Hollow Heart

She walked out with a loud bang, the double doors clanging open. 

Hair flowing with the wind, grey eyes sparkling in the effervescent moonlight, Evelyn walked out with the perfect mix of confidence and under-confidence that only a seventeen-year-old girl could achieve. 

The first full moon of the year and she was already late to help her family set up the root cellar. 

But what could she do? She just couldn't help it. That feeling of the strings cutting through her fingers. Her pick’s smooth strokes over the soundhole and how she could play and play for hours at a time and completely immerse herself in her own little corner of the world she liked to call 'music'.

Moonrise was 7:44 and Evelyn had 8 blocks to walk. Giving herself time to keep her stuff down and rush to the root cellar, she had approximately 12 minutes before her death was imminent. 

Moving along in a weird mix of speed walking and jogging, she was finally 1 block away from home with 5 minutes left on the clock.  

The fog enveloped her just as she stepped foot into the town graveyard and towards the root cellar located behind the Marshalls' marble-white family crypt. 

45 seconds to spare, Evelyn had barely skimmed past her deadline, but she made it through. 

She waited outside the cellar for her brother and sisters to walk in and prepare themselves for the first transformation of the year, with the new lock and key in hand. 

As the youngest of all the siblings, it fell to her to replace the torn handcuffs with new ones and the broken lock and keys too. The fact that she hadn't had her first transformation yet didn't help either. 

The latest age any of her siblings, family, extended family, or even her ancestors had transformed for the first time was 15. 

Fortunately, Evelyn was 17.

See, the thing was that to activate her werewolf gene, she had to kill. Her family wasn't one of the Bites. The Marshalls were one of the first seven original werewolf families who were born with the werewolf curse to kill. 

So the Marshalls, who essentially ingrained murderous qualities in their children were very obviously surprised when their youngest ended up a pacifist. 

Evelyn was more than happy not to kill for selfish reasons, like triggering the wolf inside her. So ever since she had the ability to think for herself, she had decided never to hurt someone unless it came down to self-defence. 

As the town where the original werewolf families rose from, Mystic Falls knew all the ongoings of these families. Most of the other families had moved out and on to other, much better places. But her family was traditional and weren't ready to let go of their ancestry. 

While it took them a while to accept their pacifist daughter, they eventually decided that the wolf was bound to come out at some point or another. So they weaponized her.

Too tired to argue, Evelyn accepted their offer of carrying around the family dagger, but even as a person who couldn't handle the sight of any arms, she had to admit the primal beauty of the delicate weapon.

She felt unusually connected to the fragmented mosaic of crystal-clear glass pieces. Maybe it was because, like her, it too had no particular image or aim in life. Or maybe it was because she too was broken glass, shattered and put together a million times over.

By the time her brothers and sisters started howling at the moon, Evelyn was well outside the graveyard. She knew it was safer, physically to get out of there as soon as possible because they could literally break free anytime now. 

Even without activating her gene, Evelyn had astonishing control over her super speed and strength. But she knew that as a wolf, she would be even faster, closer to the speed of sound. 

She turned the corner to her favourite park and started towards the swings. She had just sat down and plugged in her earphones to the sound of Niall Horan when her super hearing picked up the lightest of rustles in the breeze.

She glanced behind her and caught the retreating glow of a phone's flashlight. Sensing the danger she was in, she got up and stealthily sauntered in the direction of the light. Her 'night vision' eyesight gave her an advantage so that she wouldn't have to turn on the flashlights to see her way in the dark.

She knew that her family's ancestral power in the town attracted unwanted attention, especially on full moon nights, which sometimes warranted the need for defence. 

Slowly, she pulled her glass dagger out of her back pocket, sensing someone else's breaths near her. Turning around in a single swish, she brought her elbow up to the neck of the person and pushed them back to the nearest tree trunk. 

Her opponent let out the smallest of gasps with the impact of the tree on their back, but quickly recovered, and pushed their knee up to Evelyn's stomach. 

The hit blew Evelyn away, towards the lake she didn't realise was there.

Before she could register the shock, Evelyn was already halfway down the lake. She almost passed out from the numbing cold of her collision with the water body. Somehow, the freezing temperature of the water seemed to rejuvenate her, and within the next five seconds, Evelyn had pushed above the surface of the lake, her weaponized hand raised over her head. 

She came to her senses too late. 

The dagger was already plunged through the skull of her opponent. The hilt made a whack sound with the top of the forehead and the actual blade could be seen on the opposite end of it.

Stupefied by her own stupidity, Evelyn let go of the hilt and it smashed to shards. Her magnificent dagger was lying on the ground in pieces and that was the only thing that she could process in the moment because if she strayed from that, she would quite literally break.

So when she finally strayed from it, within a split second, she broke. 

Her body cracked, her neck snapped but she didn't die. She was in the water, and she was drowning. Somehow, she made it out. 

But it wasn't her exactly. She was different. Animalistic.

All these years, she consciously avoided confrontation, living with the fear that she might kill someone. And yet, the one day that she sought it out in the name of self-defence, she was bound to the one destiny she knew was fated for.

The night passed in agony. She was howling, but she didn't know the way to her pack and they didn't know the way to her. All night, the pack was divided in two and she was the only one on the other side. 

Alone.

When sunrise finally came around, and the slow transition from wolf to human took place, Evelyn knew she was never gonna feel the same again. That primal hunger inside her was never going to go away and there would always be a part of her that hunts for that completely humane feeling again. 

Now there would always be half a wolf in her and there was nothing she could do about it. 

Body completely bare, she looked down and around and found a completely fixed glass dagger in her hands. Not on the ground, where it had shattered last night, but in her hand. 

She expected it to look the same, really, because she figured that it was magic and it just repaired itself whenever needed. 

But when she really looked at it, she saw the distinct image of a young boy, maybe 8 or 9 years old. 

She hadn't seen her victim last night, but instantly, when she saw that innocent face, she knew that only a murder of such a degree could awaken such an animal in her. 

In that instant, her poor fragile, glass heart broke. Shattered to tiny, little pieces that could never be glued back together. 

She was never going to be human again.