The man who had soiled what they thought was their possession was hauled in front of a tribunal of Elders. They made their claim and it was echoed by the Elders. The wolves emerged and attacked him without the slightest provocation. It was a grotesque display of brutality tearing into his body like savages. To see it up close and personal, and smell the blood in the air, was too much for my delicate constitution.
The business was handled and I could hear her mumbling underneath her breath while they were temporarily occupied. They got too caught up in displaying their might to understand they had made a powerful enemy.
“All of you are going to pay dearly for this. One by one, this community will fall and I will be responsible for killing off the last of the wolves. There are twenty communities and I’m going to systematically destroy them from the inside. Inciting distrust and civil unrest will bring about a war. Manipulating all of you is going to be my greatest achievement and I will avenge his death. This I swear by everything that is holy.” Her teeth were clenched and she was trying her best to put on a brave face despite how she wanted to put her hands around their throats.
Everything became a blur, unfocused and slowly their voices faded into obscurity. I looked down and my hands were bleeding from scratching the names of those three young men onto the brick wall in front of me. Duncan, Shane, and Niles were forever imprinted in my mind.
I was a prisoner of thoughts that didn’t belong to me and somehow I had crossed over to see the past through a different pair of eyes. I couldn’t seem to move and my limbs felt like they were stuck in quicksand. My fingers tingled and I could barely understand what was going on.
I wasn’t breathing and I was pounding my chest to get my heart to work again. Somebody was rushing to my side and I was lifted into his arms but he stopped two steps up. Something had caught his attention and he was repeating those three names over and over again.
“How do you know those names? I never mentioned my father’s names. I’m sorry, I can see that you are in no condition to answer any questions. Let me get you back inside and we can try to make sense of this.” Crosby was holding me like a limp rag doll in his arms and I felt powerless to say anything.
“Your mother…” The words were frozen in my
throat, when he looked at me with a glare of disapproval.
“We don’t talk about her. We never say her name.” It was a sore subject and this was a raw festering wound they all shared.
Something told me there was more to the story and I had barely scratched the surface of what had transpired in the past with their parents. I didn’t even know where the vision came from and how it was possible to take a sneak peek behind the curtain of their past.
Chapter Nineteen
I blinked and the room slowly came into focus with the three of them looking like they had lost their best friend. Something had completely exhausted me and the last thing I remembered was Crosby coming to collect me from the stairs after a vision that had left me a little rattled.
“Don’t try to move, just take it slow. It’s been almost twenty-four hours and we were starting to worry you were never going to wake up. Sip this. It will help you feel better,” Callan persuaded and I looked at him funny while turning my nose up at the green concoction he was presenting.
“I’m into health and fitness but the smell of that turns me off. I don’t mind trying things good for me. What exactly is in it?” I asked and received in response a shrug of his shoulders, noncommittal, like he was afraid to tell me.
“It has everything a growing girl needs. Let’s just call it a family recipe. Everything is all natural and will replenish your electrolytes. Try your best to drink it all without stopping. The aftertaste isn’t pleasant but will only last a few seconds.” He sat down beside me and held my hand, while staring at me the entire time while I was drinking it.
It was smooth and I continued to devour it until my face scrunched up with my tongue hanging out of my mouth. He laughed at my expense but I found nothing amusing about trying to kill me. I knew he was only doing what he felt was right and I couldn’t fault him for relying on an old folk remedy.
“I don’t know what was in that and I prefer not to find out. There was something I was coming back to tell you. That’s right; Holly had some information about a guy bragging about killing three men and one woman in a fire. He frequents this dive and gets drunk before telling wild tales. He apparently arrives precisely at the same time every night. It sounds eerily similar to what happened to us.” I couldn’t even look at the remnants of the glass and my stomach was actually turning at the prospect of drinking anymore.
“We can deal with that later, we have some pressing questions to ask you. I wasn’t there but Crosby had some interesting things to say about what you were saying under your breath. We also saw what you wrote on the wall in blood. It’s been very frustrating waiting for you to open up your eyes. We tried everything and nothing worked. Your body needed this time to heal. It’s very rare for the bite to cause this kind of phenomenon. There are stories of a third eye, however, nobody has experienced it.” Callan wasn’t the only one interested in what I had to say and the other two looked rather perplexed.
I thought it was a hallucination brought on by the stress I was under. Almost dying in a fire could take its toll on anybody, including one of my strength and character. Nobody really knew how they were going to respond when the adrenaline wore off.
Struggling to a sitting position wasn’t easy when my limbs still felt like they were in quicksand. I began shaking my fingers and toes.
The feeling was coming back into my extremities and my mind had a clarity which wasn’t there before. I shook my head of the cobwebs and the vision coalesced into something more than fragmented images.
I clutched the sheet covering me and I lifted it to witness how somebody had taken care of me. My clothes were neatly folded by the bed. Being completely naked could have left me feeling vulnerable and exposed, but it didn’t bother me, it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen it before. They probably wanted me to be comfortable with no possibility of choking on my constricting clothes. It was actually nice to see how they were concerned about me but now they were begging me without any words to tell them how I could possibly know those names.
“I’m going to need a minute to collect my thoughts. There were some dangerous men and they were searching the area under Donovan’s orders. His succession is either going to take place shortly or has already been done. Are you sure you really want to give him that power and then take it away from him? He has been highly unpredictable and you never quite know what he’s thinking from one moment to the next. It could be he was responsible for the fire and is covering his tracks by making sure we are really gone,” I suggested, although I had a feeling they were already thinking the same thing.
“It was a close call but we were able to mask our scents with some of the ingredients you got from Holly at the market. She has the best selection of fresh herbs and spices outside of the wolf community. We sprinkled a medley of them around the perimeter of the building and along the threshold of this loft. We pretended nobody was home and they didn’t feel it was necessary to go any further considering they didn’t have our scent.” Crosby said from the window, with his hand pulling back the threadbare yellow curtains to see to the street below.
They were consistent in how they were always there for me. I felt like the popular kid in school, getting all the attention, instead of being ostracized for being different. The images in my head became distorted with the vision and the sex. It was hard to distinguish one from the other. Concentration brought things back together cohesively.
I didn’t invite their scrutiny but I wasn’t going to get away with anything, with them watching me like a hawk. They were waiting on pins and needles to hear what I was going to say next. It was hard to figure out what went wrong and how I had gotten here.
“Crosby is reluctant to say her name for obvious reasons. You somehow know our father's names and we would really like to know how. Would you care to fill in the blanks? We don’t remember them and they died shortly after my birth. We were raised by the community and had several father figures to learn from. It was a family atmosphere and I found acceptance through meditation and other spiritual arts.” Wesley was giving me insight into how he had been taken underneath the wing of those of spiritual belief in the community.
“I don’t exactly know what it was I saw and how to explain it. In a nutshell, your father’s killed their best friend for his infidelity, when he slept with your mother. They were going to kill her but were convinced it was a bad idea. I have to wonder where she was after your fathers died.” I wasn’t sure how much more I should tell them as they had already heralded their fathers as heroes.
Learning about them keeping their mother against her will, to father two more children, most likely would have destroyed their pristine image of them. I just couldn’t decide whether or not it was my place to bust their bubble.