Humphrey's P.O.V.
At first, I thought my mate was crazy. There was absolutely no way in hell I would be able to do what she needed me to do, especially if I had to do it alone. If Scar was indeed the Artist like we suspected, then tailing him was not only dangerous, it was completely idiotic, and that's coming from and alpha's standpoint. For someone like me, it was downright suicidal.
Sure, I had been training with Miles, but even though Kate was aware of our arrangement, I don't think she realized just how little progress I had made by that point. The overwhelming majority of the lessons that Miles taught were strength, endurance and agility related. I tried to bypass all of this and get to the real training, of course. Hell, he knew as well as I did that I had already covered most of the lessons that he was teaching me back before I was nearly killed in A-School. However, in spite of this, he insisted that we cover the basics again.
"All alpha training comes back to four basic principles," he would lecture, "Strength, endurance, agility and intelligence."
He didn't focus too much on the intelligence aspect of my training for whatever reason, but regardless of all of this, while I had laid the foundation upon which all alpha training is predicated, I had not yet learned any of the skills I would need in order to execute the delicate, dangerous operation that my mate had in store for me. She insisted that she would have done it herself, but since she was gimp and with child, she worried she would not be up for the task. I mean, it made sense, of course, but that didn't mean that I would be. If I'm honest, the whole idea terrified me to no end, and I wasn't sure if I would ever be able to find the courage to do what needed to be done. Hell, I wasn't sure if I would even be able to convince Miles to move past the basics of training without outright telling him what I would be doing.
In spite of everything that he did for me and my mate, we knew that we couldn't trust him. As a combat specialist, there was no doubt that he understood the importance of discretion, but as a recovering addict, there was never any telling what crazy thing he would say or do, and we worried that if we told him, he would blow my cover and put all of our lives in danger. But I was running out of time. Something needed to be done. Now, I feel terrible about it, and I am not in the least bit proud of what I did, but the only way I could think to get Miles to do what I needed him to do was to subtly manipulate him.
Early on in my career as an omega, I realized that if I wanted to effectively placate alphas, I first had to understand them. It took a lot of trial and error, as I had learned far less from my time with Kate than I thought I had, but with each fight that I broke up, and with each argument that I de-escalated, I learned a little bit more about the way alphas think. Eventually, I got to the point where I could get inside of an alpha's head without any real effort at all. Since I had assumed a role more akin to that of an alpha after my marriage to Kate, I was a bit out of practice, but eventually I managed to worm my way through Miles' defenses and the next thing I knew, I spent the majority of the following days getting my ass kicked.
Miles always was a trial by fire kind of instructor. That's why his trainees thought that he was the biggest bastard this side of Alberta, but that is also why he was renowned as one of the best instructors the park had ever known. He stressed the importance of adaptability, proactivity and always forced his trainees to think on their toes and problem solve in real time. At first I was completely helpless in the face of all of the random scenarios that he would throw at me, and I would return home in the evenings exhausted, battered and bruised. Each time I staggered through the door disheveled and defeated, Kate would be reminded of her days as a trainee and it would cause her to laugh as she moved in to massage my aching body.
As a former student of his, she knew my pain better than anyone, and while she refused to give me any information that may help me to predict Miles' next move, she always found a way to give me the strength I needed to keep fighting. And god was it a fight. Addiction still held a firm grip on my instructor and his instability was exhausting. The rants, the mood swings, the impulsive decisions, and that hair-trigger temper that he developed were just about enough to drive me to my breaking point, but I made a promise and I aimed to keep it, no matter the cost. I do have to give him credit, though. Through it all, he managed to keep the berries out of his mouth and even on his worst days, he still found a way to teach me something of value.
Of course the quality of my lessons varied from day to day depending upon which Miles I happened to get, so my training was still moving quite a bit slower than I needed it to, but at least it was finally moving in the right direction. It wouldn't be for another couple weeks of intense training that I would feel like I could maybe brave the mission that my mate had in mind, but by then, the threat that the Artist and the Traditionalist ideology posed to our pack had grown so dire that I needed to act whether I was ready or not. I remember the night before we set the operation in motion quite clearly. The air between us was so thick with tension that I could hardly breathe as I sat across from my mate in our den that night, and the silence that had befallen the park spoke louder than any chorus of voices ever could. Honestly, such silences brought to life by primal fears should have come as no surprise to anyone. After all, what could mere words do for anyone when we were faced by such horrors? By that point, we had expected the Artist to make another move, but we never expected them to go that far…
Kate's P.O.V.
Though I want to forget what I saw that day, I know such images will never leave me. It's been years since I set my eyes upon that particular crime scene, and even still my dreams will occasionally take me back there. With time, memories tend to become distorted. Truths become lies, and all the lies we tell ourselves to try and process the horrible things we've endured eventually become our new reality, but that memory is as fresh to me today as it was when I first laid eyes upon her.
I can't recall the exact details of who she ended up being. If I understood everything correctly, she was a breeding bitch for the Northern Republic or something like that. Some poor omega girl with better genetics than her sister brethren who was forced to breed with other high value males to create strong, resilient workers. I don't know if I can really explain the ins and outs of it all. After all, how can one possibly explain something so backward to a modern society? What I do know, is that when I woke up that morning, I was me, but when the sun set that night, I wasn't.
I was the one who found her, actually. My leg had healed up nicely at that point, but I wasn't quite at 100% yet. Plus, by that point I was as big as a caribou, so returning to work was out of the question, but at least I could take walks while Humphrey was out with Miles. I followed the same rout every time I took my walks because the layout was not only easy on my body, it made it incredibly difficult for someone to sneak up on me, but in my search for comfort and safety, I had forgotten one very important tactical rule: Never establish a pattern that your enemy can use against you. It was harped upon heavily in A-School during our War Games, and that day, I realized exactly why.
When I rounded a corner on the path that I walked, I found her staged directly in my line of sight, and it became painfully clear that she had been placed there specifically for me to find. I remember feeling this immediate sense of eeriness wash over me as my eyes fell upon her. From the distance at which I had spotted her, all I could see was a wolf lying on the ground with its back facing me, and aside from the fact that I didn't recognize her, everything appeared normal. She was tucked away just off the trail near a sapling. She lied on her side, but her head was up, and she appeared to be looking at something near her chest.
My eyes told me that I had stumbled upon some runaway or rogue who was with child and nursing, but something just didn't smell right. I couldn't exactly put my paw on it, but as I cautiously moved closer, something about what I had found caused my stomach to squeeze itself into tighter and tighter knots. I lost my courage momentarily and paused to call out to the wolf in the distance, but my voice appeared to fall upon deaf ears. I swallowed nervously and then continued forward, but part of me really wishes that I hadn't. The closer I drew to this wolf, the more apparent it became that I had stumbled upon yet another of the Artist's "masterpieces" and I rolled my eyes, annoyed. However, when my eyes beheld the horrors that lied on the other side of her, I immediately lost control of my stomach and spewed my lunch into the grass.
Pregnant… She was fucking pregnant, but that, unfortunately, was only the beginning…
After she was killed and dumped off beneath that sapling, they cut open her womb and removed her unborn litter. Atop the sickly soup of blood and viscera that had spilled from her body cavity, four stillborn fetuses had been cleverly staged to appear as though they were suckling from their mother's breast, but what still haunts me, more than even that, was the female's face… Her neck had been broken and twisted into place and a branch had been shoved down her throat in order to hold her head up. Her hazel eyes had been aimed down upon the pups at her breast, as any proud mother's would be, but where there would ordinarily be pride, there was only a haunting emptiness in her glassy, formless gaze, and it was obvious that her lips had at one point been contorted into a soft, exhausted smile. However, the rigor processes had caused her mouth to fall open slightly and the tip of her tongue to spill out between her teeth, so from that smile had been born a sickening expression that I can't even begin to describe.
I remember spending the rest of the day as though I was lost in a dense fog. I pushed it down, called in the murder and in spite of being on leave, assisted with the crime scene investigation just as I had been trained to do, but nothing can prepare you for something like that. In A-School they warned all of us recruits that there may come a day when the job would change us forever. Personally, I thought that saying something like that was rather redundant. After all, with each day we trained, we were changed. With every minute, more and more small pieces of ourselves would be altered by the lifestyle, and I knew that when I returned, I would be a different wolf than the pup who set foot on the training base that chilly, fall morning.
It wasn't until that day that I truly understood what they meant. My life to that point had been rife with tragedy and trauma, but I was always mindful to keep my work life and my personal life separate. When I was on the job, I was a professional, and when I was at home, I was a wife. No matter what happened on the job or at home, I never allowed the strifes of one life to taint the other, but as I gazed down upon the slain female and the lifeless pups at her breast, it was as though my eyes beheld a living vision of the horrible thoughts that bombarded my mind each time I reflected upon my greatest failure as a wife as a wolf and as a woman.
In that moment, it was as though I had been taken back in time to the day that I knew I'd lost them, and it broke me all over again. But I had a job to do, so I repressed these feelings and soldiered on, just as I had been taught. On the surface, I was the same as I had always been. I shared in the group's collective shock and disgust as we scraped her guts up off the ground, but otherwise, it all rolled off my back and my image of strength remained intact. Inside, however, small parts of me died with each stolen life that I took into my jaws and carried to the coroner, parts of me that I would never get back. And it was as I carried those bodies that I knew they were right. On that day, the Artist finally got to me, and I've never been the same since…
Humphrey's P.O.V.
It would be several months before she told me what she saw that day, and she would only ever talk about it once, but that night as I prepared to do what needed to be done to put an end to the madness that had blighted the pack for so long, I could tell that whatever ferity she witnessed mere hours ago was more than she could bear. I always admired my mate's strength and pragmatism, and strove to someday be able to tackle my problems with the same levels of poise and rationality, but that night I caught a glimpse of vulnerability and uncertainty the likes of which I had only ever seen in her that night that I followed her out of the den.
As we sat across from each other and finalized our plan, my heart broke for her. She tried her best to act as though nothing was wrong, but I knew better, and truth be told, I had never seen her so distracted or scared. That morning, before the body was discovered, she seemed so optimistic- excited, even, as she watched me demonstrate some of what I had been taught. Her eyes were unwavering, her enthusiasm was so genuine and her energy was absolutely infectious. It's difficult for me to describe the way she looked at me in that moment, but for the first time in her life, she actually seemed… proud of me.
Of course, I knew that I still had a long way to go before I was ready to apply what I had learned to real world ops, and she did, too. But in spite of this, an air of felicity had filled the spaces between us, and for the first time in forever, we dared to let our guard down and allow ourselves to have hope. That night, however, there was no hope or joy. There lingered only a sense of dread so thick that it was almost palpable. She spoke frankly to me that night as I returned from training. Beyond the fact that another body had turned up, she gave me no details and her actions appeared to be propagated by impulse or fear, but she saw something that day, and if what she'd seen scared her that bad then something truly awful was imminent.
I wasn't used to being the strong one in our relationship. I was always happy hanging onto my youth and letting Kate run the show. I relied on her unwavering strength to carry me through my darkest times, but this time, for her and for the good of the pack, I knew that the time had come for me to show her and everyone else what I was really made of. I was nowhere near ready, and the fear that I may never see my pups be born lingered in the back of my mind as I attempted to sleep that night, but I was out of time. When I began my training, I knew that there may come a day when I would find myself in a position that would force me to take a life, or that could lead me to the end of my own, but I never expected that day to come so soon. There was no way for me to know where or when my journey would end as I embarked on my mission the next morning, but one thing was certain: If I didn't execute this mission flawlessly, there would be no saving me. If I made even a single mistake, if I forgot even the tiniest sliver of what I had learned over the past several weeks, I would be dead.