Torlin

It isn't easy, my job. I didn't know, when I got interested in psychiatry that I'd choose - yes,choose - to come live and work here. I wasn't trained with this sort of thing in mind. Sure, they're kids, and I wanted to help kids. But...they aren'tnormal children. In my position, I'm supposed to be the open one, the one who pretends that she has never seen them as anything but ordinary. And Ido try to view them as such, but it's very hard at times.

Take this. I have one of them walk in here for his bi-weekly session with me. No big deal, they all have them. Generally, the little kids just want to color or play with dolls and I just observe them. Some of them, of course, are traumatized by the ordeal they underwent - being attacked, I mean. Then we talk, but the little ones tend to have hazy memories and their fears of large, snarling animals are soon subsided.

The older ones are different. Some refuse to talk, and we just sit here in silence for an hour. Others need, it seems, to talk about anything but their current situation. So we discuss the outside world - I get newspapers and magazines, but the kids would be out of touch save for me and their classes - and things from their past. Never their attack, but the happier times before that. Occasionally, I get a girl in here convinced she's in love with one of her peers, but stricken at the thought that a) 'He'll never see me like that', b) 'I'm just not good enough for him', or, and this the rarest, oddly, c) 'But how could
we be together, being what we are?'

And that's the moment when I don't know what to say. Because part of me wants to agree with her, that once they hit eighteen and are dismissed from the Centre, they'll be lost in the world around us, and will need to struggle for pure survival in the tides of hate around them, or will have to keep their true self quiet. No room for love when you're trying to live. But another side of me thinks - too callously for someone in my position - that she'll never find a normal guy, because he'd be repulsed by her. She ought to accept
that the only guy she'll ever get is gonna be someone like her.

So I end up telling her to 'follow her heart' or some crap like that.

The guy I got in here yesterday I know pretty well, since I see him twice a week and he's been here a while. He's one of those surly teens that grunt in response to questions. Yet, yesterday he started speaking. And he wouldn't stop. I didn't want to hear the things he was saying, but it's my goddamned job, to listen to him and try to help him. Try to help him? No one can help him. I couldn't stop him from speaking on and on. I don't get nightmares, never did. Till now. I need some dark chocolate. Or something stronger, maybe.

Ydin

How is it I got along thus far without cracking? I think I'm losing it, finally. Well, I was expecting it to happen at some point along the line. And now it's happened.

I usually get by during those terrible hours by either sleeping or eating the ultra rare meat put in our rooms before the doors are locked. As a wolf, I've never felt anything, really. A part of me is always still human. But...this time, I don't think any part of me was human at all.

I changed - if that's the world I ought to use - painfully, as always. Some of the others say their transformation is painless. Maybe I'm resisting or something, but it always hurts. It starts with my face, as I feel it lengthening and stretching. Dropping to all fours out of reflex, I feel the fur poking its way through my skin. That's when I close my eyes, and scream. When the screams turn into howls, I stop. The pain subsides, and I open my eyes, now hurting in the light of my room. Then I usually just sleep, as I said, or eat that meat they provide.

I usually can't stand rare meat.

This time, I opened my eyes and looked at the meat as I would, as a human. With disgust. But it wasn't the sort of disgust I feel now for that meat, but a sort of feeling that I needed something more. I wanted...warm meat. Living meat that I would tear off the bone, the blood pouring overmy snout and warming it as the flesh warmed my insides. I even wanted, to my later horror, human meat. Not so much that for the flesh itself, but for the hunting of the prey. And there was no prey for me to get it, locked up as I was.

I paced andhowled, hearing vaguely echoing howls in the corridor and other rooms. They're supposed to be soundproof, but they aren'tto a wolf's ears. Of course, they weren't echoes; they were my fellow wolves cries.

This overwhelming desire for freedom took me. The freedom to run under the moon and stars and to hunt as I liked. To be feared and to be fearsome. To lead them all away. I know that's ridiculous. How could we ever escape, and where could we go? Teenagers, out of touch with humanity, most of the time. Crazed, bloodthirty beasts for a brief spell each month. We'd be shot as wolves and locked up as humans. There's no where for us but here.

Yet, even now, looking back with loathing at my sudden need for bloody meat, I can still understand the wolfish part of me that cries out for freedom.