Alphess: An Angel of Death

Murder & Misery

I’d gotten that name after the incident that led me to leave home. I spent many years alone after that, living life as a rouge. I didn’t call any place home, didn’t call anyone pack. It was just me and the wilderness, living the majority of my days in my wolf form. It was a dark few years for me, filled with rage and a loss of purpose. I’m not proud of it, and I regret most of it. In that time, there was not a wolf I came across that I didn’t slaughter. Rouges, pack members patrolling borders, it didn’t matter who. If they barred my path in any kind of way, I killed them. I was blinded with anger for my excommunication and burdened with a gift that lent me power I didn’t know how to control yet. I told myself that my murdering spree wasn’t my fault. That it was just the power taking over, that I didn’t know what I was doing. But that was just a lie I told myself to keep my head above water. The truth was I knew exactly what I was doing; I knew the second I made the decision to kill, it would happen. Maybe I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it, I didn’t quite yet understand the battle skills I was born with or how best to execute them. But it didn’t matter, because the end result was the same – bloodshed.

Word began to travel around the wolfdom about a rogue that was leaving dead bodies in his wake. No one lived to see the wolf, but the bodies all had the same calling card. Just a single bite wound to the jugular to leave the wolf lying and drowning in a pool of their own blood. Human news stations reported murders too – some kind of animal, at first. Hikers were warned, campers told to beware. But eventually, it didn’t matter who or when or where I killed. Anyone was a target. Human or wolf, in my way or not. The trail of bodies could be followed at first all the way up the western coast of the United States, and then clear across Canada, zig-zagging through the Midwest. The trail dried up somewhere around Tennessee when I took a hiatus from my wolf form and sequestered myself in a shoddy motel room with binge after binge of booze. By then, my wolf had a keen taste for blood. She constantly wanted more, never to be satiated. She was a monster and a cold-blooded killer and I had begun to fear her. I wanted to drown out her voice at the bottom of a bottle.

I imagine that the way I felt at the time was much like a vampire without her next meal. Or an alcoholic. Or a drug addict. Whatever kind of addiction you wanted to name, drying out from it is not a pleasant process. If I gave in to a tiny taste, just a single creep in a back alley, the one murder would turn into a spree and suddenly a small, quiet town was harboring the next big serial killer. Or rather, the serial killer that had been tormenting the entire continent of North America for years. Keeping a low profile was becoming more and more difficult, and I knew I needed to cool it before I got caught. So I holed up in a room and refused to come out for anything.

I traded the desire for blood with the desire for alcohol. When I woke up with a burning sensation in my throat and the metallic taste covering my tongue, begging me to kill, I would drown it out with a bottle of bourbon. It wasn’t quite enough to satiate anything, but it was enough to leave me too dizzy to get up. So I more or less drank and slept off my bloody addiction. I spent weeks in that hotel room, my only sustenance the liquor and sink water. I wanted to waste away to nothing, my mind haunting me in my waking hours with visions of crushing skulls or ripping out throats. My dreams weren’t any more of a reprieve, nightmares of full of blood. The cruel part about being from a Highborn bloodline and having a gift that literally made you a killing machine meant that even with weeks without food, I remained in fighting shape. My body didn’t lose muscle, I still had fast reflexes and a mind that calculated battle plans subconsciously. Killing myself slowly apparently wasn’t an option. And don’t worry, the irony of the born-killer being unable to finish the job wasn’t lost on me.

The weeks of absolute misery did pay off in the end. I finally woke up sober and alert, without the immediate desire to go out on a hunt. The only thing I wanted now was food. Real food, without blood. I stumbled out of bed, annoyed with how easily my body righted itself and got back to normal movement. No head-rush, no weakness from the lack of nutrition. Just pure power in every muscle of my body. I left the room and wandered down the long balcony, realizing it was the middle of the night. The motel I was staying at was a simple square, four long buildings connected at the corners by the balcony overlooking the pool courtyard. I found the vending machine between building 2 and 3; I shook my hand out and turned it into my paw, trailing a claw along the sides of the glass. The noise was worse than nails on a chalkboard, but it allowed me to pop the glass out and choose any of the snacks I wanted free of charge. I replaced the glass precariously and headed off.

I settled by the pool in one of the dinky lounge chairs, watching the murky blue-green water glow from the ugly yellow light in the deep end. I ripped open a bag of Doritos and began shoveling the neon orange chips into my mouth. My mind drifted, but this time it was thankfully not to the hundreds of murders I had committed. Instead, it was to my family. Abigail would be 15 by now, and I wondered if she had found her mate. Most wolves find them sometime between 15 and 18, Highborns tending toward the lower end. It’s all she ever wanted in her life, and it hurt my heart to think I’d never get to see her get married. I wondered briefly who her mate may have been, if it was someone in our pack or someone in one of the neighboring packs. I hoped he was kind to her and all she had dreamed of. I thought of little Kingston; he’d only be 13. I wondered what stories he had been told growing up about me, his big sister that betrayed the pack and wolf-kind. Maybe he remembered enough of me to form his own opinions still. He’d be in leadership classes by now, working hard to learn the ropes of leading a pack as large and influential as Olympia. I thought of my parents, wondering if they missed me or even thought about me at all. Did they pretend they didn’t have a third child? Did anyone back home wonder about me?

I realized tears were falling and I quickly shook the thoughts away and wiped my eyes. I finished the smorgasbord of food I had stolen, shoving the wrappers into the trash as I walked out of the courtyard. I sucked Dorito dust off of my fingers, heading through the lobby of the motel. I paused only to check out of the room, feeling a weight lifted. I headed out into the night, not knowing where I would go next or what I would do. But right now….it didn’t matter. I felt new. I felt rejuvenated. But most importantly, I felt satiated.