ATTEMPTING ESCAPE

ADAIRA

~

I waited patiently and listened carefully. The rogues were being rowdy, and from the sounds I could hear, it seemed like they were being gathered together for something, like they wanted to leave, maybe to invade another pack. The Rogue Alpha didn’t send any of his wolves to guard me, and I didn’t know whether to be elated or insulted. One one hand, I knew that it was a good thing because my escape would be easier without someone constantly watching me. On the other hand, if he didn’t send any guards here, then he didn’t consider me enough of a threat to do so. Even if this was a better option for my escape, my wolf was annoyed at being disregarded as a warrior, and I was annoyed at her for letting me down.

Now I wish I could actually communicate with my wolf, the curse words I would have used on her have not been invented yet. Instead, I settled for just projecting my anger about her actions, making sure she would feel the full brunt of my disappointment. She tried to send feelings of contriteness but I blocked them out, I wasn’t letting her off the hook so easily. If she could talk, I would ask her to explain what exactly happened when the Rogue Alpha touched us. Why did she become so complacent, and she fucking purred instead of gouging out his eyes with our claws, bloody traitor. No matter how good his touch felt, if the human side was too weak to resist it, she should have taken over and fought him. Isn’t that the point of having two souls in one body? So where one fails, the other would be there to pick them up.

I don’t know what the Rogue Alpha did to me, I just couldn’t understand my body and my wolf’s reaction to him. Sage wolves were the only wolves who could wield magic and their kind have been extinct for centuries. No one knows the true story of how they were all wiped off, there were so many different versions of one story. Some say, it was a spell by one of them that went horribly wrong. Some say they were all attacked by rogues and killed. Some say they were exiled after practising dark magic, and without their connection to the packs, their magic dwindled and died off. Whichever way, they were no longer in existence else I would have immediately concluded that the Rogue Alpha had bewitched me. And I don’t know why I insisted on calling him ‘the Rogue Alpha’ in my head, when I knew his name. The last survivor from one of the packs he ravaged had come to seek refuge in the Grenshaw pack and told us all about him, that was how we learned his name… Gavrael Wulfric.

His name was another mystery, no one has ever heard a name like that, especially his last name. One of the elder wolves of Grenshaw told us a story of a pack long forgotten, the Ryannon pack. He said they had lived in the mountains until a tragedy that made the mountain fall on them and crush them all to death. In his words, they paid the price for trying to change fate, and their bones lay where they perished till this day. No one knows if the story is true or false, I doubt it’s the truth. Wolves were wild creatures, we loved open spaces, we hated being confined. Why would a pack willingly live within a mountain, in such an enclosed space? It just didn’t make sense. And besides, what on earth would make a mountain crumble? And if it did crumble, wouldn’t there be a hill at least, a raised body of land to show that truly something big was destroyed there? There was no way a mountain fell down flat, every pack around here was on low lands, no hills or mountains anywhere for several miles, even to the next town.

Gavrael couldn’t possibly be from a pack like that, even if it had actually existed. According to the story, they were all dead anyway, and he couldn’t be centuries old. Wolves lived for a long time, but we weren’t immortal, and though we age slowly, after centuries, you would still look like an elderly person and your power would wane. Gavrael was definitely young, and his power was on another level. How was he able to hide for so long? No one in any pack we had asked so far knew where he came from. It seemed like he just dropped out of the sky one day, which was impossible. Thinking about the mystery surrounding Gavrael was beginning to give me a headache. If we could figure out where he came from and who he truly was, maybe we could use the information against him.

My ears perked up as I heard the sound of several wolves howling and running. I knew what that howl meant, it was a howl of battle, the rogues were going to attack another pack. This was my chance to escape. I waited for several minutes till the running footsteps receded and I could no longer feel Gavrael’s power as a sign that they had really left. I grabbed two bars of the cage and yanked them apart, there was no time to waste. As I stepped out of the cage, I could feel my wolf push for a shift but it wasn’t time yet so I restrained her. I needed to conserve energy for when we would need to run from this pack. First, I need to free Raed.

I moved cautiously around the side of the building, making sure to stay low to the ground and to stay upwind so my scent would not be carried by the breeze and alert any guards that may have been left behind. I found one guard leaning on the wall and pounced before he realised I was there. There was no time to fight, I snapped his neck and moved on. The next guard I met was a female, and she managed to scratch my forearm before I snapped her neck, the cut healed as I started moving forward again.

As I stepped into the clearing where Raed and the others were being held captive, the wind changed direction and I cursed inwardly as the three guards there immediately perked up. Their nostrils flared and I knew they had my scent. There was no need for stealth anymore, they already knew I was there. I charged at them but only two moved forward to attack me. The third just stood behind and from the unfocused look on her face, I immediately knew that she was mind linking their Alpha… Shit!