Meet Amber, a teenage girl struggling with the death of her father, an overstressed mother- and lycanthropy. All she wants is for her life to go back to normal, but a magical corporation has lost a valuable test subject and they believe Amber will b...
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Chapter Sixty Four
Kaylie led me through the mall, not stopping or saying a word until we reached an empty bench at the other end of the building. She sat in it, and I took a seat next to her.
"Tyler told me that it's hard for a wolf to disobey its alpha," I said to start off the conversation. "But Tyler's huge, and D.K.'s like a stick. Aren't werewolves supposed to be able to challenge their alphas if things get too bad?"
"Yeah," she answered, "but there's more to it than that. D.K.'s only alpha because he took down our last alpha."
"Say what?" I exclaimed, leaning forward. "You mean that little squirt actually—"
"Don't say things like that!" Kaylie snapped, her expression suddenly angry. "Just don't!"
I held my hands up in surrender. "Okay, okay, sorry!"
Kaylie took a minute to cool down. "And yeah, D.K. killed our pack's last alpha." She hesitated. "Me and Tyler's dad."
I swear, if I was in a cartoon, that statement would have made my jaw hit the floor.
"Back then we were called the Farthest Hedge Pack, named after the town we lived in," she went on before I could interrupt. "D.K. wasn't even born into our pack, he was an orphan, and he just wandered into our territory one day. Normally, the alpha would kill a trespasser, but our dad saw he was just a kid and invited him into the pack."
If only he'd killed him, I thought.
"We just called him Dalton back then. He was the sweetest kid you'd ever met." She stopped when I snorted into my hand.
"Sorry," I said. "Just a little hard to believe. Keep going."
Kaylie frowned, but went back to the story. "Things didn't get bad until he was about fifteen. We were all in high school, and he got involved in the wrong crowd. A bunch of other boys trying to start their own gang. Dalton thought it was the coolest thing he'd ever heard, and completely changed himself to fit in with them. He became mean, and started wearing stupid clothes. My dad told him to knock it off, but he ignored him."
That doesn't make sense, I thought. If D.K. wasn't the alpha, then he should have obeyed when Kaylie's dad told him to quit.
"We found out too late that he was developing an alpha's mindset with his new friends," Kaylie went on, answering my unspoken question. "He was faster and stronger than all of them, so it didn't take long before they started doing what he said. Then, one day, he came to my dad and said he wanted to bite them all and add them to our pack."
"I bet that didn't go over well," I said.
Kaylie shook her head. "It didn't. When he said no, D.K. freaked out and challenged my dad for his place as alpha. My dad couldn't turn a challenge like that down. It would have made him look weak. So he accepted. Then D.K. pulled out a gun and shot him with a silver bullet."
