We both still, tensing as we hear noise around us. Movement. Slight movement. Not quite light footed enough to go unnoticed. Especially out here in the still of night. When all other woodland creatures have decided to call it a night.
Only the wolves around here would be so bold as to come out at night. On a lunar night.
Markus stays where he is with me laying against him, those arms around me. His nose twitching, trying to pick up the scent. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” He repeats steadily like it’s his mantra.
My tears have stopped now. Dried up in an instant. I’m looking in the direction I think the sound came from.
“It’s going to be okay.” Markus says firmly. He’s now looking directly where I’m looking. A central point of darkness. We’ve both honed in on something behind those bushes. We know it’s there. It knows we’re here. It’s a stand off.
The bushes that are the central point of darkness we’re staring at, daring, explode with sound as a wolf jumps from them.
My eyes go wide at the sight of the lycan, flying through the air, towards us. I think I can see it, like it’s in slow motion.
It’s projectile aim at us, is spot on. It’s mouth is an open snarl of ferocious fangs, salivating with hunger to tear us apart.
But Markus he stays where he is. Not out of fear, or uncertainty or slowness. He says there, because I am there and I can’t move fast enough now. He won’t abandon me.
He watches the wolf sail through the air like time is suspended out here. We stay, together, holding one another utterly still. Looking at the face of what is coming at us.
It’s just as the wolf’s arc starts it’s downwards trajectory of us, that Markus’s arm slips loosely around me and he curls tightly around me. Readying to take the brunt of the wolf’s teeth and claws landing down on us.
Markus pulls me in protectively tight to him. He’s going to be my shield and he’s going to get shredded. And I’ll be next.
But there are others lying in wait for this wolf. That collective feeling that pushes at the air, that I can feel creep over my skin. It doesn’t come from one wolf alone. It doesn’t come from two. It comes from a pack of werewolves. Breukelen werewolves. Collective feeling, is something these lycan lack. Other than their need for blood fuelled fun and rage.
Otherwise they’d have known they were being stalked by a pack of werewolves far more superior to them.
They’d have known the Breukelen would reign down all manner of blood hell on them for what they’ve done. But they don’t know us. They clearly don’t know pack werewolves. Or they’d never have come after me a second time.
A loud noise, a growl, not unlike the roar of animal anger mixed with a war cry of attack shatters the silence of the world around us.
Launching secondary cries of werewolf anger, until the woods are filled with noise. A werewolf, three times the size of the lycan leaps at the airborne wolf and throws it off course. Sideways as the silvery grey werewolf, sinks teeth and claws into the smaller wolf.
Clinging to it as it takes it down to the ground and starts clawing at it’s fur. Ripping it open without hesitation.
More Breukelen werewolves appear. There are five others that have their go at pulling the lycan, still alive, limb from limb in a morbidly precise attack.
They’re like a killing machine. With just the one goal in mind and they’re achieving it as we watch in silence and compliance. They’re vicious and fast. They’re angry.
“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.” Markus says softly in a voice by way of explanation of what we are looking at. That voice makes me look at my brother. He’s like a quiet storm, waiting to explode. It’s the first time I think I’ve noticed Markus true anger.
Markus and I straighten up and watch them in horror and fascination.
14
I’ve never seen this side of our pack before. Because I’ve never been privy to it.
A beta pup would never be told the true goings on of a pack. You can’t be told, you have to be shown. Those experiences only come when you grow up. When you become what you’re meant to be.
Before tonight, I was naive. I was clueless and unsure. Not anymore.
It’s only the one lycan and I’m starting to tire. But I know there should be more than one.
They won’t try to attack a pack this big. Not with the display these Breukelen just put on for any of those hiding cowards watching. It’s one thing to come after a lone werewolf, separated from the pack, it’s another to endure full wrath at the paws of werewolves palpable of war.
The largest werewolf in the combined attack is one I recognize instantly. I want to tell him there’s more than one. But I’m struggling with breathing and dehydration. My throat is swelling and drying up.
It’s my father unleashing on the barely strung together lycan on the ground. The lycan didn’t stand a chance against this.
It didn’t get to make a sound once my father sunk his fangs into it’s fur, because my brother Aksel who’s wolf I recognize there too, ripped it’s throat open in one smoothly efficient move. A swipe of a claw and it bled open red. Before the Lycan even hit the ground.
Shuddering Markus wraps the jacket around me and tightens his hold on me again. I don’t know if he’s seen this before now either. I guess I forgot werewolves aren’t all cute and fluffy tamed dogs.
The whole modern age living and stuff. We’re still retaining the essence of our nature. That base need to be pure beast, it remains because we remain.
And stupid ass lycans provoke confrontation that is only going to raise our baser nature to be it’s brutal best.
I’m not sure which Lycan it is that they’ve managed to mangle beyond recognition. My father, my older brother Aksel, my sister Bodil and it looks like Nick and Boden are the other two werewolves that get first blood with the lycan.
Other werewolves appear, a lot of them. It looks like most of the teenagers have shape shifted and there’s bigger werewolves there too. Adults. My pack came for me. Then it hits me that they’ll take care of the rest of the lycans responsible for this.
One werewolf comes up to Markus and I slowly and softly brushes against the jacket I’m wearing. Nuzzling Markus’s arm around me, nuzzles till it’s head is under the embrace. Part of it too. Our mother with her pups, comforting her litter.
Comfort seeps into me as I feel her soft fur and her presence brush against me. Relief sweeps through me and I close my eyes again and inhale the scent around me deeply. This is what I want to remember from tonight. The sanctuary of this werewolf pack eloping me, taking me, taking me and making me a werewolf.
Our mother unhooks her head from under our embrace and looks over at the pack who are looking at us three.
My father’s face, snout, front chest, are bloodied. Red coating his fur wetly. I guess I should be terrified by the look of the warrior animal coated in blood, like it’s been raised in it. Like it’s some sort of creature from hell. But I’m not.
I’ve never seen so much blood in my life before. But I’ve never seen such savagery that made me fee safe either with just a look. It’s the steely resolve I see in those wolf eyes, that make me nod my head back at him. He’ll find them, the rest of them and he’ll kill them and I’ll be safe.
Markus is standing up beside me. He puts a hand down to help pull me up.
“Come on let’s get you fixed up.” He says helping me up as I cry out from the pain in my shoulder. “Get that bullet out of you.”
I throw my good arm around his shoulders and start limping back to camp. The Breukelen werewolf pack spread out wide around me, following my every staggering move.
We’re moving quietly and steadily back to our camp when the left flank of the pack suddenly break off.
Markus and I look across at the break away group of wolves. My sister, brother, their friends, at least eight of them, are racing after something.
The wolf of my father, looks at us and lifts its h
ead, to indicate we should keep going. Markus and me. Might be one of the other lycan perpetrators.
I shudder and we continue on. My father takes off after the tear away group of werewolves. I’m still surrounded by a lot of werewolves. It would take an army to pull me apart from them now. To get to me and that just won’t happen, not now. Not now when I’m amongst my own kind.
Werewolves, the word floats around my head. I know what it means to be one now.
Not because I was hunted and tortured. Because I feel it now. The difference in me. Because it finally happened, the shape shift.
I did it alone, terrified and tortured. It wasn’t the way pup’s are supposed to experience their first shift. I feel a hint of anger rise in me with this thought. The werewolf in me now, will never be able to not be angry about this. But given time, I can forget it. Because I’ll live past it.
Because before tonight, I was just a pup, a whelp, waiting for the shape shift. I was nothing compared to what I am now.
I’m so much more than anyone ever saw coming.
Now I’m a werewolf.
A true Breukelen werewolf.
I am Breukelen Girl.
Other novels by Breukelen Girl:
Red White and Werewolf
A podcast series and novel
The free prequel podcast can be found on www.itunes.com and www.sticherradio.com and www.talkshoe.com
The day before her twenty nineth birthday Bg Sommers is kidnapped before the eyes of her pack mate lover Paris D’arenberg, and tranquilized.
She wakes up far from her home in Brooklyn New York, without Paris, in the unfamiliar surroundings of a forest with the two alpha werewolf males, Phelan and Thane Cavello.
Together Phelan, Thane and Bg try to work through their differences to escape a hunt they have been thrust into. But Bg might be at greater risk if she sticks with the Cavellos than if she goes it alone.
A connection between the three werewolves, threatens to do more damage to Bg and her life, than she could have ever imagined.
Uncovering the meaning of the three werewolves connection will mean confronting her past, to reclaim her future especially if she is to have one with Paris.
Wolves Love
Werewolves and lycans are known for not getting along.
One could argue that you couldn't blame the lycans for their hostility. Given, to be a lycan, means as a human you were attacked by a werewolf and survived, only to turn into one of them.
Tatum Lee only knows this existence all too well as a new lycan. It's only been a few months since she turned and has found herself in a relationship, with of all creatures, a werewolf, Wiatt D'arenberg. But loving Wiatt means, Tatum has to live by the rules of Wiatt's pack , and it means there's not much living in it when the Bronx lycan community find out exactly who Tatum is.
She's either one of them, or she's not welcome, just like werewolves in the Bronx aren't welcome. Tatum's relationship with Wiatt becomes strained as she battles to find her place in her new wolf life, with Wiatt and amongst all the wolves of New York City.
Wiatt finds his thinking pushed as he must confront the reality of the werewolf culture and his own personal happiness with a lycan for his lover. Can Wiatt and Tatum find a way to make a relationship between two very different types of wolves work? Or will they simply be torn apart, by each other and every other wolf that wants to hurt them?
Wolves
Tatum Lee is a lycan. She knows it. She can’t help but not know it, because it seems everyone is always reminding her of it. Being a lycan isn't the same as being a werewolf and living and working in werewolf territory like New York City, is just asking for trouble. Being a lycan isn’t what she wants to announce upon her arrival there. Tatum just wants to be left alone.
Only that’s not going to happen, if Wiatt D’arenberg, enforcer for the Manhattan Maen pack, gets his way. It’s Wiatt’s job to ensure there are no lycan in the Manhattan Maen’s territory, including Tatum.
Having an untrained, lycan in his territory, on a lunar week means it’s up to Wiatt to ensure she’s not a danger to his pack or the public, and that means taming her. If he can tame his feelings towards the wolf he’s not supposed to want, first.
Werewolf storm
I guess you could say I was having the day from hell.
Well, it didn’t exactly start out that way, and I may have caused a little of the trouble myself, when I managed to ditch the protective detail of werewolf bodyguards who were assigned to me. But beyond that, the rest of my day, was well and truly outside of my control. Which was a bit like my life as a Breukelen pack werewolf.
Meeting shape shifting doctor, Megan Marisini from the Neiwe Teme Pack in New Jersey, New York, kind of blew my mind well and truly open. Nothing like discovery you’re not who you thought you were for your whole life, to change your day. That and say a super storm. I didn’t know about the warnings and couldn’t evacuate in time to before the storm hit and tilted my world on an axis I never saw coming.
Alpha
Bodil Sommers has never been one for attention, but as the lunar week approaches and the moon rises high in the night sky, she’s going to get a lot of it, from various werewolf males. Doesn’t help if you’re the leading pack alpha’s daughter and every werewolf in the tri-state area wants a piece of you. And not necessarily in a good way.
Two of the males pursuing her are from her own pack and proving more than a enough to keep up with. Nick Olsen an alpha and Boden Jennings a beta werewolf who are always fighting one another. They’re supposed to be the better option, than giving herself over to another pack’s alpha male or having to win her right to date, through dominance fighting.
But Bodil finds her paws full when neither male will back down and she can’t figure out what she wants, let alone who she wants, as well as having to stop an impending turf war with another werewolf pack, all before full moon. Who new dating was so complicated?
New York, leave it to the wolves.
Beasts of Burden
A Side Show Story related to the full length novel The Nature of the Beast
Bg Sommers is in Seattle to catch up with her good friend, and fellow beta werewolf, Sonny Charleston. As usual, a night out on the town wouldn’t be a night out if trouble didn’t follow them and bring Bg more attention than she can handle. When the dangerous looking alpha werewolf, Paris D’arenberg sets his sights on her.
Bg’s heart knows it’s in trouble, even before the end of the night. As thoughts of her relationship with her pack mate Conall Wakely back home fade, she realizes her heart is willing to be taken and not by just anyone.
Returning home to Brooklyn after her mind opening weekend away, Bg comes face to face with all aspects and werewolves, of her love life. In order for her to find true happiness, she has to make some personal decisions about it and risk herself in the process.
Is she a fearlessness werewolf to truly try and unburden the beast that is her werewolf heart? Conflicted she must conquer what her heart truly desires and understand that it is okay to seek love and to love fully.
Wild Life
Addison Harrington is used to leading a pretty wild life. After all, you don’t get to be a werewolf and be normal, as such. As an alpha werewolf and second in command of the Manhattan Maen werewolf pack, he’s very much used to living the werewolf way of life. He’s up to his neck in werewolves, daily, nightly and at all times.
So when he finds himself face to face with Cassidy Owens, a non-werewolf female at a pack party, he becomes a little intrigued in the human species. Even if he is somewhat unsure of what to do, other than have some fun. But can he have fun with a human woman? His version of fun? After all, Addison’s never been one for human companions, or relations as such.
As the lunar week approaches, Addison finds himself drawn to Cassidy. But his werewolf lifestyle could spell trouble, for the both of them. Before Addison can figure out how to break it off with Cassidy, she is dragged, kicking and screaming into the wer
ewolf world at large. Addison finds he must save Cassidy as much as he must save himself by confronting his own feelings for a human. Feelings he thought he’d never have.
Bleeding Hearts
Not all Werewolf packs are equal, and not all werewolves are equal either. Doll and Jeremy are 'strays', werewolves without a pack. They witnessed the decimation of their pack by a pack of Alpha werewolves. After escaping their imprisonment, they find themselves far away on the other side of the country, the shores of the Pacific, amongst the Seattle Alki Pack.
Can these two young strays overcome their fears of alpha wolves to forge a new life with new pack-mates?
Growing Up Werewolf Page 6
