I was exhausted. I’d been traveling all day to get to my friend’s house, and as the day wound to a close, all three of us began to drift toward her bedroom. Her bed was hardly huge, but we all fit together, especially since the two of them were smaller than I. I curled around the one, carefully keeping a buffer of space between us, though I didn’t think I would mind being against her. Her scent, something unidentifiable, nearly overwhelmed me, and I smiled, feeling at home nestled under her quilt.

Whenever I was sleeping with other people, I had a habit of waking up repeatedly, sleeping infinitely less deeply than I would have alone. Now, though, it came in handy. At almost one in the morning I had woken again, rolled over to see the glaring red numbers announcing that it was far too early in the morning to be awake, even for as short as I might have been. But as I began to roll over again, I noticed the doorknob of her bedroom door moving. At first, I didn’t think much of it, assuming it to be one of my hostess’ parents come to check on us. But as the door opened, creaking loudly as it opened all the way, I realized that the figure was too tall– too dark, too well-built.

The red glow of my friend’s alarm clock glinted off his knife.

My eyes widened as I realized what this person was, and I quietly shifted, transforming to my more feral form silently. As the intruder grinned maliciously, seeing his targets sleeping peacefully, I leapt at him, snarling, claws and fangs bared and the barb on my tail slicing at him. I bit into his neck, clawing at his chest, and my barb dug deep into the nerve in his leg. He yelled and went down, dying quickly from blood loss and the punctures in his throat.

I didn’t notice the bite of his blade until he was dead and my friends had woken up. In the handful of moments before they woke completely, I transformed back, babbling nonsense about grabbing his knife and attacking him first.

They shook me, trying to get me to answer their questions. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, smiling faintly despite the pain in my chest, the blood sliding down my front.

I had died to protect their young lives, died honorably. That was enough for me– I had died doing something worthwhile.

I woke abruptly. I didn’t sit up, but I squeezed my eyes shut, panting and reaching up to wipe sweat from my forehead. This dreaming of my own death over and over again was going to drive me insane.

An image, no- a collection of images, flashed into my head. If I’d been standing, I would have doubled over. Lying down as I was, I cringed into a ball. I wasn’t dreaming again, and it wasn’t my death– it was someone else. But the images still had a dream-like quality. I knew who the girl was, and I was mostly sure it was a girl. I knew, without seeing her face clearly, who it was. But at the same time, I couldn’t name her and I couldn’t find any defining memories. Only one thing did I know for sure– she was very dear to me.

The images were only in flashes, only half-formed. Yet I knew quite clearly what was going on. The girl, this person I loved so much, had been killed, throat slashed while sleeping one night. Another was her lying bleeding in a ditch by a street, carelessly tossed aside.

As a writer, before my transformation, I had often used pretty phrases like “heart pounding” and “struggling to breathe.” But to me they were phrases, nice things to write, but not precisely real. But now, with those horrible, terrifying images sprinting by each other in a relay race in my mind, my heart beat faster until it thudded against my ribs, hammering until it began to hurt, a purely physical ache punctuated by sharp spasms of pain. My throat went dry as I gasped for breath, pinned under the oppressive weight of the imagined scenarios. My hands, my arms, my legs, trembled with fear and pain. My heart pounded until even my head began to ache.

Something happy.

Something funny.

Got to think of something else.

Slowly I forced myself to think of something other than blood and a still, too-cold body. Anything else– what it would feel like to fly, any and all good memories regarding this person. Her voice ghosted through my head, forming words I couldn’t make out. Slowly, ever so slowly, the pain began to fade.

I gasped, a desperate sound interspersed among tiny moans of pain as I tried to breathe, my whole body twitched and shook even as I uncurled myself and moved to get up. I needed water, badly. Both to splash on my heated face and to soothe my throat, which felt dry enough to crack.

What was that? I wondered. I’d never felt anything like it, and I couldn’t even understand why– who was it I had seen?

More importantly, was she really dead, or was it only my imagination?

I walked to the bathroom, splashing icy sink water into my fur, too cold against my frantic skin. I shivered, still shaking as I walked back into the bedroom. I glanced around before leaving, intending to pour myself some water from the fridge. If this was indeed my apartment, I could count on having clean water chilling in the fridge. I snuck out of the room, scanning the living room for my creepy invaders from before, but when they didn’t say anything, I walked to the kitchen. Glasses were kept in a cabinet over the microwave, which was across a tiny walkway from the fridge.

With a sigh I realized I could have done this with my eyes closed, I was so familiar with this setup.

After drinking some of the water, almost painful on my raw throat, I set the glass down on the counter, by the sink, and looked about again. I shivered, but this time not of cold. My heart and head still ached, and my paws still shook like leaves in an autumn wind, and my “guests” were nowhere in sight. I slunk back to the bedroom, glaring at the bed before walking over to the window. It was a panel of glass, and as I looked at it, I noticed the handle to slide the door across, and the faint mesh of a screen door.

As I looked out over the balcony, I saw something. Something strange. I opened the sliding glass door, and the screen, struggling against the lodged dirt and stubbornness of disuse. I approached the railing. Sure enough, there was a bright red feather sitting on the railing, a small ruby earring sitting beside it. I glanced about. Who had put them here? They were placed too well to have been an accident, and the likeliness of a lost earring landing directly on my railing were slim.

I picked them up, examining them. The feather was soft as a down pillow, smooth as a child’s skin. I ran my thumb over the spine experimentally, marveling at it. The earring was small and unobtrusive, simplistic. But it smiled up at me, glimmering hopefully, a promise of love and care sparkling up at me. As I thought the words I felt silly. How could an earring hold a promise, or smile? And yet, it was the only way to describe it. I looked around, bending to scan the floor. Where was its mate? I looked down, over the railing, and saw only flat grass. Strange.

Perhaps, if this was indeed a gift from someone intended for me to find, I would be given the other later. I walked back inside my room, sliding the doors shut with one hand as the other gripped the feather and the earring. I set the two trinkets on the bedside table, lying down carefully and rolling over to my side, falling asleep with a small smile on my face, watching the red items as I drifted off to sleep.

I was in a tall-ceilinged room made of stone. Before me was a table, covered in instruments that glinted in the torchlight, but I couldn’t make out what they were. Behind me, I saw as I turned my head, lay a wooden door twenty-odd feet away. It appeared, from this distance, to be locked tight. The walls were covered in strange torture instruments and scientific machinery. I was reminded of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. Intrigued by the table and its strange instruments, I moved to take a step forward, to better examine its contents.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

I froze, looked up. Approaching me, slinking forward out of the darkness, was a man I knew quite well. His name was Jack, for Jackson Lee Barr. He never gave his last name, if he could help it. I’d had class with him though, and had learned it from the roster. A strange dynamic, his and mine, and I didn’t particularly appreciate seeing him again. Bad blood lay between us, ever since my senior year.

“What are you doing here, Jack?”

He snorted, flicking spun-sugar-like hair out of his eyes. “The better question is what are you doing here, seeing as this is my domain.” Without letting me respond, he explained the answer to his unasked question. “I have brought you here, my dear little soldier, for revenge.”

I laughed. He had oft entertained fantasies of being a warlord, and had, at one time, tried to recruit me to his “army.” It was, in a bizarre way, a joke between us. “Revenge, on what?” I asked, playing his game for now.

“Your betrayal.”

This blatant lie angered me. “My betrayal,” I repeated, scorning his words. “You’re one to speak of treachery, Mr Slimeball.”

He smiled, and gestured with two fingers. Hands latched onto my wrists, scant inches from fingers slowly clenching into fists to strike him. I lashed out, desperately trying to free myself from his henchmen’s grasp, but nothing came of it. I was cuffed and chained at wrist and ankle to poles behind me. As they worked, looping lengths of silvery chain around my forearms to tether me with an even shorter leash, I struggled, screaming and shouting curses on Jack’s name.

He laughed.

“Try as you might, Morgana, your fight is over here. I have your strings now, dear one.”

“Don’t call me that,” I spat, livid at his nerve.

He turned aside to a hooded servant, smiling a smile no individual should have to see. It was a smile of pure evil, dripping with saccharine falseness. “Bring her out here.”

There was an emphasis on ‘her’ that I didn’t like.

A girl was brought forward, wrists handcuffed behind her back, feet dragging. She appeared to be asleep.

“Alex!”

She stirred at my cry, looking up dazedly as Jack took hold of the back of her shirt. He picked up a long butcher’s knife from the table I had seen earlier and stepped toward me, close enough that I could see the fear in Alex’s eyes. A cloth gag was tied behind her head, cutting off any noise she might have made. Jack saw me examining his handiwork and grinned eerily. “She made the most entertaining sounds when we first brought her here, but after a time my guards grew tired of her cries.”

I thrashed against my bonds. “Harm her and I’ll kill you, Jack.”

He clicked his tongue at me, frowning and shaking the knife at me. “Now, now, Morgana. No need to get too feisty. After all, if you were to break those bonds and charge me now,” he said smoothly, setting the tip of the knife against Alex’s chest, just below the dip of her collarbone, “you’d only be killing her faster.”

I froze. The last thing I wanted to was to harm her myself– and that was where Jack’s power lay.

He smiled. “Ah, I thought so. Well then, I guess the task falls to me.”

Jack raised the knife slowly, toward Alex’s neck. She shied away, arching her spine and leaning as far as she could away from the point, breathing speeding up to a pace I could hear– the sound made me cringe. He didn’t, thankfully, go for her vein, but pressed the top of his blade just under her jaw. She whimpered pathetically as a line of crimson slid slowly down her neck.

“Jack!”

He grinned at me, eyes raising from her skin to my own eyes, hate-filled and ready to kill. He pulled the knife away, and half my attention was on the blood dripping down her neck and half on him, a tiny sliver noticing the pain of my chains digging into my arms as I strained them. He handed the knife to a servant, who held the blade up in his hands like a small tray. Jack pointed at me, hand spread wide.

My chains fell away, but I couldn’t move. Every muscle in my body had frozen solid. He pulled his hand back toward him, as though pulling on the strings of a marionette. Against every instinct and urge I had, I stepped toward him.

“What are you doing to me, Jack?” I asked, refusing to let fear edge my voice.

He laughed, as if he had heard it anyway. “You are my puppet, dear,” he said, and as I came closer, he took the knife from his servant and placed it in my hand.

“The honor,” he whispered, his voice like a snake slicing through the air around me, “is all yours.”

No, my mind screamed, no! But whatever spell, whatever power this snake had over me, was valid. I stepped toward Alex, eyes wide as she trembled in Jack’s hold. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed, before he jerked his hand– my hands plunged forward, the knife slicing through fabric and skin and muscle and bones. She screamed through the gag, the sound muffled and garbled, but not enough. The sound echoed in my head, again and again as I stood in front of her, almost up against her. Blood coated my fingers and I stepped back, still not free of his demonic spell.

She slumped in his arms, and my entire body shook dangerously.

“Are you happy now,” I said, voice flat and trembling.

“No,” he said, voice smooth as virgin snow.

“What more do you want!” I cried, tears running down my face, blood-soaked knife still held threateningly in my hand, which wouldn’t respond to any order my brain sent. The only things over which I had control were my eyes and mouth. “I killed her! I killed her because of you! What more can you take away from me?”

He smiled, perfect teeth too white and sinister in the dark stone room.

“Your own life, my darling soldier.”

I wanted to scream at him, no no no I wouldn’t kill myself. But in that moment, anything was better than living with the knowledge of killing Alex with my own hands. I turned the knife toward my own heart, realizing through a daze that his spell had no more claim on me. I did what he wanted, in the end, just as he had always known I would, even when I had, according to him, betrayed him. All I could think before my world went dark was that there was so much blood...

I had hoped that falling asleep with the items on my night table would have kept everything at bay, this time. But clearly luck was against me. I woke with tears in my fur and my stomach in knots, and all I could do for an hour was wonder who the girl was. I was sure her name wasn’t Alex, any more than the man’s name was Jackson Lee. But who were they, really? Every minute offered new mysteries and I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to understanding it all. Though I couldn’t go back to sleep, I couldn’t bring myself to get up yet either.