A/N: I've been re-watching the Percy Jackson movies and I can't decide which movie I like more. The first one which is such a classic quest movie or the second one which is just more awesome, has more character issue and cool effects! Plus it has Nathan Fillion and Anthony Stewart Head! Anyone who has an opinion on this feel free to share!

 Enjoy!

Four

-The Wolf in Cabin Three-

Part II

*Ryan*

The next day went by agonizingly slow, I ate everything in the cabin that could be eaten and I was still hungry. My foot was healing and the cuts had closed up and the previously black blue bruise was turning a sickly greenish yellow, which I guessed was progress. But since I still couldn't support my weight on my leg I was fairly certain the leg was broken, maybe even crushed and it was taking my body a long time to get it fixed. I also began to wish for a pair of shoes since going outside for a piss in two inch snow without anything on my feet was about as fun as juggling with razor blades.

I'd inventoried the stuff I'd found in the green emergency supply box, found candles and crayons. I figured the candles would be nice for when the sun set. They might both offer a little warmth and light. The crayons provided a bit of a distraction from both my throbbing leg and the boredom that quickly was beginning to take root in me. I wanted my carving knifes and a piece of wood. Carving was something my father had taught me and over the past year I'd gotten seriously good at it, since it was one of the things I could do for fun that cost no money and needed no electric outlet.

I also tried to put up some of the Christmas decorations but the effect was sad rather than festive. They seemed to be taunting me, reminding me that there would be no Christmas for me. I took them down and put them in the box of emergency supplies not even wanting to see them.

Sometime in the afternoon I began to pace (well, hobble) as I wait for Annabeth to come back. I felt a little bad for not talking to her last night, she'd clearly figured out what I was, and she was a wolf too. She would probably be able to handle what I told her. Still I wanted to know more about her before I shared things with her. Sharing, even when I'd been human, hadn't been something I did with just anyone.

I also was beginning to get desperate for a shower, and attempted to freshen up a little in the newly fallen snow. There was almost three inches of it by then and it was still coming down. I sure hoped Annabeth would still show up even with the snow.

Wrapping the thermal blanket around myself I sat on the one step outside the cabin with my back against the door. The blanket was keeping me warm and even if it hadn't been I'd not been able to stand sitting around in the cabin for one more moment.

A short while later I heard a faint sound coming from the west and looked in that direction. It was a red brown wolf carrying a backpack, bounding towards me with amazing speed.

Annabeth.

I stared, startled. I wasn't sure but I had half believed she was kidding me about being able to turn at will. Like she, I don't know, had been trying to tell me what I wanted to hear. That I had imagined seeing her first as wolf then as human. But she hadn't been messing with me.

The wolf stopped about a hundred feet away, dropped the backpack it had been carrying and then moved slightly to the left, behind a huge tree and out of my sight. A moment later a lean arm reached for the backpack and shortly after that Annabeth, now wearing clothes –but no shoes – moved out from behind the tree and hurried over to me.

I got up and made sure the door was open so she wouldn't have to stay on the snow any longer than she had to.

"Hi," she said as she got close. I tried not to stare at her. Not just because she had been a wolf three minutes earlier but also because she was just as beautiful in the daylight as in the moon light. Her eyes were so amazingly piercing blue and I'd never seen that kind of cascading curly hair before. I wanted to touch it, run my fingers through it. Suddenly I found myself wondering why the heck she was out here with me, and who the sweatshirt I was wearing belonged to. Her boyfriend most likely. Girls like this always had boyfriends.

Not that it mattered, I wasn't going to be sticking around.

"Hi," I said back, my voice a whole lot less enthusiastic than I had been intending. She entered the cabin quickly and I followed, closing the door.

She put the backpack down as soon as she was inside. It was a big backpack and I really hoped it was full of food.

"I wasn't sure if you had a favorite food or something but I got you all kinds of things. Ham, sausage, raw hamburgers and some frozen meat pies. I figured you might be able to cook them on the portable stove. And you can put the stuff you don't eat outside so it won't spoil. Only good thing about this weather. Oh I got ketchup too." She held up the red bottle. I smiled. She pulled out a whole bunch of more stuff, bread, beans, more water bottles, some canned stuff, putting it on the emergency supply box. I was kind of using it as a table. Remembering I had been drawing with the crayons earlier, I felt my cheeks get a little warm. Annabeth picked up one of my drawings. It looked like a five year old had done it.

"I was just..." I began as I walked forward to take it from her. "...just passing the time."

"Well good for you," she said, hiding a smile. I went over to get the rest of the stuff out of the backpack. I was getting seriously hungry.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered with the trouble of cooking any of the stuff, but I figured with Annabeth there I should. It was the normal thing to do. She took a bag of some sort of candy from an outside pocket of the backpack and sat down on the sleeping bag, studying me as I got the little stove going.

"You don't know much about what you are," she said after a while. It was a statement not a question. "You hadn't heard of shifters until yesterday." This too was a statement. "Still you are a werewolf or something."   

"Yeah," I said, looking up at her. "I guess I am."

She raised an eyebrow and opened the bag of candy."Now you wanna share huh?"

"I guess I'm beginning to trust you. And you did just turn from wolf to human in front of me."

"Not totally in front of you," she said, tucking her bare feet into my sleeping bag and putting a colorful candy of some sort in her mouth. "That would have meant naked awkwardness," she said, grinning.

Smiling to myself I decided not to tell her I would have traded all the awkwardness in the world for a glimpse of her naked. Figured that was the kind of thing you had to know someone a whole lot better before blurting out. Even then they'd probably take it the wrong way.  

"I don't know what being a werewolf is like," she continued, and suddenly her tone was serious. "But I figure I can tell you about being a shifter. If you want you can tell me about how it's different for you. If you don't, that's okay. I'll come back tomorrow and the day after and the one after that and maybe you'll want to tell me one of those days."

"Okay," I agreed, even though I wasn't planning on being around for long.

"So where to begin..." She hugged her legs closer to her chest, her blue-blue eyes staring up at me. I had never seen that kind of eye color. It was somehow electric and icy at the same time.

"How about the beginning?" I suggested as I got some food cooking. Beans, sausages and some of the ham. I was thinking since she'd made it sound like her father was like her it was probably genetic. But if it wasn't I would love to know if it was possible for me to become like her. To be able to change when I wanted. To not have to live with hunger for the kill, for human blood and flesh.

"Beginning? I'm not sure how we began. There is this one, like, creation myth my brothers used to tell me. It's about a huge wolf that came down from the sky." She ate another candy."She was as big as the ocean and as tall as the tallest mountain –don't ask how that makes sense- and she fell madly in love with a human. Their children became shifters. But apparently she didn't like that her love loved the children as much as her and that some of the children loved other people, so she killed her love and went back to the moon. I'm not sure how much of that to believe, but-"

"I meant more like how did you become a shifter," I said, amused by how literal she'd taken my question.

"Oh, I was born a shifter," she said, eating some more candy. "We all are. There is no other way to become one. Two shifter parents, that's the only way. Before you could have one human parent and one shifter parent but for the last few generations things have been changing. Now only two shifters can have shifter children and even then it's not sure. Lots of shifter women have miscarriages and problems with delivery."

I wasn't sure what to say to that, but she continued without me having to say anything.

"It's sad but the way it is. Anyway," she said and shrugged. "We have like two more chromosomes which is the only way to tell we're different unless we shift in front of you. We usually have our first shift before eighteen months and the wolf is like part of us. Always. Like I can sense her inside me all the time, she's separate yet not. Different yet still me. It's hard to explain."

"That's not how it is for me," I said, sitting down across from her to watch her. "The wolf is like a separate part of me. Completely other, different, alien. I can barely remember what happens when I change. When I'm human it's like I have another brain, sending me, well, pictures of his wants and desires. It's always pictures or sounds or smells though. I guess my wolf isn't good with words."

She chuckled at that. "That be something. Imagine a talking wolf. That would be so weird. You want one?" she asked, suddenly holding out the bag of candies. "They're my fave." She smiled a tight little smile, like she was unsure. Like she was worried I wouldn't take what she was offering.

It had been a long time since I last ate candy. It wasn't something the wolf ever craved and I'd never been much of a candy person. Still I wanted to turn her uncertain smile into a true one, so I took a piece of candy from the bag. It was square and a little soft and yellow. My wolf didn't want to eat it. Yellow wasn't a good color for food, he sent clear indications of.

I put the candy in my mouth and her smile, just like I'd hoped became real and happy. "You like?"

"Sure," I said chewing on it. It tasted like artificial fruit. "But I have to say I prefer popcorn."

"Popcorn?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Used to be my favorite food," I said before turning to the food once more.

"Popcorn?" she said again. "Really? Popcorn?"

"Stop saying it like that," I said, even though I was enjoying the bantering. It had been a long time since I'd bantered with anyone. Heck it had been a long time since I talked to anyone for more than five minutes.  

"Alright," she said, grinning and putting the bag of candy down. "So I'm guessing you weren't born a werewolf?"

"No." I stirred the food again. It was steaming a bit so I figured it was about done.

"So you were like what? Bitten by another werewolf?"

"Yeah," I said not wanting to think about that night. "Something like that."

"That's got to be weird," she said as I turned the stove off, eager to eat. "I've been like this since I was born. I had changed to wolf half a dozen times before I even said my first word." 

I thought that seemed weirder than being turned into a wolf when you were grown up. Like how would you be able to hide from human detection before you even learned to talk?

"How long ago?" she asked, as I started to eat. I decided not to offer her any food since I'd made a pretty odd mix of things. And I had just finished my newly invented beans, sausage and ham dish by pouring ketchup all over it. I didn't think she was used to that kind of cuisine.

"Little over a year. I was seventeen," I answered. "It's been a year and two months. Somehow it feels a lot longer than that though." Thankfully she didn't ask me to elaborate on that. I didn't want to go into the rather lonesome and depressing life I'd been making myself live since my change.  

"I'm seventeen, so that makes you only a year older than me," she said attempting to sound cheerful."You seem a bit older. I guess that's what happens when you become a werewolf."

"Seventeen huh?" I said wanting to turn the subject away from me.

"Yup. I'm doing my senior year of high school." She sighed heavily. "Can't wait for it to be over."

"Really?" I said. "You look like the kind of girl that would love high school."

"What kind of girl is that?" she asked, her tone suddenly a little sharp.

"The smart, witty and well...." Using the spoon I was eating with, I indicated her body. "...totally hot"       

She blushed a little, which made her freckles stand out. My wolf liked that she had blushed; he liked thinking about her blood. He wanted to taste it. Not to kill her, just to taste her. He sent pictures and ideas of how her blood would feel in our mouth. I pushed them away. I was not turning into a vampire, I wasn't going to start creeping around graveyards or get an east European Dracula accent and I was absolutely not going to let myself fantasize about what a girl's blood might taste like.

"I wish you'd tell Shelly Halls that," she said after I went back to eating and she stopped blushing.

"Shelly Hall?" I asked, no clue who that was or what she had to do with anything.

"She's this girl in school, she's the best at everything, even math. She even beats me at sports and she's not even a shifter. It's so not fair." She muttered the last bit, I guessed talking more to herself than me. "But whatever. Let's see what else. Do werewolves mate?"

"Um," I said eating some more of my odd food mix. I hadn't exactly been hanging around a lot of girls, but from the regular morning hard-on I woke up with I was fairly certain that part of my anatomy – and its function - hadn't changed all that much. "What?"

"Not sex you doofus. Get your head out of the gutter," she said and rolled her eyes. "Mating is, like... the wolf finding his or her other half. Mostly it's another wolf but sometimes a human. Their mate is their perfect match, like a soul mate."

"Your wolf picks like who you marry?" I asked, thinking that sounded really weird. I would never trust my wolf to make that kind of decision. I actually didn't even trust him to pick breakfast so why would I trust him with something that important?  

"Not quite," she said and leaned her head back against the wall. The move exposed her throat which my wolf liked. A lot. I swallowed and focused on what Annabeth was saying. "It depends. Mating doesn't always happen two-ways. It was that way with my parents. My mother's wolf picked my father. They'd already been sort of set up to marry, and since they got along no one cared that my father's wolf never accepted my mother's as his mate."

"Alright," I said slowly. "So it's like normal love. Sometimes you fall in love with a person and they love you back and sometimes you end up with a broken heart?"

"I guess. But my dad loved my mom. It was the wolf that didn't. People say they were happy and I guess they must have been. They were together for ten years and had five kids," she said, pulling her head away from the wall. "She died when I was born so I don't know. I only know how my dad was with my step-mom April. She was human and his mate and the way he loved her... I can't imagine that." She rubbed at her thumb nail not looking at me. "When she died I thought he would die too. It almost makes me not want to find my mate since that would be me if my mate died. I'd be as heartbroken as my dad was. Is." 

"I don't think you should look at it like that," I said gently. "Isn't it better to have had that kind of love and then lose it, then to never have had it? And who says you would lose it?"

"I don't know." She looked up at me, those big blue eyes of her suspiciously shiny. "Sometimes I want it so bad it's like I'm starving but..." She looked back down at her nails and was quite for a while. "It doesn't matter though. It will happen for me soon, it has to. I'm the only daughter."

"What?" Now I was confused again.

She shrugged."It's something to do with our bloodline, the alpha gene. It can only be passed down through a female and only when she conceives a child with her mate. That's also why my dad married my mom I guess. Her bloodline, now mine, is very strong, no humans have ever been born -even to half shifters - so we have to keep it going. The alpha couple is the most important and affects the whole pack. Whoever I mate will be alpha while I'll be luna and we will be leaders of our pack. The way we act and think will affect how the pack acts and think. It's a whole big thing." She shrugged again. "But whatever. Let's talk about something else, this shit is depressing."  

I actually had plenty of questions I wanted to ask– like what were alpha and luna and what was the purpose of a pack - but I held my tongue. I didn't know her well enough to push for more information. So if she wanted to change the subject that was okay with me.

"Tell me about the eyes," she said suddenly. "And the teeth. When you change are you part human or all wolf?"

"All wolf I guess. I'm more like a bear-wolf though. I'd say almost twice as big as your wolf."

She nodded eagerly."Can you half transform? Like some sort of freaky 80's movie werewolf? Shifters can only take the two shapes, no middle ground. But on Monday I saw your teeth and eyes. Can you do more?"

"I haven't ever tried," I said edgily. "I've mostly been trying to make myself, very unsuccessfully, I might add, forget what I am."

"So you've never experimented with it? Like to see if you can become half and half or something?"

"No." I stood, despite my injured leg's protests, suddenly feeling cornered and fuming with some sort of repressed rage. "And I don't really want to try. I don't want to be like this. Speaking of that; you have any clue if there is a way to reverse this? Could I be human again? Because that would be a dream."

"No. I don't think so." She too stood, and wrapped her arms around herself. For warmth or because my size and budding anger I wasn't sure. I hoped it was the first. "One of my brothers is dating a witch. They said they might come for Christmas. It's only a few weeks left. You'll be healed up by then. You could come talk to her. She might know something useful."

I backed into the corner. I could suddenly smell her fear. No it wasn't fear, but something a little similar. Something that was the beginning of fear. I wondered if my eyes were glowing. Worry I suddenly realized. That was what I was sensing from her. She was worried.

"I don't know if I'm staying that long. I usually don't stay for too long," I said, turning to look out the window. Her scent –worry, wolf and smoking herbs- was lovely and it made my wolf want to pick her up and press her against the wall. To kiss her lips and then sink my teeth into her neck. Not to kill but to taste. And to put my mark on her. Only I knew the wolf. If he tasted her blood he wouldn't be able to stop. He'd rip her throat out and...

"Maybe you should this time. Maybe you could like it here. It's quiet and boring but the forests are lovely to run in and the people are nice. The pack is nice. Maybe you could be part of that." I felt her move closer to my back and put a hand on my shoulder. "Maybe-"

"Do you ever get this hunger feeling?" I asked tensely, still turned away from her. This was what I really had wanted to ask all along. Did she too ever hunger for human flesh, for the kill, for the pride the wolf took in downing his pray?

"Hunger for what?"

"Hunger for the kill," I whispered, not wanting to scare her but also desperately wanting to know.

She sucked in a deep breath and thought for a moment. "I suppose. The wolf hunger's for the wild hunt but-"

"Not for animals. For-"

"For humans. Yes," she whispered. "That is the wild hunt. Do you know the story?"

"No," I said, turning to her, my leg feeling oddly numb. Light was still coming faintly through the windows, but in the twilight shadows Annabeth looked somehow eerie. Unreal. An illusion.

"The wild hunt is the hunt of the fey. They are mystic creatures that live in a world between ours and the next. Between our world and the world of the dead. Some say the fey are as real as we, others that they are spectral creatures of mist. All say they are beautiful, so beautiful merely looking upon them can make you blind or mad." Her voice was a lower as she continued, making me inch a little closer to her."And what they hunt is the great white stag. She is both a human maiden and a stag at once. A human soul, a human body, while also an animal. The fey hunt with horses and hounds – only the hounds are not always hounds. Sometimes they are great white wolves. Werewolves. So when one speaks of the wild hunt-"

"One speaks of hunting both animal and man."

"Yes. The perfect pray. The animal's ability to run and the human mind's ability to think and plan." She looked up at me and for a moment I thought she might lean up and kiss me. She was close enough. I could see the blueness of her eyes and could count her freckles. I wondered how she would kiss. Soft and tentatively or demanding and passionate? Would she wrap herself around me or just touch my face softly with her small hands?

I wanted to find out, but at the same time I knew I stood no chance. I hadn't showered in forever, I was a drifter with about eighty bucks to my name – that was if I could find the clothes and cash I had stashed on Saturday afternoon -,  I hadn't finished high school, had no job prospects and I turned into a monster three night a month. Just the guy you wanted to bring home to meet the parents. Not that I was looking for that. I would settle for a kiss with the option of trying to see what the sleeping bag was good for besides sleeping.

Annabeth however didn't strike me as the quickie type so I was fairly certain there would be no kissing or touching of any sort. But a guy could dream right?

She didn't kiss me but took a step back, smiled and said, "I should get home. My dad might wonder where I am."

"Alright." I nodded.

"I really liked hanging out," she said, reaching out to open the door. "I might not make it out tomorrow. If not I'll see you on Friday."

"Okay." I glanced away from her and notice her bag. I quickly scooped it up. "Don't forget this."

"Thanks." She took the backpack from me, our fingers brushing. Suddenly the idea of not seeing her for more than a day seemed unthinkable. I wanted to tell her that, but figured that might freak her out. Figured it was one more of those things you had to know each other well to say.

Backpack in hand she went out the door and into the dark.

I smiled even though I wasn't happy. I would stay and see her on Friday but then I would have to leave. Staying any longer would make me get attached, and that would be no good. But I would stay until Friday.

Yes. I wanted to see her one more time. Needed to. After that I would leave. For both our sakes.