Trials of a Teenage Werevulture (Trilogy of a Teenage Werevulture Book 1)

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  “But I’ll have the instincts,” I argued. “Especially since it’s almost full moon.”

  The full moon was when magic was at its peak. Weres shifted and stayed shifted until the moon set. Specters went insubstantial. Vampires had to suck blood — or energy, or whatever it was their particular clan needed. Giants stayed enormous, abatwas were tiny, loreleis could only breathe water, and so forth.

  “Yeah, bad luck your birthday falling so near to one,” she said.

  I was a little offended. “Why is it bad luck? I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Nnn.” She shrugged, and her nose went beaky while she used one of the claws on her right bird foot to scratch an itch on her arm. “It’s just, instincts being high isn’t always a good thing. I nearly attacked a weremouse at school right before my first full moon.”

  I remembered that. She’d wound up getting a detention for not reining her instincts in. The weremouse had been a very popular senior who had been mortally offended, which had made things even worse.

  “We don’t have any wererodents in my class,” I said. “And the most popular seniors are a nix, a dryad, and a poohka. Should be fine.”

  “Maybe at school,” Collette shrugged, wriggling a high heel onto her human-again right foot. “What really makes you unlucky is that you won’t even have time to get to know your clan before you have to lean on them at full moon.”

  I swallowed. For a moment, I’d forgotten that I was a vulture, not a hawk. I had no clue what instincts I’d wind up with. Did vultures hunt? Or did they just eat rotting, dead things? Ugh, I hoped my new clan wouldn’t meet at a landfill.

  New clan.

  Just the thought made me feel depressed. For the rest of my life, my clan wouldn’t be my relatives, it’d be a bunch of random strangers. On the other hand . . . what if there’d be a bunch of eligible guys there who weren’t related to me and were much nicer than Alec? That wouldn’t be all bad. My imagination was already racing.

  “I’ll look up my new clan as soon as I get home,” I said quickly. “You’re right. I ought to meet them beforehand. Build trust and rapport and everything.”

  Collette eyed me. “Are you over Alec already? You’re so fickle, Lisette.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said with great dignity. “I’m just talking about my new clan. What do you mean?”

  She smirked. “Right, like I haven’t been a teenager in a clan with nothing but relatives. Yeah, okay, good plan. And let me know if any of them are hot and my age, would you?”

  “You have a boyfriend,” I reminded her.

  “Jason and I aren’t married,” she sniffed, and went to put her glass in the sink.

  So I was in a pretty good mood when I went to catch the school bus half an hour later. Having to shift my wings back to fit through the narrow doorway was annoying, and the crush of the other high school students on board made it impossible to bring them out again. But that was all right. Everyone had seen me standing out there with them, and there were comments galore.

  “Nice wings!” a senior boy called out, and whistled.

  “Happy birthday. I mean, I assume you just had a birthday, right?” a pimply freshman girl across from me said.

  I soaked in the attention. No way was I going to tell them that I wasn’t the were I’d been hoping.

  The school bus bumped into the parking lot, and students crowded out. A specter who was sitting across from me just phased through the side.

  Once I was out of the bus, I struggled through the tide of students heading for the entrance so that I could find a place to release my wings. I knew I wanted to walk into the school with them gorgeously visible. I had them, they were gorgeous, and I wanted to show them off. But the crowd was not obliging.

  “Hey, Lisette!” a girl shouted from behind me.

  I recognized the voice, and spun around just in time to see Kegan slip into insubstantiality to get past a cyclops who was chatting with his girlfriend and blocking her path out of the bus. The girlfriend screamed and jumped back.

  Perhaps in preparation for the role she would one day play, Kegan had grown her hair down to her waist, and then bleached it shocking white. She also tended to wear old-fashioned dresses that were artistically shredded, the sorts of things you usually only found at shops aimed at vampires. Usually, this meant she looked a little weird, but pretty cool. When she went insubstantial, with the glow and hollow black eyes of a banshee, she looked terrifying.

  She swooped right through a number of students, who shouted and dove out of her way, then landed in an empty space that opened in front of me.

  I was used to Kegan, so the horror-movie sight didn’t bother me. “Guess what?” I asked.

  “You’re officially a werehawk now?” she asked excitedly.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “N—” She stared at me in horror. “Don’t tell me you’re a human!”

  “Nope. Try again,” I said, enjoying this.

  “Ummm . . .” She walked around me, taking in the slits in the back of my shirt. “Well, I’m guessing you have wings, or you wouldn’t have worn that. Subspecies drift isn’t that uncommon. A kite or a goshawk, maybe?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “A sparrowhawk or an eagle?”

  “Nope nope.”

  “Um . . . what else is related to hawks . . . a harrier or a buzzard?”

  “Getting warmer,” I said.

  “Come on, just tell me!” she cried. Her voice was probably louder than she’d meant it to be, and no doubt much shriller, because people around us slammed their hands over their ears. All my relatives had voices that were piercing, so I wouldn’t have even noticed it if they hadn’t reacted like that.

  “Here’s a hint,” I said smugly.

  People were walking further around us than ever. Perfect. I pulled the vulture within me outward.

  One freshman stopped and gasped as the wings spread out of my back, arching outward in humongous bulges of flesh. Then feathers peppered all over them with a slight itching sensation, one that I was growing used to already.

  I stretched my wings out, and then stretched them farther and farther. Even though I was standing six feet from the entrance, my right wing was blocking half the doorway.

  “Hey!” one girl protested, trying to walk around it.

  An abatwa shrank and ambled underneath. He was pretty tall for an abatwa, nearly three feet, and he had a beard, so he was probably a tomte.

  “I’m guessing you’re a werebird,” Kegan said. “I have no idea what those wings are. Are you a sparrow or something?”

  “No!” I said, annoyed. “I’m a vulture!”

  She stared at me. “A vulture? I thought they had black wings.”

  “Me, too, but apparently not all of them.” I shrugged.

  She walked around and looked at my wings. She rubbed the fuzzy down on my arms. She leaned down to poke at my feet, as if checking to see if they were bird feet.

  “Pretty awesome, right?” I said, hoping she would agree. I really wanted to convince myself this was a good thing.

  “Sure,” she said, straightening. “For one thing, we’ll match. That’s pretty neat.”

  My heart fell. It was one thing to be fine with Kegan looking like something from a horror movie. It was another thing to think of people avoiding me that way. I wanted to be admired, not treated like I was repulsive.

  “Great,” I said, trying not to sound too unenthusiastic.

  A bell rang from inside the building.

  “Excuse me,” a senior boy asked rudely. “Can we get past you?”

  Reluctantly, I folded my wings, and the remaining students outside ran into the building.

  “I’m pretty excited that I turned successfully,” I told Kegan, trying to convince myself.

  “Of course you are,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders. “And this full moon is going to be awesome. You’ll see.”

  We walked into the building together
, me wriggling my wings to try to get them into a comfortable position despite her arm right at the spot where part of them were supposed to fold. At last, I gave up on that and made them disappear.

  As we split up to go to our different homerooms, she waved at me. I waved back, feeling a knot at the pit of my stomach as I turned away.

  I loved Kegan. She’d been my best friend since elementary school. I certainly wasn’t ashamed of her or anything. But matching her?

  No. No way.

  Chapter 3: Matching the Banshee

  In English class, I got bored. We were studying some boring classic called Frankenstein about an impundulu who wanted to create an heir without a turning stone, and so he tried making a body out of dead people and frying it with lightning, and it all went terribly wrong because, duh, lightning is how you heal living impundulus, not create new ones, blah blah blah blah.

  It was totally unrealistic.

  So I snuck my phone out of my pocket and decided to do some research. It was long past time I figure out what kind of vulture I was. Maybe I could even look up clans in the area and see if there were any for my particular species, or if it was just a werevulture clan in general.

  A Ghoulgle Image search for “vulture” turned up quite a lot of different species, including one with wings that were light brown on top and dark brown at the bottom, like mine.

  Aha! I thought triumphantly. A griffon vulture! Actually, that’s a cool name.

  The phone slipped upwards out of my hands.

  “Ahhh . . .” I said, looking up. “Hi, Miss Specterclanvila.”

  “Do you want to tell me why you had your phone out in my classroom?” she demanded, dangling it in front of me.

  “Researching Frankenstein?” I asked hopefully.

  “And I’m sure Frankenstein’s monster had vulture wings,” she said sarcastically, pointing at the screen.

  “It could have if he’d thought to add them!” I said cheerfully.

  My fellow students tittered.

  “You can have this back at the end of the day,” she said, walking to dreaded bottom drawer of her desk. She didn’t even bother to unlock it. She just made her hand insubstantial, dropped the phone in, then pulled her hand out again.

  I sighed. So much for finding out about my werevulture clan before school was over.

  Still, I spent the day imagining it. There would be a huge number of people, even more than the werehawk clan I’d missed out on, and one of them would be as hot as Alec. No, wait, why just one? I’d take two or three. Also, they’d all fall in love with me instantly and starting fighting over me. Yeah. A love triangle with me in the middle of it would be awesome!

  After school, I retrieved my phone and tuned out the lecture about not using it during class, and then went and found Kegan waiting outside for me.

  “Do you want to go shopping?” she asked excitedly. “Now that we know your clan, you should get a whole new wardrobe to celebrate!”

  “Ummm . . .” I said. There was no way I wanted to shop at Mina Harker, her favorite boutique. “I don’t have that much allowance money. Sorry. I spent it all on new stuff last week.”

  “Yeah, but we can return some of those,” she said. “Like that skirt that’s meant for a tail. Oh! I saw the cutest white dress last week!”

  Uh uh. Okay. This had to stop. But how was I supposed to let her down easy?

  “I have homework,” I said, which was true. I never lied, though sometimes I did stretch the truth a wee bit. “Geometry is killer. Mr. Abatwaclangoblin assigned us ten different proofs, and they don’t look like they’re going to be short ones, either.”

  “I hate that!” Kegan said, as if she weren’t in Pre-Calculus and getting straight As in math. “It’s like, what, do they think we don’t have lives outside of school? Hello, I have friends and a clan and stuff!”

  “I know!” I cried. “Mrs. Giantclanorc actually assigns homework at full moon. Could you be more rude?”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Kegan said, shaking her head. “Giants do not understand. How are you supposed to hold a pen when your hand goes straight through everything?”

  “Right! Or when you have bird instincts so strong that you can’t even read human writing! I mean, hello!”

  Not that I knew that was going to happen to me. It happened to my father, though. He could sort of understand English when people talked to him at full moon, but not as well as he thought he did. Collette and I had often taken advantage of this to get permission to do things like sneak off to midnight showings of movies. Or we had, before she’d turned and started ignoring me.

  Man, I missed the days before Collette had decided I was uncool.

  Still, now that I was a werebird too, maybe she’d decide I was worth hanging out with again. Plus, I might have a legitimate excuse to skip homework at full moon.

  “Okay, then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kegan said. “Will you text me when you find out about your new clan?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She grinned and held out her hand. On a whim, I pulled out my wings and slapped her five with the tip of my gigantic left one. She laughed and made her hand insubstantial to slap me five back, going right through my wing. You could actually see the veins through her translucent skin, one of the things that freaked people out about banshees.

  I was already on my phone, searching busily for were clans, when my school bus left.

  The first thing I learned was that there was obviously not a large werevulture clan, because it didn’t turn up in the major searches. That was disappointing. I pulled up Werepedia, but while it listed all the different subspecies of vulture, it had no links to clans in my area.

  How annoying. How was I supposed to figure out which clan I now belonged to? Turnings that went wrong weren’t common, but they weren’t that rare. I really ought to be able to find somewhere that listed all the local clans and how to contact them.

  When I got home, I asked Mom.

  “Oh, right,” she said, looking distracted. Her eyes were bloodshot, probably because she’d just come off a twelve-hour shift. She worked as a nurse at the local hospital. She would have liked to be a doctor, but generally only vampires got into medical school. Being able to heal people with your blood was considered a basic requirement. “I meant to look that up for you, Lisette. I asked someone at work, and they said the site to look at is Wereconnection. It’s like a phone directory for clan leaders.”

  “Oh, cool,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I plugged my phone into the charger and sat at the computer we kept in the kitchen, which tended to access the Internet faster. I pulled up Wereconnection and typed in “vulture.”

  No hits.

  “That’s odd,” Mom said, looking over my shoulder. “Maybe there’s not one in Sky City. Try the surrounding areas.”

  I had an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. I broadened the search area and checked. Still no hits.

  “Try statewide,” Mom said.

  I was already moving to do that, even though a clan three or four hours away wouldn’t have been very practical to reach.

  Nothing.

  Uh oh.

  I swallowed.

  “Now, that’s just silly,” Mom said. “There has to be a werevulture clan. Maybe the site isn’t working properly.”

  I broadened the search to include the whole country, and tried again. This time, there was one hit.

  One. In New Yeti City. Half the country away.

  I was too shocked to speak. Did that mean . . . I was the only werevulture in Sky City? The only one? That didn’t make any sense! Vultures weren’t that rare in nature! Even dodos had a clan!

  “You can’t be the only werevulture here,” Mom said, echoing my thoughts. “I don’t see how that’s possible. Maybe . . . maybe the clan is under a different name?”

  I looked up every other bird related to hawks I could think of. Goshawks, kites, and buzzards. Sparrowhawks, harriers, and eagles. Besras, shikas, and starlings.
Every one of those had a hit somewhere in the state, though not all of them had their own clans in Sky City.

  “I’m the only vulture,” I said in a small voice. “I’m the only vulture in Sky City.”

  “We don’t know that,” Mom said, but her voice was indistinct. I think she knew as well as I did that my hopes of any real clan were dashed.

  I shoved back my chair and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked.

  “To my room,” I said. “I’m going to do my homework.”

  “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked.

  “No!” I shouted.

  I stormed up the stairs, went into my bedroom, locked the door, and buried my face in my pillow. Then I screamed a blood-curdling scream of anger and frustration and rage.

  It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair! Why had I become a vulture? It was the worst werebird I could possibly have been!

  I’d been willing to accept not being a hawk. I’d been willing to accept a new clan. But this was — this was — what was I supposed to do? Start my own clan?! You couldn’t have a clan without a turning stone, and nobody had any of those spare!

  Why were there no werevultures? Why, why, why, why, why?!

  I grabbed my phone and furiously texted Kegan. There is no werevulture clan. Why?!

  Almost immediately, I saw her typing. A moment later, her response appeared. No clan? What? Has to be one.

  Isn’t, I typed furiously. I think I’m the only one. Why?!

  There was nothing for a moment. Then she started to type, and stopped. She started again, then stopped again. At last, her response appeared.

  It must be like banshees. Nobody wants to be a banshee. That’s why Mom’s clan’s in danger of dying out. That’s why I decided to be one.

  I stared at the text, dashing tears away from my eyes angrily. Okay, so Kegan had decided that. Fine. But I hadn’t decided to be a representative of a clan that was not just dying out, it was dead.