"Good practice, guys," Abbie said, wiping her sweaty brow. The thirteen members of the Stokerville High girls' basketball team settled onto benches on the margins of the gym to recover from their latest intense practice.
Hailey stretched. "Can't wait for Selena to get here, Abbie. All of us are so excited to become werehyenas!"
"ALL of us, Hailey?" Katelynn asked skeptically. "I'm not even sure I want this. Part of me's curious, but a really large part of me that wants to stay human."
"Oh come on, Katelynn!" Layla laughed, clapping the nervous girl on the back. "This is a team thing; if most of us are doing this, we all should. How'd you like to be the only human on the team?"
Katelynn shrugged. "Who knows?"
"Well, I say you're gonna love it!" said Naomi. "I heard we're gonna get dicks outta this. It'd be like a strap-on plus!"
"Yeah, no more getting busted smuggling sex toys into school!" Riley snickered. She glanced at the door as her girlfriend walked in. "Summer, you made it! Excited to become a werehyena?"
Summer Vogel practically flew into Riley's arms. "You bet! I just know your cock will feel totally AMAZING in me! Ooh, and I'll get one, too! You'd be okay with me fucking you for a change, right?"
Riley smiled lovingly at her adorable cheerleader. "Of course you can top me sometimes. To be honest, I've been fantasizing about that for a while. Sometimes it's pretty fun to be dominated by a cute girl like you." Riley and Summer shared a quick kiss on the lips.
"This all sounds so damn impossible," Jazmyn remarked, running a coffee-colored hand over her buzzcut, "but so damn cool, too. Can't wait t' see how big my muscles can get!"
"You know," Riley said to Summer, "you should tell Micki Steele and Jessica Tang about this, Summer. I know they're some of your best friends on the cheer squad. Oh, and Ashlee Kline, too!"
"I actually bumped into Micki and Jess on the way here," said Summer. "They already know; Ashlee told them. Believe it or not, Ashlee and her girlfriend Zoey've been werehyenas for a couple of days now. Micki and Jess'll get turned some other day; the Ring's gonna get too much of a workout with us."
"Awesome!" said Riley. She turned to Diana Lyall. "Hey, Di! Are you excited to become a werehyena. Your sister's the alpha, after all."
Diana grinned, ready to drop her bombshell. "I'm not becoming a werehyena..." The entire room gasped at her words. "...because I'm already a wereWOLF!"
"No fooling?" said Abbie. "Oh, of course! Selena mentioned being the only non-wolf in a werewolf family. That WOULD make you a werewolf, wouldn't it?"
Diana puffed out her chest proudly. "Yup! That's where all this gorgeous muscle comes from. Pure werewolf genes! Well... werewolf genes, and plenty of exercise. My other sister Luna doesn't work out much, and she doesn't look a third as buff as me. Still more than most girls, though."
"What's it like living in a werewolf pack?" Katelynn asked shyly.
"Fun, I bet," Chloe guessed.
"It sure is!" Diana said. "We don't have dicks (except for the dudes), but we make up for it with strength and stamina. My girlfriend Sylvie could tell you a tale or two! But it's not just about mating. You little pink monkeys haven't fucking lived until you've chased a herd of deer through a moonlit forest. And then you catch a straggler and tear it to pieces with your claws and fangs! Then you tear the juicy meat from it with just your teeth, and... you alright, Katelynn?"
"It sounds horrifying!" the shaking girl answered. "I'm a vegan, for Pete's sake!"
"Well, there's so such thing as a vegan werewolf," Diana responded. "Or a vegan werehyena, for that matter."
"Hey, what's werebeast religion like?" Sofia Rivera-Lopez asked. "I'm a Christian, you see."
"Me too!" Maddison Kaufman agreed, squeezing her girlfriend's caramel-colored hand.
"Traditionally, we worship the Moon as our Goddess and ancestral Mother," Diana replied. "Nobody's gonna tell you what to believe, though. Dad says he met some Muslim weretigers in Bangladesh once. If you wanna keep going to church after you join Selena's pack, be my guest!"
"Tell me more about your beliefs," said Abbie. "Living with abusive and neglectful foster parents, I haven't had much of a chance to explore my spirituality. At this point, I guess my religion is basketball." She laughed self-effacingly.
"Like I said," Diana answered, "all werebeasts (those of us who keep the Old Ways, anyhow) believe that the Moon is their ancestor. Whether that means the Moon literally gave birth to the first werebeasts or that She's responsible for turning humans into the first werebeasts depends upon an individual pack's traditions and oral history. The way my pack tells it, Lady Moon swallowed a man and a woman and carried them in Her womb; the were reborn as the first werebeasts. Besides Lady Moon, we believe in all kinds of minor spirits. Everything in nature has its own guardian spirit: every animal, every tree, every river, every mountain. We sometimes pray to them when we need help that particular spirit is especially good at giving. For example, if we need to cross a real nasty set of rapids, we pray to the river's spirit for a safe crossing. Or we might give thanks to a slain animal's spirit after a successful hunt. That kind of stuff."
"Gotcha," Abbie nodded. "Sounds cool. What about moral codes?"
"Lady Moon commands that the pack always come first in our hearts," Diana responded, "even above our own lives. We must also honor nature, never taking more than we need to live. We are also ordered to shun cities, which is why we live out in the fucking boondocks. It's said that silver is sacred to Lady Moon, so sacred that we're forbidden to touch it. If we do, Lady Moon punishes us with burning heat that sears our skin."
"Hence all the movies about monster hunters with silver bullets," said Abbie. "Any religious ceremonies I should know about?"
"There's the coming-of-age rituals, for starters," said Diana. "You shift for the first time when you're thirteen, usually. Sometimes it happens as early as eleven or as late as fifteen, but seven times out of ten, your first shift comes around your thirteenth birthday. The shaman and his or her assistants send you on a vision quest. They give you a pipe full of psychoactive herbs (that means drugs in Shamanese) and send you into the deepest part of the forest (or sometimes a mountain peak if one's nearby) to commune with Lady Moon and the spirits. You fast and meditate on sacred mysteries for a couple of days (while stoned out of your mind, of course) and wait for your spirit guide to come to you in a vision. The vision all sounds suspiciously like a drug hallucination to me, but then again I always saw the spirits more as metaphors and symbols than as literal magical beings. But, hey, who knows?
"Well, that's the first initiation ritual. The second occurs when you're sixteen. The shaman brings you into his or her home and brings you into adulthood by having sex with you. Don't worry about whether or not you'll be comfortable with that. A sixteen-year-old werebeast is gripped with an irresistible urge to mate. It's sort of like an animal's rut or heat. Trust me, you'll be comfortable with literally anything that takes the edge off your horniness. Most teens in our pack spend the next couple of months after their sexual initiation mating with anybody who'll have them. I know I did! Of course, you're all seventeen, so it doesn't really matter for you. These rituals are more for your potential cubs.
"The ritual you'll experience most often if the monthly Sacred Hunt every full moon. Werebeasts usually get to control their shapes, but we have to spend the entire night of the full moon locked into our were forms. This is the night our inner beast is strongest. We celebrate with a massive hunt the entire pack takes part in. We start with a bunch of prayers and songs to Lady Moon, followed by the hunt itself. Once we have enough meat, we throw a feast full of music, dancing, storytelling, and what humans would call acts of public indecency. Lotta cubs get conceived on Sacred Hunt nights, let me tell you! Then, of course, we have rites for taking on a formal mate, for births, for naming cubs, for funerals, and shit like that. I could talk about all of them, but we'd be here all day. I'll just leave some of them as surprises."
"What's your family like?" asked Jazmyn.
Diana laughed. "You mean my CLOSE family? They can really be something. Dad's the pack alpha. He's a bit aloof, but always tries to be fair. Mom, she's wild. She can get pretty aggressive, and always seems to have an opinion. I try to stay out of her way when I can. My older sister Luna's bitch. Hate to say it, but she really fucking is. She was born gorgeous and has a natural talent for bossing people around. Naturally, she's Mom's favorite. You may remember her from your freshman year; she was the captain of the cheer squad before she graduated and Ashlee got the job. Thank Lady Moon, she's away a lot now. Always shows up for the full moon, though. Mom says Luna'll be alpha after Dad, but I'm not gonna let that happen. You're allowed to challenge the heir to a fight and win their position from them in a pack. We value strong rulers over fancy bloodlines, and I'm waaaay stronger than Luna. As for Selena, I honestly wish I hadn't teased her so much. I didn't know it bothered her at the time, but it did. That was no way to treat a wolfborn."
"A what?" asked Kadie.
"A child of werewolves whose werebeast gene is recessive," said Diana. "Everyone treated her as the pack omega, and I slipped into doing the same fucking thing, just in a 'nice' way. I hope I can make it up to her."
"Speaking of which," said Cassidy, "where the hell is she? I can't just wait all day for her to come and turn me. Mom and Dad will start asking questions if I'm not home in about an hour or two."