At my locker, I put my backpack in and kept only my phone and lunch bag on me. I already had enough excitement for one day; so, I was not going to the cafeteria. Instead, I planned to eat my lunch alone. I made my way to the first floor, then exited the building and walked past the portables towards the wooded area I had noticed earlier.
Feeling happy in the woods, I sat down on a large stump. I listened to the sound of bird song as I ate my granola bar and drank some water. As I continued eating, I thought about my upcoming birthday. It was about a month away. I felt nervous about it because I was turning 16, and for my people, that was a big deal. Although my Mom had taught me some basic fighting skills to protect myself with, none of my official training could begin until after my birthday. Although we didn't have a physical copy of the Magnus Corpus, Mom just intended to teach me everything she knew.
My thoughts drifted again to making friends. Maybe it was better that I was alone, it kept me safer; but I couldn't lie to myself anymore that I wasn't lonely. I sighed. There was a reason that Mom and I disguised ourselves as human; that both of us had to hide who we were. It was all because of a stupid, bloody war that raged for years and ended before I was even born. The two groups that were fighting were the vampires and the werewolves. Their violence spilled over and effected all other beings as well. The main reason they stopped fighting and made a truce and signed peace accords were the humans. So many humans were killed as they were in the way of the warring races. The vampires realized if they killed off all the humans, then they would lose a vital food source. The werewolves wanted to protect humanity because a large enough percentage of them had human mates. In the end, the vampires and the werewolves didn't see eye-to-eye on everything. They basically split the land in half and each took a side. In one, humans were enslaved to vampires, in the other, the humans lived in peace and relative freedom.
So, where does this leave me?
During the war, the vampires spread propaganda about my people, the shapeshifters. They said we would change our form and fly around at night looking like bats to show our support for them. They also lied and said we were using our abilities to spy for them, taking any shape necessary to gather intel about the werewolves and bringing it back to them. The reason that the werewolves believed these lies, at the time was because the vampires were winning the war at this point, so to them it seemed more likely to be true- that we were the cause of it.
So, the killing began; the werewolves killed us in the name of eradicating treacherous spies and the vampires killed us just for fun and all the other species got out of the way and hid.
Over those years, our population dwindled, and though we were classified officially by the government as 'endangered', I knew we were much closer to being extinct than that. When I was two and a half, the government passed a bill making killing us illegal, and gave us some basic rights. But almost all of us lived in hiding, because there were groups of werewolves that still viewed us as vermin and treated us poorly. All of us knew what had happened. Some of us were alive during the war, the rest were raised by those who suffered through it. Since it happened once, we knew there was some chance it could happen again. What was written on paper, and what was enacted by society were two different things.
So, while I wouldn't get killed at high school; I could still be bullied, shunned, mocked and beat up.
'The fun, old cycle of violence.' I muttered darkly, to myself. I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind of all thoughts. It worked for a few minutes until...I bolted upright and took my phone out to check the time. I had 15 minutes to be in my next class on time. I sighed. Too soon, I would I would have to leave the safe haven of the trees and go back to the school. I packed up my lunch bag and looked around me to make sure I forgetting anything. Then, feeling determined to make it through the day, I left the forest for the school.