Forbidden Alliance: A Werewolf's Tale (Forbidden Alliance Trilogy) (56 page)

I growled at him.

He put his hands up in surrender.
“
Bad joke. But s
eriously
, G
irlie, Tanis is so sorry.
He’s been listening to depressing music at concert levels.
The
re
’s
only so many times one can hear
All By Myself
before
you
want to kill yourself!
Seriously, I haven’t gotten laid since before your birthday.”

Abigail smacked him in the back of the head
, giving him a warning look
.

“What?
It’s true,
” he argued. “
It’s like the rise of Hitler-level forced abstinence all over again,” he whined.

Abigail’s mouth fell open with a popping sound and she looked at him with wide eyes. “Tell me you did not just compare your lack of a sex life to the persecution and mass murder of millions of my people but
your
people!” she hissed.

Steffen shrugged and reluctantly nodded. “Baby, that was a rough
time for everyone involved, but, comparatively speaking without the added genocide,
it’s nearly as bad. Everyone’s
super
depressed, well those with a soul!” he called out loudly, getting a middle finger from Georgiana in return
, as he desperately tried to change the subject and ignore his snarling wife
.
“
Jay
,
talk to him for a minute, just give
Tanis
sixty seconds.
If you feel the same way after he say
s what he has to say
then h
e’
ll leave
...
he
’
s prepared to
leave if that’
s what you want him to do
.
Please, Jay
? E
veryone makes mistakes.”

I
didn’t
want to hear
any of
that
.

Sure, it would
have made it so much
easier if
Jerk-f
ace
left
. It would be that whole
out of sight and out of mind
thing
.
But I wasn’t remotely strong enough
to let him go if he
did leave
.

Be strong Jay Dee, be strong.

“Please?” Steffen whispered, looking intently in my eyes and his pupils dilated. “Please, just give him sixty seconds.”

“
I’m a fucking werewolf, that shit doesn’t work on us,” I snarled.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I forgot.”

“We’re done here,” I hiss and stood up, having to use the wall for support.
I really need
ed
to hunt
, it was
seriously taking its toll
.
I
had never gone that long
without feeding before.

“Are you okay
?
” they both asked, getting to their feet,
and offered
me a hand of support.

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.
It’s a mutt thing,” I said coldly, and headed to the locker room to change.
I was
done
for the day. I was
going home, not
going to work
, but home
.
I might
attempt
hunt
ing
,
but I wasn’t sure
.

I
honestly felt like I didn’t
know anything anymore.

I was obviously wrong about the one thing
in my life that
I
had
never questioned.
I thought that
Jerk-f
ace
loved me
and wanted to be with me
...
I thought he saw me for who I really was.

But
I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.

Apparently
I was nothing more than a quick screw, something to distract him
self
with
...that
i
s as
long as I was human.
Once my lack of humanity registered with him, with
the
extremely slow vampire, I wasn’t good enough for him.
I
t would be a cold day in hell when I would be
with someone who
thought
they
were
better than me.
It was
bad enough that I
had
to put up with that shit from nearly everyone else.
But
Jerk-f
ace
was
supposed to be
the one person that I didn’t feel like that around.
Even if I
eventually
forgave him, there would always be weirdness.
His words would always be i
n the forefront of my mind
...
I
honestly
didn’t
think that I could
simply
go back to acting
as if
everything was okay
between us
.
Knowing Jerk-f
ace as well as I seemingly did, he
would always be weird around me
after his little ‘inferior bitch of servitude’ spiel
if we
ever
attempted to move on with whatever it was that we started, and
I
couldn’t handle that
.

“
I am better and I deserve more than that.
For o
nce, I am thinking about myself
,” I mumbled, trying to give myself a
pep talk
but it
wasn’t helping in the least.

My house was empty by the time I got home.
Walking around my
empty
home
and
cave-like bedroom
made me even more depressed than I already was.

I need
ed
to
hunt...I needed to remember what it was like and what it meant to be a werewolf, that way maybe I wouldn’t
have been questioning if Jerk-f
ace was right or not.

I opened my b
edroom window and took off my clothes.
I
looked at myself in the full
length mirror and sighed.

Just like vampires, werewolves need
ed
blood
to survive
.
Some need
ed
it on a daily basis, usually the larger males, because our bodies burn through calories at an accelerated rate.
Phasing bur
n
ed
a large amount of calories
due to the extreme physical change
, s
o I braced myself for the draining
process
.

When I was younger,
I was able
to tell when I phase
d. T
he feeling of my body changing,
reshapening, smooth skin bursting with fine, white hairs
, maw elongating, teeth sharpening and elongat
ing, razor sharp claws tearing through the soft skin at what used to be my fingers and toes
. But
the older I got, the more seamless it became
; what once took a measurable amount of time was now seamlessly done in a blur of movement comparable to those of a vampire
.
Mom said that type of fluidity doesn’t happen until you reach fifty or s
ixty years old, sometimes older:
apparently I was an overachiever.

In the full length mirror, my
black eyes
were staring
back at me
;
snow-white fur
covered
my slender,
muscular body
, my black nose had a cute dark rose shaped heart
which Jarvis always
teased me about when I was younger.

I was
a good-looking wolf
, even though being
a wolf was the reason behind my heartbreak and current situation.

Oh well, it is what it is
,
I silently mumbled to myself.

I took a step forward and collapsed
...

...
t
he amber-eyed vampire swaddled the pale child in his shirt, with no time to clean the child of the afterbirth,
he held her tight to his chest
and ran.

The Aslak army swarmed the cave, the ringing of metal against metal and the
howls
of the dying guards
flowed
along the breeze behind them.

The vampire ran as fast as his ancient legs could carry him,
effortlessly
floating across the snow
, through the
woods
,
and a snowy mountain pas
s, leaving no trail behind them.

When the fires from the burning city and villages were far behind them, he sought shelter from the impending storm
which
was licking at his skin.
The only shelter to be found was a deep cave with a hibernating bear gently snoring in the
deepest recesses of it
.
Toran quickly took care of the bear and used its fur as a blanket for the crying child.
The closest human city was more than a thousand miles away, and all of the smaller villages with werewolf inhabitants were destroyed by the Aslak on their march to the Holy City.

The Aslak attacked more quickly than the Valkyrie had anticipated.
More than three
-
thousand villagers lost their lives i
n the Holy City alone, and five
-
thousand warriors died defending the outer region.
The Aslak split the Valkyrie forces, spreading them thin, and in a single precision strike, the Valkyrie were destroyed and the Holy City was left vulnerable.

Toran hadn’t seen anything like
it in centuries, not since the
D
ark
Wars which nearly tore the mythical world apart hundreds of years ago
.
He saw his friends killed, the royal family of the rare and beautiful race of white werewolves, the Varulv, murdered.
Kaia, the small newborn in his arms,
was the last of
Varulv
, thus s
he
had to
survive no matter what.

With no milk, and the
crying
child refusing the bear’s blood, Toran was running out of options.
The howling wind would keep their location from the Aslak
for the moment
, but the child was in need of nourishment or she would surely perish.

As a last resort, Toran
slid
his dagger from his boot and pulled it across his forearm.
He presented it to the child, and without hesitation, she drank
...

...
“Sis,
can you hear me?” Jarvis asked
and he poked
me
repeatedly in the cheek
.

“
No, leave me alone,” I groaned and
fought
against my eyelids.
“What happened?”

“You tried to phase,
” he whispered. “But
since you haven’t fed or eaten anything in days, you collapsed.
I found you when I came home.”

“
Huh, that sucks…
”

Wait, hi
s voice is an octave higher than it should be.

I forced my eyes open and looked at him but
he was looking across the room
; he was
lying.

“Who found me?” I demanded.

When he didn’t answer, I followed the scent of flowers to my nightstand.
A delicate blue vase sat with a breathtaking arrangement of blue and white orchids.
In front of it sat a card with a
coiled up snake chain necklace with a
red diamond ring in the center of it.

“That
sonuvabitch
, he broke into our house?”
I groan
ed. “Please tell me he
didn’t take my suggestion seriously and attempt to tan without his ring.
”

“
No, it’s supposed to be a
token of how you are his world,
and
now
that
you have turned from him,
he is in perpetual darkness until the light of your heart can once again illuminate his
existence
…he didn’t pay me enough to recite
this
romantic shit
,”
Jarvis
mumbled and folded up the piece of paper he was trying to hide in
the palm of his
hand and shoved it in his pocket. “I would like to point out, Sis, that he only broke
into
your
room
,”
he
said
.
“It’s a good thing he did, otherwise I’d still be in Vancouver.”