ALPHA BRIAN'S WOLFLESS MATE

The Dying Man

The chilling night was dark and cold.

Melinda Carter, a seventeen year old, sat at the best spot in the middle of Fountain Park with her eyes reddened and her hands folded across her chest, consoling herself not to cry.

Two hours ago, she was surrounded by families and friends eager to see her shift but they were struck with disappointment when she didn't even produce a fur, let alone c***k into a wolf.

What really hurt her most was the way the doctor had touched her as if she were a curse. Like Peacocks displaying pride, the rest of the pack had shook their heads, looking down on her as if she were a parasite and someone had whispered “Wolfless!” It wasn't an insult but it was the worst. It was a pity.

So she slipped out through the back door in her white dress and kept walking until the pack’s lights disappeared from view.

Her father never said a word. He was by her side when the whole thing had happened and was holding her cold hands in his.

His silence had hit her like a hacksaw biting a wood. She had hoped he could defend her openly, but he didn't. He had looked at her expressionlessly and she had tried to read the words behind those dark eyes, but found none.

Was he disappointed in her or was he pitying her like the rest of the pack? She really wanted to know.

Unable to stomach the silence around the hall and the beat of her heart, she finally walked out of the door.

A faint sound crunched through her thoughts. A weary, jagged breath.

She followed it and located the source of the sound.

A man lay in the chilly grass. He was covered in blood and wounds: fresh, old and crusted. Ragged, gray trousers, torn to the knee, tattered t-shirt, once yellow, now gray, bare feet. Raw scars circled his wrists, as though something heavy had lived there for years. The rest of the skin where there was no scar or wound was gray like clay.

“Mister, wake up!" She dropped to her knees and shook him, her throat twitching.

His skin was ice under her fingers, but his eyes opened slowly and Melinda forgot to breathe.

She had never seen eyes like them, clear as diamonds - a blue lit from inside ringed faintly in gold, struggling to focus on her face, his brows twitched with the effort.

"Poor thing,” she thought, and her heart squeezed.

Something occurred to her. A faint scent reached her through the blood: pine smoke and snow. It tugged at her like a half-remembered song. ‘Have we met before?’ But she hadn't. Who could forget those lovely eyes of his?

"Mister, I will call right away for the ambulance.” She tried to dial the emergency number when his voice stopped her.

"No hospital." His voice was a scrape. “Help me."

“Who did this to you?"

“Not now. No time. I need blood." His gaze slid to her and back. "Yours — Just a little, please.”

Her world twisted. Every wolf knew the old story: the last great war had been sparked by a handful of starving monsters who fed on blood, and the packs had formed the Concord hunters to hunt them down to the last. Blood eaters. This always sent a chill through wolf pups even when no one had ever seen them.

Was he a convict? A criminal? Or was he kidn*pped? She scanned his wrists, the torn clothes on him and his general appearance. No convict looked like this, whatever his crime. Somebody must have held him for years, and somebody had afflicted those scars on purpose.

Curiosity, the type that had gotten her scolded since she was four, took hold. She wanted to know who he was, who had done this to him, and how her blood could possibly help him. A tiny voice coming from her mind wondered if she was being hypnotized.

She should have left him to die. Every lesson she had been given said so: a stranger, wounded; asking for blood. She remembered her father's countless warnings and her nannies’ teachings and every tale, true and fairy, that ended badly for girls who stopped to help. But this man’s fingers, cold as ice on her wrist, were trembling. He used no force, only pleading. In her seventeen years of being warmly protected, respected and pitied, nobody had ever requested anything from her as though her opinion mattered. And she couldn't bring herself to refuse the first person on earth who was anxious to see her saying yes.

She tore a strip of cloth from her long, flared gown and wrapped it around the worst wound on his arm. He flinched and she whispered, “Sorry, sorry," and tied it up anyway.

“What is your name?" She asked.

“It doesn't matter."

“It matters to me."

The corner of his mouth moved: a cracked painful thing that was almost a smile. “Later," he replied.

“Miss Melinda!" Voices, dozens of them, and the slap of boots on the sludge grass. “Young Miss!"

The man's hand shot out and closed around her wrist.

"Don't go.” His breath cracked. “Help me."

“Don't be afraid. Those are my people. They can get you a private doctor to attend to your—"

But he was already moving her hand towards his mouth and she couldn't remember agreeing to it.

"Daughter, where are you?” Her father's voice, very close. “Melinda.”

Flashlights swept the darkness. Footsteps thundered, a ring of guards, her father at the front, burst from the trees, and every gun in the ring came up. Flashlights wavered and gloom leapt, and for a moment the whole park looked lit from within, like the inside of a lantern about to burst.

"Halt!" her father shouted.

The man refused. He was bleeding out on the icy grass, but his fingers were shackled around her wrist like a trap. His gaze fixed on the armed guards, daring them to fire. The look in those eyes was not the look of a dying man. It was the look of a wolf guarding a kill.

"Let her go!" her father ordered.

He tightened his grip. Pain shot through Melinda and she cried out.

He was too fragile to sit up, yet the intensity of force in his hand could have rooted up a tree. He grasped on like a stubborn goat with a stolen cassava root, daring anyone to take it.

“You are hurting me!"

"My bad, dear." He still refused to let go. He looked stubbornly at her father. "She's going to help me."

"Let go of her, or I'll blow your skull off," Andrew, the Carter's head butler, threatened, and the guns c****d.

"Dad, make them stop!" Melinda's voice cracked. "He's hurting me!"

She noticed something cross her father's face, and it was not fear. It was something old and terrifying, as though he had been waiting a long time for this to happen and still hated that it had finally happened.

"Stand down," he said, and it sounded like giving something up.

"Sir…” Andrew hesitated.

"Stand down! Let him have his way." The old man's tone left no room for argument.

The guns lowered. The dying man looked at Melinda with those unbearable eyes. "I'm sorry, dear," he apologized again, and dipped his teeth into her wrist.

Her body shuddered and a cry tore out of her as the pain surged through her veins. But even as it rose, it began to vanish into the air, and what she saw made no sense at all. The gray, wounded man swelled and straightened. Colour and lines flooded his face. His shoulders widened. His bones spun, cracked and reformed, and then the largest black wolf she had ever seen in her life, stood on the grass where the dying man had been, gold-ringed blue eyes burning, steam pouring from its jaws.

Stunned and shocked, she refused to believe such a wolf could exist.

Her knees buckled and the last thing she saw before the darkness took her was her father's unreadable face - not fear of the wolf but something closer to recognition…