Little Red and the big bad Alpha

Chapter 2 - Trust? You kidding?

Lilia woke in a car, her sister protective beside her, her bags on her lap. She wasn't sure where she was at first. It took some time to remember what had happened. The eviction, the 'offer', and the crazy running. She blinked sleepily out the window, still somewhat confused, watching the moisture bead down the window and the dark snowy landscape rush by outside.

Someone had kissed her, some gross older guy, and then he'd tried to do stuff, and then-

She quickly looked down. She had a big jacket over her torn clothing, a man's jacket, done up. It smelt like Emila had put it on her, she smelt her on the fabric, but the other smell was something else entirely. It had belonged to someone.

Those dark green eyes slammed into her memory like a slap and she sat straight up, staring around, Emilia's arm tightening around her.

"It's okay." Emilia reassured her. 

She stared at the front seat, at the driver, those same dark green eyes glancing at her in the rear view mirror. 

"Neither of you have anything to fear." The man reassured them. Alpha. She had to keep reminding herself that. He wasn't just a werewolf or a man. He was an Alpha. She felt the same terror rise up in her, that she'd met his eyes, and dropped them quickly.

Even worse than that, she'd bonded to him.

He could say they had nothing to fear all he liked but Lilia knew that being a human-bound werewolf, the werewolf that lived separately to their wolf-skin, it meant she was forbidden from taking a mate. She hadn't meant to mate to anyone led alone an Alpha. 

She clutched the bag tighter, the bag containing her wolf-skin, Emilia's arm comforting her somewhat. Emilia had been trained to be a fighter before she'd become a weaker werewolf, they'd always assumed both of them would be the strong kind, so Lilia could trust her. 

Around eighteen or so, though it was usually younger in her Pack, a werewolf began their changes. A wolf would come to them, it would offer itself, and then the ritual would begin. The werewolf would skin the wolf, the parents of the werewolf would prepare it for them, and from then on they would be able to change into wolf-form. The wolf would remain with the werewolf as a 'pack-mother' or a 'pack father', guiding them, almost like a spirit guide. 

Perhaps 'werewolf', the movie mutation of half-man and half-wolf wasn't quite the right term, maybe they were closer to shifters. Lilia had never worried. She figured it was a safer thing to go all the way to wolf- humans would only see a big dog. The last Pack of the kind that Hollywood liked, the half-man and half-wolf  mutation, had been wiped out close to the start of the 1900s in Washington. 

 For her kind though, they prefered to stay hidden, and had survived. There were five Packs. Lilia's Pack, the Northern Pack, more or less controled the entire north of America and had always been a large strong Pack with strong traditions. 

That was why she'd been disowned. Because, at the age of nineteen, she and Emilia had both had their 'binding change' early. This was the moment between wolf and werewolf where they made the choice, unconsciously, about what would happen. Everyone had expected LIlia and Emilia to become wolf-bound, to absorb the wolf-skin and become the strong werewolves that ran the Pack, but they'd instead both become human-bound. This meant that they could never merge with their skin permanently, they were weaker, changed slower, suffered more pain with each change into wolf, and were seen as the slaves and workers of the Pack. Their parents had disowned them and grieved as if they'd died.

Emilia had disowned them right back. Lilia couldn't do it. She missed and loved her parents, she was still hurt, and it had forced them to live independant for the year.