In The Shadows (Re-written)

-TWELVE-

Numbness filled me. The blood under my claws no longer itched, the blood coating my face, my arms and my hands no longer pinched my skin. The swelling of my cheek where Coda had backhanded me didn't even prickle. Even my head had stopped throbbing. There was just blissful silence in my body.

No thousands of voices screaming at me to kill my own people. No intense hunger clawing in my belly to taste hunter blood. No hatred for everyone around me.

Just emptiness.

I was grateful for it. Terrified of the things I would feel if I let myself.

So, I sat on the couch, perfectly still, my hands in my lap as I stared ahead at nothing while Vern and I waited for my father to arrive.

The alpha often worked late, catching up more on the finances that came with running a pack than the politics he spent most the day engrossed in. I believed it was also a habit he had adopted from my younger years when I'd stay up all hours of the night for the chance to talk to him.

He had used work to avoid me and eventually I had given up, but my father had never altered his habit after that. Whether that was because he may very well believe that I still waited for him, or simply because he liked scheduling his work this way, no longer mattered to me.

When Eric Farland finally did show up, he gave the broken door but a passing glance. Without a lock or handle of any sort, the door only continuously swung open when pushed shut but was now at a standstill in a slightly ajar position.

The alpha had a stack of papers under his arm and I felt a bitterness fill my heart, remembering when I had been a child and had often envied the files he always seemed to have, wishing my father would just give me an ounce of the attention he devoted to those stupid pieces of paper.

I sighed wretchedly to myself and slouched forward. My hands came up to rake my hair back from my face and stayed threaded tightly through the strands as I grasped my head. The slight discomfort I felt from my elbows stabbing into my knees wasn't enough for me to fix my position.

"I passed Coda on my way here," the alpha commented nonchalantly from a distance away from me.

I peeked out of the corner of my eye at my father as he pulled out a chair from the small kitchen table and then dumped the pile of papers he was carrying onto it.

His cool gaze then settled on Vern. "Looks like she got Iram good."

He didn't say more than that, but he didn't have too.

The atmosphere of the room was thick with tension that spoke volumes. My father was insinuating that Iram shouldn't have gotten hurt so badly by me considering he had been Vern's apprentice for nearly three years now, undergoing the intensive training that came with having the hunter gene. He was telling Vern that his training methods had proven inadequate and either Vern was simply unable to implicate the methods necessary to raise someone to the hunter rank or he was being too lax on his apprentice.

Either way, Vern's mentoring had not met the bar in my father's eyes and this right here would be the one and only warning for the hunter.

Vern understood my father well enough, the bobbing of his throat betraying his nervousness. Still, he met my father's eyes unflinchingly and replied, "It seems Coda has taught her well."

I would have grinned at Vern's clever response if I wasn't so terrified what reaction my father would have to it.

My fingers slowly untangled themselves from my thick black hair. I let my hands hang limply between my legs and turned my head to fully look at the two hunters.