by Warren Smith
Throne Of The Werewolf
By Warren Smith
Throne Of The Werewolf
Copyright © 2015 by Warren Smith
Published by Warren Smith
A word from the author:
This is a different genre of book for me as many of my readers know but it was always something that I wanted to one day write about. I came up with this short story to see if I had what it took to write something other than urban fiction. Some of you may not like it and some of you may but either way I had a great time writing it! Don’t worry, I’m not leaving urban fiction just branching out a bit. Hopefully you will enjoy this short story and as always, your reviews mean more than words can say. If you like, friend me on Facebook @ Author Warren Smith. Enjoy!!
This is a work of fiction. It is not meant to depict portray or represent any real person. All characters, incidents and dialogue in this written work are a product of the author’s imagination and are not to be considered as real. Any references or similarities to actual events, entities, real living people or dead, or to real locations are intended for the sole purpose of giving this novel a sense of reality. Any similarities with other names, characters, entities, places, people or incidents are completely coincidental.
Prologue
Antoine Leblanc writhed in pain on his bathroom floor. For nearly two weeks now he had been suffering from debilitating body cramps that were so intense that he feared they would soon begin to break his bones. He was covered from head to toe in dark purple bruises and even though it was mid-summer, Antoine wore long sleeved shirts and long pants to hide the hideous abrasions. Something was terribly wrong but he was too scared to find out what it was, what if he was dying? It sure felt like it but he prayed that he was wrong. His body felt torn and stretched and he noticed that his skin was getting a lot rougher in some places, almost callus like.
The painful attacks never lasted longer than a few seconds but often felt like an eternity, especially to a sixteen year old tenth grader on the chess team. Finally the pain started to subside and he was able to struggle to his feet by gripping on to the bathroom sink basin. He flinched in horror when he saw the bristle like hairs extending from his shirt sleeves and covering the back of his hands. He stumbled backwards hitting the closed bathroom door as he stared at his beastly hands. Antoine tried to scream but what came out instead was a low deadly growl.
His head shot up and he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror only to find a stranger staring back at him. He could see some of his facial features in the thing that stood before him but he knew that it definitely wasn’t him. For one, the thing before him had what looked to be golden colored eyes and it’s teeth were slightly elongated and pointed. It had bushy eyebrows and dog like hair on it’s outstretched face. When he moved the thing in the mirror moved as he did and this sent Antoine straight back into panic mode. His heart began to feel as if it would beat out of his chest and his face hurt something awful, his whole body did.
It began to feel as if someone had injected battery acid into his veins and before he knew why, Antoine let out a god awful roar that shattered the bathroom mirror. He could hear the distant sound of dogs whining from miles away even though he knew that it was impossible. The burning sensation coursing through his body grew even stronger and his head began to pulse in feverish waves. He staggered out of the bathroom and walked across the hall to his bedroom and flopped down on his bed, and then he passed out.
Chapter 1
Lisette Leblanc had come home from work looking forward to watching a little television before she crashed for the night but her priorities quickly changed as soon as she stepped one foot in her house. Her nose wrinkled up as she sniffed the air. There was a presence in the house somewhere, a powerful presence. She hadn’t felt something that strong in quite some time now and it made her kind of nervous.
“Antoine!” She shouted with a worried expression across her face as she bolted through the living room and up the steps towards his bedroom. She burst into his bedroom looking like the scared mother that she was only to find her son Antoine asleep in his bed and snoring like a bear. Lisette breathed a sigh of relief as she slowly walked towards him. She sat on the edge of his bed and ran a hand across his forehead, the boy was burning up. Now she understood the presence that she felt in the home, he was beginning his transition.
Lisette Leblanc looked at the tiny beads of sweat on her son’s forehead and began to wipe them away with her hand. She hated to wake him up but it was extremely important that he get some fluids in him and try to eat something. Transitional hunger was horrible and this was something that she had experience with first hand. She gently shook his shoulders and after a few seconds Antoine began to stir awake.
“Hey, wake up sweetie. How are you feeling?” The boy turned around and opened his eyes and Lisette nearly fell to the floor in shock.
“Is everything ok mom? What’s wrong?” Antoine said in a groggy voice, still sounding as if were still half asleep. She had a startled look on her face that puzzled him and he began to sit upright in his bed, one eye brown and the other a brilliant shade of gold. She snapped out of her shocked state and all at once her face took on a frightened concerned look.
“Did anything out of the ordinary happen today? I need to know the truth Antoine, so please tell me everything that happened today!” He looked at his mother confused not knowing why she had gotten all serious all of a sudden but he answered her question anyway.
“Relax mom, nothing happened today. I woke up, I ate breakfast and played a few video games and that’s about it. It was only until later on that I started to feel kind of bad. I think I had a fever or something because I had one of the craziest dreams or nightmares ever! But I’m ok now mom so there’s nothing to worry about, so please calm down.” Lisette acted as if she didn’t hear when her son said calm down and kept pressing on with the questions.
“What kind of dream did you have? What was it about?” Both eye’s were back to their normal color of brown now and Lisette thought that she might have been seeing things, but she had to know for sure.
“I don’t see why that’s so important but whatever! It was nothing really but it kind of scared me a little bit to be honest. In the dream that I had it was me, but It wasn’t if that makes any sense. In the dream I was some kind of beast, hairy and everything! My teeth were sharper and kind of weird looking and oh, my eyes were gold or something. I remember howling and I remember hearing dogs whining or something and that’s all, I promise. The next thing that I remember was you waking me up in the middle of a great sleep!” He gave his mother a slight innocent smile and she smiled back at him. The worry in her face hadn’t gone anywhere and that troubled him a bit.
“Ok sweetie, I’ll have dinner ready in about an hour or so. Go ahead and get yourself together and I’ll call for you when it’s done. There’s something that I want to talk to you about after dinner and it’s kind of important so don’t make any plans for now ok.” He nodded his head in agreement and watched as his mother got up and left the room. He was starving and felt like he could eat a whole horse if it came down to it. He got out of bed when all of a sudden a thought entered his mind. Please don’t let this be another one of her birds and the bee’s talks. Antoine wasn’t sure if he could sit through another one of those.
Chapter 2
A little over an hour later dinner was served. There was no salad or soup or any other sides for that matter. Just two of the biggest Porterhouse steaks known to man, cooked extra rare. Lisette Leblanc Knew her son like the back of her hand, just like she knew that he liked his steak well done. She had barely finished calling his name when Antoine showed up in the kitchen looking like a starved animal. His eyes
had taken on that golden color again and she knew that what she had seen earlier was real. She hesitated for a second.
“Have a seat, we’re having steak tonight! I hope that it’s cooked enough for you, I was rushing because It’s kind of late and I wanted you to eat something.” Antoine sat down so fast that he nearly knocked over his chair in the process. He never even made an attempt to grab his knife and fork at all. He picked the Porterhouse steak up off of his plate with his bare hands and devoured the whole thing in a matter of seconds.
Lisette hadn’t even started on her steak yet, she had her hunger under control. She had been around for quite some time now but could still remember the terrible hunger that came along with the transition. What Lisette didn’t remember, was the last time she saw someone in transition with golden eyes. There were only two other people in their history ever to have those eyes and one of them was getting closer, she could feel it. Antoine finally looked up from his plate, his eyes dissipating back to their normal color of brown now that his hunger had been satisfied. He looked around sheepishly, feeling embarrassed for his lack of dinner table manners.
“Sorry mom, I don’t know what got into me. I haven’t eaten all day and got a little carried away, won’t happen again.” Lisette looked at her son and smiled because she knew that he was lying his ass off, he just didn’t know it yet.
“That’s okay, I cooked it for you to eat and you’ve done that so I’m happy!” Lisette said as she pushed her plate aside and became more serious. She didn’t really know how to start the conversation but she knew that it had to be done. It was definitely a delicate situation and one that she had to word very carefully so that Antoine would understand exactly what was at stake.
“Listen sweetie, I need to talk to you about some of the things that you’ve been going through lately. Your not a kid anymore and I know that your body has been going through some changes. I guess I’ve always knew that this time would come but----” Before she could finish talking Antoine cut her off in mid sentence with a horrified and embarrassed look on his face.
“Come on mom! Don’t you think that I’m a little too old to be having your little birds and the bee’s talk again? I just turned sixteen for Christ’s sake!” Lisette couldn’t help but bursting out into a fit of nervous laughter. Talking about sex was the last thing on her mind but she did get a good kick out of seeing her son’s face turn the color of a bright red apple.
“No honey, I don’t want to talk to you about sex! That ship has probably sailed a long time ago, I want to talk to you about us, your family. There’s things about our family that you need to know and understand and I thought that now would be a good time in light of recent developments.” Antoine’s shoulder’s slumped and he seemed to be a bit more relaxed now that he knew that the “S” word wasn’t going to be the topic in their discussion.
“What do you mean recent development’s mom? What’s going on?” He was sitting up in his chair now with a concerned look pasted across his face as he waited for his mother to explain what she meant. Lisette couldn’t think of a subtle way to tell him what she was thinking so she just came out with it.
“Listen, I know that for the past two or three weeks that you’ve been having horrible body cramps that made you feel like you were about to die. I also know that you have been having fevers for almost as long. What I don’t know is why you didn’t come to me and tell me what was going on sooner!” Lisette stared at her son waiting for some sort of explanation but all she got in return was a dumb blank stare and a bunch of stuttering at first.
“I was going to tell you mom, really. It’s just that it seemed like as soon as the pain started it was over and I was ok again. This isn’t the part where you tell that we have some rare genetic disease in our family and that I’m probably going to die young is it?” He looked to be genuinely worried about this and that made his mother ease up on him a bit.
“Yes, I guess you could say that we do have a rare genetic disease in our family.” All of the color drained from Antoine’s face and he looked like he was about to pass out at any second.
“And no, your not going to die young.” His mother stated. “In fact, your probably going to live for a very long time! I need you to understand what I’m about to tell you and take it very serious, your life could depend on it someday and we don’t have much time.” Some of the color came back into his face when she said that he wasn’t dying but he was still curious about this disease that she was talking about.
“Damn mom, You nearly gave me a heart attack! Don’t you think that It would have been smarter to mention the not dying part first? And what do you mean we have a rare disease? Let me guess, I’ll be taking meds for the rest of my life and be confined to a wheelchair by my early twenties or something crazy like that right!” Lisette looked at her son and shook her head in aggravation.
“Wrong, now shut the hell up and let me finish before you won’t have to worry about being in a wheelchair because if you keep talking I’ll put you in one myself!” His eyes grew wide at her threat and he swallowed hard enough to hear an audible click in his throat. Antoine nodded his head that he understood and then he shut the hell up while she told her story.
“Like I was saying, we’re not like other people and sometimes when certain people don’t understand something, they tend to do mean things because deep down inside their really scared. Tonight when you had your dream you probably thought that you were delirious from the fever, but what if I told you that you weren’t delirius? What if I told you that you come from an ancient race of people that can do things that you only see in movies or read in books? Would you believe me?” Antoine looked at his mother thoughtfully for a few seconds. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to answer her question, it was because he didn’t know if he should. Not even a full minute before she had promised to put him in a wheelchair if he spoke again and he liked walking and running a little too much to risk it.
“What the hell is wrong with you boy? Stop acting like a simpleton and answer the damn question!” Antoine was convinced now that his mother’s memory was going down the crapper. First she wanted him to shut the hell up and now she wanted him to talk. She needed to make up her mind fast because the whole conversation was getting to be a bit confusing to him.
“Well, I guess that I would want you to go into more detail because to be honest with you I really don’t understand where your going with all of this mom.” Lisette looked at her son and smiled warmly. It was good to know that the boy had an open mind and was willing to listen, even if she did threaten to paralyze him to do it.
“I’m going to tell you a story so that you have a better understanding of what I’m talking about. Some of it might sound a little crazy but all of it will be true I promise you that. When I’m done you can ask me any questions that you might have but for now just let me get it out, I tend to get emotional just by talking about it.”
Chapter 3: Lisette Leblanc
I was born in French Quarter New Orleans back in 1803. My parents were Haitian Creoles that fled Haiti during the Haitian Revolution. My mother was pregnant with me at the time and my father nearly died getting his pregnant wife out of the country, but somehow they made it. I was born three months later. I can remember when I was about six years old or so how the women lusted after my father and the men lusted after my mother, white women and men mostly.
They were what the folks called “high yellow” and eventually they wound up meeting a wealthy white couple that spared no expense on them. Fred and Mary Hampton were their names. I had everything that I ever wanted right up until I was seventeen year’s old, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse. As the years rolled by Fred and Mary seemed to become more and more obsessed with my parents. It got to the point that my folks felt like they couldn’t breathe because they were always around, night and day.
Finally my folks had enough and began to distance themselves from their wealthy overbearing friends and that didn’t sit too well
with them. They began to spread rumors about my parents and even sent death threats when their rumors didn’t work and nobody believed them. The last straw for Fred came when he spotted my parents spending time with another couple, he shot them both dead that night right in front of our home in cold blood. He never even spent a day in jail for the murder of my folks. Five years had passed and Fred was still walking around a free man, until another form of justice caught up with him that he couldn’t pay off.
I met Marie Laveau in a Roman Catholic church in 1825. I was in the church at the time lighting candles for my murdered parents and sending them prayers like I did every sunday. I said my final prayer, turned around and nearly jumped out of my damn skin when I saw Marie Laveau standing before me. She scared me so bad that I almost fell into the altar.
“I’m so sorry Ms. Leblanc, I didn’t mean to startle you I just wanted to speak with you for a moment if that’s okay?” Her voice was like silk with a sharp edge to it. Every word that she spoke was drawn out like she had the tongue of a snake. On her head she war a decorated Tignon, she was beautiful and powerful and she knew it.
“Sure, we can talk.” I said stupidly, still not believing that I was actually talking to the woman. She was a big deal in New Orleans and I was just a depressed young woman who was too scared to do anything about her own parents murder. The murdering bastard Fred and his wife Mary attended church every Sunday and were considered pillars of the community.
