Author's Note:
I know that I should be focusing my attention on my two other unfinished stories but I couldn't help me. I really want to get this story started so I hope you enjoy.

The ground was hard below my soft, furry feet. The pads of my paws stung as the contacted the icy soil and it took all my resilience not to recoil from it. I wondered how the local animals did it, how they could tolerate the feeling of their skin freezing below them. It didn't help me that I had no idea where I was, maybe if I were in the area that I grew up in then I wouldn't feel as overwhelmed with the cold as I was.

It wasn't like I'd never experienced cold before, but somehow it felt so much worse here. Almost like the land and weather here actually disliked me and had a vendetta against me. It was stupid to think that the inanimate ground and the lifeless weather had consciousness but I couldn't help it.

I was feeling more than a little insecure at the moment, as I had just been 'turned out' by my mother. My fraternal brother had been permitted to stay but not me; no, mum had said that I was too old to live at home and that I needed to make my own way in life. It was painful to be turned away by your own mother, to know that the woman who gave you life no longer cared about your survival. I also felt a little cheated by the fact that she was happy to keep my brother around; I knew that girls developed faster than boys but it still felt quite rough.

A twig snapped and I knew that it wasn't something that I had done. My head whipped around to face the direction that the noise had come from; ears pricked to catch the slightest sound. Whatever had made that noise was large and I had to be careful of who I ran into, I was vulnerable to large predators and knew better than to be caught off guard by one. I would probably be able to fight off a cougar or a lone wolf but anything larger than that was a major threat.

Whoever had broken that twig was not worried about being spotted because they were making a hell of a commotion in their travels. I heard every step they took as they made no effort to hide themselves. A bird darted out from the trees, frightened by the presence of this unknown individual, and it was soon followed by a rabbit and then a small deer. It was a predator of some sort and knowing my luck it was an angry black bear, ready to kill anything that didn't get out of its way.

I dashed to the nearest tree and quickly climbed well out of reach. It was in times like this that I was thankful for my heritage as I had heard many stories of my kind being attacked and even killed when they were unable to get away from another, larger predator. My body was designed to scale trees, even though I spent most of my time on the forest floor; I was so dextrous that I could climb head first down tree trunks without a worry and hang easily from the underside of branches by just my hind feet.

As the noises got closer I noticed that they weren't coming from one individual but from at least two. My breathing deepened as my nerves grew, I hoped that whatever they were they couldn't climb. That was when I realised that bears could and often did climb trees. I craned my neck to find a way out of the tree. The only things that I could find were other trees.

I coiled my powerful hind legs and leapt away from the noises that I was hearing. I sprung towards the closest tree, landing with a hard thump that forced the air from my lungs. I ignored my aching chest as I scurried further up the tree and launched myself at the next tree. After my fourth successful jump I decided that they would not be able to trace my scent without executing those exact jumps themselves and I started to calm down a little.

To be on the safe side I decided to climb as high as the bough of my current tree would allow. I wanted to keep an eye on the creatures that had scared me but at the same time I didn't want them spotting me. The last thing I needed was to have a large predator following me and waiting for me to make a mistake.

From my vantage point I was able to watch them as they stumbled upon my trail. They were not what I had expected. They weren't bears or cougars or wolves; well, not real wolves. They looked like wolves and they sounded like wolves but they had to be at least twice the size of normal wolves, and normal wolves were already big enough as far as I was concerned.

The first that I saw was a dark silver beast and I got a feeling that he was the most dangerous of the three, simply by how he held himself. The second one was reddish-brown and smaller than the first, while the third was ashy-brown and seemed to be thicker set than the other two. They froze as they reached the spot where I first heard them and the large sliver wolf pulled back his lips to reveal dangerous looking teeth; although I was sure that my canines were longer.

My scent seemed to confuse them and to begin with they started following it in the wrong direction. All I could hear from them was a variety of panicked growls as they desperately tried to figure out who I was and where I'd gone. After a few flustered minutes the three overgrown wolves were joined by two more.

One was sleek and brown, and about the same size as the silver wolf. He was the first of the two late comers to arrive and his eyes flew upwards almost the second that he arrived. I shrunk back into the dappled shadows, even though I was sure that he wouldn't be able to pick me out from this distance. Sure enough his eyes seemed to fly over me without a second thought.

The final wolf was beyond massive and his size was exaggerated by the thick, black fur that engulfed his already huge body. The sight of him made me shiver and I knew that I could not let him see me. A wolf that size would tear me to pieces without breaking a sweat. This wolf followed the actions of his brown friend and moved his attention from my trail to the tree tops.

I'd hoped that after a little while they would just give up on the trail; that they'd figure I was long gone amongst the trees by now and there was no point wasting their time trying to follow me. But it became clear after the first five minutes that these were not natural wolves, because they refused to give up on the mysterious scent that they had found.

They seemed to be waiting for someone, or something, and with every minute that passed I become more and more anxious. Eventually one of them would take a long hard look at the tree tops and it would be inevitable that they would find me. The worst bit was that I couldn't move anywhere. They were predators, so their eyes were designed to spot movement; if I tried to get to another tree then they would definitely see me and then I would be absolutely screwed.

I almost fell out of the tree when one of the wolves started to tremble and reared on to its hind legs before disappearing. He was replaced by a stark naked twenty-something man, who bent over to retrieve something from the ground and in doing so gave me a very good view of his taught arse. It was then that I noticed he had a pair of shorts tied around his ankle, as did all of his other friends. They were all Shifters.

This was as overwhelming as the cold of the forest floor. I'd never met a Shifter that could take on the form of a wolf. I had only ever met one confirmed Shifter before and that was my mother, she always told me that my father was a Shifter as well and that my brother would likely be one too, but she'd never said anything about there being others out there and I certainly wouldn't have expected any this close to where I was born and raised.

My mother lived in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, towards the edge of the township so that her less than normal habits wouldn't be too obvious. She lived in fear of people finding out what she was and had assumed that my becoming a Shifter would only draw more attention to our family, so she sent me away. I knew that she told everyone that I'd run away with some fictional man because I'd seen the news report about my disappearance; I still wasn't sure whether I should be insulted or not.

And after years of not being allowed to tell anyone anything because of what we were, I find out that a mere 240 miles away, just over the Canadian-American border, were five men who could do exactly what we could only they were wolves. Something told me that I might want to go back and tell my mother about these men but something else told me that I would not get a warm welcoming if I tried.

I thought back to that last time I'd seen my mother, the last time that I'd spoken to her. For weeks she'd been unusually impatient with me, she'd go from being the jovial mother that I'd always known to a scarily loud and aggressive woman that was more a stranger than a family member. On the last day she had screamed at me for four straight hours, stopping only when she found herself having to leave the room to stop herself from hitting me. I had no idea what I'd done but she didn't seem to care. Eventually she lost it; she pushed me out of the house and into the cover of Elk Falls Provincial Park. Once out of sight of the humans that mum liked to surround herself with, she phased and I was forced to phase myself so that I could defend myself against her.

It was like seeing me as my animal self had triggered something in her and she attacked me. It wasn't an 'I want to kill' attack but rather a 'Piss off before I do something we both regret' kind of attack. She snapped and spat and slashed at me, forcing me to retreat as she advanced. There was nothing I could do, it was either run for my life or try to talk sense into my irate mother.

No, she would as soon as kill me as look at me if I tried to go back. She'd just have to live without knowing the truth because I would not risk my life for her, not for a woman who would so quickly turn away her only daughter.

I truly started to panic when the Shifter that was in human form walked up to the tree that I had originally ascended and started to climb. He was nowhere near as fast or efficient as I was but he didn't have any real problems scaling the large fir tree. I glanced up above me to see if I could push the tree any further but I knew that it wasn't a good idea, if the tree started to move then it would immediately draw attention to me.

"I can't see anything, the canopy is too thick." The man in the tree yelled down at his friends.

"Can you smell it still though?"

I jumped a little and looked back down at the forest floor. Two more wolves had disappeared, the ashy-brown one and the jet black one, to be replaced by two tall men. One was decidedly older than the other but they were both very intimidating to look at. It looked like they could take me down in either form.

The man in the fir tree yelled back to them, "Yeah, whatever it was came up to this point and then seems to have disappeared."

"What do you mean disappeared?" it was the same guy that had called out before and I noticed that he was the older and taller one.

The man in the tree climbed up a little higher, "I mean, it reached here but didn't go any higher. I don't know where it went but it's not in the tree anymore."

"Can you see anything at all?"

"Nothing. Whatever it was is gone. I say we give Jake a heads up and just wait to see what happens." The man in the tree started to descend again, going very slowly and carefully as he seemed to be afraid of slipping.

The third man tapped the taller, older man on the shoulder and then mumbled, just loud enough for me to hear, "Maybe the Cullens could help."

Everyone seemed to freeze for a second at the mention of these Cullens and that made my stomach turn. I was already scared of these wolf-men and they were scared of the Cullens. That was not good for me. Whoever these Cullens were, I had to get away before they got here.

"No. If it goes off of the reservation then they can have their shot at it but I don't want them here. We'll tell Jake but as it stands, I'm not afraid of whatever it is. We'll sort it out ourselves." The tallest man said just as the guy that had scaled the tree reached the ground.

The three men turned to the west as started back off through the trees, mumbling about patrols and mysterious creatures. The last two remaining wolves headed south but they kept looking over their shoulder as they went, clearly still questioning what I was. I waited until I couldn't hear them anymore and started down the tree, head first.

I couldn't help but note how cold the ground was in comparison to the ambivalent temperature of the tree bough. I had been heading south when I heard those wolves coming but I was not going to tempt fate by continuing in that direction; and for the same reason I couldn't head west. It would be pointless of me to head north because that was where I was trying to get away from.

The only option left to me was east. So I turned back in the direction of the town that I had actually been trying to avoid. I didn't want to get too close to any large settlements, my mother's paranoia had rubbed off on me over the last eighteen years. My plan now was the head away from the wolves but before I reached the town I would aim myself south and try to squeeze between the wolf territory and the settlement.

I was about two hundred metres from where the wolves had unknowingly chased me up a tree when I smelt the familiar pungent smell of vampires. In my head I put two and two together and prayed that I had reached four. I guessed that these were likely what had scared the wolves, these vampires were the Cullens.

A bronze haired bloodsucker stepped out from behind a tree. For a second he didn't seem to notice me, but a cat my size in North America was rather conspicuous. It didn't take long for him to spot me and he seemed as confused by the sight of me as the wolves had been at my scent. It definitely didn't surprise me though.

I was four foot tall at the shoulders when in my feline form and that was the smallest of my measurements. From nose to tail tip, I was almost thirteen feet long, although six foot of that was my tail. Weighing in at close to six hundred pound, it was not a hopeless situation, but I didn't really want to start anything. No, my best option was to try to scare away the vampire.

A loud hiss tore from my throat, getting louder as I opened my jaws to show off my impressive four and a half inch canines. My animal form was a giant Sunda Clouded Leopard which, I was proud to say, was well known for having the largest canines of all the living feline species. This was my best weapon and it was used more commonly as a threat than anything else.

Unfortunately, the threat didn't work and the vampire turned toward me. I wasn't going to push the matter, I didn't care if he thought I was a coward. I'd rather live a thousand years as a coward then to be a hero and die within the hour. The vampire took chase and I bolted back towards where I'd seen the wolves. I'd rather face them than the vampire and seeing how the wolves seemed to hate these Cullens, I got a feeling that they would be more concerned with this vamp being on their territory than me.

Author's Note:
So, what do you think?