[Rewritten] The Family Secret - Voices of Beasts (Book 1)

Chapter 9

I never got my question answered. For the next few weeks, all I could focus on was the physical, mental, and societal training, and the only ones I interacted with were the Three and Mary, and while that was great it was so hard to go from acting like my clumsy former human self during parts of training when the people I saw knew what I was actually capable of.

It was the fourth week when Helaza woke me up super early before the sun rose and told me to get dressed. We were going to try an early morning walk out on a main city road and we had to leave now to make it there before the sun rose.

"You're going to need to wear this." She said, snapping a survival bracelet to me. It had a large rune at the top and a few very small pockets on the sides.

"Cool, it's got pockets." I chuckled, standing and getting changed. Helaza and I were the most comfortable of the four of us and didn't mind getting changed in front of one another. Not that it mattered, since I had the wrong parts and from her upper thigh to her belly button were all bone when we were home, since she didn't care to keep up the charade around us.

"Those pockets are well reinforced and each one has a blood tablet inside. If you start to get hungry, just pull one out and bite down." She explained as I pulled my shirt on. I'd thrown on all black   running clothes, baggy sweats and my biggest band tee that Azaran had given me. She was in a pair of yoga pants and a tee with a windbreaker over it. I grabbed my hoodie and we quickly got into her small black mustang.

It took almost an hour and a half for us to get where we were going, and she'd chosen a path that was surrounded by forest. We got out, stretched, bullshitted about Thanksgiving being close and what I wanted to do for Christmas if I didn't get to go home by then. I was thinking about it when she started on the path, at a human pace, and I followed, keeping her seemingly impossibly slow pace. I was so used to running in the woods at my own pace that a human speed was just strange. Hel kept me close any time I started to get a bit too far ahead and she brought my focus back to Christmas.

"I guess I'd want to do the tree thing, maybe just decorate one outside, and do stockings for one another. Simple, easy, and we can either make each other stuff or we can get one another little stuff. Maybe do like a white elephant thing."

"What's a white elephant thing?" She asked, looking at me funny. 

"It's a gift game where there's a small pile of presents in the center, and we sit in a circle around them and we pick who goes first. They open one and keep it, then the next person goes. They can choose to steal a gift or get another from the circle, and we play until all the stuff in the center is gone."

"That sounds fun and confusing." She giggled.

"We could always play that speed unwrap game where we each get a present and wrap it like it's nobody's business then race to get them open first. Or there's another similar one where we make a giant plastic wrap ball, hide gifts inside as we wrap it, and have a big gift in the center. But with that one we have to have someone playing and stopping music. They're all a ton of fun, we'll figure something out." I smiled.

"Humans have such weird party games." She replied, shaking her head.

"Yeah, they really do."

We were about a mile into our run when the sound of thumping reached my ears. My first thought was that it was my own heart beat, it usually got like this after about an hours worth of running so I wasn't overly surprised. But when I signaled Hel to stop so I could take a moment, figuring it would slow, but it didn't. It just got louder.

"Dante, what's wrong?" she asked.

"I can hear a loud thumping, I thought it was my heart but it's not slowing it's just getting closer." I mumbled, confused. She looked around saw something, then got a real good grip on my shoulder.