The wolf pack, p.12
The Wolf Pack, page 12
I walked into the lobby and bypassed the elevators for the stairs. This was my form of exercise and I bounded up the flight of stairs three at a time, feeling the burn in my calves. I thought of Callan and his big brown eyes. I was not about to let them out of my sight but I couldn’t remain glued to them twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.
Suddenly, it was like Déjà vu and I felt like I had been here before in a previous life. It was almost like I was seeing through the eyes of another woman in a similar position in the past. Things began to spin around me and I dropped to my knees, with my legs collapsing out from underneath me. I couldn’t manage to keep my balance and everything was these disjointed images of colors and shapes in front of my eyes.
I tried to say something but nothing came out of my mouth. Something was attacking me. Although this wasn’t a physical altercation, it was more spiritual, like a mental barrage, leaving me stymied and unable to defend myself.
The stairs were exchanged for a shack that had seen better days. The hands I was looking at were not my own. Somehow I was a passenger looking through the eyes of this woman. The three men talking in hushed tones at the hearth of the fireplace had similar features of the Black family. Their sense of style was one of a different era and I thought I had to be hallucinating.
I tried to wrestle free and wake up from this nightmare.
“We have to do something about this betrayal. She slept with him and must pay for it with her life. To do anything else would show favoritism and they would perceive that as a weakness. We can agree this was a mistake but there’s no way we can forget this trespass.” The man looked like Callan but his features had been altered by a bushy beard and a pronounced scar underneath his lip.
“She has been with us and has given us a child. How can we throw her to the wolves, if you pardon the pun? I understand this is an unforgivable sin but maybe we can find another way to deal with it more humanely.” This guy seemed familiar and something about him was making it hard for me to look away.
“Shane, what do you suggest, and take into consideration everybody knows about her infraction. She hasn’t been exactly shy about telling everybody within earshot. It should be known she shows no remorse for what she has done. Her death will serve to be an example to others and it must be public. You can hear them out there calling for her blood and we can’t turn a blind eye to community justice. Look at her and tell me what you see without the blinders on,” He demanded, with his cold dead eyes looking right through the woman I was inside of.
“I didn’t want any part of this but I made the best of a bad situation. Living with the three of you and dealing with your disgusting habits have tried my patience. It makes me sick to my stomach to sleep with any of you. I thought I would grow to love you but I loathe you all with every fiber of my being. Kill me while you still have the chance, I would rather die than to spend another minute in your presence,” Her words were like venom, she could have used a little liquid honey to soothe the savage beast but she refused to capitulate.
“Why did you take the gag out of her mouth? I really don’t want to hear another word out of her lying mouth.” The one that looked like Callan didn’t take kindly to her speaking her mind and rectified that with the gag being placed back in her mouth.
It was funny, but I could actually taste the rag and I wasn’t just seeing through her eyes. I could feel everything, including her hatred and the way the ropes chaffed her wrists, with the skin burning with the effort. I was looking out from the inside to a time of their ancestors. The ritual was sometimes forced on the individual with surprising results.
A child crying in the crib was making a fuss, thrashing and turning in his blanket. He must have sensed the animosity and was acting out accordingly to his parent’s bickering. He was beautiful and I saw Callan at the age of three looking back at me through his eyes.
“Duncan, death is too good for her. Besides, she still has to give us two more children and I don’t care how it happens. She can be willing or not. The choice is entirely up to her. I know it seems distasteful but this has been foretold. We will have three children and they will take over where we left off. When she is finished birthing our next two children then we can cast her aside without further thought. We have a duty to perform.” This one was the quietest of the three but he made his voice ring out with conviction.
“Niles, as much as it pains me, I agree with you in theory but this goes against everything we have been taught growing up. Forcing her to breed our children is wrong but it’s better than the alternative. She has to agree in public and swallow her pride by apologizing for her infidelity. If she can do that, then maybe we can pull the wool over their eyes,” Duncan said in response to Niles. They had come up with a game plan which depended on the woman who was to bear their children to agree to.
They took out the gag to hear what her response was going to be.
“I will never forgive any of you for this. My children are more important to me than breathing. I don’t like it but it looks like we’re going to have to live with each other for a few more years. You have no idea how much I want to wipe those smug looking grins off of your faces. I won’t forget any of this and will carry this putrid stench of revenge with me everywhere I go. Don’t mistake my smile in public for being a willing concubine.” She sighed deeply and sat there in silence while they discussed the elephant in the room.
“I think it goes without saying somebody is going to have to pay for this crime. None of us have to like it but it has to be done. He will be labeled and killed without mercy by the three of us. I understand he was our friend but this cannot go unanswered.” They all agreed and they released her with a fake smile painted on her face.
The man who had soiled what they thought was their possession was hauled in front of a tribunal of Elders. They made their claim and it was echoed by the Elders. The wolves emerged and attacked him without the slightest provocation. It was a grotesque display of brutality tearing into his body like savages. To see it up close and personal, and smell the blood in the air, was too much for my delicate constitution.
The business was handled and I could hear her mumbling underneath her breath while they were temporarily occupied. They got too caught up in displaying their might to understand they had made a powerful enemy.
“All of you are going to pay dearly for this. One by one, this community will fall and I will be responsible for killing off the last of the wolves. There are twenty communities and I’m going to systematically destroy them from the inside. Inciting distrust and civil unrest will bring about a war. Manipulating all of you is going to be my greatest achievement and I will avenge his death. This I swear by everything that is holy.” Her teeth were clenched and she was trying her best to put on a brave face despite how she wanted to put her hands around their throats.
Everything became a blur, unfocused and slowly their voices faded into obscurity. I looked down and my hands were bleeding from scratching the names of those three young men onto the brick wall in front of me. Duncan, Shane, and Niles were forever imprinted in my mind.
I was a prisoner of thoughts that didn’t belong to me and somehow I had crossed over to see the past through a different pair of eyes. I couldn’t seem to move and my limbs felt like they were stuck in quicksand. My fingers tingled and I could barely understand what was going on.
I wasn’t breathing and I was pounding my chest to get my heart to work again. Somebody was rushing to my side and I was lifted into his arms but he stopped two steps up. Something had caught his attention and he was repeating those three names over and over again.
“How do you know those names? I never mentioned my father’s names. I’m sorry, I can see that you are in no condition to answer any questions. Let me get you back inside and we can try to make sense of this.” Crosby was holding me like a limp rag doll in his arms and I felt powerless to say anything.
“Your mother…” The words were frozen in my throat, when he looked at me with a glare of disapproval.
“We don’t talk about her. We never say her name.” It was a sore subject and this was a raw festering wound they all shared.
Something told me there was more to the story and I had barely scratched the surface of what had transpired in the past with their parents. I didn’t even know where the vision came from and how it was possible to take a sneak peek behind the curtain of their past.
Chapter Nineteen
I blinked and the room slowly came into focus with the three of them looking like they had lost their best friend. Something had completely exhausted me and the last thing I remembered was Crosby coming to collect me from the stairs after a vision that had left me a little rattled.
“Don’t try to move, just take it slow. It’s been almost twenty-four hours and we were starting to worry you were never going to wake up. Sip this. It will help you feel better,” Callan persuaded and I looked at him funny while turning my nose up at the green concoction he was presenting.
“I’m into health and fitness but the smell of that turns me off. I don’t mind trying things good for me. What exactly is in it?” I asked and received in response a shrug of his shoulders, noncommittal, like he was afraid to tell me.
“It has everything a growing girl needs. Let’s just call it a family recipe. Everything is all natural and will replenish your electrolytes. Try your best to drink it all without stopping. The aftertaste isn’t pleasant but will only last a few seconds.” He sat down beside me and held my hand, while staring at me the entire time while I was drinking it.
It was smooth and I continued to devour it until my face scrunched up with my tongue hanging out of my mouth. He laughed at my expense but I found nothing amusing about trying to kill me. I knew he was only doing what he felt was right and I couldn’t fault him for relying on an old folk remedy.
“I don’t know what was in that and I prefer not to find out. There was something I was coming back to tell you. That’s right; Holly had some information about a guy bragging about killing three men and one woman in a fire. He frequents this dive and gets drunk before telling wild tales. He apparently arrives precisely at the same time every night. It sounds eerily similar to what happened to us.” I couldn’t even look at the remnants of the glass and my stomach was actually turning at the prospect of drinking anymore.
“We can deal with that later, we have some pressing questions to ask you. I wasn’t there but Crosby had some interesting things to say about what you were saying under your breath. We also saw what you wrote on the wall in blood. It’s been very frustrating waiting for you to open up your eyes. We tried everything and nothing worked. Your body needed this time to heal. It’s very rare for the bite to cause this kind of phenomenon. There are stories of a third eye, however, nobody has experienced it.” Callan wasn’t the only one interested in what I had to say and the other two looked rather perplexed.
I thought it was a hallucination brought on by the stress I was under. Almost dying in a fire could take its toll on anybody, including one of my strength and character. Nobody really knew how they were going to respond when the adrenaline wore off.
Struggling to a sitting position wasn’t easy when my limbs still felt like they were in quicksand. I began shaking my fingers and toes.
The feeling was coming back into my extremities and my mind had a clarity which wasn’t there before. I shook my head of the cobwebs and the vision coalesced into something more than fragmented images.
I clutched the sheet covering me and I lifted it to witness how somebody had taken care of me. My clothes were neatly folded by the bed. Being completely naked could have left me feeling vulnerable and exposed, but it didn’t bother me, it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen it before. They probably wanted me to be comfortable with no possibility of choking on my constricting clothes. It was actually nice to see how they were concerned about me but now they were begging me without any words to tell them how I could possibly know those names.
“I’m going to need a minute to collect my thoughts. There were some dangerous men and they were searching the area under Donovan’s orders. His succession is either going to take place shortly or has already been done. Are you sure you really want to give him that power and then take it away from him? He has been highly unpredictable and you never quite know what he’s thinking from one moment to the next. It could be he was responsible for the fire and is covering his tracks by making sure we are really gone,” I suggested, although I had a feeling they were already thinking the same thing.
“It was a close call but we were able to mask our scents with some of the ingredients you got from Holly at the market. She has the best selection of fresh herbs and spices outside of the wolf community. We sprinkled a medley of them around the perimeter of the building and along the threshold of this loft. We pretended nobody was home and they didn’t feel it was necessary to go any further considering they didn’t have our scent.” Crosby said from the window, with his hand pulling back the threadbare yellow curtains to see to the street below.
They were consistent in how they were always there for me. I felt like the popular kid in school, getting all the attention, instead of being ostracized for being different. The images in my head became distorted with the vision and the sex. It was hard to distinguish one from the other. Concentration brought things back together cohesively.
I didn’t invite their scrutiny but I wasn’t going to get away with anything, with them watching me like a hawk. They were waiting on pins and needles to hear what I was going to say next. It was hard to figure out what went wrong and how I had gotten here.
“Crosby is reluctant to say her name for obvious reasons. You somehow know our father's names and we would really like to know how. Would you care to fill in the blanks? We don’t remember them and they died shortly after my birth. We were raised by the community and had several father figures to learn from. It was a family atmosphere and I found acceptance through meditation and other spiritual arts.” Wesley was giving me insight into how he had been taken underneath the wing of those of spiritual belief in the community.
“I don’t exactly know what it was I saw and how to explain it. In a nutshell, your father’s killed their best friend for his infidelity, when he slept with your mother. They were going to kill her but were convinced it was a bad idea. I have to wonder where she was after your fathers died.” I wasn’t sure how much more I should tell them as they had already heralded their fathers as heroes.
Learning about them keeping their mother against her will, to father two more children, most likely would have destroyed their pristine image of them. I just couldn’t decide whether or not it was my place to bust their bubble.
“We tried to get answers when we were old enough to understand what was happening. The Elders strictly forbid us from even mentioning her name in public. It didn’t stop us from looking into what happened but it left us with more questions than answers. From what we could gather from those willing to talk about it, our mother disappeared shortly after their demise never to be heard from again. To be completely honest, this recollection was a little spotty and we heard from some reliable sources that she loved us with all of her heart,” Callan recalled and I could see the pain in his eyes from having to relive what was a horrible childhood memory.
He turned away from me, obviously affected and about to show it physically, which he couldn’t do in front of the others. The door opened and slammed behind him to give him that bit of privacy to relive his loss without consolation.
The man was strong and was relied upon by his brothers to do the right thing. It didn’t seem fair to heap that responsibility on to his shoulders. It was apparently the way things were and he was considered the true Alpha. Nobody dared to speak against them and Donovan was going to rue the day. It was just a matter of time before they stepped back into the limelight to take what was rightfully theirs.
“Forgive him, he remembers them better than we do. I wish he would talk about it and tell us some stories. The only way we’re going to keep them alive is in our hearts and our minds. I’ve seen photographs but they pale in comparison to heartfelt memories.” Crosby didn’t venture any closer, keeping a watchful eye as a good soldier on anything that might have been out of the ordinary.
Seeing through their mother’s eyes made it impossible for me to see her face. I had to believe they had those photographs near to their heart, never too far away from them. Some things began to make sense when I began to place emphasis on every single word said in my vision. Their mother could’ve been the architect of their father’s demise.
I didn’t want to tear them apart and saying anything more was tantamount to relationship suicide. I was afraid that news of how their fathers had reacted to their mother would sour anything we had together. Killing the messenger with deafening silence would be their reaction. There would be no way for them to get over the words coming out of my mouth. I wasn’t giving them the credit they deserved but the risk was too great to take.
“I carry my parents with me everywhere I go in this locket. Callan wears the family crest on his finger and Wesley has their initials tattooed, emblazoned on his skin, right above his heart. We honor them in our own way.” Crosby came over and put his arms around me.
I sighed and enjoyed the extended intimacy, giving me a moment to breathe again. It was those moments of quiet contemplation and unspoken passion which meant the world to me. None of us were innocent and we all carried the burden of our sins. We hadn’t gotten close enough to share those darkest feelings and fears. Being physical with one another opened up the pathways of communication but keeping the truth from them was a lie by omission.
My finger played with the locket around his neck, quite curious to see the contents. It would confirm or deny my visions were supernatural by origin. It wasn’t like I was ever going to forget the three of them. They had come to life in the past and I was a bystander, through the eyes of somebody that hated them with every fiber of her being.
