The Wolf King's Burden

Elara's POV I woke up with the taste of copper and dirt in my mouth. My hands were covered in dried blood, dark and crusty, but not mine. I pushed myself up from the forest floor. Every muscle hurts. Pine needles stuck to my bare chest. Somewhere during last night's chaos, I'd lost my shirt. Again. The full moon was gone. Morning light came through the trees in weak, gray streams that did nothing to warm the cold in my bones. I didn't need to look around to know what I'd find. The sharp smell of death hung heavy in the air, mixing with dirt and broken branches. Three bodies this time. Maybe four. I couldn't tell yet I didn't want to look close enough to count the pieces. I stood slowly. My bare feet pressed against the uneven ground. My jeans were ripped at the knees, barely holding together. Blood soaked through the denim in patterns I didn't want to think about. The beast had been thorough. It always was. Twenty feet to my left, I saw the first body. A young man, maybe twenty-five. His throat was torn open. His eyes stared at nothing, frozen in that last moment of fear. I didn't know him, which meant he wasn't from my pack. Wrong place, wrong time. Or maybe he'd been hunting me. Everyone was hunting me these days. I made myself walk around, checking the damage. Four bodies total. Two men, two women. All werewolves I could tell by the partial wolf features still showing on their cold bodies. Their scents told me they were Blackthorne packs. Kaine's wolves. Scouts, probably, sent to track me and report back. They'd found me. Just not the version of me they could survive. My stomach twisted, but I'd learned long ago to push down the sickness. Throwing up wouldn't bring them back. Nothing would. I'd been living with this curse for three years, and the body count kept growing. Some nights it was rogues who got too close. Other nights it was hunters stupid enough to track a monster. Last month, there was a family camping in the wrong clearing. That one still kept me awake on the nights I could sleep. I left the bodies where they fell. Someone would find them eventually, probably more Blackthorne wolves on patrol. They'd report back to Kaine, and he'd add four more names to his list of reasons I deserved to die. The list was getting long. Too long. The walk back to my ruins took an hour. My feet knew the path through the thick woods past the creek that looked silver in certain light, over the fallen oak tree that had been ancient when I was a child. The forest knew me. It had known my father and his father before him. Now it knew my shame. The Veylor stronghold came into view as the sun finally broke through the clouds. Calling it a stronghold was generous now. Three years of neglect had turned it into rubble held together by ivy and stubborn memories. The eastern wall had fallen completely. The main hall, where my father once met with visiting Alphas, was open to the sky. Rain had rotted the wooden floors. Animals lived in the spaces where my pack once gathered. I'd lived here alone since the curse took hold. After the first m******e when I killed twelve of my own wolves, including Marcus, my Beta and best friend since childhood the survivors scattered. Some joined other packs. Some went rogue. A few tried to kill me in my sleep, thinking they were doing everyone a favor. They weren't wrong. I headed to the only room still standing: my father's old study. The stone walls had survived time and weather, and I'd saved enough furniture to make it livable. A cot in the corner. A table with three legs, propped up by a stack of books. A basin for water. Nothing else. I didn't deserve comfort. I cleaned the blood off my hands and arms with cold rainwater from last night. The basin turned pink, then red, then dark. I scrubbed until my skin hurt, but the stain never really went away. Not the one you could see, anyway. Someone was coming. I smelled them before I heard several wolves, moving fast through the forest from the south. The Blackthorne border. I'd expected this. Find their scouts dead, send more wolves. It was simple pack logic. I pulled on a clean shirt from my small pile of clothes and waited. Running was pointless. Fighting would only kill more people. Maybe today was the day it ended. Maybe Kaine had finally decided to stop sending scouts and come finish this himself. The thought should have scared me. Instead, I felt almost relieved. Boots on stone told me they'd arrived. I counted twenty heartbeats around the ruins. Twenty wolves against one cursed Alpha. The odds were almost fair. Then I caught another scent, soft and unexpected. Herbs and something sweeter, like honey mixed with smoke. A healer's scent. Why would Kaine bring a healer to kill me? The answer walked through my broken doorway a moment later, with Kaine himself and a dozen of his biggest enforcers behind her. I'd been wrong about one thing. Today wasn't the day it ended. Today was the day everything changed.