Chrysalis (Book 1.5 in the Wolfen Brethren Series)

CARSON

The gods were punishing me. They whipped their power over my back and beat me into submission. They tortured me for the wrongs I had done.

Punished me for stepping outside of the bond, for crushing the beautiful soul that they had gifted to me.

They had warned me throughout Nelly's pregnancy. Taunted me with what could be. They made her sick, made her bitter and then when that was not enough. They made her body attack the life she nurtured for me.

They warned me, they had spat on my new bond just as much as I did. That faulty stupid bond with a sneaky female. The rotting bond that I had created over the sliver of moonlight the gods had given me.

Nelly. Nelly. Nelly. She was a black widow.

A poisonous viper who had used me and the gods laughed all the more. A fool I had been and she had taken me for her own.

Nelly had her own mate and when he would not claim her as she so wished she forced my hand. Her promiscuous body was a match for mine in that one moment. She knew all the tricks. All the ploys.

She knew that if she bit me during sex that my nature would see it as a claiming. She knew I was unhinged. She knew that I was on the precipice. One nudge and I would fall into a deep abyss, head first.

She had pushed me over and I had sunk so far down that my nails were bleeding as I tried to scrape myself off the floor.

She was a viper and she had tricked me. Wrapped me in her lithe body as she sunk her poison through my veins. Heart beating fast and sweat licking against my clammy skin as she had shattered me with one fateful bite.

She had marked me and I had marked her back. We had been mated for all of one second before her grand plan was released. Her mate Niko manifesting from thin air, on his knees and at her beck and call.

Begging and whining for his mate back and she would have, taken him back that is. If it wasn't for my son.

She hadn't anticipated how potent my genes would be and neither had I. Not weak little Carson. It seemed that even my ancestors were out to get me. The ever present Manasseh genes, one hit wonders that we were.

Her mate had refused to take her back with a pup in her womb, he had told her to abort it. Abort it, as if my son was some Thing. My hand clenched around the small life in my arms. Body wriggling and a toothless cry escaping thick lips.

I peered down at the fickle life in my arms. He was fleeting, here but for how long we did not know.

I was forsaken and because of my choices my son suffered. My poor weak son. He had been fighting all his short life. From conception he had fought against his mother's violent hands and then her body as each cell rejected my son. As her very nature refused to cradle the life we had created by default. Wires and tubes, travelling through her veins as we tried to stop her nature.

He had fought and won through his birth. A birth that had ripped his mother in places no human wanted to be torn. Places that would perhaps never look the same. His nails clawing at the womb that had tried to kill him.

My son was a fighter and he would fight through this ailment that had gripped him since birth. He was strong and we prayed daily that the gods would give him more strength. Lessen the pain and ease his suffering.

The gods ignored us.

They had forsaken me and now my poor sickly son was becoming sicker by the day. No cure in sight because some old world disease had caught him in its grips. Months and months of scouring over books and nothing. I couldn't name it. They couldn't name it. The healers just knew his genetics were not right.