She hadn’t been born into this life.

Once, she’d been a normal kid living a normal life, never dreaming what waited in the dark.

The night that all changed - after her best friend lay bloody and mangled on the forest floor, after she’d seen the thing that did it shot down and the human body it left, after she’d caught a glimpse of her boyfriends face disappearing through the trees - after all that, among the ambulance sirens and the bright headlights of the police cars, they told her it had been a bear attack.

She had vowed not to rest until she found out the truth.

She spent hours in the library, back before Google had made everything available at the touch of a button. She had scoured manuscripts with a Latin dictionary in one hand and a strong coffee in the other. She had listed every possible explanation, and crossed them through one by one, until there was nothing else left.

And then one evening in Chris’s bedroom, she had turned to him and smiled and asked: “So, what do you know about werewolves?”

And he had said “I thought you’d never ask.”

That day, she became part of the family.