I’m falling forward through thick blackness towards a faint green glow, and I don’t even land. I’m just suddenly...here. I glance down to where my feet should be settled on grass blades, but nothing is there. Wherever I am, I don’t really exist, and somehow that’s perfectly fine with me.

I snap to attention as a tiny girl with thick brown coils of hair styled neatly on the top of her head races past me. 

“Lettie! Lettie? Lettie Lettie Lettie!!!” Her desperate cries startle birds from the branches of trees nearby. 

The little girl crashes into the arms of a short bald woman with the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen. She’s eerily beautiful as she dashes towards me, her slender form moving with a grace that’s truly stunning.

Then suddenly I see him. A boy with spiky blond hair kneeling in the grass by the pines a few feet from me. There’s blood pouring from underneath the miniature hands he’s got clutching his forehead, but he’s completely silent. My chest explodes when it hits me that it’s him. Sam? He can’t be more than five or six years old, but I know it’s him. Before I can scream or something, the woman sweeps his body against her chest and pulls a phone out of the back pocket of her jean shorts.

“Ella!” She speaks frantically into the phone. “It’s Sam. Head wound.” 

Her voice bounds across the forest as the little girl beside her releases a sob. She’s frantically ripping the grass out of the ground with her tiny fingers, and I watch in horror as she cries helplessly by his side. As Sam shifts back and forth between a tiny black wolf and a human, and neither of them can seem to stop it. 

“What’s happening to him?!” The girl shrieks when the woman tries to hold him still in her arms.

“Sam’s a werewolf, Emma.” The calm in her tone is clearly forced. “Just like you and me.”  

“But, he’s never...I’ve never seen him as a wolf before.” The girl named Emma whispers. “I thought he was just a boy.” 

When the child Sam goes limp, I fall back into darkness.

Sam’s a werewolf. And it just...makes sense. A fact with no room for questioning. I wasn’t hallucinating last night. I didn’t overdo my dose or drink too much. I saw his black fur. I felt it in my fingers while the strands were stained with blood. It was all real. He’s a werewolf, and this is simply additional proof. 

But even though I’ve accepted as much, this sensation doesn’t stop. I keep falling, until I’m suddenly in a dimly lit room lined with logs. A cabin? 

Ella Jo is leaning over a bed in the far corner, and it doesn’t take long to decipher what she’s doing here. My heart sinks when I spot Sam beneath a pile of quilts. His skin is unnaturally pale, and his face is drawn thin around hollowed eyes. My guess is he’s around eleven years old in whatever this is. Far too young to look like that, if you ask me. 

I watch Ella Jo inject something through an IV that sinks into the back of his hand. When his eyes close, I’m gone again, pulled through that tunnel of darkness as weightlessly as I came.

I end up in what appears to be a hoarder’s garage. The boxes piled all over leave no room for vehicles, but never mind that. 

A strangely familiar voice pulls my attention from my snap judgment. “You just have to focus.” 

I turn around, and suddenly I’m staring at a teenage version of that asshole, Max. I know it’s him by the pompous look on his face and the golden gleam of mischief in his eyes. His obnoxious smirk momentarily distracts me from noticing that he’s got a knife in his hand. By the time he’s sliced a narrow gash into his arm, I’m fully convinced he’s a psycho. But then he speaks again.

“The pain…” Max winces slightly as he removes the blade from his skin. “It always triggers my wolf healing.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath while I watch the cut on his arm close in seconds. It leaves no trace, and it occurs to me that this is normal. For him. Because Max…he’s a werewolf, too.

“Give me the knife.” Sam’s tone is so flat, I know instantly that he’s annoyed before I spin around and discover the absolute scowl spreading across his adolescent face. Cute. He’s a skinny teenager in this one, with patches of stubble poking out of his chin.  

“Start small.” Max chuckles nervously as Sam takes the blade from his hand. 

Are they friends or something? 

There isn’t time to find out. As soon as the knife cuts through Sam’s skin, the blood doesn’t stop rushing from him. The scene fades away to the sound of fearful shouting.

I don’t even have time to be worried about what I’ve just witnessed before I’m landing in grass again. I’m blinking up at stars speckled across a blackened sky when a noise to my right alerts me that he’s here, too. I find Sam sitting against the log cabin underneath a window with his head turned upwards. There’s a teenage girl with curly brown hair beside him, and she’s got her head resting on his shoulder. Before I can try to figure out what the hell they’re doing cuddling like this in the weeds, a shout nearby startles both of them into a collective flinch. 

“Mom, come on!” Max’s unmistakable voice drifts through the screen above their heads. “He’s seventeen. I’m not driving his ass around anymore, and I thought it was fine that I-”

“You had no right to teach your little brother how to drive behind my back!” It’s the bald woman’s resounding tone from before. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is for him?” She’s trying to whisper, but it isn’t really working out.

They’re…family. I blink down at Sam covering his face while their voices carry through the window.

“I know I know I know.” Max sounds scared. “But he-”

“No! No buts!” The mom is furious. “Sam doesn’t heal like the rest of us. If he gets in an accident, he could bleed out before we even know anything happened!”

A gentle sigh escapes teenage Sam as he closes his eyes. 

I fall again, and I think I get it now. These are memories. Maybe even Sam’s memories. Or…everyone around him. 

But I end up in a kitchen somewhere before I decide that I’m possibly tripping on something I don’t recall taking. I stare at a wooden table for a solid few seconds before I realize Sam’s silently sitting in a chair, and the woman who is apparently his mother is seated across from him. 

This is recent. Sam’s grown up. Not much taller than the previous memory, but more filled out. He looks the same as when I met him, minus the blood stains. His muscular build collapses in on itself when he leans forward, and his expression is impenetrable. Dark, and frozen. 

His Mom is speaking, but there’s something wrong with the quality of the sound. Her voice switches between clarity and clouded, muffled tones, but I hear everything. Everything she told him that night. 

About him imprinting on someone.

About him being a Shadow.

I take it in as if it makes sense. As if I’m finding out my blood type or some shit. My brain simply accepts the information, but I can tell something’s not right. Something’s off in her voice, and I can’t find it in me to trust her.

I watch Sam turn to leave, and I leave with him. 

But I soon wish I hadn’t. That I could turn around and leave this string of memories behind.

Because now I’m staring at myself stumbling around the fire pit in my backyard, and it’s beyond pathetic to witness. I glance around me for some sort of escape, but I’m instantly startled to discover the black wolf at my nonexistent feet. Sam...so it really was him out here? We’re hidden in the trees behind a purple-flowered bush, and I force myself to follow his gaze and observe the other me collapse in the grass, drunk as all hell. He saw this. Well…fuck. 

When the drunk me starts to shiver, wolf Sam creeps out of the shadows. He transforms smoothly as humanity hits him like a wave. His dark green t-shirt materializes with his form and flaps in the wind as he runs into my house. He emerges seconds later with a blanket, and tosses it across my drunk ass. The look in his eyes almost tears me in half, because I know exactly what that tight jaw and narrowed stare means. He’s done this before.

Sam watches me for a moment with his hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts. Then he shifts back to a wolf, his clothes disappearing as quickly as they formed as thick black fur takes their place. Wolf Sam settles behind the bush once more, and I grasp at the image of his little fluffy ears, but it fades as I fall away.

The next scene takes a while to emerge, although at this point I’ve lost all sense of time.

When my vision clears, I’m staring at a young woman next to Sam on a small couch. It's Emma, the same girl from before, but Sam’s broken voice snaps my attention to him.

“I’m so sorry. It’s someone I don’t even know, and If I could have a choice it would be you. I need you to know that. I thought it was you all this time, I just...I don’t know what’s happening.”

My heart sinks as soon as he’s done speaking. Is she his girlfriend or something?

The images blur, and suddenly Emma is crying. I can hear it, and I can faintly see them hugging. Then they’re just a swirl of bright colors and sounds that I can hardly decipher.

“I wish it was you, too.” A female voice emerges from the ruckus. “But I think deep down I’ve known that you...that we aren’t…” It fades away.

Then a soft little laugh echoes in and out.

“But we’ve never even kissed on the lips.” Her voice again.

I can’t see anything until Sam appears suddenly with his face completely contorted in rage.

Emma screams when he releases a deep growl, and I watch him run away before I’m falling again.

The next scenes are even more broken and distorted. Flashes of sound and images hit me all at once, but then they’re gone in seconds.

My backyard flickering in the firelight. 

Rough growls and teeth in my face.

Sparks flying and landing out of sight.

My actual body on my kitchen floor, with a human Sam kneeling beside me.

His tanned and blood-stained arms clutching me to his chest as we lay on my couch. 

“He healed you completely, Sam.” Ella Jo’s broken voice echoes clearly over everything else. “He took your pain. Everything you’ve felt since the day you were born.”

Sam’s twisted face is chilling to witness like this as his tears soak the skin on my neck.

His fingers seem to belong in my hair as he desperately grasps the strands.

Then I fall again. It’s dark all around me, but everything I’ve seen is clear.

Sam imprinted on me, and now it’s a bond between both of us. 

We're somehow in danger, but if I die, so will he.

Sam didn’t want this. Any of this.