“Come out here Janelle, I can put an end to all of your misery.”
I stepped forward and ignored the glare coming from Janelle.
“You are not welcome here, and she won’t walk straight out into an ambush.”
“Even when you ran away, you still became somebody else’s little side kick. I’m sure your father would be so proud of what you made of your life,” he stated smirking.
“Go home Alexander, and I will come to you tomorrow evening. We will settle this like real Alphas, we will fight for leadership and you will realise how misguided it was to underestimate me.”
“Ok dear niece, I can agree to those terms. But as standing Alpha, I choose for this match to be to the death. If you do not show tomorrow, by the time the last rays of sunlight have kissed the ground, I will assume you have come to accept you could never best me.”
He turned around and strolled away, to his fellow weres. Some stared at Janelle for a moment longer than they should, but none tried to speak to her.
“Janelle, why did you do that?” I asked, surprised by what had just been arranged.
“I can’t keep living in the shadow of my failure, Alexander was right about one thing, I did run away. But I am done with running and hiding in the shadows. Either I win this and take my inherited place as Alpha or I die and can be reunited with my little girl.”
“I don’t want to lose you Janelle,” stated David, who was finding this a difficult subject to come around to.
“I know David, but I need to do this. It’s time for me to return to my pack and if I have to do that alone then so be it, just know I care about every one of you.”
We began to go our separate ways when the ground began to shake, the sudden movement shocked us all. It went on longer than a natural earthquake would have, but the thought did not register in that moment.
Janelle shifted back to her wolf form to aid her balance, and she was supporting David who had fallen at the start and cut his head on a jagged rock.
I tried to make it over to them but came up short when a fissure appeared on the ground. Smoke was rising from it, stealing all of our
attention, which ensured we would be distracted when our home caught fire.
It wasn’t just the building, but every tent, log cabin and other dwellings that we had secured for our people to sleep in.
Ishira tried to call the fire into herself, but she was too far away to make a big difference. All we could hope, was that everyone had managed to get to safety.
By the time everything had settled down, the entire place had been destroyed. David was suffering with his head, but it wouldn’t stop him from lending a hand in searching the demolished homes.
He was swaying on his feet and staggering after each step, but he refused to listen to reason.
The other rebels came to stand with us, and I began allocating teams to search the damaged areas.
Janelle stuck close to David’s side, but they didn’t say a single word. Every one of us was stuck in a state of shock, we had no idea what had caused this but an educated guess would point to magic.
The only ones I could think of that would want to do this to us was Nyakesh and her band of followers or the Gods of Olympus.
The latter seemed a little far-fetched, but I knew we couldn’t rule out any of the options until we knew for sure.
After what must have been a couple of hours, we all stood around a giant Pyre and prepared to say goodbye to all of those that we lost. We were all dealing with our anger and pain, but that did not stop us from leaning on one another, and offering comfort where we could.
David was healed by one of our healers, and even though he felt weaker he would make a full recovery.
It turned out that we had lost fifty of our people, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. It was a mixture of creatures, including our strongest healer, four of our sorcerers, two of our mind readers and many, many more.
40
Marcus
We had Norah, David, Ishira and me joining Janelle on her journey. She had forced an unwilling promise to not interfere no matter what happened, but we had to give in under threat of her going on her own.
We had also managed to get one of our mind readers along for the ride, we hadn’t thought to ask Mika, but she had been in desperate need of the distraction.