Silver Claws

20. Nature cannot be fought

I think the planet was revolving in reverse.

It was the only plausible explanation how the world had shifted on it's axis, like Atlas had shifted his hold on the sky and decided it wasn't worth holding up anymore.

I drilled the hole carefully through each fang. I didn't like Akela's assessment that Farah's death was completely my fault, but I knew I was part to blame. I asked Farah not to fight, but I had to wonder if death wasn't an unappealing option for her. Her mate was dead, she was in a pack that wasn't her birth pack, and I was there to swoop her off to more unknown. A pack that didn't want her.

I pushed the thought away. I put one fang on my empty cord, and one on Akela's. On her cord sits seventeen pairs, it makes my stomach churn.

I feel her rather than see, and I turn slowly.There stood my own personal wrecking ball.

Apathy dripped from her voice like a broken faucet. "Yes I'm sure that it is much easier for you if you think of me as nothing but evil."

"Oh I can't get into your head, but you can go in mine" I growl, the wolf rising up. He is angry at her challenge towards him in the arena, for being told what to do.

"It reassures me that you think at all." Her teeth flash, but her lip drops back into place just as quickly. She's hurt, like a wounded animal trying to fight off an attacker. Wounded, but still dangerous.

"It was never my intention to find a new mate."

"Ah, but her intentions..." she shakes with rage, "It matters not. Your replacement will rot and waste from the earth."

Annoyance spikes, "That's a bit dramatic don't you think?"

She steps closer, her feet make no sound on the floorboards that should have creaked. Creepy.

"I have no reason to be dramatic. I am a creepy monster to you." She's resentful, but it doesn't feel aimed at me, but herself.

I'd had to much time to think about her when I left the arena with her presentation of our fangs. She was a ghost in more ways than one, haunting me. I'd went over the times I had spent in her head, over and over.

She was more like a wolf than I had thought. Pain was different when you were in wolf form, not more manageable but different. I think this is the way she felt it, the way her brain worked. Maybe that was how she functioned so well without me, while I had to drink myself into oblivion to escape it.

Muscle, sinew and tendon working together in an easy harmony when I was a beast, when I let the wolf side take over instead of shoving it aside like I always did. Akela didn't do that, there weren't two seperate parts that felt different things. There was just the one--- the wild. She was wild. She was other.

It made it harder to be angry with her. I wasn't sure if I could ever love her, love anything that was so black and white, instinct and action with no humanity to keep true morality intact. Compassion was foriegn, mercy was unfamiliar. So I had found a Luna, a wolf like me. But I felt the cold creeping realization ooze down my back the moment Akela entered the arena. There was no werewolf that could ever face a force of nature like Akela. She would crush them. There would be no one that could ever rule in her place.

I wasn't prepared for the mourning in her voice. "No there is not. No shifter either it would seem. I am an acolyte of death for those I meet."

She never shared information like this before. "Really? I thought all shifters were like you."

She grimaces, the expression makes my chest ache. "Sparkly and formless? No, I give most of them a worse name than they deserve. I am an... exception in many ways." Formless? What did she mean by that? She smiles coldly, not the real hesitant smile I've come to know. "Reed and Trevor should be able to tell you about how exceptional I am."