Chapter 37: Werewolves

Roughly 125 AD

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Another couple decades passed by and things went back to normal. Or as normal as it could get. Samira's dreams of impending danger lessened and her powers continued to get stronger. They were taking longer than Bastian had predicted. She had complete control over her shifting abilities, she could even shift to look like other people with little to no pain. And her abilities to control the elements continued to grow. If she concentrated too hard sometimes she would get a headache, but that was getting easier too. However, we knew there were more to come. Not all the gods in her bloodline had manifested yet. Isis granted her control over the elements and magic, which was something else she slightly possessed even as a human. It only got stronger the older she got. Her visions came from Horus as well as Ra, except Horus allowed her to see more than just the future – she could past and present as well. That left Hathor, Mut, and Osiris to give her an active power. However, Mut was also in Dorothea's bloodline and granted her the ability to be a Queen and a mother. If Bastian had been a descendent of Ptah, they could have had children together. So there were two active powers still yet to manifest. Bastian believed they wouldn't until they were needed. They would show up when she most needed them.

This year brought struggle throughout Northern Africa as a plague swept through. To the west, in the kingdom of Numidia, rumors were worse. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the plague and famine resulting from large swarms of locusts. In order to protect Egypt from the plague, the all went into the temple to pray for protection. Then, they asked Samira to try to use her magic to cast a protection spell. She did the best she could, but whether or not it worked was hard to say. Perhaps, it had, or the gods merely answered their prayers. Either way, we escaped the plague, but barely.

Samira took it as a sign that she was getting stronger and she kept on track. Her diet of feeding on the dead no longer bothered her. She lost all craving for animal blood, which was more than I could say for myself. Human blood was still very appealing. Anytime we went into the city it was a struggle not to walk into the nearest house and slaughter the inhabitants. Samira calmed me as best she could.

While we were still in the city we found something interesting. But it was something that made Samira very upset. I heard her scream and when I ran to her side I found her staring wide-eyed at a couple of dead bodies. They weren't just any dead bodies, and it definitely wasn't a normal death. They were ripped to shreds. Blood was everywhere, on the walls of the houses around them, on the sand, and their entrails were also spread out on the sand. No vampire did this.

"Who would do this?" She muttered then looked up to me. Then Bakari came running along. As members of the Authority, we couldn't go out on our own, especially after what happened with the Celts.

"My gods." He whispered as he knelt down to investigate the damage. He noticed a mark on one of the bodies, on his arm. It was a brand. I looked at the other body and found the same marking on the same arm. It was a hieroglyph, but I didn't know what it meant.

"What is it?" I asked. It looked like a crescent moon over a stork, a disk, and a woman.

"Aheh bahket." Samira translated. "Servant of the moon?"

Bakari groaned in disgust. "Werewolves."

"Were…wolves? What are werewolves?"

"Relatives of shifters, but they are limited to only changing into wolf form. They are a relatively new race in comparison to us."

"What do we do?" She asked in concern. "If they are massacring people…"

Bakari shook his head and stood up to get away from the stench. "No. There was a dispute. Probably for control of the pack, or these were traitors and this their punishment."

"Why have we never seen one in the area before?" I asked. We had been in Egypt for over a century now and I had yet to ever see a werewolf. I had yet to see one since I left Rome as a matter of fact. Just looking at these two battered bodies reminded me of the first werewolves I had seen in my life. I was still human, a few of us were accompanying Appius through town on business. He went to an auction and bought a handful more. Two among them – a man and woman – were close to each other, I thought they had been family and it made me miss my own. They acted strangely towards Appius when they first saw him. Everyone fights, no one wants to be chained up like an animal and thrown into a carriage with bars, but this was different. They were aiming all their fury at him alone, not the guards who were binding them. When we returned to the villa, Appius made a spectacle of them. He claimed it was because they had tried to kill him. I thought it a waste considering he had just bought them. He crucified the man as an example to all of his slaves what would happen to us if we tried to harm him. The woman he was going to as well, but she begged for the life of her unborn child. Appius slit her from her privates to her throat and fed her to the dogs. Ironic considering she was a werewolf. He told me the truth of that later. He hadn't killed them because they made attempt on his life, he bought and killed them because they were the enemy and he couldn't bare seeing another one born.

"They were banned." Bakari answered. "We have to tell the king."

We hurried back to the palace after we buried the bodies. Then to our surprise he already had a few visitors. Bakari stepped in front to protect Samira from the intruders that were werewolves. Most likely they were the ones who had killed the ones we just buried.

"It is alright, my son." Bastian reassured his progeny gently. These werewolves weren't for killing.

I didn't trust them though. I took her hand and kept her behind me to be safe. She had never seen werewolves before, and they unnerved her. She clutched at my sides as she peered at them from over my shoulder. Knowing her she was delving into every secret they had in their heads to see if they were friendly.

"We just buried their kin, I would not be so quick to trust them." Bakari replied.

"Battle for position." One of them said. He was about Bastian's height, and broad as well. He was obviously European, though I couldn't tell from where. He had no distinctive markings on his skin that I recognized. "I won." He added with a smirk.

"They have come to inform us that they believe a war is coming. It has brought struggle among their own ranks."

"Hence the battle." The woman added looking to her companion. They were intimates, and she was afraid of him. Or at least she was below him and worried for speaking out of turn.

"War is coming." The man said. "To the Romans. And we will fight in it."

Bastian nodded understanding their opinions and respecting them, but "We shall not." He replied. "As I have already made clear."

"You claim these to be your people and yet you would not fight alongside them against such a tyrant?"

"The matters of mortals are not ours to meddle in. We watch and protect, we do not intercede unless the tyrant is supernatural. Humans must conduct themselves."

"They will be slaughtered." Samira murmured.

"Men have been killing each other since the beginning of time, what difference is this?"

"Fine." The werewolf huffed giving up. "Let your people die." Then they escorted themselves out.

Samira waited for them to leave before she barged forward to state her opinion on the matter, which was – not to my surprise – in favor of the wolves. The last thing she wanted was to let the people die, even if they were human and by nature to us no better than cattle.

"Will you really stand there and do nothing?" She asked bluntly, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Eloquent as always, he simply said, "Samira have you seen any sign of this war they speak of? I have not." Then turned back towards his throne and began walking up the stairs. Except Samira followed. The staircase might as well have been the throne too, no one was allowed to stand on it. Bakari tried to hold her back, but she easily shoved him off of her arm and kept going and kept talking.

"Just because I have not seen a war yet, does not mean they are wrong. They are European, Awi, perhaps they know something we do not with an insider's advantage."

He sat down on his throne and stared at her. I knew that look. He was trying to see right through her, but he couldn't. She was a brick wall at this point, she was too strong for even him. "They are not European." He replied rather than going on with the argument of war. "They are from the Sinai Peninsula where you once lived, and that was where they were meant to stay. By crossing the sea they broke the law."

"They are kin to our kind." She replied.

I too found it strange that he was so judgmental on a race that was as she said kin to theirs. They were shapeshifters too, though less powerful. I had only seen two kinds of weres, aside from skinwalkers, in my life – wolves, and strangely enough birds. I met the birds during the time I was on my own, before I met Samira. I was hunting and when I tried to kill a certain human, it shifted into a hawk and flew away. I didn't know about shapeshifters at that point, Appius never mentioned them. So out of curiosity I followed it and found a whole flock residing in a hillside. Their alpha came forward, threatened to fight me if I refused to leave. I was no longer there for food, I was just curious about them. I thought the only shifters were the werewolves. He laughed at me and said there were almost a species of were for every carnivorous species, and a small few that aren't. However, they were nearly extinct because the carnivorous ones had a tendency to eat them. Then when that supply ran low, they started eating the others. Weres weren't exactly fond of each other apparently, even though technically they were all related.

He told me that they all had a common background. A pack of shifters would, for their own purposes –most likely survival – decided to only phase into one specific carnivore in order to be able to hunt. The others, he said, most likely renounced this way of living and therefore chose to be a creature that was not a killer. Then through time, breeding and evolution did the rest.

It had me curious where shifters originated from. Surely they couldn't all be Egyptian.

"They are not." Bastian announced looking down to me from his seat. Samira had heard me too, but ignored me for the moment. She was too focused on her argument with him. Yet he continued to answer my question. "Believe it or not, we have found that all religions are true. All gods exist as long as there are people to worship them. Shifters come from many different religions – Greeks, Celts, Scandinavians, even Romans. Europe is festered with them."

"Why do you look down on them?"

"They made their choice." Dorothea replied for him as she came closer to me. He looked down at her surprised that she interrupted him, and she simply gestured to Samira. He had her to worry about, so she would speak to me on his behalf. "They outcast themselves from being shifters and broke our laws by breeding a new race. They corrupted themselves. And most of them are inbred in order to keep their were blood and not revert back to shifters or become human."

"I see."

"They turned away from us, not the other way around."

"Still, you banish them." I went on. "If they choose to live away from you, so be it, but must you force them out and only encourage their separation?"

She smiled as if she were proud of me. I didn't understand why. "You do have it in you." She said.

"What?"

"You would make a good leader one day."

A leader? No. That was never my destiny, and it was never one I wanted. I gladly gave that torch to my brother, not wanting anything to do with leadership or any role that others looked up to.

"It is in you." She said again. "Do not hide from it."

I tuned back into Samira and Bastian's argument. He was merely telling her the same as his wife had just told me. They were corrupted and disgusting. He wanted them isolated so they could not spread their disease and corrupt the other shifters in the area. Even the European Authority had the right idea in that regard, because their religions too looked down on them. And he was not going to change it. Shifters were a dying breed, he had to protect them.

Samira huffed and walked away in defeat, which was astonishing to me. She never accepted defeat, at least not with me. But he was King, and she could only go so far. I followed her to make sure she didn't do anything drastic in her angered state. I stopped her in the hall just outside of the throne room and gently placed her against the wall. She was breathing heavily, panting and huffing. Her fists were in balls, she was ready to kill something. I held her there, my hand caressing her cheek.

"Sh…"

"I never thought he could do something so terrible as to be prejudiced."

Honestly, neither had I. I always thought he and her were so much alike, that they would agree on everything. So to see them so torn apart was a first. I could see she was starting to question him in everything now. "Do not hate me for saying this, but – "

"You agree with him?" She finished for me in astonishment. The look she gave me was of pure disgust.

"Samira, your kind are dying. I know the weres, I have seen them. They will do whatever they have to to survive, and that includes recruiting what shifters are left in this world and forcing them to corrupt themselves so they can breed more. Is that what you want?"

She shook her head honestly. She just wished there were a middle ground.

"Things are never that simple, my love." I whispered kissing her forehead.

"I know." She muttered sadly. Life would never allow it to be that simple. It had to be hard. No one understood why.

I held her close for a moment letting her cry out her frustration with life's cruelty. To her, the thought of her race being no more was unimaginable. The world would be dim without something so magical and beautiful and pure that was sent by the gods. But somehow she knew that it would one day come to be so. She hadn't seen it yet, but she could feel it in her bones. She tried explaining it to me, but she couldn't. She just knew. I believed her.

My one concern, well greater concern, was what would she do now that she was questioning their leadership? We all knew one day when she fully matured she would be far stronger than Dorothea who had been Queen for centuries. I was worried that when the time came, she would want to place herself in Dorothea's position so that she could keep Bastian in check. Dorothea was a good Queen, strong and powerful, but she had no backbone when it came to her husband. Like all Queens in society, she did as her husband bid and was there for support. He was ultimately the one in charge and the final decisions were his to make since she wouldn't stand up to him if she disagreed. However, it wasn't because he would not listen, it was simply because she was a woman and she understood that was the way things worked. Samira would not if she were in her position. Thinking about it, I had a hard time seeing how such a coupling would work because the two would never be able to stop arguing and come to a decision on some of their more important issues.

Yet, Samira claimed she had no intention of ever being in a position of authority. It wasn't her place to tell anyone how to live, though she would gladly voice her opinion. Though I had an odd instinct, something that rarely happened, but when it did I was usually right, that she just didn't want it as of yet. In time, their decisions would drive her to the brink and she would call them out for it. How long exactly it would take for that to happen, I didn't know. But when it did, I couldn't see her losing.

Then I looked up and there he was yet again standing at the end of the hall watching us. That odd instinct tingling up my spine was his influence. He winked with a proud grin and disappeared. These gods of hers were getting to me and I didn't like it.

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