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dive into my education, and for a while, school and books became a relief from my depressing home life.  In Haven, all young werewolves studied at the village school, and most of us were expected to voluntarily end our schooling a few years after our first shifts began, when we were old enough to help out at home.  But if a young werewolf showed aptitude for learning, he or she often continued studying under the schoolteachers, training to become a replacement teacher in the years to come.  Since I wasn't going to be a pack princess and was terrified of turning into a replica of my meek stepmother, I figured teaching would at least let me build a place for myself within the pack.  However, on my fourteenth birthday, my father killed that dream just like all of my others.  Waiting for me once again at the bottom of the stairs, the Chief informed me that I was no longer a student at the village school.
    The ensuing shouting match woke Cricket and my one-year-old brother, the latter of whom soon drowned out my arguments with wordless complaints of his own.  In my anger, I shifted into wolf form and fled to the woods, but I eventually came home hungry, my tail between my legs.  My father was waiting at the door in his own fur form, and his reproving bite on the top of my muzzle wasn't the ceremonial chastisement most alphas would use against an erring underling.  Instead, the Chief's teeth broke through my skin, and I picked at the scabs in human form for days thereafter.
    The scabs were what finally pushed me over the edge and made me decide to leave the pack.  "A werewolf can't survive alone," Cricket had told me months earlier when I sobbed on her shoulder about my hatred of Haven, and I'd believed her then.  But I was starting to realize that my wolf couldn't survive within my father's pack either.  It was quite normal for young males to leave the village and hunt down another pack in order to court unrelated females, and teenage girls sometimes spent time in the outside world as well, so the possibility was there.  But only if I could learn to control my shifts.
    So I began to hunt down the root of my uncontrollable changes to wolf form.  Whenever I could slip away, I would retreat into the woods and practice shifting for hours, until my legs were so wobbly with the effort that they could barely carry me home.  Out of spite, I maintained the illusion of being out of control around my father, but by the time I was sixteen, my wolf and I were acting more like a team and less like two duelists.  As I practiced, I came to the conclusion that any unpleasant emotion could trigger the shift; even seeing a ball flying toward me out of the corner of my eye was sometimes enough to make the wolf pull out her fur to protect us both.  So I worked on proving to my wolf that I could take care of myself, and I also learned to smooth over my emotions, even during that time of the month when they were especially hard to control.
    I'm sure that Cricket knew what was happening, but she didn't tell my father, and he was oblivious to anything that didn't impact his iron control over Haven's pack.  Just learning to work with, rather than against, my wolf gave me a bit of peace, and I drifted through my restrictive life for most of my sixteenth year, not sure I really needed to leave the pack after all.  Then my father's eye came back around to his wayward daughter.
    When I walked down the stairs on the morning of my seventeenth birthday and found my father waiting on the landing, I couldn't resist thinking that perhaps the Chief had thespian aspirations.  Why else would he always pin me down on the morning of my birthday?  Unless—depressing thought—that was the only day my father could be bothered to spend a minute thinking about his disappointing middle child.
    "What now?" I demanded, deciding to go on the defensive even as I sought to still the wolf inside me.  My period had begun the day before, and the wolf was more