I woke up in a strange room. The first thought that occurred to me was that I had been kidnapped and I was ready to make my escape until last night's events filtered my head. I reached for my pant's pockets to search for a weapon that I kept in the phone holder of my phone's case.
But of course, such items had been taken away from me so that my captor could guard their own safety. Anything and everything in my pocket had been emptied away, and I didn't even have my bag with me.
I got up from the grey sheeted bed, wondering which captor would let their captive sleep so easily on a soft comfy bed and leave them to room their house. I watched the expensive wooden flooring of the house I had ended up in, against which my soft footsteps tapped softly.
There was a large rocking chair nearby that continued to rock very softly, almost unnoticeably, as though some had recently left it. The thought it could be a ghost's work did cross my mind, but I decided to keep that out of my head as that idea was too stupid. If anyone was on that chair, it had to be my captor and his absence gave me enough time to make a good escape without him knowing.
The little lamp from the bedside table reflected on a photo frame kept by the bedside. That distracted me from my goal as I wanted to know a little about my captor and have just enough information to be able to report him.
As soon as I went to touch it, a thread of thought on looking at the family of three reminded me of my own mission that my voice had given me to complete. Yet I had become so forgetful and involved in such incidents that it had slipped out of my mind.
'You must visit that alley,' my brain recollected a memory and retold it to me in its own words with the main keywords. 'You must know what is in that area that the King of the Lycans wants to hide from everyone's eyes.'
'Whatever could that be?' I asked myself before shaking my head. 'No, that is not important—'
Then my mind rewound the whole of last night's events for me to think about what I had done.
'The King of Lycans wanted to hide something and Gean found out something last night before I passed out,' I said, trying to connect the dots. 'Does that mean there is a huge connection?'
Then i knocked on my head and snapped at my own self, 'Focus, Riya! We need to escape! We can't stay in this person's den, whoever it belongs to. We can't trust the owner of this place and we have to make a run for the exit while he is busy elsewhere.'
I turned around and let out a shriek, crashing onto the bedside table and toppling the frame and the lamp. I almost sat down on the space between the cupboard and the small table on the floor if I hadn't caught hold of the closet's handle.
"What do you think you're doing?" said Gean, his eyes staring with great hardness at me.
"Just looking around?" I said a little timidly, standing up straight and tidying my crumpled clothes. "Why are you here?"
"The question should have been framed the other way round. Why are you here? Because some great person passed out right in that ill-fated alley before I got the chance to kill her or make anything out of her."
"Why does it matter for you to bring me to your house when you decided to cut off your friendship right that moment when you knew that I knew about your kind? I don't think I would like to spend another moment here, realising that whatever we had built over the years meant nothing to you, even though you're loyal to your kind, amongst which the rotting ones have also started to live and kill innocents."
"Riya, watch your tongue. It wouldn't take me a second to snap your neck or tear your heart out of your body. I have no mercy for humans, never did and never will."
"Then I shall take my leave. I thank you for taking care of me although you had no wish to do so. you should have just left me in that alley to rot along with that beast you had killed."
I turned away from him, making sure that my shoulder pushed his arm so that I got my way to pass through even though it hurt me. I had barely gotten past the closet when I felt myself being pulled
"This is the thing about humans, isn't it?" he uttered through gritted teeth. "They are not grateful for what they have."
"I was more than grateful for the friendship we had before you decided it was alright for you to cut it off," I said with tears of frustration in my eyes, flinging away his hand from my wrist. "It is easy for you to say your goodbyes when you probably didn't cherish a friendship as the other person did. So I will let you have your way. Just leave me alone and let me be."
Being friends with a bad boy had come in handy when I needed to get away from others bullying me or getting at me just because I wasn't like them. Those were the few things I had learnt from: using bare hands if I had any strength, using a weapon to my advantage with my few skills and learning tactics to use against others. The only thing that I had developed by myself at that time and taught him too was using my tongue as a unique weapon to shut them up.
It had been a valuable friendship and losing it would definitely cost me a lot now that we had met up again after a really long time. I thought we could still get along although most of my college had ended up being annoying, including the interns who had with time become one of my closest friends I had made in my entire life.
His room was pretty large enough for me to get lost as there were quite a few passages. But by heart and mind seemed to know that he had a pent house and that the exit was going to be down stairs where the main hall was going to be. I couldn't understand how my subconscious mind knew all this but it had somehow learnt all of it and had made use of it at the right moment.
"Riya," he called out but I ignored the man whose true name I knew not.
I knept walking towards where I thought was the exit before I was pulled back again for him to pull me back with one sharp movement of his hand. I hissed at the pain he created in my joint because of the yank and would have thrown a good punch at him if I didn't hear what he had to show.
"Don't tell the woman escape at any cost," said the strange voice. "You must bring her to your place and keep her. It is a royal decree. Don't disobey this one and create a chaos like the other idiots."
"What is this about?" I questioned him before remembering the line about being the saviour of some land. "I don't give a damn about that. I will not do what you wish of me, even if you are going to keep me here."
I pushed him off and started to walk away but he didn't rest from topping me until he was made to give up by my certain stubbornness.
"Riya, your loyalty lies with us, the Lycans," he said, blocking my access to the main door by bringing his arm right in front of me. "You verified the creature you are to me yesterday and there is no way you can leave this place without being a traitor to the King of Lycans."
"That is completely decided by me," I snarled at him. "If I want to save your people from whatever you want to solve, I will do it. And if I want to against your kind for what they have done to the people close to my heart, I will do so as well. So don't even try changing my mind and making my choices for the life that I'll choose for myself."
"I suppose your loyalty won't matter anyway because the trap set up for you is very painful for you indeed. It will be the same as the ones your parents suffered except more painful. A torturous death for going against the Lycan King."
"Then so be it. At least I have something to protect me from creatures like you."
"Not anymore."
There was a tug on my neck and the necklace fell into his hands. He dangled the thing between his fingers, proving to me that my words were now as empty as the bottles that had not a pint of wine or water in them.
"Give that back," I roared, with eyes glowing from the flame of my anger. "You don't touch what belongs to me."
"If you are really capable," he said in a soft tone, sauntering away from me, "you would take it from me without asking for it."
"You are asking a weak woman to do something that she can never do."
"You have a sharp tongue. Then you definitely have something more in you to give weight to the words you had uttered."
"You know very well about where that power lies since you touch it."
"You weren't bluffing, were you now? Because it looks like you are now afraid of fighting for what belongs to you, which includes your life and this very chain. If it is very precious to you, you would fight for it with everything you had, even if it meant that you would have an unvictorious death."
I snarled at him and he back away in good time, not because he was scared of me but because he wanted to challenge me. I never felt so angry at a person who tried to demean the values I had unlike the other people I had met.
"Why does it feel like you are testing me so that you will turn me into one of your kind?" I asked him when I felt that my temper was going to get the better of me. I was losing control of it rather quickly unlike all the other times because of how far I had been provoked with my current mental condition.
"I already told you," he said in a daunting tone, playing with the chain in his fingers so that the ring kept moving from one finger to the other like a mini rollercoaster. "I hate the ones that are turned unless they are blessed by a great being like the King or some other Divinity."
"And just what if this divity of yours was killed and was replaced by someone wrong?" I said, adding the note of taunt in my voice. "I am sure you wouldn't be able to do anything since you must be in the lower category. You will always be behind the King, be it the current one or the new one. How shameful that is, isn't it?"
This time it was his time to get angry. I didn't know what I was provoking him for except that I wanted to get my ring back. He gave out a guttural growl as his temper burned away his insides like it had for me. His bent head straightened to meet the level of my face and his closed eyes opened to show the gold colour familiar with all the werewolves I had known until now.
"Now it burns as much as you burnt me and my family, doesn't it?" I asked with a high head, realising that we were both turning on each other who we had called friends. "Imagine how much it hurts to see your own kind die in front of you. It is same as breaking away the bond you might have established with your so-called King."
"This time you have crossed the line, Riya," he said with another growl before changing slowly into the vicious beast he was known to be. "You made a great mistake to go against a Lycan, someone who can't control most of their instincts. I will give you what you have wished for: A death so painful that you would die before you even got the chance to turn from the venom."
He let out a ferocious sound from the very bottom of his throat before leaning against t the wall. his glowing eyes didn't leave me for even a minute as I watched him into a stronger, taller and more frightening beast that the ones I had seen in reality or in movies or even heard.
His clothes didn't tear off like the others and instead changed into an extra, thick, furry grey coat. I now looked into the eyes of another were whom I didn't know how to defeat. The only things I could depend on were the knife on my phone and the ring on the chain that he was holding. Maybe I had done the right thing by provoking him since he now couldn't keep the chain in between his fingers.
But the beast had other ideas. He threw away the chain to the other corner of the room and pranced towards me. I had heard my phone as well as his clatter to the floor, but with my eyes focused on him, I couldn't locate either of them.
I looked about for a way to reach the chain that was closer for my safety than the phone that lay behind him. I studied the room to make use of anything as a weapon and found only a standing lamp that could be of any use to me.
I swung the lamp like a spear that I was ready to pierce through his heart. Even in his beastly form, I could see the smirk on his face and the scoff he had let out like he was mocking me. The only thing he wasn't doing was sneering since he couldn't speak in a language that I wouldn't understand.
He ran lightly towards, but I stepped away to let him crash into the wall. He stopped before his head would create a large hole in it. I brought down the head of the lap on his large head, finding no other way to get rid of the chase. Then I ran towards the amethsyt ring that had been gifted to me.
He, in his werewolf form, was still all the more faster than me. He recovered from the hit quicker than I had expected and reached towards the chain with his mighty paw, covering the thing beneath it again.
I hissed at the push he had given me to throw me off my balance and get to the chain before I could. Now my only choice was to reach for the phones. When I saw the next opportunity of escape by throwing the hot light bulb at him, I took to my feet immediately after that.
My phone was withing my reach, but my hand had grabbed his first due to the similarity of our official phones. I cursed at my fate at my phone a little further away from me. That didn't give me enough time to make any escape plan as the were-creature came on top of me.
I thrust the phone onto his eyes so that I could get away easily. The wolf of course let out a whine and growl at the hit and staggered back after feeling the pain erupt on the right nerves that I had made sure to hit on.
I picked up my phone with a racing heart and sent out an SOS whilst taking out the knife from the back of the phone. That was the exact the moment I hadn't noticed the attack that was being prepared for me.
I was pushed to the wall by werewolf, who stared at me with hunger and anger in his eyes. Hunger that showed how much he wanted to end me right that moment without a second's thought of who i had been to him. The anger seemed untamable because he didn't want anything to do with a "sick" human like me who he found incapable.
I thrust the small blade into the thick coat on its side. The only reaction that I could get out of it was a wince before a lunatic smile formed on its mouth, same as he had given me one during the day. I couldn't believe that my blade couldn't make anywhere close to a major organ so that he could bleed and cry out in pain while I got to safety.
Without anything to fight with him against, my only hope lied with the SOS being answered soon, before I was turned into his meal. But I knew that the latter was going to happen first before I was saved from my trauma and agony of having to deal with the same creature for the third time in twenty four hours.
A slash marked my left arm and I bleed like a river that had red water in it to fill a lake. I screamed at the pain that erupted in the middle of my arm. When my teary eyes went to look at the mark he had created that was sure to leave a huge scar, my blood boiled with rage. But more than that, something inside me stirred and seemed to awaken rather quickly as my heart felt a sudden tightness.
In a split second, I bright light surrounded me in his grey and white hallway, blinding both of us. I had to close and cover my eyes to prevent the light from entering my eyes and killing them, yet that still wasn't enough. I heard a growl and right then the light dimmed away. That was when I found the beast sprawled on the floor, gorlwing and whimpering in deep pain.
'Don't dare to kill the woman without my permission,' yelled a voice, which couldn't be removed by holding my head and covering my ears, in my head. 'You have not been given any command to touch, slay and make use of her in any way you see fit.'
'Forgive me, Your Highness,' I heard the wolf speak in a ragged voice. 'But this creature didn't seem genuine despite the chain around her neck. I needed to test the truth for myself and see how compatible she was to be our cure. And she turned out to be the most difficult cure to not only find but also handle.'
'Then I shall take it from here. You don't have to lift a finger from henceforth.'
'But, Your Majesty—'
'If my identity shall be revealed, it can't be helped. This is more important than my own life and you know the price I'm willing to pay.'
'As you wish, Your Highness.'
My head that felt like it was going to explode from the shock of using something I didn't know exist against the were and for hearing them speak to each other in my head.
"You heard him," he said with a high head, watching my slightly dilated eyes from the shock of having a telepathic connection, as he transformed back into the human he was known to be to me before today. "You are the jewel of his crown. So don't you dare disappoint him after revealing those powers to me, and him as well."