A Symphony of Howls: Of Wolves and Woods, #1

By Val St. Crowe

The full moon calls.

 

At night, in the dark, and it hurts.

 

Camber Fordham lives inside the fences erected by the vampire ruling class, fences created to keep the werewolves out. Werewolves live beyond the fences, deep in the woods. Camber feels the call, so she will shift soon.

 

When her sister felt the call, she disappeared one night before the change and came back a vampire. But that's not a solution. Her sister only lives because the vampire king took a shine to her. There's a strict moratorium on creating new vampires. And anyway, Camber doesn't like her sister's life in the city, even if she's looked appreciatively into the ice blue eyes of her sister's human boyfriend, Landon. No, Camber wants the trees and the sky and the open air.

 

So, when the moon is fat and round and white, she climbs the fence, leaving behind everything she's ever known.

 

The first person she sees is Landon. But he's not human anymore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Punk Rawk Books
• Release date: May 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393996705

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Parker, I said, you’re here early.

My boyfriend Parker was huddling in his coat outside my apartment building in the town of Cutler where I lived and went to college. I had just finished with my last exam of my first semester. Parker and I had plans to go on a date later. We’d never really gone on a real date, like to an actual restaurant. We were more likely to grab pizza and hang out at my place. I was kind of excited at the prospect. But I hadn’t expected him for hours. I thought I’d have time to grab a shower and make myself pretty.

Parker looked me over. Then he furrowed his brow. Oh, Camber, it’s you.

Yeah, I said. We’d been together for three months. Didn’t he recognize me?

Your, uh, your hair’s different.

I touched my dark hair. No, it’s not.

Well, it doesn’t matter. Parker cleared his throat. Look… I was going to do this over the phone and my friend Cathy convinced me that was a dick move, so I was just coming by to say that, uh, I think we should see other people.

My lips parted. You’re breaking up with me?

"Well, I mean, we were never really together together, he said. We mostly just hooked up sometimes."

Sometimes? Try every weekend for the past three months, I said. Truthfully, I couldn’t say that my relationship with Parker excited me. He and I really didn’t talk much. He’d show up at my place on Friday or Saturday with takeout and then we’d eat and watch TV and have sex. Which wasn’t even that good. I mean… I was working up to saying something to him about it, but I wasn’t sure how to say it or what to say.

The bad sex was probably my fault. The fact that he never called me was probably my fault. The fact that we didn’t go on dates was probably my fault. The fact that he was dumping me, that was probably my fault too. I shrugged. It’s not you, it’s me.

He furrowed his brow. I think that’s my line.

Whatever, Parker. I sighed. I wish you would have told me earlier. I might have taken more time on my exam this afternoon. I was kind of rushing for our date.

What date?

You promised to take me out tonight to a real restaurant. I mean, obviously, now it’s not happening, which is fine, so forget about it. Have a good Christmas. I guess I’ll see you around next semester.

Did I really promise that? He scratched the back of his head, looking confused and guilty. Well, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.

It’s okay. I patted him on the arm.

You’re, you know, great. And you’re going to meet someone who really is into all the stuff you’re into.

I’m sure I will, I said. You got any recommendations of places that I could go to meet people with similar interests?

Uh…

Do you even know what my interests are?

He cringed. Hey, Camber, we had fun, right?

Right, I said, smiling at him. I was being too hard on him, really I was. Truly, it had been wishful thinking to even call him my boyfriend. I didn’t have boyfriends, and I knew that. I patted him on the arm again. It’s really okay, Parker. I’m fine. Goodbye. No hard feelings.

Really? he said. You sure?

Positive, I said, and I pushed past him to go upstairs to my apartment.

On my way up the stairs to my place, one of my neighbors waved at me. Hey there, Cassie.

Camber, I said. It’s Camber, Melissa. My name is Camber.

That’s what I said, said Melissa. Everything cool?

Well, my boyfriend just dumped me.

Great, said Melissa, moving past me. See you later.

I watched her go, sighing. It was always like this. Like I was here, but I wasn’t really here. It was this way with everyone, even my parents. The only person who ever seemed to actually pay attention to me was my sister Desta, but that was back before everything changed. Desta was gone now, and I rarely saw her. When I did, she was preoccupied with her new life.

I made my way into my apartment. Well, Parker was gone.

Thing was, it didn’t even really bother me. I couldn’t even be that angry about it. Because the truth was that I felt like I wasn’t really here. I couldn’t connect with people either. That was why it was my fault.

No one ever thought I was special, but I never thought anyone was special either.

And I was pretty sure I knew why all of this was, but I was in denial about all of that. If I was right, Parker would have been out of my life soon, anyway. It was all inevitable. I resisted the urge to take out my phone and check the phases of the moon again. It wasn’t as though they’d changed any time recently.

The full moon was soon. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, but the next night. Three nights away.

So, tomorrow, I was going to drive to my parents’ house, ostensibly for the holiday break, and I’d have one night with them. One night to say goodbye. It would have been nice if I could have had a real date before the full moon, but that wasn’t in the cards.

I wondered if anyone went on dates in the woods.

Somehow, I didn’t think they did.

I resisted the urge to go to my window and peer outside to look at the fence that surrounded the town of Cutler, to look into the woods beyond. I’d be there soon enough. No need to gaze out at the sea of trees.

I shook myself.

Why was I thinking these sorts of thoughts? I needed to distract myself.

I should pack. Yes. Pack.

The closet in my apartment was very tiny, but I had managed to fit all of my clothes inside it. I opened the door and began pulling sweaters off of hangers and throwing them on my bed.

I looked up at the window.

Oh, dear.

It was one of those winter afternoons in which the moon appears in the sky too early, while it is still daylight. I gaped at the moon, hanging above the forest, pale against the pale sky.

My heart hurt.

It came upon me all at once, a yearning that was so intense it nearly hurt.

My body tensed, and my muscles ached.

I gasped.

CHAPTER TWO

The call.

That was what it was, and I knew it. I tore out of my apartment and ran down the stairs to get out of the building. Once on the ground, I ran all the way down the hill, past the college, past all the buildings, past the end of the last street, until I was at the fence.

I panted, clutching the chain link, whether to keep myself upright or because I thought I could tear it apart with my bare hands, I wasn’t sure.

I looked out at the woods, which stretched out ahead of me. It was winter, and all the trees were bare except the evergreens. Still, to me, it looked lush and wondrous.

Home, thrummed something inside me, inside my veins.

And then pain splintered through me, making my back arc with it. I opened my mouth in a silent scream.

No.

A silent howl.

And then I shuddered and fell to my knees. I huddled in on myself and eyes stung with unshed tears.

I couldn’t deny this was happening anymore. I was feeling the call. My body was trying to change. What was I doing?

There was a protocol to be followed when a person felt the call. By mandate of the law, I was supposed to turn myself into the authorities and tell them all about it.

But no one ever followed the protocol, because the authorities would have simply shot me in the head on the spot.

That was what was done to werewolves, after all.

Werewolves—in their human form—could be easily killed. It was in their wolf form that it was difficult, requiring beheading or fire. A werewolf who was injured in either form could shift and heal its wounds. So, if the authorities found a werewolf before its first change, they would kill it.

I understood why.

Werewolves were dangerous. A werewolf unchecked in a town or city would run wild. It would bite people. It would kill people. So, of course, to keep everyone safe, a wolf had to be done away with.

As I said, no one much liked queuing up to turn themselves in to be killed, so most people hid the fact that they were experiencing the call. And the call could strike anyone. Technically, it was genetic, but it was a gene that nearly everyone carried. From what I understand, hundreds of years ago, when this land was settled, the native people were werewolves and there was so much intermarrying amongst the settlers and the natives that the gene was passed down to nearly everyone.

But the gene doesn’t always trigger. No one knows why it does in some people but not others, and it’s fairly rare. That both my sister and I would be triggered was bad, bad luck for my parents. They didn’t have any other children. I felt bad for them, because I knew I would be gone soon, one way or the other.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and I looked up the phases of the moon.

Yup. Just as it had been every other time I’d checked.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But the next night. That night, I would change. I would become a werewolf.

I probably wouldn’t be killed. The truth was, almost no new werewolves were killed by the authorities. The only ones who might be were ones turned in by others. And even then, it took a special sort of person to turn in another when they knew that their death would be the result.

No, most usually, families of the afflicted did their best to hide that the call was happening. And then, just before the full moon, the person who felt the call would go and scale one of the fences and disappear into the woods, never to be seen again.

No one knew exactly what it was like in the woods, but there were packs of werewolves roaming wild out there. Sometimes, on a full moon, a pack would attack a town, throwing their furry bodies into the fences and howling and growling. The wolves usually didn’t get through, but sometimes they did. When they took down the fences, they would cause carnage and destruction in the towns.

It was awful.

I didn’t want to be that—I didn’t want to be a monster.

But the woods and the moon, they spoke to something inside my blood and bones and heart. I had always known it somehow. I would be a wolf, roaming in the woods for the rest of my days. In some ways, I was terrified of that future. In other ways, I longed for it to come true.

* * *

Five years ago, when I was only thirteen, I remember that my sister began to feel the call. She was only sixteen when it began for her. The time that the call hits for each werewolf is different. It is sometime after the onset of puberty, but it can be as late as the age of twenty-five. It is sometimes as early as eleven. Those are the worst. The children taken from their families and tossed into the woods to make it on their own.

We all assume there are packs out there to care for the new werewolves, but no one really knows for sure. No werewolves come home to visit, you see.

I think that’s why my sister chose to be a vampire. Because she knew that she would be able to see us all again, that she wouldn’t be exiled entirely from everyone she had ever loved.

The first time I noticed anything, I awoke in the middle of the night and I found my sister standing near the picture window in our living room, gazing up at the moon as if she was drinking in its silvery light. She turned to me with radiant eyes and whispered, Do you feel it, Camber?

I didn’t feel anything.

It went on like that for months. Desta would get up in the middle of the night to stare at the moon. When she started to feel the pain, when her body would contort in the moonlight, that was when she knew it was close.

She made me swear I wouldn’t tell our parents. One night, she sneaked out in the middle of the night. Before she left, she gave me a kiss and a hug, and she was crying.

I was afraid. I sat up in bed. You’re not going to the woods are you? Not yet.

No, I won’t go to the woods at all, she said to me. I’m going to fix it.

Fix it? I said. But how can you fix it? Even then, I knew that there was nothing that could be done.

You’ll see, she said. "I won’t go to the woods. I won’t be a wolf. I refuse."

I lay awake all night while she was gone.

She came home just before sunrise, and she was dirty and her eyes were bloodshot and her clothes were stained in reddish brown spatters. She climbed into bed, and she wouldn’t wake up when my mother tried to rouse her for school.

My parents took me aside and asked me what I knew. I was supposed to keep her secret, but I broke, and I told them about the call, and my mother started to cry hysterically and say, No, no, not my sweet girl, not my daughter! and my father got tears in his eyes, and I’d never seen him cry before.

When night fell, Desta woke up and she staggered out of her room. Her eyes were sunken and her skin was pale, and she stumbled down the stairs wordlessly.

She sprang on me when she saw me, and she opened her mouth, and that was when I saw her fangs. Two rows, pointed and sharp.

I thought she was going to bite me.

But she didn’t. She stopped herself and ran out of the house.

My mother ran after her, yelling her name, screaming for her. My mother had been crying all day. But my father pulled her back inside. He had figured it out. Desta had gotten herself turned. It was smart. It was the only way to avoid becoming a werewolf.

But it wasn’t easy to become a vampire. Everyone wanted it, of course. They were ageless and powerful. They ruled the land.

The head of the government was the vampire king, Viggo Heathcote. He was ancient. No one knew exactly how old he was. He practically oozed power even through the television screen, which was the way that we all saw him. He had ruled as long as everyone could remember. He had been the head of the government since before my great-grandparents were children.

The vampires were the ones who had put up the fences. They protected us from the werewolves as long as we paid out tribute. Every human who lived within the fences had to give blood weekly. The blood was put in blood banks and sent to the vampires.

The existing vampires didn’t die out with any regularity. They didn’t die from old age, so it was only accidental deaths or the occasional murder that thinned out their population. There were too many of them as it was. The vampires weren’t allowed to make more, at least so we were told.

But Desta did it somehow.

She didn’t come home that night. Instead, she called my mother to tell her that she was all right, and that she’d been taken someplace safe. Everything was going to be okay, Desta said, and she would see us soon.

We did see her again. Not often, only once every few months, but she was still part of our lives. She lived in the city with the vampires. She was absorbed into their lifestyle, and she was distant and different. But my mother could call her on the phone and email her and those sorts of things. So, it was better than a life in the woods.

Here I was, on that same precipice that Desta had stood on. But I didn’t think I could make her choice. I thought I might answer the moon’s call. Something inside me knew that the woods was where I belonged. It had always been that way.

* * *

The next morning, I locked up my apartment and I felt wistful, because I knew I wouldn’t see it again. I had packed up everything that was important to me in my suitcase, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it would all work. Certainly, I could haul a suitcase over the fence and drag it into the woods, but once I turned into a wolf, I would be insensible to such things, wouldn’t I? I would leave the suitcase behind, and I would have only myself.

Perhaps I needed to get used to the idea of having nothing.

I got in my car, started it, and gripped the steering wheel, thinking of exactly that. It seemed freeing. I thought I would be happy to be free of all my material possessions.

Well…

It might be nice to keep my cell phone, I supposed.

I pulled my car out and drove out of town to the gate. I told the attendant I was going home for the holidays and handed him my driver’s license. He barely looked at it before handing it back to me. He was probably deluged by college students leaving town this week. Once a student finished her last final exam, she had no reason to stay, after all.

The gate opened, and I drove through.

I took the ramp onto the highway, and now it was nothing but the road and the fences on either side for an hour and twenty minutes, as long as it took me to get home.

As I drove, I tried to convince myself that I should become a vampire.

But it would be wrong to ask Desta to do that. She’d be breaking the vampire’s rules, and we might both get in trouble.

And besides, I didn’t want to be a vampire. There were advantages to it, like the ability to live a very long time, perhaps forever, but I was going to become a werewolf, and that meant that I would live a long life anyway. Wolves aged slowly from what I understood. I would not be immortal, but I didn’t think I wanted to live forever anyway. Life ceased to mean anything if it never ended.

No, I wasn’t going to be a vampire.

I was sure of it as I got off at the exit for my hometown. I was admitted at the gate easily enough, and then I drove straight to my parents’ house and parked in the driveway.

It was odd, I mused. I’d only been gone for six months, and yet this was my parents’ house now, not mine, not home. Of course, the apartment I’d left behind wasn’t home either. The only home I had was beyond the fences.

My mother met me at the door with a big hug. Oh, Camber, you’re home!

I hugged her back, and I thought to myself that I should probably tell her about the call. She deserved to know. She was a good mom. I’d never felt as close to her as I might have, but that wasn’t her fault, I didn’t think. It was the fault of whatever it was that was in me, my wolfness. I had never really belonged with these people, and I had always known it.

She pulled back, holding me at arms’ length. Guess what? Desta has invited us to the city for dinner tonight.

Oh, I said, surprised. Tonight?

Yes, you’d better go and get changed. We’ve got to leave in about an hour.

Oh, I said again. You didn’t tell me this.

My mother ushered me inside, shutting the door behind me. Well, I know. I kept forgetting. I always mean to call you or text you, sweetie, but it slips my mind.

It’s okay, Mom. I set down my suitcase, looking around. The house looked the same.

You just get on up to your room, said my mother. I can’t wait to see Desta. It’s been since May of last year.

It has been a long time, I said. Desta was always my parents’ favorite. I never minded. I still don’t. I love Desta too. I climbed up the steps to my bedroom, but it was no longer my bedroom. There was a bed in there, but the rest of the room had been converted into an exercise room with a stationary bike and a treadmill facing a TV fastened to the wall.

Huh.

I went across the hallway to look at Desta’s room.

Yeah, they still hadn’t touched it. My mother cleaned in