Doctor Milton glared at her. “Yeah, I was a human. A good human. I saved animals’ lives. I’m a protector.”
“I know you are.” Amelia didn’t know if she should crawl forward, make him see that she was justlike him on a certain level. What she didn’t want was to have that gun pointed at her for no good reason. “Milton, I need you to look at me, okay? Look at me.”
Doctor Milton stared at the gun for several seconds.
“Milton!” She cried out his name, hoping to gain his attention.
He looked up, and she tried to smile at him.
“It’s me, Amelia. I’m the woman that brought you the deer, okay? I found Rascal and Buster. I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegan.”
“You’re a wolf,” Milton said.
Amelia refused to admit it.
“Iwork at a bar. I … I used to work at a diner. I’ve worked at the library. I do whatever I can to survive. I don’t hunt. I don’t kill. I’m a good person. A very good and kind person,” she said. “Whatever has happened to you, it shouldn’t have. Someone … did something to you. You’ve got to tell me what it was.”
Milton growled.
The memory was bad for him, and as heseemed to think about it, it brought forward his transformation. He wasn’t quite wolf, nor human, but something in between.
Thiswas why she didn’t exactly know what he was that day.
It had been Milton. Afully dressed, terrified, Milton.
But how?
Why?
Who had done this to him?
Shereached for the cage and wrapped her fingers around the bars. “Look at me.” She screamed at him.
He stopped doing whatever it was he was doing. His face was covered with fur, but he had human facial features and long teeth. The sight of him was gruesome. The rest of his body also didn’t seem to match.
Odd.
“Tell me who did this to you. Tell me what happened,” Amelia said. “You have to tell me so that I can figure out how to make this right for you.”
He glared at her.
“I … I was out hunting,six months ago. I … I don’t like to do it often, and I never fire. I just, I hunt, without any ammo, I have a gun, watch the creatures, and then allow them to live.”
Amelia nodded. “That makes sense.” The Doctor Milton she knew would never harm a single animal.
“Something was off on this … trip. I got into position, but I sensed something watching me. I don’t know what it was, nor can I remember what happened. One moment, I was watching this group of rabbits, just happy, and the next, I felt pain. It hurt. It hurt so much that it was unbearable. When I woke up, I was naked. I had bite marks all over me, and I was covered in blood.” Milton bent forward, his arm wrapped around his stomach. “I’m hungry all the time. I need to eat. The rabbits I was watching … they were my dinner.” He started to snarl.
This wasn’t good. She was losing him.
He dropped the gun, and his hands covered hers where they wrapped around the cage. Amelia screamed as he squeezed them, almost crushing them. She felt some of her bones break, and the pain went to the next level.
“Do you have any idea what that’s like?” he asked. “Killing things you don’t wantto?”
“Milton, stop this. This isn’t whoyou are.”
“Oh, but it is. It is exactly who I am, and I am going to see how much you can suffer.”
She didn’t want to die. Nor did she want to hurt him, but there was no way to stop him. He was on the warpath.