Chapter 0003

“Yep. That’s me, orphan Annie over here.” I smirked at the three musketeers. “My parents didn’t want me, so they gave me up. Better than what yours did, Kaylee. Late term abortions are bad enough, but to try it when the child is outside the womb? Ouch, that must’ve stung. Can’t say I blame them, though.” I said, inspecting my nails. “What family would want a magicless wolf?”

It was a cheap shot for sure, but so was the time when Kaylee poisoned my food with wolfsbane for a week straight. If I thought hard enough, I could still taste the blood-tainted vomit in my mouth.

Besides, nothing I said was a lie. It was common knowledge Kaylee’s mother tried to murder her as a child—all because Kaylee here didn’t have abilities of her own.

“You slick bitch. You think you’re so funny, don’t you?” Kaylee hissed.

“I’m hilarious, ask anyone.” I deadpanned.

I ran through the different scenarios that could get me out of this, but there weren’t many. All three were approaching from various sides and I had a gaping pit of snakes at my back. Even with my father’s training, and the lessons I’d learned from spying on the recruits’ sessions, I wasn’t going to make it out unharmed.

My abilities could get me out of this, but that was a box I could never, ever open. If I was going down, you could bet my perky ass was taking one of them with me.

Ivy Davenport whipped her bleached ponytail over her shoulder. “She won’t be laughing when she’s being strangled by a boa constrictor.”

A what now?

“Have you even seen a boa constrictor, Ivy?” I asked, my eyebrows sky high in the face of her sheer dumbassery. “For crying out loud, these are Black Mamba’s.”

“Same fucking thing.” She spat; her toilet water eyes narrowed into slits.

I scoffed. “Yeah. Totally, same fucking thing.”

“Darlin,’ last I checked it don’t really matter. Either way, you’re going to meet them bad boys up close and personal. I’ve been dyin’ to try out this new move we just learned in Krav Maga class.” Weston drawled, rubbing his hands together, looking like a predator in the bad way (if you catch my drift).

Laughter tickled the back of my throat. Jokes on him, I knew the move too.

Kaylee and Ivy closed in on my left and right, crouched in fighting positions with their hands out, ready to grab hold of me incase I tried to flee. I braced myself for the impact of his meaty fist. As it hit my cheek and the blunt pain of busted blood vessels slapped me upside the face, I made a show of falling to the ground.

“Get the hell up.” Ivy snarled.

 “What a fucking weakling.” Kaylee laughed.

Oh, if only they knew. If I wasn’t worried about getting my revenge on those who sentenced me here, these three would be dead in the dirt. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I whimpered, my lower lip quiver pathetically. All three exploded in laughter, and while the sound made my eardrums contemplate suicide, it kept them from noticing the fist full of dirt I held in my hand. I didn’t give him time to make the first move. That punch of his had my adrenaline flowing, singing its siren-song of blood, agony, and beautiful pain.

Since Kaylee was such a grade-A bitch, I threw the fistful of dirt in her face and swung without abandon. She let out a squeal of outrage that quickly turned into hacking and sputtering. I ducked in time to dodge Ivy’s heavy-handed punch, but not in time to miss Weston’s knee-kick.

It hit me in the gut hard enough to rip the air from my lungs.

Mid-kick, time slowed, and I noticed something about Weston’s form. While his kick was solid, his balance was subpar. I wasn’t usually a glutton for pain, but once the idea popped into my head, it was just too sweet to resist.

The force of his kick made me stumble back, but there was only open air and a pit full of snakes to break my fall. Flailing, I reached out and snagged the back of Weston’s shirt. The second the ultra-soft cotton brushed my fingertips, I grabbed on for dear life and used his body weight to pull myself closer.

The seductive purr of victory washed over me as I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. I grinned without abandon because even Weston Phillips couldn’t fight gravity.

Weston let out a wail that would put Kaylee’s hyena laugh to shame, trying valiantly but failing to free himself from my hold. Didn’t he know? Once I sink my claws into something, I never let go.

As for me, I tossed my head back and let loose a wild laugh, pulling us both into the pit of angry venomous snakes.

Delphine Hawk, my favorite Medic in all of the First Division, took one look at me, covered in blood, hair tangled to hell, and a snake still dangling from my back, and let out a string of curses that made me blush—and I had the potty mouth of a sailor.

It was Delphine that took care of me the first time Harriet knocked me unconscious. When I’d made the grave mistake of pissing off Phineas Striker and received those ten lashings, she was who I called out for in those blurry moments before the numbing relief of unconsciousness took hold.

“I am going to be the youngest wolf in history to die of a heart attack, and it’s all because of you, Lilac.” She groaned, rubbing at her eyes. “You’re not even a recruit here and I swear I see you more than any other patient. I’ve got your aura practically memorized at this point.”

I made a sound of agreement deep in my throat. Delphine was the one person in this entire shit hole that I semi-trusted. Delphine was easily the best aura reader in the country, and even she could barely get a read on me. It meant my emotions were tightly under wraps, easy to tuck away in some dark corner of my mind where they would never again see the light of day.

I batted my eyelashes at her, swaying on my feet since the Black Mamba’s venom was currently coursing through my body. I’d lost all feeling in my left leg on the walk here, which wasn’t a good sign at all.

“Aw, you care.” I cooed.

“Hush up, troublemaker.” She grumbled, side eyeing me.

Delphine ushered me into one of the examination rooms. She flitted to the tall medicine cabinet against the wall and snatched the key from out of her pocket. Pill bottles rattled on the shelves and prepackaged syringes clattered to the floor in her hasty search.

“Tell me how you’re feeling, Lilac. I can see you fighting to stay awake. You know by now that you got to stay conscious for me.”

Fuck, it felt like my body was on fire. Was my blood actually boiling in my veins, or was that just the venom? I hadn’t felt pain like this since the Crawford twins made me play punching bag for entire class of trainees.

“Like, emotionally or physically? Because emotionally, I’m a ray of fucking sunshine. Physically? Eh, I could be better.”

Delphine turned to face me with a syringe in one hand and a large pair of forceps in another. She had that loathsome look on her face, like she was seeing me. I didn’t fucking like it, even half-dead from the Black Mamba’s venom.

“Is it time for my annual pap smear already?” I teased, straining my eyes as my vision blurred.

Delphine snorted, utterly unamused by my bullshit. “This is not the time for jokes, Lilac. You know if you were a human you’d be dead right now?”

“It’s not like I had a whole damned parade to escort me to the Medic’s unit. I walked here on my own two feet.” I snarled weakly.

Poor Weston had to be fished out, then carried away by Ivy and Kaylee. I had garnered a few more bites by wrestling him back in a second time, but I didn’t regret in the slightest.

Delphine pulled the Black Mamba from my back and chucked it into the trash can, slamming a textbook on top to keep it from springing back out. She forced me onto the padded seat, and while she hooked up a heart rate monitor and jabbed a needle into my arm, I continued to fight to stay awake.

The two of us fell into a comfortable silence and I watched her closely as I had every other time I came to her for mending. Her eyebrows were always pinched, that much remained the same. Sometimes her nose would wrinkle, but only when the wound was severe. If it was messy, her lips would part, and the tip of her tongue would rest against her canine.

It was her ability that made her so skilled at her job. Reading auras was a lucrative business, one that could reveal a lot of secrets about a person. There was a reason many of the werewolves steered clear of Delphine, choosing other medics to tend to their wounds.

She had skin as dark as the night sky, warm from its rich brown tint. There were splotches of white skin around her mouth, left eye, down her neck, and on both arms that she’d once told me was due to a skin condition called Vitiligo. I’d found the two contrasts in colors interesting as a young teen, and Delphine had been more than happy to educate me.

“Alright, I’ve got you hooked up on a slow intravenous injection. The anti-venom will take about an hour or so to get into your system, but I need to monitor you the entire time incase you have a bad reaction.” She huffed, her shoulders slumping as she settled into her chair.

“Yes, Ma—” I began, grinning when her face morphed into a death glare. “Yes, Delphine.”

If there was one thing Delphine hated, it was being called ma’am.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what happened at the snake pit. Clearly you managed to fill it up.”

“It was an accident.” I stated plainly.

Delphine lifted an eyebrow, pinning me in place with those smoky eyes of hers. I’d been around her enough to know her tells, and right now her expression was telling me she smelled bullshit.

“Mmm, okay. An accident, I see. Let me guess, Weston falling in was an accident too?” She mused, her voice taking on a smart-ass tone.

I fought a grin. I liked Delphine more when she got snarky.

“Yep.” I popped the ‘p.’

“Really?” She pressed, then leaned back in her chair. “Then what’s this I heard about you trying to strangle him with a snake.”

I held back a laugh. Again, it garnered me a few more bites, but it was so worth it.

“There wasn’t any trying—” I started but caught myself when Delphine’s eyebrows shot up. “I mean, an accident. It was an accident, of course.”

“Right, that makes sense.” Delphine drawled, not at all convinced by what either of us were saying. “And you cackling as you and Weston “fell” into the snake pit?”

I grinned manically. “That? Oh, that was on purpose.”

Then, Delphine did the one thing I could’ve never anticipated. She flicked the lock on the door and rolled over to my bedside. Leaning in much too close, she lowered her voice to a whisper.

“I want to help you, Lilac. I can’t stand seeing you here anymore. Every day I think that this will be it, that this will be the day they bring your body in here.” Her smoky eyes were tight with fear even though the room was thoroughly sound-proofed. She wouldn’t just be punished for this. She’d be killed. “I want to help you escape.”

“You can’t be serious, right now. Even if I escaped this place, what do you think my life would look like? They’d hunt me, Delphine. I’d be a rogue, fair game for any werewolf in the country to kill. Besides, I wouldn’t run.”

“What would you do, Lilac?” Delphine asked.

The thought was so sweet, so fragrant that I couldn’t help but smile.

“I’d find my father. I’d kiss him and tell him how sorry I am for what I was about to do. Then, I’d find the boy that betrayed me—though, he’s more than likely a man now, and I’d end his life. Once I drained him of his blood, I’d come back here. I’d come back to this hellhole…and I’d burn it to the fucking ground.”

By the time Delphine cleared me, night had fallen and most of the recruits had ventured back to the barracks.

It was now 9 p.m. and despite the fact that the sun was still out, it had lost most of its intensity. The rays of gold which were responsible for lightening my hair over the course of four years, had softened into mellow tones of yellow and orange. They trailed along the horizon, weaving in between the snowcapped mountaintops in the distance, like streaks of bleeding water paint.

The rumbling of my painfully empty stomach brought me back to the present. I hadn’t eaten since this morning, when I woke up at the crack of dawn to sneak into the kitchens. It was the only way I could scrounge up a decent meal considering the lunch staff were a bunch of heartless fucks.

It took energy I didn’t have to trudge across camp to the barracks. There were two of them, both sitting next to one another. The plain brick buildings were unassuming, lined with windows that looked into the trainee’s dorms. They were long and about three stories high. Wedged in the middle of the barracks was a smaller and equally plain building with rows upon rows of showers inside.

My room, if it could even be called that, had nothing of the sort. It was a glorified coat closet with a cracked mirror, stained toilet, and a sink that spewed water that smelled like sewage. The one and only time I’d asked to have the sink fixed I was laughed at, then thrown into the mud for daring to speak in the first place.

Every step was calculated so that my busted sneakers didn’t squeak against the tile. My room was two doors away from the staircase that led to the second level. With my shiv gripped in my hand, I nudged open my door and crept inside.

After a quick scan of my room, I shut the door behind me and set to work rearming my make-shift security system. It wasn’t much, just a bunch of empty soup cans I fished out of the trash, held together by decaying string, but it gave me a head start if anyone decided to break into my room.

Keeping my blood-stained clothes on, shoes included (you never know when you might need to run), I crawled onto the lumpy mattress sitting in the corner of the room. There had once been a bed frame in here, but it had been so rusted that the smallest bit of weight made it collapse.

With a groan, I curled up on my side and stuffed my shiv under my pillow. It was never too far from reach.

“Monday’s suck ass.” I muttered into my scrappy, moth-eaten blanket.

Holding close the promise of the breakfast I’d steal tomorrow morning, I let the thoughts of bacon and scrambled egg chase me into heavenly oblivion.