Chapter 1: Wedding Plans

         “Will you marry me?”  Beautiful Kael.  Poor, unsuspecting Kael. “Yes.”  He knew why I said it.  He knew I didn’t love him…at least not yet.  Behind the joy in his emerald eyes, I saw the pain of knowing what my real intentions were.  I was selfish and afraid.  I was stupid.  I didn’t know what I had here in front of me; all I saw was my best friend…my pained, perfect best friend.  The smile on his face was fighting the urge to become a frown and the second I looked away, I could see the pain take over in his expression out of the corner of my eye.  I told him I’d marry him, planned on it---hoped for it, even---because I was afraid to leave my family and friends.  I didn’t want to go to college because it would be my first time away from the love and comfort of home…and that scared me out of my wits.

         Kael Green and I had known each other all of our lives.  I grew up with all of the same friends in this town and, other than him, there was only one person with whom I truly connected.  That other person was Raven Quinzel, my next door neighbor for as long as I could remember.  Had I not stayed so many nights over at her house as a child, I don’t think I would have ever known that she didn’t live in mine.  She was to be my Maid of Honor, my moral support.  I loved her as I did Kael; as a sibling.  They were the brother and sister in the adoptive family I had created in my mind; the adoptive family away from my real adoptive family, that is.  I wasn’t born in this place, to the parents that raised me.  I didn’t know who my parents were, nor would I ever.  I’d been told all my life that my real parents died, though when I asked how, I never got an answer.  Nobody really knew for sure.

         The wedding was to be in our clearing.  My friends, whom I had dubbed my “Pack Family” (never a more accurate nickname could I have chosen), and I would go out into the woods when we were children to play.  We found many interesting things and places and eventually made our own trails to these special landmarks where we would just rest and play and talk.  Our clearing wasn’t but a half mile or so from the town and it was absolutely beautiful.  That was where I wanted my wedding.  Kael wasn’t very happy about that, of course, he didn’t much like being outside and he especially hated hiking through the woods as a child.  He whined and complained because he didn’t want his clothes to get dirty and we should just get married in the church like a normal couple, but as always, I wasn’t listening.  This was my wedding, and this was how I wanted it.  It did turn out, however, that setting up was a very difficult task, but if I was going to marry somebody whom I didn’t truly love, I think I deserved the perfect wedding.  What was an inconvenience to everyone else was of no concern to me.  Selfish Cara.

         Patrick Napier, Kael’s Best Man and Raven’s fiancé, tailored my wedding gown; I designed one of my own to fit my personal style (if I was going to get married before I was ready, I should at least be happy with the dress).  My gown was beautiful---Medieval, with long tight sleeves ending in a V over the back of my hand and a gorgeous corset top with an intricate flower design and the skirt flared out longer and wider as it reached my feet, leaving a long train, all bordered in gold silk.  The veil was long and also bordered with gold and it was held to my head with a silver tiara which had a diamond in the center.  I felt like a princess when I tried it on.  Or like a little girl playing dress-up.  I was suddenly overcome with joy when I looked at myself in the mirror and I just couldn’t stop myself from giggling.  I was getting married!  And to Kael!  I was going to marry Kael and we would have a wonderful life with beautiful children who would look just like him and it was going to be amazing and I would never have to leave home!---that’s where it hit me.  I was being so selfish and so unfair to Kael.  I didn’t care about the wedding, I just didn’t want to go away.  Stupid, stupid Cara.  Stupid, selfish Cara.

         Nala was more than happy about Kael and me getting married.  She was a bride’s maid and everything!  She also offered to bake the cake and decorate the clearing, and she would do a wonderful job.
         “I can’t believe you’re getting married!  Where are you going on your honeymoon?” She asked me once…I had forgotten all about that.  I didn’t know what we were doing for a honeymoon.  I hoped Kael had forgotten too, “I have no idea.  Hopefully no place too far.  I’d like to stay closer to home.”
         “Oh that’s right!  You’re afraid of the big city!” she chuckled,  “I’m sure you’ll be just fine, Kael probably feels the same way.”  She was wrong.  Damn it Kael!

         The wedding was soon…too soon.  A week to be exact.  Nala was still working on the cake and planning on the decorations.  Patrick was in charge of what the Groom’s Men would wear, Raven  was in charge of Bride’s Maids.  I spent every day wearing a hole in the living room floor as I paced up and down worrying about what Nala had said.  Where would we have our honeymoon?  I didn’t know, I had no idea!  Kael wouldn’t tell me, he was keeping it a surprise…that was never a good thing.  The radio was announcing news about the gangs in the big cities safely outside of our borders here.  Al Capone was suspected to be behind the Valentine‘s Day Massacre.  The whole world knew he was, but he wouldn‘t be caught regardless of what anyone knew.  That would never happen, there was no real news to report there.  I hoped my darling fiancé wasn’t stupid enough to take me some place like that.  I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew for a fact that he was.  I was right.  I was always right when I didn’t want to be.

         I tried to escape my worries by reminiscing; by remembering all the simple things that made my childhood sacred.  I thought about our storytelling days in the clearing.  That was a mistake.  Telling stories was a favorite pastime with the Pack.  We went to our clearing late at night to build a bonfire and tell our stories when we were children.  No one then knew of this god forsaken wedding to come in a few years, I wished things had stayed the same since then.  We spent one night a week out at the clearing for our stories and we always sat in a specific order, not that there was any assigned order to begin with, we just all became accustomed to where we sat in our little circle around the fire.  We had rotting logs and a couple of old tree stumps for seating (these would be used much later to support the enormous wedding altar).  The tree stumps were already conveniently placed across from one another and the logs we brought in from the woods whenever we would find one sturdy enough to use for a bench.  My parents absolutely hated our ventures into the woods.  “Campfires just aren’t very ladylike,” my mother would scold.  “Look at you!  You’ve got dirt and grass stains all over your dress!”  We often ignored our parents, they would never understand us anyway, so instead of fight, we just snuck out most nights.  What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them and we had become very sneaky in our adolescence.

         Elliot always sat on the larger of the two stumps.  This was because the campfire stories had been his idea when we were 10, so he was always the first to share.  This became a tiresome tradition, of course, as all of his stories had something to do with wolves.  He was obsessed.  He loved anything wolf related, in fact, it was his idea to nickname our circle of friends “The Pack”.  Because of that, his nickname was Wolf.  I never did truly understand his affinity with the creatures.  In my opinion they were far more vile and frightening than the noble animals Elliot often described when he spoke of them.  He had always made a point to emphasize the value of teamwork and how wolves always hunted in packs and acted as a team.  That was his favorite thing about them and, eventually, would become my very least favorite.  To his right was Helena, always with her notepad.  She was the writer, my Poet.  She took notes on almost everything in her notepad.  Anything that could inspire beautiful words; anything worth noting.  She always told her story last, so that she could take notes on our stories without any interruptions in between.  Helena, my Poet.  She sat there with her long chestnut hair shoved back behind her ears or braided down her back as her parents would have it, all the beauty of nature in her pale blue eyes.  Raven and Patrick shared the log to the right of Helena.  They had their eyes set on the new movie business, Raven was sure that she would be the next big star in the talking pictures and Patrick wanted to direct.  They were different in their passions, as most people are.  Raven would do anything to be acceptable in the eyes of a hotshot film maker.  She had her hair cut short in a bouncy blonde bob and had sewn her own dresses out of various different materials to look like a flapper from the city.  Her parents didn’t approve, of course.  But it was a phase and would be over before it could really begin.  Patrick was talented and knew it.  He would go to college to study the new technology.  He would learn the business and work his way to the top.  Patrick didn’t need glamour, he had promise.  That and a big white charismatic smile.  Next to them sat Nala on her stump across from Elliot, the only daughter of the only negro family in the village.  She was the only one of us who had not been raised here.  She was born in New York City and her father took her here when she was 13.  She had seen much more than we had, and she had known of the evils and prejudices that existed only outside of our boundaries.  She knew no more of that here, as our town welcomed her and her father with open arms, Mr. Fox even owned a little store in the marketplace.  He made quite a decent living with his small business, Nala’s father was a smart man and he’d passed that on to his daughter.  She was another writer, though different by far in method and style from Helena.  Nala was the most unique of all of us, an artist, and a mystery; she didn’t have a mother.  No one knew what had happened to her, and when asked, neither Nala nor her father would say any more than that she was gone and she was never coming back.  I always wondered why they never told us, but I suppose it was never anyone’s business to ask.  To her right in our campfire circle, I shared a log with Kael.  My Kael, always by my side.  So many nights I had spent next to him in front of that fire, so many nights he looked at me, his eyes ablaze with a look of worship I never would notice.  Raven and Patrick seemed to have had it so easy.  They’d been dating for as long as any of us could remember.  They knew from the beginning that they loved each other and would always be together.  They were more lucky than I was ever destined to be.

I would never know until it was too late just how much I truly loved my Kael.

         The story Elliot would tell this night years before it would bear relevance was different from the many he had told in the past or would tell in the future.  This story was almost gossip---it was gossip!  Trivial and stupid, a rumor.  This was the story that would stick with me for years and sneak into my dreams the night before my wedding day.  “Did you guys ever hear what happened to Timothy Shrew?”  He asked us before going on.           “Who?”  We were only about 15 at the time, and Nala did not know everyone just yet.  Timothy Shrew used to live down the street from me at the edge of the woods.  “Didn’t he disappear like three years ago?  So Timothy ran away, what of it?” Kael replied, possibly more confused than Nala by the question, almost irritated, it seemed.

         “Timothy didn’t run away,” Elliot began and we immediately knew where he was going with this, “he was bitten…by a werewolf!”
         “Oh yeah right, Elliot!  Are you running out of whacko stories to tell us?  Maybe you should find some new source material.” Nala teased, rolling her eyes.  She still didn’t know who Timothy was, but two years was more than long enough for her to join us in our wariness of Elliot’s silly werewolf tales.

         “No!  It’s true,” desperate to defend himself, Elliot now jumped into the story, trying to ignore any further heckling.  “One night, Timothy snuck out of his window.  You guys remember when he used to sneak out, right?  He went out to meet up with his girlfriend in the woods like he did every night, but he never came back, remember?  Everyone in town sent out search parties and no one could find him, but every night since then, there’s been this wolf howling in the woods!  It’s gotta be him!”
         “There are wolves howling every night, Elliot.  It’s been that way since we were little.  How would you know if there was a new one?” Raven was always so condescending to Elliot.  Pursing his lips and giving Raven a look mixed with annoyance and his own inner conflict, he simply replied, “I just know.  I can hear it, like a sixth sense.”
         
         “Besides I saw him that night.  I couldn’t sleep so I was looking out the window at the full moon.  That’s my favorite phase, you know.  When the moon is full, you can see everything so clearly!  Anyway, I saw him go into the woods and that’s when I heard it, he was yelling something.  He sounded afraid or angry or something and then he just stopped and everything was quiet for a split second before the wolves started.  I heard barking and howling everywhere, but Timothy’s voice was gone.”  Dead serious was his tone and I noticed as the fire lit his face that his eyes hid a much deeper knowledge from view.  Elliot was positive now, if not then, of exactly what he had seen.
         “So he was attacked and killed by wolves.  It doesn’t have to be ‘wolf men’ you know.” Raven’s annoyance heavily implied in her tone once more.
         “There was no body.  There would have been a body.  Don’t you remember the search parties?  I do.  Half my family was gone for an entire month in the woods looking and couldn’t find him.” Kael suddenly defending Elliot startled me.  That he defended Elliot, of course was not what surprised me.  What took me by surprise was that, from the looks of it, Kael had been half asleep most of this time, his head resting on my shoulder.
         “What does it matter if he was bitten by werewolves anyway?  What does that mean, exactly?” Nala, the city girl, was still confused as ever by this entire conversation.

         “Well, werewolves are cursed, you see,”  Elliot said, all of a sudden right back into the story, “They are merely men with an evil curse upon them, a virus.  It’s like a disease and it’s contagious.  When a werewolf bites someone, the disease is spread to the victim.  I’ve heard it’s also genetic, but who knows?  For all we know, there could be werewolves living among us right now…” His eyes grew bright with excitement and the mysterious knowledge he held behind them seeped out into the grin on his face, he knew what he was doing.  Werewolves, here?  No.  They were fictional creatures I told myself.  Silly Cara.  No one that night asked Elliot any more questions concerning his story.  Most of us shrugged it off as stupid and trivial, not something to encourage of someone with an imagination so wild, but Kael’s reaction to Elliot’s dramatic ending words was nothing short of agitated.  He sat there next to me, silent and brooding.  He stared intently at Elliot, almost glaring.  Needless to say, he was wide awake now.  Why he seemed so angry in such a lighthearted setting was beyond me, but he was like that for the rest of the night and the entire walk home.  He refused to even acknowledge me when I spoke to him.  The whole night was rather strange, looking back.  I just couldn’t understand why, after even defending him in his claims, Kael had gotten so incredibly angry with Elliot after that story.  Nothing seemed to make sense.

         The walk home was intense, despite the lighthearted mood set by everyone around me.  Nala and Raven chatted away about all the silly theories they had about how the curse of the werewolf had come about.  Of course Raven thought that two men had been fighting over a beautiful woman and the more evil of the two had put a curse on the other to make him an undesirable monster, therein winning for himself the fair maiden and creating the hideous wolf man.  Darling Raven, silly little trifle.  Nala believed that it must have happened over a grudge of some sort.  They also argued over the possibility that vampires were involved.  Of course, because one mythical creature would just never be enough, there must be more.  Everything has an equal and opposite counterpart.  For every action is an equal and opposite reaction.  Vampires and werewolves.  You can never have one without the other.

         Of course, where I lived in the woods, there were wolves everywhere.  My parents worried every time we would go to our clearing on these nights because deep in the woods almost every night, we would hear them howling to the moon, even if their was no moon.  I knew I had nothing to fear, but Elliot’s outrageous claim was enough to make me feel more than just a little bit superstitious.  As we walked home that night, the wolves’ barking and howling seemed to grow much louder than usual.  It also felt like they were uncharacteristically close to our trail.  Normally, we would only hear them from afar; they were usually a few miles from town.  Because of this, I huddled close to Kael, latched on to his arm for protection against the beasts I so feared.  This didn’t seem to phase him, he was still in his bitter mood, burning a hole into the back of Elliot’s head with his fierce glare.  There was something almost primal about the way he carried himself, a savage instinct in his demeanor.  He was on guard and stiff.  Defense mode.  But why?  As the wolves got louder, I latched on tighter, though everyone else seemed to be perfectly at ease.  What is wrong with all of you?! I wanted to say, but I held back.  Didn’t they see the potential danger?  What if the wolves were getting closer because all together, we looked like a tasty meal and they were closing in to pounce?  But the wolves continued their battle cries and no one flinched at the growing sound but me.

         My awareness of the wolves from that night on was never so acute.

         The wedding was a day away now and I couldn’t focus.  I feared I would faint at the altar while I was making my vows and the entire thing would be a disaster.  I had already been accepted to The New Jersey College for Women.  I wanted to go to be a journalist, but changed my mind at the very last second and, instead, planned to get married.  That was the safest way out.  It seemed it wouldn’t matter either way, however, because I had to leave town for my honeymoon; Kael was planning a surprise for me.  I wondered if it would be too late to call off the wedding and sign up for summer courses?  Who was I kidding?  Of course it would be!  The wedding was tomorrow!  I couldn’t win.  Either way I would leave the village and either way I would be afraid beyond necessity.  If I must leave, I may as well do it with someone I know I can trust to protect me, I thought to myself.  I should never have gotten myself into this situation.  If I hadn’t been so afraid to go away, I wouldn’t have been betrothed to my best friend under false pretenses.  I shielded myself away from that idea, coming up with stupid virtuous reasons for why our first kiss could not happen until the wedding ceremony.  I was truly a stupid, selfish girl.  I guess it would stand to reason, since this was, in fact, a stupid, selfish world.  A world of superficiality and greed.  A world in which I was a much larger part than I wished I were.  Its influence on me was greater than I had known, and I hadn’t even seen anything past my own refuge in these woods.

         “Calm down, dear.” I didn’t even know my mother was in the room with me, “everything is going to be ok.  I’m so proud of your choice to marry!  Kael is such a wonderful boy and college is just no place for a young lady.”
         “I know, Mother,”  I understood her point of view, of course, she was trying to be helpful…it just wasn’t working.  My mother didn’t quite understand the new feminist movement; she didn’t know any different from how she was raised, and she tried to raise me like that too.  “In the house, that’s a woman’s place.”  She always said.  “A lady never leaves the house without her husband by her side to escort her.  That way, she’s always safe.”  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that these rules were more because women couldn’t be trusted in the eyes of the world than anything else.  The average man couldn’t care less about his wife’s safety, all that meant was that he would just lose another little bit of his estate.  Nothing that wasn’t replaceable.  Marriage was just a contract, a business deal, swapping property for false love and a family name.  Maybe women really were as stupid as we were so often made out to be.  I liked to think that I wasn’t, but my decision to get married made that idea increasingly more difficult to believe.

         “Now chin up, darling!”  My mother’s chimed, interrupting my brooding thought processes, “This is no way for a blushing bride to behave!  We’ve got to get you cleaned up and ready for the rehearsal, now scoot!”  Dearest mother.  She really did have my best interests at hand.  I guess it couldn’t have been all bad.  After all, this could have been an arranged wedding with a dowry and everything.  I should have been thankful to have had my own choice in the matter.  As it were, I had chosen correctly, whether I was ready to believe it or not.

         The rehearsal dinner was set up in the church instead of the meadow.  This was mostly because it was snowing.  The entire village grumbled about my choosing an outside wedding in the middle of February, but I didn’t care.  Snow was one of my favorite things and it made my clearing just that much more beautiful in the daylight when the temperature betrayed the winter setting anyway.  And as it were, I would not give up that perfect scenery for the comfort of others.  Cruel, uncaring Cara.  Maybe I secretly hoped we would all freeze there, never to move again.  Then I could be sure to stay home forever.  The dinner passed with an incredible amount of tedium and by the time I got home to lie down in my nice, warm bed and close my eyes, I was dead asleep, the day forgotten.