A Mist of Brightness

Two

Generally, a person doesn’t run from their mate. Well, no. Not typically. But as I ran down the street, all I could think of was of his piercing gray eyes. I didn’t know if they were gray or just a very light blue.

I could hear my heart beat in my chest as I ran from that handsome stranger. Maybe I was making a mistake. Maybe I was making the right choice. Either way, all I could concentrate on was on slowing down my breathing…and those eyes.

This couldn’t be happening. It simply couldn’t. Too much was at stake for me to find my mate—especially right now. 

I could hear his enticing voice calling out to me—to wait, to stop running, and that he hadn’t even gotten my name. As tempting as it was to listen to his voice and turn around, I knew I couldn’t. His voice wasn’t what was worrying me though. It was his very loud footsteps against the wet pavement behind me that had my heartbeat speeding up.

I was generally considered a fast runner. Thanking my gift to run fast, I dodged past a few pedestrians and many buildings, turning at random corners to get him off my trail. The few people out and about gave me strange looks but got out of my way.

Man, this day wasn’t going at all like I’d planned.

I simply had to make it to the old Council building. This building sat mostly isolated toward the edge of downtown Bayston, Oregon.  The building caught fire over ten years ago, and the fire department was able to put out the fire once it’d consumed half of the building.  The top three floors were beyond saving while the bottom two survived, mostly, miraculously. Kids would graffiti the old brick walls and loiter all over the place, using it as a haunted house. Well, at least until a fifteen-year old boy died as he tried making it to the top floor. After that, the building was closed off by wired fence and a couple of cheap “keep off” signs.

As I neared the building, I never thought I’d be so grateful to see it. I checked behind me to see that I’d lost the guy. I had. Hurrying before he tracked my scent, I pushed aside a bush and crawled through a small hole in the fence. I ran up to the building, scared I’d be seen since it the sun hadn’t set completely on the horizon.

I creaked open a side door, closed it, and slid against it as I slowed down my breath and contemplated what I should do next.

In my world, werewolves and humans co-exist in harmony, at least right now. There is thick tension between the two though. Certain cities are assigned by a country’s federal government where werewolves can live without humans around. These special cities are “werewolf only” territories and each must have a governing council. The council consists of the main leader, Alpha, who has the last say and strongest influence amongst our people. They are considered royalty and are treated as such. A beta, also considered royalty, is the second ranking a werewolf can have. They mostly are a guiding voice to the alpha and also hold much influence. The third rank is a gamma, the nobility. The gammas take care of the more mediocre business and are the links between the higher ranks and the lower ranks—which consist of deltas, or lower nobility, and etas, the commoners. The caste one was born or mated into determined the rest of one’s life.

The council consisted of an Alpha, a Beta, four Gammas’, and three Deltas’.  They ran the city populated with almost one million werewolves. Bayston had the most werewolves out of the twelve werewolf cities in the world. Werewolves could technically live in human cities, but there were rules and limitations we had to follow amongst humans which made it almost impossible to do so.

Mate.

The single most important word in a werewolf’s vocabulary.

 Being part animal gives us instincts to survive. Survival is of the strongest importance to us and it is hard for us to reproduce. Soul mates are a way for werewolves to protect one another and procreate. Every female werewolf is compatible with a number of male werewolves and vice versa. And although a werewolf has a number of possible mates, they only have one soul mate. The perfect and most compatible person another person could have. And I’d just found mine. Great. Once werewolves are mated, sort of like marriage, all other possible mates become null. There are many technicalities and rules, but I won’t get into that.