Chapter Four: Wynter

He looked down at the leather band, rolling it around his wrist admiring the way the jade pendant shimmered. His father had given it to him a week ago, the band was just thick enough to hide the name on his wrist without being too large as to attract unwanted attention. It didn't really change his situation; the damage was done.

He had finally scored himself a girlfriend, she was beautiful and popular, and he'd been certain that she didn't know he existed but then Julia Anthony had her yearly back to school party and by sheer luck she'd chosen him to hook-up with. She was gorgeous in a way that none of the other girls in their class were. With soft wispy blonde hair, chopped in spikey waves, and these green eyes that shone like emeralds when she was happy. She also had this spirit about her; fiery and untamed, like a firecracker. Independent and opinionated. What was even more incredible was the fact that she agreed to date him.

She was manipulative, volatile, and cruel. Slowly he learned where the safe-zones were, and what mines to avoid. It was the rice he paid to be free of high school torment, and it came with great perks. She was a phenomenal kisser, it was like heaven in every kiss. Bliss in every touch.

Maybe it was just because he had nothing to compare it to, but he was willing to put up with all of her mind games, just for one more taste. He hadn't realised that she was searching for a way to break up with him. 

They had been making out on his father's sofa. He was engulfed in the bliss of her touch, and so he was taken off guard when she broke the kiss only to screech at him. Disoriented, he tried to calm her down, find out what had angered her. She was asking him about a person, asking him if he was cheating on her, asking if she was the cover girlfriend for his closet relationship, asking what the tattoo was, asking who it was for. Eyes wild, cheeks blazing red with her anger, she was terrifying.

She had seen the name written in a beautiful script on his wrist. It wasn't just any name, it was a male name. and it gave her the ammunition she needed to paint him as a user, and her as his helpless victim. 

He wasn't dating anyone, and he wasn't using her as a cover, though he had to admit he held an attraction to males just as much as he did females. She had left his house in a furry, sending a text to all of her friends, telling them about the tattoo and his supposed other lover. Within a few days the whole school had latched onto her story, making it even more hellish than ever. He was even more of an outcast than he'd been before, but at least he had Connor – sort of.

His best friend was furious at him. Why hadn't he told him, did he really not have a secret boyfriend, then what was with the tattoo? An array of questions flooded out of his best-friends mouth, most he was unable to answer, and what he could say he didn't seem to believe. It just drove a wedge between them, and the mistrust in Connor's eyes hurt Alwyn in a way he'd never felt. 

He vowed never to take the band off, it hid the mark and with it he could pretend to be normal. If he was normal he'd never have to see his friends drift away from him, and he'd never have to see that mistrust in anyone else's eye. If he was normal than he wouldn't have to feel so alone. 

****

Alwyn felt cold, so very cold. It was the kind of chill that penetrated bone, leaving you shivering for hours after you'd thought you'd escaped its embrace. His teeth chattered, whole body vibrating as frigid air washed through him, wave after bitter wave. 

He opened his eyes expecting to find himself in a meat locker, dead bodies hanging from meat hooks in plastic bags like a cheap gangster flick, but instead he found himself surround by rough uncut stone. Alwyn was laying on the outcrop of the stone wall, in the bubble of some small cave. A hole was cut out of the ceiling, about the size of a fist, giving the cave air flow and letting in the moonlight. The mouth of the cave was a door or charcoal dark metal, a small flap at the bottom of it. It was a prison door, the kind he seen in solitary confinement in the older styled prisons he and his father had visited. 

His cell companion, a gigantic white canine with blood tipped ears paced along the far end of the cell. His flank was raised with nervousness, even from here Alwyn could feel the animals swirling emotions like a physical force in the air. 

Another shiver shock him violently, causing the room to quake. Everything grew hazy, his ears full of the sound of his clattering teeth as he tried to pull himself into a tighter ball. The stone slab he was on wasn't helping to buffer the sensation of cold, instead it seemed steal all the heat Alwyn's body made. He could barely feel his fingers and toes anymore, only bitter numbness where the sensation of limbs should exist. 

"Are you okay?" His brown orbs jolted up at the sound of a voice. He had been trying so hard to conserve his heat that he hadn't noticed his cellmate approach him, nor had he felt the shift in the air as he had shifted into a human form. Guess that part wasn't a dream. Alwyn thought as he stared at the man with red eyes. 

They weren't quite red though. From far away they blazed with the fires of hell, but here up-close Alwyn could see there was more to them. They had bits of gold and orange, mixed in with little shade of green, like someone had taken hazel and encased it in bronze glass. They shone with warmth, shimmering like flame, but more dynamic; and they were concerned.

"F – fi – fine," He stuttered through clattering teeth. "Just c - co – cold." He barely managed to spit out before another earthquake racked through him. Shock littered those amber depths, as if the thought had never occurred to the shifter. Had he not felt the cold, or did he just not realise that humans didn't handle cold well? Alwyn wondered as he watched the man in front of him contemplate something. 

As another shiver rocked him he wondered if he could break his teeth from clattering. Figures I'd die having been ripped apart by my own shivering in a cave next to a person who could turn into a giant dog… I've lost my mind. Or maybe that wasn't it at all, maybe he was still knocked out in the woods and this was just a dream. He'd gotten lost in the woods as a child, perhaps that's all this was. I'll freeze to death if I don't wake up soon. 

Suddenly warmth was enveloping him, radiating along his back and side. The sudden change in temperature cause him to shiver – his body rejecting the new sensation. Alwyn turned to see the shifter moving to hold onto him. Pulling them close together, sharing his heat in an attempt to warm Alwyn. It was like lying next to a furnace, the warmth slowly over taking the cold, thawing out the ice ball that had settled into his gut. 

"What's your name?" Alwyn asked, turning in the other's arms to look at him. Something was so alluring about him, it drew Alwyn in and held him captive. Perhaps it was the otherworldly vibe he had about him, or the way his eyes blazed – his gut told him it was more than that. 

"Wynter, of the Gwyllgi." He said, tensing as if he expected Alwyn to rip violently away from him. Gwyllgi? The word tugged at his memory, pulling up the imagine of his mother of her voice and expression as she told him a story. For nearly five years he listened to her tell him that story every night, the story of Annwn and the war over earth. He'd nearly forgotten it till now, even still most of the details were fuzzy. Gwyllgi were soldiers, no they were… Alwyn mind puzzled as he tried to think of what his mother had said.

"Who lead you here?" The voice caught him off guard once again, causing him to jolt eyes jutting back up to the strange shifter. 

"Ah… no one, I was just – I had cabin fever, and the forest looked so…" He struggled to find a way to explain what had been going through his head, how perfect it had looked, how to describe the longing that had itched at his mind. But the words failed him. "I was just walking," He said finally. 

"Just walking? Alone?" He nodded, watching as the others features shifted in confusion. "That's not possible, a human can't make it here without a guide. It's not supposed to be possible." He looked at Alwyn like he was a Rubix cube that defied completion. Alwyn was certain he had a similar expression on his face as he tried to figure out what was going on. 

A dream still seemed to be most likely explanation. A strange man wakes him up in the woods who can turn into a dog and tells him he is a creature that Alwyn knew only existed in his mother's old stories. They proceed to be hunted down, and kidnapped, locked him some sort of cell. Not to mention this guy had the same name as what had been burned into his wrist years ago, he'd never met someone with that name until today. But as much as his mind latched onto the logical reason his gut rejected it. Who falls asleep in a dream only to wake up in the same dream? Not even Inception had worked that way. 

He opened his mouth to ask Wynter a question, but the words caught in his throat. To even entertain the idea that this was all real, that men could shift into animals, was insane. And if he answered the question as Alwyn assumed he would, well what then? Was it a confirmation that it was a dream, or would he take it as fact? The hesitation caught the Gwyllgi's attention. 

"What is it?" 

"You keep saying here, and I'm starting to wonder if – maybe – here is not where I think it is. Or I guess I've got the sensation that I'm Dorothy and somehow have woken up in Kanas." The reference went over the shifters head, amber eyes looking down at his with even more confusion than before. Alwyn decided to try again. "Is this Annwn?" He felt himself flinch against the word. It was such an impossible question, Annwn was a place of fantasy, a realm for magical creatures. It didn't exist, it – 

"Yes," The answer caused all the buzzing thoughts in Alwyn's head to pause at once, the silence throwing him off edge. Annwn, the otherworld, he was in the otherworld, he had somehow ended up in the fairy realm. I am totally Dorothy. He thought as he tried to calm the panic threatening to overpower him. He needed to think of something else for a minute, a distraction any distraction.

"So, Wynter. What's it like to turn into an animal?" The question was random, and the other was now looking at him like he'd lost his mind. 

"Uh…" He tried to find words to answer Alwyn's question, but his mind could wrap his mind around it. "It's… uh… a different view point. My senses are sharper, I can tell things apart better, there's not as much interference." 

"So, like you can always hear everyone's footsteps but as a dog you can tell who it is by the footsteps?" He tried to think of every movie, book, and other media he'd consumed with werewolves and other shape shifter creatures to come up with a comparison to Wynter. His eyes glowed red like a hell hound, and he was at least as big as the Twilight wolves, he seemed to be very instinctual so maybe a bit like the Lycans in Underworld. 

"Um… maybe. More like I'm not as easily distracted, when shifted I can focus on my task, zero in on the target and achieve the goal but when I walk on two legs it's easier to be swayed – to get off course." Hunting dogs! Alwyn's mind exclaimed as it remembered the bit of the story he'd been pulling at earlier. The Gwyllgi were Arawn's hunting dogs. He could hardly envision Wynter in his shifted form, red eyes blazing as he chased a rabbit – fox, he corrected hunting parties chased fox and deer. 

"I bet you travel faster to, running on four legs instead of two. Closer to the ground, more thrust. How fast can you run? 20km? 30?" Again, the Gwyllgi fixed him a stare that told Alwyn he thought he was nuts. 

"I'm not sure, I've never measure it. Fast enough to hunt I suppose."

"Well the average deer is around 48km, could you catch a deer?" 

"Uh… we used to. We aren't allowed to hunt the humans animals, to do so would warrant death." He could tell the subject was starting to make the other uncomfortable, the way he refused to meet Alwyn's eyes, and how he had put a distance between them – not enough that the chill return but just enough that he wasn't as wrapped up anymore. 

"I'm sorry," He said, turning his gaze away from Wynter's face, pulling the shifter back around him. "Tell me about something else, do you have hobbies? A job? Family? Friends? School?" It was a tiny acceptance, but it broke through the shifters ice wall and slowly he relaxed behind Alwyn, telling the boy about his life. About his three younger siblings that tormented him, and his older sister who was always pressuring him to be better. 

They talked about Alwyn's school, about his classes to become a botanist like his mother. And they talked about how Wynter had always loved watching his own mother as she took care of their families garden. They talked for hours, Alwyn got so wrapped up in the conversation he forgot about where he was, and about the stranger who'd locked them up. All that existed was Wynter and Alwyn, a little bubble of warmth in the dark.