The Rogue Alpha King

CH.3 - Blood

Chapter Three

Alpha Creed's Point Of View

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

I could almost taste the metallic scent of blood that lingered in the air. The warmth of my hand inside his chest, the slight movement of his still-beating heart, the grip and the pull. His eyes were glued wide open with his mouth slightly agape as the look of surprise registered on his face at the moment I ripped his heart out with my bare hands.

I shot upright, eyes wide, heart pounding in alarm.

I looked around my surroundings in an attempt to orient myself. My body was fully waking up and registering last night's events alongside the nightmare I had just been shaken out of. I honestly hated how vivid and graphic my dreams were but there was nothing to be done about it. I had been killing from a very young age and all of it was catching up with me. Taking a life does something to a man and none of it is pleasant.

I exhaled a deep breath and brought my hand to my chest as a calming gesture. I noticed the peaceful empty green field that I had passed the night in and felt a sense of calm come over me.

For the first time in a long time I woke up feeling utterly peaceful deep within myself. Kronos was silent, tucked away in the far reaches of my mind, and though I was not yet fully awake I could already feel the difference. The eyes. Beautiful vivid green orbs, just looking into my soul. I could still feel them on me but there was no one in sight. I tried racking my brain to determine whether I had seen those eyes before or whether someone had followed me into this field after last night's raid but no. Nothing came.

I finally got to my feet and took a good look around, trying to find my bearings, but the landscape offered nothing familiar. I began to walk in the direction that felt right. The morning breeze calmed my soul and the fresh air filled my lungs with something close to peace. As I walked I could feel my wolf slowly becoming more and more aware of his surroundings. It was as if something had its grip on me and was leading me toward it. A strong pull, impossible to name, was directing me somewhere and I couldn't help but follow it with great curiosity.

I couldn't recognise a single landmark but that didn't tempt me to turn around or change direction. It was as if I knew where I was headed even though I genuinely didn't. The whole thing felt familiar, as if I had been here before. The feeling of eyes on me caught me off guard again and drove me to look around on reflex.

Kronos had had many past lives. He was a reincarnation and according to him we had always been together since the beginning, his human forms forgotten across the centuries, which was why people only ever recognised him in his wolf form. Our souls had been bound together to exist as one across eternity. A lot of things felt familiar to me because of this. My sense of déjà vu meant more than it would to the average person. Every time it occurred I knew it was most likely triggering memories from a previous life, and in all of them I was essentially the same person, just more and more enraged as the centuries went by.

My goal, across every life, had been to find a mate. I wanted love. I wanted to be grounded. I wanted to know that someone had my back and that I could love wholeheartedly without anything standing in the way. In all my past lives the madness had been difficult to outrun. After a certain number of years without finding a mate Kronos and I would run wild, taking out our pain and anguish on other beings. At some point in our history we had arrived at the conclusion that perhaps we simply did not have a mate, that the moon goddess truly had not created one specifically for us. Regardless of having a mate or not I still craved love. I yearned for a real connection. The only way to keep my sanity and maintain some type of control was to get mated, and so I had done exactly that in previous lives, marking someone to be my mate and using that bond as an anchor.

I could suddenly feel a barely noticeable shift in the atmosphere and I knew that I was no longer in the supernatural realm's core territory.

Something felt distinctly off. It was not unusual for me to wander off into unknown lands but leaving the realm entirely while lost in my own thoughts was something new. I held great power within me, much of it still untapped, and one of those abilities just so happened to be unnatural speed, faster than any vampire or werewolf. So fast that in an absent-minded state I could apparently end up on the human side of the world without intending to.

Upon further inspection of my surroundings I determined that I had been in this territory before, both in a past life and in my current one. It took me a while to recognise it but I was not in the human world exactly. I was in a small village that sat on the border between the supernatural realm and the human world, inhabited by both humans and supernatural beings who had chosen to exist alongside each other. Some of the humans seemed aware of our existence whilst others remained completely ignorant of it.

My feet seemed to know which way to go without instruction from me. It was as if I had walked this route so many times that my body had memorised it without my conscious mind being involved. The thought of food entered my mind as I spotted a small diner on the other side of the road.

All eyes turned to me as I entered. The small bell above the door announced my arrival and the room responded in the way rooms always responded to my presence. Some people looked away immediately. Others took longer to decide that looking away was the safer choice. A few left entirely. None of this bothered me. I would rather be feared than have to deal with people who hadn't yet learned to respect my space.

I reached into my pocket and retrieved my bank card. Yes, a bank card. We might have been considered monsters by some but we were still civilised enough to sustain an economy.

I chose the corner table, which kept me fairly well hidden from the rest of the diner, and settled in to wait for the waiter. I couldn't help feeling that I was missing something, as if something was off about the entire atmosphere. I took a deep breath.

A scent caught me completely off guard.

Unique. Unusual. Irresistible. It captured all of my senses at once without being intense or overpowering. Just incredibly, impossibly inviting. I could feel my wolf stir inside me in a way he rarely stirred for anything that wasn't blood or battle.

I couldn't decipher what the scent was or where it was coming from and then just as suddenly I lost it again. I was deep in thought trying to sort through what I had just felt when the waitress arrived and dropped my food on the table, hurrying away from me before I could even look up.

My hand reached for my cappuccino and froze midair.

It hit me all at once.

It was her. The waitress. What I was detecting was her scent. I couldn't detect any supernatural essence within her at all. She was human.

I had to speak to her. I just had to.

I needed to be near that scent again.