Jungkook

Yuan remembered it so vividly, as if she were still there. She was only six, a little fox cub who had only just learned how to shift into her second form. She remembered the screams, remembered the faces of the people—people whose hearts had been poisoned by fear, arriving in the dead of night.

"Wizards, spawn of darkness, burn them!" — those screams still echoed in her ears whenever she woke up in a cold sweat during the night.

They set their house on fire. Yuan remembered the smell of smoke that had seared itself into her memory, remembered how her mother scooped her up in her arms. Her mother had carried her through the fire, suffering terrible burns, and ran into the forest as fast as her legs could carry them.

They survived, but her mother grew weaker with every passing year. The burns, the freezing winters, and the unbearable longing for her murdered father had exhausted her.

When Yuan turned ten, she woke up in their little burrow and realized that her mother was no longer breathing; the scent of her favorite flowers had faded, leaving her alone.

Since then, she had learned to be alone. She forgot what human speech sounded like, save for the rare words she whispered to herself so as not to go insane. She hunted in fox form, slept in the trees, and never, under any circumstances, approached the edge of the forest where the lands of humans began—the humans who had taken everything from her.

The village, however, had not changed in the ten years since he had been gone. The same fences, the same road, the same curious glances from behind the curtains.

Jungkook exhaled, stopping his SUV by the house—the residence of the village head, his father.

Jeon, an alpha, a pure-blooded wolf, the heir to the pack, had been sent to the capital many years ago to receive a prestigious education and study how modern werewolves lived in the civilized world. The city had taught him much: business, control over his instincts, diplomacy. But the city could not root out one thing—a sense of wrongness that had haunted him since childhood.

He remembered that night, though he had been nothing but a pup back then; he remembered the conversations of the adults.

"We have cleansed our land of the red demons," they had said... "Foxes are death."