Filed To Story: Claimed by the Alpha I Hate Book Read Free
round, creating a song that sounded like a banshee’s wail.
Breyona cleared her throat, sucking my attention away our surroundings. She shifted from foot to foot, shuddering from the cold breeze even though her werewolf genes protected her from the brunt of it. 1
“Her body was found in a clearing just ahead. It’s barely a minute walk inside the forest line, but you’ll know it once you see it.” She said, her voice gradually quieting until it became a whisper. “There’s…
there’s still a lot of blood.”
I wanted to tell Breyona not to worry about me and that I’d be safe, but the moment I locked eyes with the shadows lingering along the forests edge, words escaped me. I turned away from my best-friend and headed in the direction she pointed me in, feeling the air shift when she finally left.
“Please be careful, Daisy.”
It was the last thing I heard Breyona say, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t make promises that were so easily broken.
Slipping between a small gap in the trees, I thought about how much things had changed and how being careful was no longer an option.
The crunch of leaves beneath my feet silenced my thoughts, and with every branch I stepped on, the image of a blood-crusted femur bone would flash in my mind. I kept my eyes peeled, staring through the darkness, embracing every cell in my body that reminded me what I was: A fucking predator.
In a way, I was all but daring a witch to come out and attack me.
It truly wasn’t a long walk to find where Cordelia lost her life, but I had a feeling my sense of time was skewed by grief.
There was a small clearing up ahead, barely large enough to fit two full-grown wolves. Moonlight streamed down on the patch of grass, illuminating the large spot of blood that had long ago soaked into the earth.
I entered the clearing, skirting around the edges of the blood stain. Unable to help myself, an image of
Cordelia came to mind, her lying helpless and wounded as she bled out.
My eyes fell shut as another wave of pain wracked my body. This time it wasn’t from the mate-bond, but from myself. I silently wondered how much more a heart could take before it seized up and stopped working all together.
Cordelia and I weren’t close. In fact, we barely had anything more than a student- teacher relationship, but she was someone I trusted-someone I looked up to and wanted good things for. There was a kindness to her, an inner light that reminded me of my grandma in so many ways.
To know that this was where she died, cold and alone, only brought more pain.
‘…your fault, Daisy.’ The irritating voice in the back of my head whispered, it’s words like freshly sharpened razor blades against my skin. ‘All your fault.’1
I was seconds away from fully descending into madness by telling it to shut the fuck up when the shadows, who had been watching my every move since leaving the hospital, whispered in my ear.
‘Over there…by the tree.’
The shadows hadn’t spoken a word the entire trek through the forest, choosing to keep their distance even more so than usual.
I had a strong inkling that they could sense. how close to the edge I was, and knew that with every passing second, my foot came closer and closer to slipping.
Tendrils of shadow slithered along the forest floor, gathering around the base of a particular tree. It was bigger than the rest, it’s roots more pronounced as they crawled across the earth, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.
There was a groove along one of the longer roots, a hint of the tree’s pale flesh peeking through its bark.
I had no choice but to step in her blood, wincing as I did so, to get a closer look.
‘It’s a sigil…’ Maya whispered.
This was the first I’d heard from her since waking up in the forest. I’d almost thought she was unaffected by what happened, but hearing her voice and how weak it sounded,
I knew that wasn’t the case.
Maya was afraid, terrified that there was some possibility, no matter how small, that we were the ones who killed Cordelia.
The realization made my stomach drop, but I couldn’t vomit here, not where she lost her life.
The cold wetness of her blood seeping into the knees of the sweatpants I wore was sickening, but I had to get closer to make out the faint network of lines crisscrossing one another.
It was jagged and rushed, but the more I stared at it, the more it looked like a crescent moon with a constellation as it’s background.
As I pressed my fingertips against its rough surface, a rush of magic tickled my skin.
My eyes fell shut as a gust of frigid wind passed through, ruffling my hair, and sending it scattering over my shoulders.
Carried on the wind was a voice. Or perhaps, an echo of a voice.
“Daisy…”
“Cordelia?!” My eyes snapped open, darting around the clearing but there was no one here.
I removed my fingers from the sigil and the wind didn’t just die down, it vanished all together. This had to be part of the magic she’d put into the sigil, which meant I needed to shut off my frazzled thoughts and listen.
For the second time, I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against the carving. Another gust of wind passed through, cutting through the sweatshirt I wore and chilling me down to the bone. When
Cordelia’s voice drifted by, I didn’t recoil.
Instead, I let it soak into my skin.
It snuffed my other thoughts out one by one, like the flame of a candle. Her voice grew louder, and I clung to every last word.
“Daisy, this will be our last lesson together, for as you already know, I no longer walk this earth. This sigil will let you see the truth, a truth others have fought to conceal. I must warn you; this spell is as brutal as my death and if you choose to accept it’s magic, you will feel every second of my pain.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. All I knew was that ignoring this in fear of the pain would be the biggest injustice I’d ever done to Cordelia, and she deserved so much more than that.
“Show me…” I whispered; my voice carried away by the wind. “I’m ready.”
“You’re going to think you’re the one dying, that it’s your soul that’s floating away but I assure you, it is not. When the pain becomes too much, you must remember one thing. You are alive, Daisy. You are among the living, and you still have work to do.”
The world fell out from beneath my knees like water sucked down a drain, spiraling into the furthest reaches of the dark.
There was no more wind, no more blood seeping into my pants, only silence.
Then, like my soul had been plucked from my body and tossed into another, I blinked and was somewhere else entirely.
Instantly, I could tell that I had no control over this form. Thoughts drifted through its head, flowing like a winding stream, but I couldn’t tap into them. The terrain was too rocky, too tumultuous to allow me to get any closer. Instead, I was left with whatever stray thoughts washed ashore and the emotions that followed them.
I stood on the shoulder of a narrow, winding road. Clusters of trees surrounded me like a cage, spanning up and up and up to kiss a sky full of stars and to bask in rays of silver moonlight. By all accounts, it was beautiful, but there was a sourness to the fresh air that felt an awful lot like foreboding.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?