Broken Souls

Prologue 2 - His Story

I always think of her face in the form of a beautiful, haunting nightmare. It's the only memory of her face I can remember clearly. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, drawing patterns on colored pieces of paper. The smell of cinnamon and spices perfume the air. Her laugh soothing to me as she bops around the kitchen making her famous banana pancakes. She runs her hands through my hair with that soft touch only a mother can give and litters my forehead with her kisses.

As I look up at her face, pressing my boyish cheeks as far out as I can to match her smile tooth for tooth, her serene expression turns sour as her smile falls. I can see the panic and fear in her deep brown eyes. I still can't remember what happened right after that. My mind carved out the heinous scene and only left me scarred with the image of her lifeless body laying in front me. She looked as if she had been chewed up and spit out. Claw marks so deep it made her face unrecognizable. My small hands bloodied from trying to put the pieces of her back together.

This nightmare plays a continuous loop in my head. Her brown eyes burned, searing hot in my memory like a branding. I can't stop seeing her and I hate it. I hate I needed her. I hate I loved her. I hate she left me. I hate her. I fucking wish I never knew her. I wish she fucking died the day I was born so that I never felt this pain.

As a lycan, we often didn't live in packs like regular werewolves and I never knew my father, so after my mother died I was admitted to foster care. At five years old, it was my first time being around so many other people, so many humans.

The first foster home they sent me to only lasted a week. As soon as the matching blonde haired couple picked me up from the court house, I could tell I put them on edge.

          Uncomfortable    .

     Off              balance.

They didn't know how to feel.
The mans hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, all the way until we pulled up to their white-pickett fence in suburbia. I couldn't understand it at first but the power I gave off as a Lycan, even at a young age, was too much for humans.

But I didn't care, never tried to ease the tension I created. I liked that they were scared and felt uneasy. I liked that they felt like their perfect little lives had been turned upside down and they didn't know how to feel. I was angry at what my life became and took pleasure in making other people feel even a small fraction of what I felt.

By the time I hit puberty, I was already raising hell around the city. I'd rounded up a few other foster kids and wreaked havoc on the streets. People followed me naturally. We took what we want, and never wanted for anything. I was young and I never cared for the shit we stole or the things we did, I just needed to release some of the chaotic energy that festered inside me. I needed to do something, anything to ease this burning rage I felt inside.

Foster home, after foster home, after foster home. The cycle continued until I was fifteen and instead of another suburb or city apartment, this foster home was a few miles out of the city canopied in by the forest.

I'd take long walks deep into the forest and began to understand why my kind preferred the solitude. My overly heightened senses got some relief out here, and I found the sound of birds chattering and the smell of wild flowers to be relaxing. A drastic change from the piercing noises that knifed away at my eardrums in the city.

One day I'd wandered so far into the woods, I'd stumbled upon a cabin. It looked old and worn, but taken care of. Before I could even take a step closer a power, greater than my own, passed through my body. The door opened and a man with a salt and pepper beard took up the entire door way with his massive build. He punched me square in the fucking jaw and I woke up who knows how long later chained to a chair with him sitting across from me.