It was an unseasonably cold day in May when the world as I knew it ended and all hell broke loose. No one expected it. No one predicted it. No one had even gotten close to the truth revealed on live television all over the world. I was standing in my kitchen, hands wrist deep in hamburger meat as I prepared my famous meatloaf. My husband of two years, Hank, was changing our son’s diaper in the living room. We both froze at the sounds emanating from the television’s evening news.

People were screaming. There were sounds of an animal snarling and ripping clothes, and possibly flesh. I ran into the living room where my husband held our son, Michael, tightly and watched in horror the live feed. Spots of blood on the camera lens tinted the scene a pale red. Through it, we saw the head of a news anchor resting on her desk.

It took a moment to wrap my mind around the scene. Then it hit me. It wasn’t the cougar sitting on the newsroom desk, or even the way it looked at the camera with eyes that seemed too intelligent and understanding. It was the newscaster’s head lying on the desk while the rest of her body slouched against it.

I wondered why people were running away and not calling animal control, or the police or...someone. Then I realized the only other people in the room were dead. My husband was shaking while my son wailed in his arms, disturbed by his father’s emotions.

"What the hell happened? How did that animal even get in the building?" I asked quietly, disbelief clear in my voice.

My husband turned to me slowly, almost dramatically so, as if we were in a bad horror flick. "It was human," he said. "That animal was the other news anchor one minute and then...an...animal the next."

I wanted to laugh and throw something at him, or just scowl and walk away at the ridiculous statement. But we’d lived together for five years before we got married, and I’d learned Hank well. In all those years, I’d never seen him truly afraid of anything or anyone. At six-foot-two, with a muscular build, he could probably bench press our car with one arm. Nothing ever intimidated him, but what I saw in his eyes and heard in his voice was fear and complete conviction.

We spent the next hour flipping from one channel to the next and on every one, the story was the same. Shape-shifters are real and they lived among us. In a world made up of billions no one had any clue how many of them there were at the time, but over the next few weeks, as more and more people in high places revealed their true nature and wars broke out on every continent, it became painfully clear there were many. Too damn many. The small town we lived in was overrun. We were near a national park and many of the shifters chose to live close to the sanctity of the trees. Our battle was short lived and most of the humans died. My son, my husband, the only family I had left, were killed before my eyes. I killed my first shifter that day, but she was not my last.

It took three years for the worst of the battles to end and the lines to be drawn. Nearly a third of the world’s population came out by then, and they were all stronger and faster than humans. Many of the third-world countries were completely overrun, turning into totalitarian empires with an alpha male ruling the land. They figured it out amongst themselves somehow and an uneasy peace kept them settled. In the States, the country was pretty much divided in half. If you looked at a map, it was like the Civil War all over again. The south was human, the north mostly shifters. I say mostly, because some bleeding hearts decided it was okay to let the shifters run the country and stayed up there with them. They had a real live-and-let-live attitude about the whole mess. I might have been that way too if I hadn’t already seen so much death. By the time the country split and the two governments were established, I had more blood on my hands than I could ever wash off, and I ached for more.