Golden Destiny

Chapter 2. - Harper

When we reached the school parking lot, I saw a group of students gathered around a shiny red sports car. They were ooh-ing and aah-ing, and basically just standing there talking about how shiny the paint was.

"Oh, look, someone's got a new toy," Harper muttered sarcastically. I let out a small laugh at how she sounded.

Harper was new to our pack. She joined about two years ago. Her parents were killed in a rogue attack while they were out camping. She had no other relatives so being sixteen, she was supposed to go into a foster home. A human foster home. Since she was not human, and since our kind was a secret from the rest of the world, she requested the assistance of the shifter Crown to petition for emancipation. Her family was well-off and she was able to prove maturity so her petition was granted. Rather than staying with her old pack, she decided that she was better off living far from the place where she lost her parents so she traveled to Colorado and joined our pack.

She was also a latent shifter, and was accepted into the pack only through the intercession of the Crown. As I've said, latents were normally looked down upon, and since there were already two latents in our pack, the Alpha was not too excited at the prospect of having a third join.

She was actually the first to talk to me that day two years ago. We were in school and I had just gotten pushed into a locker by Tawny, the queen bee. As I'd always done, I kept my head down and gathered the books that had fallen from my arms. I was surprised when I saw a hand holding one of my books out to me and I looked up and I saw this small brunette with a big smile on her face.

"Oh, look, the two latents are friends. Isn't that sweet?" I heard Tawny taunt us. I got to my feet, looking everywhere but at her when in my periphery, I saw her arm moving to possibly shove me.

In a flash, the brunette was in front of me and holding her arm in a vice grip.

"Let go of me! Who do you think you are? I'm your future Luna," Tawny said in an imperious voice, struggling to pull her arm away.

I expected this tiny girl to immediately let her go and apologize but she just stared at Tawny until she stopped struggling. It was only then that she loosened her grip, allowing Tawny to take back her arm and get out of there.

The girl then turned back to me, smiled and said, "I'm Harper. I'm sure we'll be really good friends."

And that was that. We were inseparable. Finally, I had a friend in school who knew what it felt like to not be like everyone else and didn't pile on to the taunts commonly thrown at me by the popular kids.

Don't get me wrong, they weren't all bad. Most of my brothers were part of that group when I was a freshman, when the verbal bullying started. That alone spared me from much meaner words because it was clear that my brothers didn't like it. However, there was a line in the sand. As long as I wasn't being physically hurt, or wasn't being too cruelly bullied, they didn't do anything to stop it. So I was still an outcast, still a pariah.

When the last of my older brothers graduated last year, that's when things took a turn for the worse. With them not being in school anymore, and with my youngest brother turning a blind eye to anything and everything that was being done to me, the bullying escalated and I began to get shoved into lockers, elbowed while walking in the hall, and tripped in the cafeteria. One time, I even got slapped by none other than the queen bee herself because I wasn't able to stop before running into her in gym class.

My saving grace was Harper who, though she was latent, was a badass. She didn't cower to the cool kids, and gave off such a strong aura that staring those kids down was mostly enough to get them to back off.

"Of course, it's that Alpha-hole," she said, still looking at the crowd that had gathered. "What is that? His third car this year already?"

I shrugged. I didn't really pay attention to the exploits of Adam, our future Alpha.

"Yeah, remember? His first one, he lost to your brother, Jagger, in a race, and the second, he crashed into a parked car. Boy, if I were his parent, I would not have gotten him a car until he turned fifty or something," she snickered.

"Well, he's the future Alpha and the future Alpha can't be seen walking like the rest of his lowly subjects."

"Ha! Right you are!"

We reached our classroom and sat down before Adam and Tawny entered the room. She, of course, was clinging to him like a bad rash, while he looked smugly nodded back to the shifters in the room who gave him a discreet bow. When his eyes reached mine, he turned around and took his seat in front of Harper before I could offer a bow, which was his due as future Alpha, communicating to me that I wasn't worth a dime of his time.

I saw Harper's hands clench into fists, obviously irritated at what just happened on my behalf, so I called her name and shook my head with a small smile to calm her down.

I was so lucky to have her on my side.