A mutation on a mutation. As if life could not be more difficult, I was born with a mutation on the gene...that was already mutated. Being born to the family I was, I've had my fair share of secrets, problems, and life threatening occasions. I am seventeen for goodness sakes. Two months into my senior year and life for me has officially reached rock bottom. A rogue tear managed to slip its way past my lashes. But I cant cry. No, I am not one of those, "crying is for wussies" girls. Crying is understandable, a involuntary human function. Unfortunately, I cannot cry because that means I'm uncontrollably sad. Uncontrollable emotions mean uncontrolled powers, and I can't have a slip up in the back of my grandparents car. All they have ever done is try to support me and love me. Try and create a better, happier world for me. I cannot release unbridled, emotional rage on them because I "slipped up". No, I'll have to just swallow my sadness, accept that my mom is gone, just like my father, and that I am now officially parentless.

My mother was a geneticist for a pharmaceutical company. Although that was only her cover. She acquired her PhD in Genetic Mutation and Gene Coding in four years at Yale. She was supremely intelligent, and could have worked in any high ranking government establishment. Instead, she took some low level testing position at a company not worth the ground it was built upon. Why? Because she knew she could create a persona of superior hierarchy by doing her job to its best ability, and in return, bring home equipment and testing materials whenever she desired without too many nosy inquiries. My mother and father loved me unconditionally, But my mother always feared that something was different about me...other than the fact that I was a pre-mature werewolf. That was actually the normal part of our household. Both my parents were werewolves. That is what pushed my mother to become a geneticist in the first place. She wanted to understand her body better. That is also how she met my father. She entranced the young shaman in training when she went to Africa for research. Three years later, I was born. I was born... with heterochromia. An uncommon yet natural human disease, heterochromia means that one of my eyes is two different colors. One green eye and dark blue eye. Well that was a beautiful and unique trait to my parents and other humans, but the strange part to my mother was that werewolves have an extra gene in their system that codes for all the extra...fun...stuff... and that gene also prevents imperfect mutations like heterochromia. At least, it was supposed to.

It was not until my thirteenth birthday that my mother began to worry about my "gift" as she aptly named it. At the age of thirteen, each pre-pubescent wolf shifts for the first time. I did not. Instead I received mind numbing, chronic migraines. Less than a week later, my father was killed on a shaman version of a missionary trip. My mother fell to pieces and so did I. So emotionally down trodden had I gotten that when we returned home from the funeral and I let out my bottled sadness, I also tore down half our house. With my mind. With renewed purpose my mother threw herself back into her work, attempting to love me and raise me while also studying me. She generally succeeded in that, needless to say I am immune to most pain as I built up a tolerance to "test subject" pain. But everything she learned, she shared with me. Her theory, after thinking spiritually like my father (and reading his handy books, journals, and notes), was that the strange abnormality on my Lupine Gene didn't prevent my "magical" shift, but rather put the magic else where. Aka, my head. She believed that the magic used to create the transformation inside the average werewolf had been transferred, not destroyed, and that when I turned thirteen, my gift was revealed, just like a werewolf. And I was inclined to believe her. About this time I noticed the strange black tattoo that had fixated itself five inches below the base of my skull. A tattoo of a crescent moon inside a circle with a wolf howling and flames licking at the bottom. My mother simply took note of the change and said,

"You have so many beautiful aspects, why not one more?".

Two years later, after my mother had slowed her testing down and we began to fall into a steady living rhythm, another power manifested itself soon after my birthday. I ran into the road to catch our neighbors dog and my mother should have hit me with her car coming home from work. But she did not, as her car hit a barrier four inches from my body that completely destroyed her front bumper. Forgetting the damaged car, she raced me inside and ran her usual scans, finding higher activity levels in my brain and a new extension on my old tattoo. Beautiful, curving tribal tattoos now ran from the circle down the rest of my back. Of course mother and her humor,

"By George I think we have it!"

On my seventeenth birthday, my current fling broke up with me via text. I fell asleep crying and seething with anger and woke up to my arms and legs on fire. As well as the rest of our house. My mother and I fled our home and stayed with a close friend. My mother thought she knew everything about my... issues... but she had to be sure. She took pictures of my recently expanded tattoo (as it now crept down my shoulders to my elbows) and my neural scans and made plans to visit my fathers old village.

She never came back.

The authorities say they found pieces of her throughout the surrounding brush. It became obvious that someone was not happy with my family, and my grandparents stepped in to help keep me in hiding. They took their comatose granddaughter, problems and all, into their lives. And that is how I wound up in the back of a ford explorer with grandparents I only met on holidays, going to a town I had never seen, which hosted a pack of wolves that I would never fit in to.

Hey Guys! Thanks for reading! Terri's father to the right!