The sun rose over the town of Bel-Air, located in the hills dominating the City of Cap-Haitien, northern Haiti. Lucien Henri lay buck-naked on the soft grass, and blinked against the light. Not again, the young man thought as he slowly got up. If someone told Lucien a year ago that his existence would become this strange, he would have laughed out loud. Lucien found his clothes, thankful that, in his, ahem, transformed state, he hadn't ripped them off but merely discarded them.
Lucien took a look around the colline, the beautiful, grassy hill overlooking the suburb of Bel-Air, where he'd been born and raised. He hadn't seen this place in years. It wasn't nostalgia which brought Lucien here, the summer after his first year at Miami-Dade Community College in Florida. Nope, Lucien felt driven to come back here in order to face his demons, so to speak. A man can run from basically anything except himself, after all...
"Mwen se vremen yon Loup Garou, I'm really a werewolf," Lucien said to himself as he put his clothes back on. A year ago, he was living in the City of Miami, Florida, while attending Miami-Dade Community College. The young Haitian man had life on a string. He was studying Criminal Justice while playing basketball for Miami-Dade Community College and his girlfriend, Heidi Mitchell, made him feel like a king. Of course, that was before Lucien's aunt Victoria Henri revealed the Family Curse...
"Lucien, there's a reason why you're stronger and faster than anyone else on the basketball court even without trying," Aunt Victoria Henri said, the day Lucien came home after scoring fifty seven points in a single game against Chipola College. Lucien, the hero of the Miami-Dade Community College men's basketball team and the big man on campus, looked at his aunt like she had two heads. He'd come home feeling great after a spectacular night, unaware that his world was about to be shattered...
"Aunty, what are you talking about?" Lucien asked, and Aunt Victoria, the woman who raised him after his parents deaths, sighed and explained. Lucien and his aunt sat in the living room of the two-story house they'd been living in for the past decade or so. The Wynwood area was nice and neat, and they were proud to live there. Lucien, born in Haiti, was brought to Miami, Florida, by his paternal aunt Victoria Henri after his parents Marcel and Justine Henri died in a car accident. For Lucien, Florida was home, and the past was simply that, the past...
"Lucien, my nephew, your late father, my brother Marcel was a Loup Garou and you inherited it from him," Aunt Victoria said, shattering the young man's world in a single sentence. Lucien looked at his aunt and burst out laughing. Could she really be serious? The old Haitian woman flashed him a sad, patient smile. Shaking his head, Lucien walked out of the living room and headed to the basement, to chill. He didn't want to listen to the old woman's nonsense.
"Not trying to hear that shit," Lucien told himself, as he watched his favorite show, Empire, on TV. Lucien thought about what his aunt Victoria told him, and shook his head. A lot of Haitian people were deeply superstitious, believing in weird stuff like the Voodoo religion and some of them old-school Haitians believed that people could turn into wolves. Lucien, born in Haiti but raised in Florida, didn't believe in such nonsense. Lucien was a regular brother living his life, and what mattered to him was getting a college education while playing basketball. No room for myths and legends in his carefully ordered existence.
Lucien had always been quite strong and fast, but he attributed that to him being six-foot-five and weighing two hundred and fifty five pounds. When Lucien tried out for the Miami-Dade Community College's men's basketball team, he impressed the coaches and players with his speed and athleticism. Lucien recalled how he played more minutes than most of his teammates and never seemed to really get tired. When things got physical, Lucien took hits, on and off the court, but again he seemed to recover really fast when he got hurt.