The wind whistled through the scattered patches of darkness that exhaled around the edge of the forests grasp. I rose and danced around the large, silk shelter I lay beneath with my love. The tent swelled and shrank with the passing winds, weaving the offspring of the encounter through the fabric and onto our intertwining bodies. She shivered, waking me from my peaceful slumber.
Instinctively, I rolled over and covered her back with my chest. I slid my arms over hers, and buried my face in the back of her head and neck. Her scent put me back to sleep. There was nothing like it. In the many months we'd been together, her scent seemed to get stronger and stronger. And the faint smell of the lakes surface could do nothing to delude it.
Shortly after I'd fallen back asleep, the alarm on the new phone went off. It played Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata.' And I couldn't tell you how I knew the name. But as I scrambled for it, rolling over Angela in the process, she remained asleep, though barely.
I decided to give her a few more minutes of sleep while I stood outside to stretch, and as I exited the tent, a familiar scent hit my senses. I turned mid-stretch to see my father, fully changed, and bearing down on me. Standing there like a deer in the headlights of a mack truck, I was frozen. Unlike regular wolves, my father stood upright... sometimes. When he came to my rescue back at that camp, he was upright. During regular hunts though, he was normal.
"Dad?" I asked, lowering my arms. His claws retracted then extended at the sound of his name. They almost seemed to glow yellow as my father stood in front of me, poised for attack, but waiting for the command.
"What's wro-" He struck.
His claws dug deep into my right side, and rooted me into the ground, silent. I couldn't gasp, and I couldn't breath. All I could do, was feel. And what I felt, was burning inside the five wounds in my side. Something was releasing into my system as he held me there like a puppet.
My eyes darted to his features for some sort of clarity, but all I saw, was the monster everyone had played him to be. That unnaturally wide mouth, those glinting white spikes that filled it. His wildfire mane that seemed to explode out into the air. The tall harbinger of death, the killer.
These thoughts infiltrated my mind and conflict rose between my love of my father, and my hatred of the pain he inflicted on me. And as he pulled the bloody claws out of my side, and caught me in his arm, I could only feel as though this had something to do with last night's visitor. It had too be, because my father... my father would never hurt me... never...
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I was seven years old again, my mothers palm smacking me in the face before shoving me to the side so she could go drink without her whiney, little mistake asking her why she hit him. Tattered rags covered my dirty body, stained, and disgusting. That little rats nest apartment that I'd wished I'd never return too, was as filthy as ever. The kind of place where roaches don't scatter at the flip of a light switch.
The air smelt like rotting milk, and felt just as thick as I covered my bruising eye and moved around the now empty apartment. Grabbing a trash bag from under the rusted sink, risking a spider bite, I began my normal routine. Clean and forget about the pain.
"Why do you bare it?" A voice asked, rising from the recesses of my mind. I thought it my conscious as I stood, closed the cabinet door, and answered.
"She is my mother."
Before my lips had time to close, someone had grabbed me by the back of my neck. And her painted nails were starting to dig into my collar bone. The pain caused me to gag on my own screams as she yanked me forward and shoved me into the bathroom.
"Clean that fuckin' bathtub!" She yelled, hitting me in the face with an empty bucket, and tossing the rest of the cleaning supplies at my bare feet. The bathroom reeked of a clogged toilet and bad plumbing. "And don't you ever scream like that again, or I'll give you something to scream about, you little shit!" My mother's words were like storming hell, and the rain of her words seemed to peirce me with every drop of malice.
"She doesn't see you as her son..." His voice was cold, raspy, and wicked.
"She gave me life."
The door that she'd shut on me burst open. Her drunken face plastered with an angry bewilderment. "What did you say?!" She yelled as she stumbled towards me. She grabbed my ratty hair, slamming my face into the porcelain side of the toilet, stains ran all around it to the point of turning the whole thing yellow.
She pulled my right arm behind me and snapped it easily. Screams that could shatter the ear drum exploded like shrapnel from my lungs. My toes curled from the pain, my eyes opened wider and wider until they hurt, my agony had peaked.
"Mother's don't do this to their children." He said, his voice trying to convince me.
"And what does it matter!" I yelled over the screams and shouts of my mother complaining that I was too loud.
"You need to learn to take a human life." His voice crackled, half-laughing. "And it's starts, NOW!"
My arms flailed without my consent, and grabbed my mother by the throat. I twisted my thumbs around her trachea, popping it out of place in my hands, and she began to choke. "Stop." I muttered under my shock.
She flung her arms in all directions, smashing the bathroom mirror into pieces. "Please, stop..."
My hand dove for the largest shard, slicing into my palm and fingers as I gripped it, and raised it high. "Stop... please..." My plead became winded and hurt for me to exhale.
The bladed mirror came down with thunderous vengeance. "STOP!!!"
The world seemed to flee at my words. My surroundings fled into the dark cracks of the home of my torment, leaving only, a blinding, white light.
I covered my eyes, the light seared at my sight, and burned through my eye lids. Though, through the cracks in my bleeding fingers, I could see a figure. His entire body seemed covered in black. And despite the horribly bright light coming from all directions, I could see his smile.
It was wide and demented. Eyes white as the room that surrounded me, teeth covered in saliva, housing a forked tongue that slithered around in it's cage. "Why should we stop?" He asked, his body being propelled by some invisible force til he was inches from my face. "When there is so much more pain for us to explore!"
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I stood, gripping Emily, raising her by her throat. It was the first time I'd ever had to decide whether or not to kill a human being.
"And the first time you showed your weakness."
She gasped and writhed in my grip, I pushed her harder into the wall to keep her from struggling. Warring emotions scraped inside of my skull as her life became closer and closer too ending. I couldn't kill her... But I couldn't let go either.
"Ha ha ha!" She started laughing, as I became stale mated with my own consciousness. "Why would you save me if I'm just going to betray you?" She asked, those blue eyes, honestly seeking an answer. My own darted around in my head, praying for an answer to appear. "Then why not kill me now?"
"Because." I said.
"Because why?"
"Because..." It hit me. "You don't deserve it."
"Wrong!" She said, shifting into the black devil that haunted this nightmare of mine. He kicked me hard, and as I stumbled back, I fell hard against what appeared to be the chair I'd been sitting in with my talk with Seymour. And as I looked up, there he was.
Petrified as my father rose his massive fist to strike hard against the man who was, seconds before, about to kill me. I ran.
"Why save these people, when all they bring you is dishonesty, and pain?!" He yelled, watching me from the dark corner of the room.
My movements were slowed to a crawl as I slid in between my father and my enemy.
"He wants to live so bad that he'd sacrifice his own daughter for a taste of extra life, and here you risk life and limb too save him?! WHY?!" He screamed, watching me come up to block the attack.
"Because," I said, staring at him. My resolve seemed to stun him as the blow came closer and closer too me. "I have the responsibility."
The attack connected against my arms, and the world, shattered.