Chapter 4
959 Words
"I think dying trying is better than living with you."
"Fine. If it's death you want I'll find another use for the girl since she's alive, after all. She'd make quite the….."
"Not a chance."
The sound that followed was not the one I was expecting. Something more final than a fight. A decision made in violence. My mother's voice came, one last time cutting through the roar.
"You don't get to touch her. You don't get to use her. You don't get anything from me except this"
Then a crash. A sound like the world was folding on itself.
Then the fire was louder than ever, filling in the space where her voice had been.
"MOM!" I called
Someone grabbed me by my arms around my waist, lifting me clearly off the ground to my feet I was kicking at nothing.
"Let go of me…. let go…. that's my MOM…."
"Kaelira." The voice in my ear was wrecked, barely holding together. "Kaelira, please"
I didn't stop fighting. I couldn't. I could see the window, I could see the fire eating through what was left of the frame and somewhere inside that fire was my mother and if I could just get back, just get up there maybe I can save….….
Then I saw her.
Through the window, through the smoke and the roaring for just one second, I saw her face. The great white wolf, half-obscured by flame, was turning one last time to look at me.
A single tear tracked down her face with the faintest smile.
And then the fire swallowed her whole.
I stopped struggling.
I stopped everything.
As I slipped through the arms holding me and fell to the ground, I sat there in the dirt and ash while the world burned around me, I stared at the place where my mother had been.
The beta knelt beside me without a single word. There was nothing to say.
Time moved strangely after that.
The sound of the fire. The sound of wolves howling in the distance, battle cries turning to mourning. The weight of the air, thick with smoke and blood and the particular silence of things being over.
At some point, I looked around.
Bodies lay scattered across the grounds the pack members, rogues, the evidence of a battle fought desperately and lost. And among them was my father.
“The Alpha.”
I looked at him for a long time. I don't know how long.
I thought about his voice in the bond. That final word he said before he took his last breath. Come meet me soon. I'll be waiting.
He hadn't been wrong to say it.
Something moved through me then rising from somewhere so deep I hadn't known it was there. Something that had been sleeping inside my bones waiting for exactly this moment when everything else had been stripped away and only the core of what I was remained.
The air shifted.
It happened all at once I felt it in my hair, felt the silver spreading out from the roots like frost moving across glass. Felt my eyes burn and change. Felt the ground beneath me respond to something I was putting out without meaning to, something enormous and ancient entirely mine.
The beta who had been holding me stumbled backwards.
Around the clearing people stopped.
Friends and enemy alike they stopped moving, stopped fighting, stopped everything and turned to look at me.
I stood up slowly.
I looked at the enemy fighters still standing in the ruins of my home. I looked at what they had done. At the bodies they had left. As the fire was still eating through everything my parents had built together, side by side, for every year of their lives before tonight.
They had taken everything.
My father's laugh. My mother's hands. Every morning I had ever woken up to the sound of their voices. Every future I had ever imagined with them.
They had come here and taken everything.
The rage that moved through me was not hot. It was cold pure and crystalline and absolutely without mercy. I didn't feel like a child anymore.
I wasn't sure I would ever feel like a child again.
I didn't hesitate.
The closest rogue lurched forward, baring his teeth, trying to intimidate.
I moved before he finished.
The sound he made when I reached him was very short.
I straightened up slowly, blood on my hands, and looked at the rest of them.
No one dares to move.
They stood frozen staring at me with something I had never seen directed at me in my entire life.
Then one by one, beginning with the familiar faces, my pack, my people they dropped to their knees. The movement spread outward like a ripple, like the only possible response to what they were feeling radiating from me in waves.
The beta was the first. His head bowed, his voice was thick with so much grief and something that sounded like awe and sorrow braided together:
"Alpha."
One word.
And then everyone else followed warriors, survivors, the wounded leaning on each other until the word was everywhere, rising from the ruins filling the burning dark.
"Alpha. Alpha. Alpha."
I stood in the middle of it all. Blood on my hands. Silver in my hair. Fire at my back where my parents had stood one hour ago.
I was only fifteen years old.
And I had just become the thing I was always supposed to be.
I looked out at the faces of my pack so exhausted heartbroken with no other choice I made them a silent promise.
I will find who did this.
I'll find who dares to ruin our pack and our loved ones.
- Writer
