Leila had sat in her room listening to the violent wind outside for nearly two hours until she heard voices through the walls. It was her father and her grandfather speaking in the hall.

"Have there been any signs?" Her father asked.

"What do you think?" Was her grandfather's snapping reply.

A growl of disgust came from her father's throat. She could imagine him shaking his head, as if that would make the shame he felt for her fall away.

"How did this ever happen?" He asked, half rhetorical, half desperate for an answer. "The first two are fine, but the third..."

Her grandfather offered him the proposal she'd heard plenty of times before. "Nine months before she was born... How often did Suzanna leave your sight? And when she was out of it... how high is the likelihood that she visited some human civilization?"

Her father's growl was harsh. "She's dead in the ground and you're still intent on slandering her name?"

"She left behind an invalid child, what else is anyone to think? Two werewolves make a werewolf, not a—a—whatever she is! A blank slate!"

"She isn't!" Her father shouted, "She can't be! She has to shift, she's just a late bloomer. We'll keep working with her and it'll be forced out eventually."

Her grandfather's voice was low, sympathetic but self-satisfied all at once. "Your hopes and wills won't change the blood in her veins."

"She has Ardeneux blood," her father snapped back, "Suzanna didn't do what you're accusing her of. Just watch and see."

Their quickened footsteps started moving, coming closer. By the time they stopped outside of Leila's door, she had lurched the window above her bed open, allowing the forceful winds to come whipping in. By the time her father turned the knob and threw open her bedroom door, she was gone, scaling down the side of the manor and already halfway to the ground.

She ran from there. She ran like she did have four legs instead of two, like she really was the werewolf she should've been and not the useless humanoid she really was. She had no destination, no path marked in her mind.

Her only objective was away.

She could never truly get away. She knew that. She knew that she would die here where she was born, likely with her life in between having been all for nothing because, for a reason no one knew, she wasn't able to play the role she was given.

But the rain pounded down around her, on her, and the ground was turning slippery with muck. She slid in it, though her bare feet dug in to maintain her footing and she charged on. Her clothes were soaked. They clung to her body and made any type of agility more difficult.

Leila ran until she came upon the crest of a ridge, where she was forced to slide to a stop, grabbing hold of a tree for good measure to act against her inertia. Below, the woods were swimming in water, the current wrapping around tree trunks and carrying with it fallen logs, ripped up bushes, and masses of collected dead leaves. The water flowed like an uncontained river through the wooded valley, and in the midst of it, completely submerged up to the chimney, was the cabin her brother was meant to have led one group of the Belfiores to.

It was not where she had taken the uncle, aunt, and cousins and the grandmother, being the matriarch, would have been given a much more luxurious cabin of high esteem. That left one last dot to connect to, Leila concluded, and it was that this was the cabin of the mother, the father, and the son named Zakai.

Her heart pounded like the rain, like the dangerous pulse of the flood.

She began climbing the tree she'd used to stop herself from tumbling off the ridge. She recalled the boy's near-catonia, the feeble looking state of his body, its lack of muscles and prevalance of skeleton. Would he even be capable of escape? She wondered. And an ugly voice in her head also wondered: Would his father even let him?

She had to find out, one way or another. There was no other option in her mind as she crawled to the end of a branch, as she grabbed the tip of a neighboring one and swung herself carefully into the next tree. She made her way across the water like this, from treetop to treetop, calling upon the muscle memory of all the years she'd spent climbing and hiding in them. They were the only place where no one would follow to poke or to prod her, to ask her uncomfortable questions or bring with them their 'tests.'

At the midway mark, as she hung above the irate current, a flash of movement caught her eye. Zipping past below her, consumed by the flood, were the two thrashing bodies of the mother and the father. They were alive, using a rotten log as a raft. Leila watched with wide eyes as they were smashed into a hillside, the log that had once saved them now crushing them into the earth. They survived though. When the rotted log washed away, it revealed the couple clinging to an exposed tree root. From there, Leila watched as they shimmied their way to land, where as soon as their feet touched the ground they shifted into wolves and sprinted uphill to higher, and therefore safer, ground. At the highest point possible while remaining in sight of their cabin, the parents stopped, prancing in place.

They howled for their son.

Their son did not answer.

With quickened movements, Leila hurried the rest of the way across the water. From the last slick branch, she dropped down onto the roof of the cabin which was disfigured and misshapen, bearing a lumpy appearance that no roof should. A portion of it had collapsed under the weight of the water.

Even standing on the roof's arch, the water rushed over Leila's ankles, causing her to grab hold of the chimney to prevent herself from being swept away. She clung to the cold stone of the chimney, hugging her way to the top of it where she stuck her face in the hole and peered down into the crevice. She saw nothing but black soot... but she did hear fast, shallow breathing and she did smell the living scent that could belong to none other than the boy.

"Can you get out?" Leila called down the chimney.

"No!" The boy shouted back, his voice strained, panicked, "No, I'm trapped! I think they're broken!"

"What is?" Leila asked as she slipped one foot, then two inside of the chimney.

"My ribs." A ruckus and an agonized whimper followed, as though he were struggling and paying the price for doing so.

"Hold on!" She ordered, sliding down through the soot and becoming stained by it. She popped out at the bottom, tumbled and tripped over the firewood in the hearth, but arrived in the living room of the cabin nonetheless.

The boy was pinned beneath a thick wooden beam and various supports, having fallen on him during the roof's partial collapse. The main point of contact was at—as he said—his ribs.

"Can you crawl out if I lift?"

"Yes—" a pained exclamation interjected, "There's no other way."

Leila braced herself at one end of the beam, finding a point of leverage beneath it. Numerous voices of doubt rushed through her head, like the rushing water engulfing the cabin around them, but she fought them back. She couldn't listen to them now. Doing so could result in both of their deaths, hers by drowning, his by having his entrails smushed out, bleeding out internally, or drowning—maybe even all three if he was unlucky enough.

A nine year old, healthy werewolf would have no trouble lifting the beam. What if she wasn't? A nine year old human had no hope of it. But she wasn't human. She knew she wasn't human, if nothing else, and nothing else besides that mattered right then. Whichever she might be, wherever she might lay on the spectrum in between, whatever blood might be in her veins, it had to suffice.

Whatever she is, she had to suffice.

The beam crept slowly upward. Leila strained. Her legs drove down into the floorboards. Her elbows trembled where they were bent at her sides. She squeezed her eyes shut and in that darkness she heard the storm all around them.

The howl of helpless parents. The rush of the water. The clap of the thunder, the crack of the lightning. The roar and rustle of the trees as their tops all clashed together, snapping at the roots and taking others down with them.

She feared no storm.

She knew what she feared and in that moment she was fighting against it.

With a series of wolffish whimpers and wounded growls, the boy managed to drag himself from the rubble. He collapsed against the wall, safely away from the swayed portion of the ceiling.

Leila released the beam. It crashed back down to dent the floor further. Relieved of its weight, she took in air heavily, felt the beating of her heart in her fingertips and toes.

"Wait there," she said to the boy through ragged breaths, then wasted no time in bolting off down the hall. She zipped from bedroom to bedroom, yanking sheets off of beds, twisting them tightly and tying them end to end. When she was finished after a handful of precious minutes, she hurried back to the fireplace, her makeshift rope dragging behind her.

"I'll go up first and then I'll use this to pull you up," she told the boy with all the seriousness of a military general. When he only stared at her, seemingly in a daze, she waved her hand impatiently in front of him.

"Okay?" She prompted with an edge to her tone.

He nodded frantically.

Leila then stuffed one end of the rope between her teeth, biting down, and hopped over the stray firewood now scattered across the room. She clawed her way up the chimney with blunt fingers, ashes embedding in her nails and clumping onto her wet clothes. At the top, she secured herself by hooking her leg over the chimney's edge and then gave the rope a jiggle.

"Ready?" She shouted down. The answer came in the form of a light tug on the sheets.

She pulled. As the water below her rose higher, as her sopping black hair matted over her face, she put hand over hand as she towed the rope of bedsheets up, feeding the distant end to the flood.

He came into proximity. She wrapped the rope around one arm and reached down.

Zakai's soot stained hand united with Leila's. They held each other's fully, completely, and never let go.