Inhumane

002

DAMON

The pack was strong and able, we were close knitted and ruled a vast territory. We always held bonding activities, like feasts and bonfires or pack runs in the night time. Sometimes we would go down to the river in the heat of summer when it was nice and calm and spend the day all together in each other's company. Yet these woods, in early October, were a whole different world than the one we lived within late August. It was strange, the quickness of a shift of elements.

Everything was normal bliss, we had grown together, the new generation. We worked together like no pack had before us in our lineage. Everyone was as close as family. Our parents were proud of keeping us close, keeping all the wolves close. The Hatcher Pack, named after the Alpha family who won the title every year. They had strong blood on both sides. Cody, their only son, was my best friend and Alpha. His parents even held tightly to our wolf natures, always making sure that the pack was run as if we were wild. No humanity until it came to the materialistic things like log homes, skin gatherings, rituals, and such.

Together, Cody and I formed a powerful duo, Alpha and Beta. Strengthened by years and years as pups, playing, learning, and living. Ruling the pack with ice from him and fire from me. We worked together in the best of ways. He made the deals and I kept the books. He started the fights and I finished them. That wasn't all though.

It was how it was supposed to work.

However, I wasn't all about that. Our peacekeeper, Paul, was always picking up people who fell down. Paul seemed much older before I collided with her, he had a kid and a mate and a house. But he was a good and wise friend. An important asset to the pack.

I was still living with Cody and his mate Faith, slowly constructing my own home with the help of my father and occasionally my mother. I just wanted out of my birth house, I wanted freedom. Never did I realize before her that I had subconsciously been building a den, one that would make a mate swoon and pups safe. Odd to think that had been seven years earlier.

It was at the Fall Equinox feast my parents, the previous Beta and his mate, hosted yearly, that I scented something bittersweet and tantalizing. The thick scent of stale lust permeated from a male mingling with a few females near my parents' fireplace described best as grandiose. It was the highlight of the house.

I got a little closer, just tipping my nose up, scenting the air near him. It wasn't his scent, and it wasn't lust's tangy scent either. But it was someone's in general. And it smelled damn good, in fact, it got me high. Just a taste, a small whiff, and I felt drunk.

I sat back on the couch like a stoner and stared at the lit fireplace. A still body for once, amidst a current of rapid river like movement around me. The orange flame flickered and danced in heat, and suddenly I was thinking of a female in my arms, the features blurred out. Soft hair between my fingers, that scent clogging my nostrils in a good way. I imagined flipping a pancake on a skillet with soft hands wrapped around my waist. I imagined running in the woods with a wolf I didn't know.

When I opened my eyes, I hadn't realized I had closed them, I felt... For the first time in my life...

Lonely.

PAIGE

My head was always made up of fantasy and far away lands. Dreams were something I always looked forward to, waiting to be taken far away into the sky and space. Drifting around to moon and landing on its lunar surface. I would watch the shaded portion of Earth enjoy the view, until the stars began to twirl and twirl and I would fall dizzily back to the conscious world.

As if it knew, my head would steal me away from reality. Maybe as if to change the path of corruption I continued upon. But it was all I knew, and it would take nothing less than fate to get me off course. Even then it would be nearly impossible to get my head away from death and destruction and evil thought. Nothing would break me away from my father, the only person I had.