Would she recognize her daughter's art? Would she be proud?

The magazine smelled glossy and was cool in her hands. She found her print and devoured the sheen of it, crisp and dark. And will those girls at school notice me now? she thought.

She hadn't even bothered to see who she shared space with. Is my my work better than the others? she wondered. A poem was on the page oppisite from hers. She looked at it suspiciously. A crappy poem would lesson what she'd done, make it cheep.

The title startled her-"Wolf Change." She read on

Corsair of the wood

discard your skin

your pallid, wormlike

vulnerabilty.

Corsair of the wood

exchange your skin

for pelt of dun

and brittle luxury.

A pentagram is burning

in your eyes

and soft, pale twists

of wolfbane

squeeze your heart

A grinding pain

is withering in your thighs

a crunch of bones

proclaims the change's start.

Pirate of the flesh

throw back your head

and part your jowls

to sing a luner song.

The forset paths are dark

the night is long.

She shivered in delicious shock

He knows, she thought. He knows what's in the picture. Anger edged out the exitement and her eyes narrowed. Who was this Tadase Hitori? Why should he know the forests paths?

But she was intrigued. Maybe she should seek him out and have a look at this person who wrote of the crunch of bones, see if she approved of him.

And what if she didn't? Set the Five on him? She laughed softly, baring sharp white teeth.