Sometimes, the beginning of a story can properly set the tone for the rest of it. Everyone I know that can read (which, admittedly, isn't a lot of people) say that they can tell what a book will be like from the first chapter. That isn't how this story goes. Or at the very least, I damn well hope it isn't, because the start of my story was bleak.
It started with my mother dying during childbirth while being held captive in a dungeon beneath a pack house during a rogue attack to free her. Myself and my brother barely managed to survive, and our sister was born, lived, and died in the dark, surrounded by half starved rogues and the smell of piss, blood and rotting flesh. Triplets would have been hard enough for her to deliver, never mind in the circumstances she was in. Obviously I don't remember any of this, but rogues love a tragic story that make the alphas seem like bastards, so it's a popular story around the campfire.
Not when my da's around, though. He lost his mate and child that day, even if he did manage to salvage me and my brother. I was twelve before I even knew my mother's name, such a taboo topic it was, although we always kind of knew that we had been triplets. There had always been a cold, dark place in mine and my brother's mind, the old and dusty tendril of a dead link that should have been alive and thrumming like the one between us was.
Now, we're both seventeen, around a month away from our eighteenth birthday, and already we have quite the reputation. Da first let us play at trespassing on pack ground when we were five, then came how to run away and hide, how to fight, and most importantly, how to steal. By the time we were ten we raided regularly, and by the time we were fifteen, we had our own raiding team to lead. I had tussled with several alphas in my time, courtesy of a very dominant wolf, and Nathan, with his weirdly good mind tapping skills, had managed to extract vital information while I did. Together, we made a good team.
Except when we were pranking each other. Then we always ended up coming dangerously close to killing each other, but apart from that, we were the dream team. Between us, we had a bounty on our head's for almost two hundred thousand, not that it even held a candle to da's million pound bounty. Still, we were suitably proud of ourselves, with the mutual understanding that we were now in a family competition to see who could drive their bounty the highest.
"You are being unnaturally quiet. Stop that." Nate reprimanded me, giving me a friendly shove for good measure and sending me crashing into a tree.
"You always complain that I talk too much! Which is it, man? Talk more or talk less?" I hissed back, shoving him into a puddle of mud and chuckling as he glared at me.
"Just don't be weird." He snapped back, climbing to his feet and ignoring the mud now generously coating his already dirty clothes. Rogues knew better than most that the best way to get mud off was to wait for it to dry and then use a brush, and we were also better accustomed to being dirty than most. When an icy river was your only option to get clean, personal hygiene drops a couple of priority spots.
"Says you." I scoffed, though we both froze as we reached the border of the Nightstalker pack. As did all the other packs, the outline of their territory was formed entirely of decomposing rogue bodies, giving off a beautiful stench of rotting flesh and wolf piss. A few meters back from it, we both dropped to our stomachs, me having to wait patiently as Nathan reached out and checked for any spirits nearby, to make sure we wouldn't walk right into a patrol.
This raid was different... more personal. See, the Nightstalker pack happened to be the pack we were born in, technically speaking, and the alpha that had let my mother die still reigned supreme. Today we were going against our father's clear instructions to avenge our fallen mother and sister, preferably by spilling Ethan's throat over his front patio. It was also why we were on our own for this one, even if we had been willing to risk the lives of our team, they wouldn't go against their leader's orders. So it was just us, with a plan to lure him away from his pack, courtesy of Nate's mind exploiting ability, and then kill him, courtesy of me and my wolf.
"Good to go. Time to shift, me thinks." Nathan whispers. I stood and put my back to him, shrugging of my jacket, pants and kicking off my boots before changing my form. My wolf was big, especially for a female without a drop of alpha blood, with a black coat aside from a white tuft on the middle of my scruff. Nathan was much smaller, with a white coat and a black tuft, much to my amusement. My wolf tussled with his reluctant beast, swiftly gaining the submission she was after before turning and leaping over the bone fence, starting to lope towards the clearing we had decided Nathan would lure him to. He was going to hang back, just in case I needed help, and do his mind stuff from a safe distance while also protecting me given I can't do it myself, much to my chagrin.
My heart thundered in my chest, adrenaline beginning to course through my blood and my mind buzzing with excitement. I loved a good run, and I loved a good fight even more. Through the link, I felt a pulse of happiness, telling me that he had been successful. The alpha was on his way.
Once I got to the meeting point, I hunkered down in the undergrowth, muscles coiled in readiness for the ambush. I was downwind, so the alpha shouldn't be able to scent me, and the mind control would leave him confused for a second or two after Nathan relinquished it, and I fully intended to capitalise on that precious time. I also opened the link a little more, so he could watch the fight through my eyes, see if I needed his help.
Here we go. I linked as I got a nose full of the alpha, the sickly pack smell and testosterone making me wrinkle my snout. He had been going at full speed, no doubt due to Nate attempting to tire him out, and he barely managed to skid to a halt before I sprang, silent and deadly, my jaw locking around his shoulder. It took him a heartbeat too long to respond, so I had already sunk my fangs to the bone, intent on bleeding him out. My front paws were gouging bloody furrows into his sensitive underbelly, though that soon had to stop when he began to twist and try and get at my throat. There were two obvious kill spots, one where the spine met the skull and the other, obviously, being your throat. Though, if he broke one of my paws or opened my belly, I doubted I would be able to get off the territory alive anyway.
He tore at my shoulder, nipping at me again and again but not being able to get a proper hold. Soon my hide was torn open in a few dozen places, but it was mostly his blood pooling around our paws. Suddenly, he bucked, causing me to tear him open and more importantly, loose my grip. In an instant, he was at my throat, and it was all I could do to stop him ripping it out. Nathan seemed distracted, no doubt trying to deflect all the mind links to his pack so I wouldn't get ganged up on. He suddenly changed tactic and grabbed onto my right foreleg, sinking his fangs in so deep I felt the bone snap. I almost managed a killing bite to the back of his head, but at the last second he pulled away. For a moment we sprang apart and began circling each other, both of us limping and snarling. He lunged first, his weight bowling me over and snapping a couple of my ribs. We rolled over and over again, until he got the upper hand, a heart beat away from tearing my throat out, when Nathan intervened.
That had two consequences; the first, and less immediate, was that Ethan's mind was battered back and forth by Nate's until he couldn't even see straight, letting me get my fangs into his throat and pull until I could feel the skin and muscles and sinew tear and snap apart, until I could hear the wet, desperate gasping sounds as blood filled his lungs that were so hungry for air. The second, more obscure consequence, was that in those few seconds when he was attacking Ethan's head, he wasn't batting away the desperate mind link attempts, so one managed to get through. And so, his twenty year old son was soon en route, arriving just in time to see me licking my wounds over his father's corpse.
Talk about awkward, am I right?
I could feel Nate freaking out at the other end of the link, but it felt numb. For some reason, the usual reflex of running like hell was drowned out, my wolf oddly docile, but it was probably just the pain. The boy- sorry, alpha now, my bad- seemed to be going into shock, his wolf keeping his ears slicked back and tail high, almost playful like. He let out a low whine that I presumed was sadness, and that sound was enough to make me wrestle back control from my wolf, turn on my tail and sprint off, back towards the border. It was hard on three legs, and it was damn painful, but I had the benefit of being shit scared for my life. Taking on one alpha had been like flipping a coin, taking on a second one was nothing short of suicide.
And I wanted to go tombstoning at least once more before I died.
After a moment, he took chase, and I could feel him reaching for my mind only for my brother to sharply knock the tendril of thought away. That wasn't a good sign; usually it would be a far more lazy swipe, the more definite strike telling me that his strength was beginning to ebb and he was starting to panic that he wouldn't be able to keep protecting me. I kept running, though the alpha was hot on my heels, and I realised that I really needed my four wheel drive back no matter how much it hurt, or he was gonna catch and kill me, so I started putting my broken leg to the ground as well.
And fuck me, did it hurt. So much that my muscles almost seized from the agony, but I gritted my teeth and pushed through it. It was better than dying, I repeated in my head, better than dying. A gust of wind brought the scent of the border marker to my nose, and I had never been more happy to smell that stench. It spurred me on even faster, the alpha still so close behind me I could hear his pants, and I quickly sent a garbled plan down the link to my brother, more feelings and urges than actual words as I focused more on where to put my paws. Still, he got the message, so as soon as I hurdled the bone fence I saw him vanish into the undergrowth, just in time for the alpha to follow me and get ambushed.
I had been flagging, so Nathan had just saved my life. But now it was his neck on the line instead.