THE DARK ALPHA'S CURSE

PART TWO

CHAPTER TEN:

    The building shook to its very foundations, echoing alongside my roars, each roar accompanied by a terrible pain in my heart.

"No, no, no!", I changed repeatedly, unable to move from my spot.

   My wounded body, though healed completely, suddenly seemed shattered, and each time I tried to stand, I felt more transfixed to the spot.
     My mind was broken, my head refusing to accept the only truth: Ralph was dead.

   I knelt there, relaxed on my knees, tears streaming down my face to my chest, some dropping down my chin to splatter on the ground.

    Somewhere behind me, I had the feeling of being crowded, but my observers, apparently sensing my demeanor, refused to talk or even move.

       The room fell quiet, the silence broken only by my intermittent sobbing, my chest heaving.

  "Chief", a voice wavered over to me through the bond I now had.
    I ignored it, and I heard someone shuffle past me, walking unsteadily.

    The scent that wafted to me as the person walked by was foreign, and through my peripheral vision, I saw the tiny silver - tinged red ring all Redwolfs wore on their pinky finger.

     My nose flared in anger, but try as much as I did, I couldn't muster the energy to lift even a finger, and I just watched him go by.

   Grief weighed me down.
Its weight hung around my neck like a wrecking ball, about a tonne of solid iron ore, beaten and mashed together with baked earth.

    Pain gripped my heart like a tightened vice, forcing me to gulp.
I couldn't believe I lost my friend, my closest friend, and childhood friend. And his body sat less than ten feet away from me, his head hanging limply.

     I sighed.
Sorrow was going to have to replace my best friend, because there was no way I could recover from this blow.

Nobody would understand.
In my head,I could already see the tabloids screaming either of three headlines:
   "UNIBEN STUDENT MURDERED IN CULT CLASH"
"KIDNAPPED UNIBEN STUDENT DIES IN HANDS OF CAPTORS"
"BODY OF MISSING BUSINESS MOGUL AND UNIBEN LECTURER FOUND"

       My friend deserved more, he deserved better. He deserved a decent burial.

What was I saying?

Ralph deserved a decent life. He should've live long enough to have all the good and bad sides in life.
He didn't deserve...

     A weak, low groan drove me out of my miserable reverie and I jerked back to reality, my senses heightened as I focussed on the scene in front of me.

    A fully naked, and to be absolutely fair and candid, genuinely beautiful human female with well defined, firm masses of well trimmed fat in all the right places, endowed with curves that were so well rounded that I doubted Michelangelo and Picasso could cut better angles, stood beside Ralph on his seat, leaning over so it seemed she was breast feeding him.

     From where I knelt, her hands worked up and down in rhythmic motions, and a fleeting thought that she was giving him a handjob ran through my head, briefly, before it was replaced by an astounding horror.

     And anger.

Mostly anger, but even as I tried to work my body  up to get her away from my best friend's corpse, I found I couldn't move a muscle.

     Only one muscle in my body could find the energy to stand up, and it stood quite gallantly, like a proud soldier after a well wrought victorious battle.

   On sensing my awareness, she stood up from the body on the chair, yeah, the one with the odd bone sticking out of the neck, scrunching her perfectly well cultured and perfectly designed face, one that beat any lady I'd ever seen by an astronomical distance that none of the others could even orbit near.

    Okay, she was dark skinned and on the fair side of being short, to my standards, though to be truthful, she was at the same height as Mitchell, or even taller.

   "I think you'd like to talk to him now", she said, pushing down against a gaping wound that wasn't there before.

    Or was it?

    I couldn't be too sure.

When I didn't respond, or even show signs of listening, she growled out a silent menacing command, her will slamming against me like a solid wall of pointed baked clay, tearing through my defenses.

     I instantly shot out of my default airplane mode where I feel pity for myself, locking others out, and sped up to my friend's side, hoping against hope that the faint heartbeat I heard was his.

    I covered the fifteen or so feet in less than a blink, and as I knelt beside the gorgeous female, who still had her hands pressing against the gaping hole in his abdomen, right above the spot where my Keith Moore's Anatomy textbook said the spleen was, I felt a wave of black, sooty sadness wash over me again.

     It wasn't from Ralph, which was not the least bit surprising.
Ralph always had wanted to go out like a man, you know, on his feet and all that bravado.

     Don't blame him. We watched too much cowboy movies to actually differentiate between the movie world and reality.

    The sadness came from the lady beside me.

Strange as it was, it got me thinking.

Why would a member of the pack who so desperately wanted to hurt Ralph be the one who  cried and felt so much grief for the person they intended to hurt?

     "O.. Os.. Osas", Ralph's voice called out quietly.

I shook my head, dispelling all thoughts as I looked into his eyes.

     They held all I knew he wanted to tell me, and more.

He nodded, tears falling out of his big brown eyes, the only similarities he shared with his dad, and I gripped his bloodied palm tighter.

        Ralph never cried.

    Right from when we met, sixteen years ago, till now, he hadn't shed a tear.

Not even when his dad got beat when armed robbers raided their home.

     Not even when his sister was raped by Fulani herdsmen a couple years back, in front of him.

Not even when he had taken blows for me, back in primary school, when I was a whimpy kid with strange and weird fantasies.
He'd collected blows from secondary seniors then, his little face still defiant when they beat me up for refusing to kneel for no reason at all.

      I remember my brother, David, being too far away to help me, and then little Ralph had stood up for me, taking blows and whippings from leather belts, kicks from thick heavy leather sandals all the while punching them with his leather fists.

   He'd always taken pride in never having to show his tears.

In fact, I believed he never even had tears to begin with in the first place.

      And now, he was crying like a baby, his lumped throat unable to swallow, blood and phlegm running out from tiny holes, his torn neck now pressed on by the dark skinned female.

    He gripped my hands, and I tried taking his pain.

   In my life, I'd never felt pain like that.
It was no longer pain, it was grief, betrayal and sorrow merged in one, and it hung heavy, with a foul smell.

      I closed my eyes tighter, using the pack bond to search for any way to take in the pain.

Without looking, I knew my veins had bulged from my skin, looking like giant worms beneath my skin, worms that snaked their  way to my heart, as the pain triggered my Wolf out.

I held him in check.

     I wanted to feel this pain.