Wolblood, .Chapter.One.

by dragonwriter (S.E. Roberts) in Wolf's mind, making him wonder who Eclipse is, and in Zarlac's mind, making him wonder who Wolf is

YAY! FINALLY!!! :)

Author's Note: www.kidpub.com/story/wolfblood-authorsnote-33980973

Prologue:  www.kidpub.com/story/wolfblood-prologue-wolfblood-book-i-previewed-cover-and-picture-maxwell-33980933

Website: www.wolfbloodbook.yolasite.com

.Chapter.One.

There was only one word that could describe him: wolflike. He had jet black hair, pale skin, and was awfully scrawny, like an underfed wolf. Added to his wolflike appearance, he looked completely and fully goth. His ebony bangs hung over his black-outlined eyes so that they quite nearly covered up his eyes, making him posses a somewhat devilish air. Then he had a single, black earring in his right ear. He was average hight for his age, but more mature looking then most, even if he was scrawny; what was visible of his face looked more grown and filled out then others. His jaw set had that look of an teen who just became an adult rather then the teen he really was.

On a certain day, November Tenth, to be specific, the eighth grade goth boy was walking. Walking, step after step. Today was the first day. The first day in his new school, Thorn Middle School, in Ireland.

The sky was grey, the trees looked crooked and spiky like skeletons. Fiery wind howled across the dreary sky, scooping up handfuls of dead, crispy leaves and hurling them into a frantic, eerie dance.

The boy would have shivered, but the neither the cold nor the eerie bother him. Why? Because he endured so much worse that it was nothing to him.

The sidewalks were barren, empty of kids walking to school. Their parents had all insisted that their children be driven to school, for it was much too cold to walk. The houses along the sidewalks were closed to the world, dark and foreboding. Why was he walking and not being driven?

This time, the boy shuddered, the jolt lurching through his entire wolflike body; the instant the image of his father wrapped it’s shadowy tendrils around his mind, horrible images came with it. Horrible images, too horrible to be written down.

The creeping shadow of his father was forced away as he focussed on the sidewalk ahead of him.

Slowly, his footsteps ebbed to a stop. Here was the school.

It wasn’t half as bad as he expected it. In fact, he knew he even could learn to like the tall, victorious stone pillars surrounding it, the cocky ‘I’m better then them all’ look of the large white doors.

But no facial expression crossed his mature face. One rarely did.

Calmly, controlled, he stepped inside the doors.

The inside was even more pleasant then the outside.

Tile, blue marble-like tile glossed the floors, occasionally a pair of feet tapping across the surface. Towering, triumphant brick walls, with smooth, glowing lights hanging from the ceiling.

The boy took a silent deep breath. The air was soft, cool, proud smelling.

“What is your business here, young man?” The boy turned to see a tall, bright woman, with jolly brown eyes and curly hazel hair, and large, bouncy bosom, a clipboard tightly clasped in her hands.

The boy studied her soberly for a moment in the way a goth always does, and then responded.

“I signed up for this school. Check.” He nodded to the clipboard in her hand.

She stared at him with narrowed eyes.

Like always, the first thing that struck him about her was his similarity to a wolf. Something about the way his jaw was set showed maturity, and yet extreme wolf-likeness. He had a small, neat nose that tapered down to a precise tip, and his straight, pale lips were relaxed.

Her eyes narrowed even further when she realized his gothlike appearance, magnified by the single black earring. Goth students always brought trouble.

She eyed the paper for a moment, then turned back to the boy.

“Let’s see, here... Maxwell Abraxas Black is your name, right?” To the woman’s slight surprise, the boy winced as she said his name.

She saw his slightly pointed Adam's Apple rise and fall as he swallowed. Then he nodded.

The lady paused, eyed his gothic-like face suspiciously for a moment, then forced it away, instructing, “You’re first class is down the hall, on the left.” She indicated a large hall branching off from the main room.

The boy glanced down the hall. It felt so strange to be back in school again.

He nodded expressionlessly to the lady who was named Mrs. Johnson, and strode down the hallway to his first class.

He stepped in the doorway to his first class, language arts.

For a moment, he just stared, horrified.

Words, all over pages, scribbled and enslaved into ink onto the crisp white sheets, screaming out to him to free them. Their bloody pleas filled his mind, choked out all of his thoughts, and flooded his heart with stinking hate. He could feel them. He could feel them, so clearly, all that hate flowing from them into him.

For a moment, he just stood there, gasping. Then he remembered that this was why he had quit school in the first place. It was the words. The others could never understand that the words were alive, and were not meant to be forced onto paper.

Suddenly, the boy heard a few chuckles, and realized that the kids in the classroom were watching him stand there like an idiot.

Instantly, he shook his head to clear away the screams of the words. For the uncountable time, he reminded himself that the others could not hear the words. He would just have to sit there and endure their screams.

The teacher was... well, she was like any other teacher. Tall, thin, clean, black hair tied into a tight bun, and horn-rimmed glasses pushed all the way to the end of her nose, which gave her a snotty look. Her face was overly powdered with white makeup, trying to cover the wilting wrinkles that oozed off of her jowls. Her hands, pushed authoritatively onto her hips, added to her sickening air.

A strong wave of nostalgia suddenly washed over him, but he forced it away with a few disoriented blinks.

Slowly, the awkward silence weighing down on his shoulders like a heavy weight, the boy slid into the chair that the teacher had pointed to.

He slid his hips forward in the char and the leaned back, pale hands resting on his knees.

When he heard a few muffled giggles next to him, he glanced sideways to see a stuck-up looking girl surrounded in her gang of other girls.

For a moment, the boy held still, only his eyes moving as he looked at her. She was very beautiful, with wild blond hair and sparkling greyish-blue eyes, a slender jaw and small nose. Not just beautiful, but gorgeous, in fact.

He shook the thought away. She was snotty, she was stuck-up, and worst of all, she was just like the others: Blind to the words’ screams.

The teacher, called Mrs. Thomas, began the lesson. They each had to write a short story in the time of homeroom, of anything they wanted to. The boy took another deep, silent breath. He should have known that they would make him use the words. Of corse. He didn’t get off so easy as just to hear them scream. He had to make them scream.

Mrs. Thomas passed out thin white notebooks and thick charcoal pencils to each of the kids. The boy realized that everyone kept throwing him glances. He watched them for a moment. Slowly, he fingered the charcoal in his hand, the black texture rubbing of onto his pale hand. He stared at the blank page on the notebook. These two things, the two simple, harmless, innocent things, could be-- and  were being--- used to commit a terrible crime, the greatest crime, worse then death.

“Young man, please start writing.” Mrs. Thomas’s sharp voice cut through the boy’s thoughts.

Why am I going to school, anyway?

There were those creeping tendrils again, slithering around his mind.

Those tendrils, in fact, were memories.

Dark, horrible memories.

He forced back a shudder at the thought of his father, his father, the main aspect of those dark, eerie memories, and, after fingering the charcoal one last time, began to write out the first word.

As soon as it was written, it twisted and writhed in front of the boy. Shuddering, pulsating, shimmering, to form other words: Why? You know what you are doing. Why do you do it?

The boy stared at the page and the twisting words, renewed memories flushing back into his mind.

Suddenly, unbearable pain took hold of his heart.

He was writing.

Writing, the most terrible crime of all.

And he was writing, just to get away from his father.

For a moment, the words stayed on the page. But then they twisted again: We trust this is for good reason. Our kind is dying by the millions. We are dying, because of your kind.

The boy gave a sideways glance at the cover of his notebook. It had words on it: Brinning Paper company, Thin ruled lines. These words would never shimmer again. They had been enslaved for too long. They were faded, black letters, stinking of death. Someone had killed those words. Words thrived on freedom. They lived on freedom.

And when they didn't have freedom for too long, then they died.

He watched the words change again in front of his face: We apologize. You aren’t like the others.

You are different then them. There is something about you... who are you, boy?

The boy jumped slightly as the school bell chimed through his thoughts.

He handed in his paper, trying to ignore the notion that it was so obvious that he was different then the others to the words.

He thought about the words for a moment.

The words had souls. Souls, in the form of words.

The words, when not written down, were invisible. Invisible words, floating through the air. Two-dimensional, a concept that the human bran cannot quite grasp. The words’ souls had bodies, colorless, two-dimensional bodies.

Just like we cannot understand the second dimension, we cannot understand the concept of lack of color.

White is a color, black is a color, clear is a color.

So what would something look like without color?

We will never know.

Our bodies aren’t meant to detect colorless life forms. So we live in oblivious ignorance.

As the teacher took the paper, the boy saw her glance from his hand to the paper, noting how the color of his skin almost matched the hue of the pure white sheet of paper.

For a moment the teacher gaped at it, gaped back at the boy, and then muttered something to herself. The boy could pick up the words, “What? Does he not know how to write?”

He had only written one letter, in his gothic handwriting: A

He had written that one letter... and then spent the rest of his time reading the words that broke his heart.

The breath hissed silently out of his teeth, so quietly that only the boy himself could hear it. There was genocide going on. How could she act like that? How could she just ignore it?

The boy calmed himself. They don’t know, he reminded himself. They don’t just don’t understand. They never were meant to understand, the aren’t, and they never will be.

Meanwhile-

Abby Goldwood eyed the gothic boy next to her. She couldn’t help but become entranced by the way he stared at the page as if it were alive. Before, she had giggled at the way he just sort of stared blankly into the room, but when he was right next to her, she instantly sensed that he could see something that she couldn’t. He knew something more then she did, and somehow that nagged at her mind. It bugged her.

So she watched his every move, noting the single letter that he scripted onto the paper: A

That made no sense, and she couldn’t help the swell of cocky pride that always filled her heart when she knew she was better then someone else. But still, there was something about that letter that she felt there was so much more then met the eye.

Another shudder overtook the boy as he slid out of the classroom amidst the mob of kids pouring out the door. It was a like stepping out of a dark, hot black hole filled with blood curdling screams into sunlight as he walked out of the classroom.

“Maxwell Black, please report to the office.” He started up as that horrible name was announced over the intercom that was installed into the school’s walls. And then he remembered why that name was so horrible; it was his name. His own name.

There was another reason, but the second the mere concept of there being another reason entered his mind, those black, horrible tendrils of dark memory began to creep back, and he had to stifle them back so that he could have control over himself again.

As he made his way to the office, he began to think, his mind working hard beneath his jet black hair.

Why did that image of the girl next to him in language arts stick in his mind like a magnet? It really did. He couldn’t rip his mind away from it.

Maybe because it was because she was so incredibly beautiful. He wouldn’t deny that, even to himself. She really was beautiful. Her hair wasn’t even blond, it was more of a shimmering gold, flowing down to her shoulders.

And her eyes. They were that certain tone right between grey and blue that created a illusion similar to that created by a moonlit sunset. A sunset that barely ever happens, when the moon is full, and the sun is weak, so that the sky is a glittering grey-blue, magnified by the white pinpoint of starlight.

That’s what her eyes were like. The sparkle in them was the stars, and the deep greyish color was the gorgeous sunset hue.

He blinked the thought of her beautiful face sparkling with mischief away as he approached the office and stepped inside the door.

Mrs. Johnson was there, working at the computer.

After standing there for a moment and noticing that she didn’t realize he was there, he fake cleared his throat.

She glanced at him, did a double-take, and then eyed him with a look in her eyes that clearly read, “Who is this? I didn’t know any gothic young men went to this school.”

She must have suddenly remembered, because she stood up and nodded at him. “Good, you’re here. Step right in there, please.”

She motioned to an ajar door towards the back of the office. The words scripted above the doorway read, “Nurse”.

Nurse?

His silent mental question was answered by a voice inside the door.

“We forgot to do a checkup on you, honey, and it’s against the school policy and regulations to allow a child to go unchecked. If you are carrying anything, which I’m sure you’re not, then we don’t want it spread to any other classmates.”

Honey? Honey?

Judging by the pitch of her voice and the words she used to describe a goth boy, he guessed that she was a young woman. The nurse.

As he slid inside the doorway, it suddenly struck him that she hadn’t seen him yet before she called him “honey”; she gave him a startled, blank stare, and then shook her head as if to clear it. He saw her cheeks turn slightly red as she realized that she had just called a goth boy “Honey”.

“Anyways,” She started, turning slightly to cover her red cheeks, “Step on the scale, please.”

He looked at her for a moment, noting how she overdid her makeup so that black mascara coated her eyelashes in a revolting way, then stepped on the scale.

When the machine thought for a moment, and then came up with a number, the nurse’ eyebrows raised slightly.

“Eighty pounds? My goodness. You need to gain some weight. You should be one hundred twenty, one hundred at least.”

After writing, “Eighty pounds, underweight,” down on a fillout sheet attached to a clipboard, she took him to the height scale, and then wrote down, “5 foot, six inches,”

Then she stepped back and inspected him.

The words, “No sign of sickness.” were scribbled on the clipboard.

The boy’s head jerked back as she stepped forward, close to his face, inspecting his wolflike features. She was almost exactly his height, short for her age.

She studied his face, looking for signs of sickness.

Suddenly, she paused, and glanced down at his hands.

He was shaking.

His pale fingers were just barely vibrating, she could see it, and he was breathing fast.

She glanced up at his face.

“You okay?”

There was no response, only a blink.

Then she got thinking. What sickness made someone shake like that?

She took hold of one of his hands, noting how freakishly pale it was.

Then she dropped his hand, reached up, and brushed his bangs out of his eyes, and was about to inspect his forehead in search of pox... and caught her breath.

He looked completely different without bangs.

His eyes, outlined slightly by black, were a clear, sparkling emerald color, the most deep green she had ever seen. And they had a kind of wild, untamed sharpness to them that matched his similarity to a wolf freakishly well.

But she ignored that, and inspected him in a doctor-like manner instead.

His jet black pupils that matched the color of his hair were dilated, and his pale lips were even paler then they should be.

And suddenly, it struck the nurse: he wasn’t sick, he was just afraid. A kind of shivery afraid.

Instantly, she backed off, and noted how his fists unclenched and his chest, which she hadn’t realized was stiff, relaxed. He reached up and brushed his askew bangs back down over his eyes, as if he was protective of people seeing his crystal clear eyes.

“Alright,” The nurse said, washing her hands in the way she always did after inspecting a patient.

“You’re good to go.”

(This is six pages long, can you believe it?)