The sand of the park was mostly even, dampened down by the rain. The slide would have been covered in small children, whooshing down in a spray of water, but it was cold and dark, and any small children would not be allowed out by their parents. The curvy climbing thing was shimmering with the water droplets dangling from the underside of it. The few swings swayed gently in the slight breeze. The climbing structure with the fire pole loomed over the swings. Surrounding the sandy area, the grass glistened as if covered in dew. The winding sidewalks were almost invisible in the night, being dark with wetness.

            I lurked behind the tree, sniffing the air. For the past night or two, a strange dog had been roaming around, and, being the brown tabby that I was, strange dogs meant bad news.

            Unlike most cats, I didn’t mind the wetness. I often pretended that I did, though, so that I wouldn’t be shunned by other cats. All cats are this vain.

            Luckily for me, there were no other cats around. I rolled in the wet grass, shaking the rain off the mottled gray and brown fur that let me blend in with wet concrete and shadows.

            There it was. The scent that had been floating around the neighborhood for the past two nights. My ears perked up. My whiskers twitched. I looked attentively around. There was another scent too. It smelled of fear.

            The night was perfectly still. I crept out from behind my tree, looking all around.

            It was the biggest mistake I would ever make.

            Whirling out of the night came two beings. The first was human, and it reeked of fear. It was madly fighting off a huge dog, more like a wolf. It smelled funny, but that could be dismissed. I was caught in the middle of the fight, dodging blows and teeth. The human was bleeding from several cuts and scratches, and was badly bruised, and the dog had a torn ear and a smashed nose.

            I batted anything with my paws, trying not to get hurt. I got one little nip on the tail, but other than that, I remained unharmed. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t get away.

            Sand was thrown up, playground equipment was ignored, and water was sent flying. Soon, the human and the dog were gone, and I sat down in the grass. I licked my tail, washed it in the water pooled at the bottom of the slide. After deciding it wasn’t serious, I cleaned it once more for good measure, and walked away.

Chapter 1

            I strolled through the alleys of the more crowded part of the city, greeting friends and ignoring enemies. I turned into one little crevice between warehouses so small that it wouldn’t fit a human. It opened out into a clearing, and this was the center of the cat world.

            I considered myself lucky to live here. It had everything; the crowds, the sights, the souvenirs, the parties, and, even better, it didn’t cost anything like everything did for humans.

            Cats wound around each other. I weaved through the crowd. I ducked into the best bar there. I never actually drank alcohol, but it certainly served mean eggnog. I sat and ordered one. Friends greeted me. One noticed the bite on my tail.

            “What did you do this time, Sprocket?”

            I sipped from my bowl of eggnog. “You wouldn’t believe me,” I said without turning around.

            “Try me,” the voice said.

            I turned. “I was down on the soccer fields,” I said, “When suddenly aliens dropped onto the grass and abducted me. They put me in their ship and drove me insane. I bit my own tail but the blood brought me back to sanity. I ferociously fought them until they let me go and set me back down.”

            Amid the general laughter, I went back to my eggnog. They knew I was making it all up. It was an old habit of mine.

            One friend, a breed so mixed he could only be described as and alley cat, wove his way through the crowd to sit next to me.

            “Hello Kamikaze,” I said.

            Kamikaze had been half living with a family for a while, and he liked the name they gave him. It was much better than his former name Washer.

            “What really happened to get that bite on your tail?” he asked.

            Another cat came. This one was a light brown Ocicat.

            “Hello Nut,” Kamikaze said.

            “Hi guys!” she said.

            “Hey, Nut,” I said. “How are you?”

            “Fine, fine,” she said.

            I shared a look with Kamikaze. If she wasn’t acting weird, she certainly wasn’t fine. She was a crazy cat.

            “Sorry I’m a bit tired, I just ran around the city twice,” she said after a long pause.

            I exhaled. She had worn herself out by running around the cat city, which was larger than you would think, and therefore wasn’t as hyper as normal.

            Kamikaze turned back to me as Nut ordered a bowl of water.

            “Are you going to tell me why you have a bite on your tail?” he said.

            “I got bitten by some freaky dog,” I mumbled.

            “A dog? You should be more careful,” he said.

            “But it happened so fast,” I protested. “I was just minding my own business, when suddenly out of nowhere this dog comes crashing out chasing this human. The human looked pretty freaked. Anyway, it happens so fast that I don’t have time to get out of the way. I’m stuck there between the two, trying to get away and I get this tiny nip on the tail. Then I get out from between them and they run off. It was really weird. I washed my tail, and it’s not too bad, so it’s not like I’m going to have a seizure or anything. I just might be able to tell when it’s going to rain. That’s all.”

            Boy was I wrong.

Chapter 2

            I went to my den after talking to Kamikaze and Nut a while longer. There I curled up and slept.

            I was worn out from the excitement of getting in the fight, not sleeping immediately afterward, and just being a cat.

            I woke up after some strange dreams. They had something to do with…but my memory was already fading. I shrugged. It’s not like they were very important, so I cleaned myself and went out into the hustle and bustle of the cat city.

            I grabbed a fish from the cat that liked to hang around the restaurant that sold the best fish in town. After eating, I went out into the human city.

            I made my way to the park. The large expanses of grass would be a nice change from the concrete.

            Seeing the playground sand messed up, I told myself that my tracks were long gone and there was no chance that the dog could lurk and attack with all these people around. What was it with me? It was just a dog; there were tons of different kinds.

            Small children that weren’t preoccupied with the playground tools started to stroke my fur. A few were called away from me by their mothers because of the possibility of some weird sickness that wouldn’t hurt them anyway, but some ran their small hands over my back and ruffled my head fur.

            I settled down in the grass, and had a flashback of the human and the dog flying out of nowhere. I shook my head. My tail gave me a twinge.

            “Oh, it’s a cat!” It was an older voice, coming from a girl of about thirteen or fourteen.

            “What kind of cat?” another girl asked.

            “It looks like a tabby,” the first girl said thoughtfully, and came up to me.

            “May I?” she inspected me anyway. Some people talk to animals like they were other people, but how could we answer back?

            Her hands were gentle, and I rolled over. “Yep, no definitive marks, it’s a tabby,” she said after a while. “A nice female tabby too.”

            “Mrrow?”

            “Oh look, she’s talking to us!” the second girl said.

            “Come on sweetie,” the first girl said, picking me up. “I want to show you to Henry!”

            I struggled to get out of her grasp. Whoever Henry was, I certainly didn’t want to see him. I didn’t care how cute I was, I did not want to end up like Kamikaze did for a while.

            There were always ‘strays’, as we were called by the humans, being picked up and adopted and brought home and other sorts of things, and it always started out nice. But having a close friend go through it definitely set my heart on not being adopted.

            He had been picked up by a nice family of four; two parents, a teenage child and a toddler. It had been nice, he had gotten food and attention and warmth. His name was the teenager’s idea. But after a while they just kind of forgot about him, which was nice, because he liked to sneak out whenever he could. But soon they stopped feeding him regularly, and they started locking him in. He said that it was like he wasn’t there at all. Then one day they had left, and hadn’t come back. He was locked securely in with no food and no way out.

            One day I had been strolling around the neighborhood where he had last been seen with Nut, and we heard something. We saw him at a window, scratching frantically at the glass and trying to call out to us. Somehow we managed to find a way out for him, and he didn’t starve to death. I did not want that to happen to me.

            Something drove me to bite at the girl, but her hand darted out of the way before I could sink my teeth in far enough to pierce the skin. She dropped me and looked hurt.

            “I thought you were my friend,” she said, and turned away. I walked off, unconcerned.

            That was another thing that humans did; they assumed that a wild animal could just be brought in and tamed. They didn’t stop to think that humans ruined many of our lives, and that we had been here first genetically. I myself could trace my lineage back through my head to a tiger, ruler of the forest. It’s a knack that cats have and humans seem to have lost.

            As I walked off I wondered, why did I bite her? I had always thought of myself as a pretty tame cat compared to some that came into the bar, but I had felt…something. Something that had never been there before. It was lurking in the back of my mind, but wouldn’t come out enough for me to see what it was.

            I dismissed it with a flick of my tail. I was still a little extra shaken up by the previous night’s fight, I decided. I needed to calm down.

            I left the playground and hid under a bush for a while before going back to the cat city. I mostly basked in the warm sun outside my den. Just after the sun set however, I got restless. Strolling out, I wound my way through the city.

The clouds looked ominous. Despite our day of sun, the rain was coming back. What few humans were out hurried through the streets with their coats pulled up, not talking much. I continued walking, not caring about them.

It was late. There were no more humans around, and it was drizzling.

Just as I was about to head back home, something happened.   

I felt…strange. Like there was something trying to come out.

            My tail twitched. It twitched again. Suddenly, I was changing.

            My brain completely reversed, reflected, and transformed all my thinking processes, and my senses went out of control. There was something unnatural going on here. It was that strange dog, I just knew it. My ears twitched, but they were picking up something different.

            I shook myself. Being caught in the rain was something I had not exactly intended to do, and I might as well find an alley or something to curl up in until the rain stopped.

            Everything seemed…smaller. I felt big and powerful, and distances were not so great anymore. They seemed to be different like when I realized that I had changed from a kitten into a cat.

            I found an alley with almost a complete roof and trotted into it. Here I found a dry spot to curl up in.

            I stared out at the rain. There was something wrong. I wanted to see a reflection of myself, just to reassure myself that I was still Sprocket the tabby, that I could still do things that I used to do.

            I found a puddle that was leaking into the alley and was at least partially still. I peered in.

            Something looked back at me.

            It was big, strong, and evil looking. I jumped with surprise. I had changed into some sort of dog. Then I remembered the tale I had watched an older sister tell her terrified siblings.

            “What’s that?” they had asked, leaving the swing set and coming up to her.

            She had looked up from the sketchpad. I focused on it. It showed a man, a wolf, and a hybrid.

            “It’s a werewolf,” she had said flatly.

            “Oooh,” the little girl said. “Can you tell us a story about it?”

            Her brother nodded eagerly.

            The older sister had sighed, obviously exasperated. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you a story.

            “Once there was a man who got bitten by a wolf. He bandaged the bite and it seemed not bad, but that night something strange happened.

            “This man felt himself changing, and when he stopped, he was a wolf. He was a werewolf, a man that turns into a fearsome wolf at the full moon. As a wolf he is a rampaging beast, with little or no control over what he does. He forces himself to move to a place where no humans live because he is tired of waking up and finding a mangled dead body nearby.”

            The children by that point had been terrified, and had run off. The older sister had smiled and went back to her drawings. I had padded up next to her and she had rubbed my head absentmindedly. Not a bad human at all.

            So that’s what I was. A werewolf.