Part 1

My name is Jericho and I’m my father’s biggest regret and disappointment. Malachi tried to tell Kai about some prophecy about me but he was pulled back into the realms of the dead before he could reveal anything about it to my father.

My life was pretty good for a while. I went to school and I joined training sessions on weekends with my father’s Zetas. I lived in a castle where everything was done for me. I had never even made my own bed and I had always gotten everything I wanted.

I’m the oldest of three and I’m a mixture of my mother and father. I have one blue eye and one green eye. I have light brown hair, probably from my mother’s blonde hair, and my father’s tanned skin. I’m a few months shy of my seventeenth birthday and I have a year left of high school.

My younger brother, Gabriel, is almost sixteen and my sister Adira is fourteen. Gabriel looks like Kai and Adira is a mixture of Adara and Adelie. We live in Oban, Scotland, and we have the biggest pack in the world with nearly twelve thousand members.

My family is full of important and badass people, people with powers, so the expectation to be great is always there and the disappointment when you fail is so much worse. I was sent to attend school on the Isle of Mull to learn to fit in with humans since Oban is a wolf town.

Kai firmly believed that I had to learn to be humble in order to become a better king and not just be the pampered prince of Oban. He wanted me to have a normal kind of life, like he had growing up and Adelie agreed with him. 

At school, I was naturally popular because my alpha aura drew people to me. I didn’t partake in physical sports like football and such, because humans weren’t as strong as us. I’m taller than most, reaching six foot three inches with an average weight of two hundred pounds. I worked out and I ran ten miles every day but I wasn’t even close to Kai in physique yet.

I’m lucky because I’ve also found my Beta. His parents died in a car accident when he was ten and since then he’s lived in the castle with me because his grandparents couldn’t handle his unruly behavior as a child. We were opposites and also alike. Slade hated bullies but he was quick to lose his temper although he didn’t nearly get into as much trouble as I did.

Slade is my brother in every sense of the word and there’s literally nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. Slade prefers to train over weekends with the Zetas since the Beta’s main role was to protect the Alpha so that weekend I was on my own.

We were traveling to Campbeltown and I was sitting in the back of the school bus even though Kai said that Carter would take me. I had opted out of it, since I had my car taken away as punishment for the whole Shawna affair. One thing about Kai though, he was very hard on me but he also protected me because he never told my mother about Shawna.

“Are you still game for tonight?” Andreas asked me as he leaned over the back of his seat facing me.

“Of course, it’s going to be epic as long as we’re not caught,” I said to him and he grinned at me.

We had a plan for that night. We were about thirty students on the bus and we would be sleeping over in Campbeltown that night, so that we would be well rested and fresh for the championship races the following day. We planned to steal the school bus and go out when all the coaches were asleep.

We weren’t bad kids and we got into normal trouble so this was our one act of rebellion. I knew my father wouldn’t approve, but what could he do? Kill me? Blaise had been quiet all day too since I pretty much ignored his warnings.

We arrived at the school and we settled down for the night after eating dinner in the school cafeteria. I was too excited to sleep and at 10 PM, Andreas made his way over to where I lay on the bunk bed. He touched my shoulder and I opened my eyes.

“It’s time to go,” he whispered.

I got up and we crept out of the sleeping hall with fifteen other boys. We were a mixture of football and basketball players with me and Andreas from the athletics team. This was also my normal social circle at school, except Slade, because he wasn’t here.

We pushed the school bus down the road and once we were far enough away I started it and drove towards Kilean. I had another group of friends there that we were meeting up with. They would supply the liquor we wanted. I had arranged all of this before we even left the school grounds.

An hour later, I pulled off the side of the road and climbed out of the bus as two boys waited next to a car. We shook hands and I handed them cash in exchange for the bottles of whiskey. Athletes don’t normally drink a lot so it didn’t take much for the others to quickly reach a drunken state and I drank more and faster than I’ve ever done in my life.

“We should get back,” I said, feeling happier and slightly drunk.

“Yeah, before someone wakes up and realizes we’re gone,” Andreas said. 

We all laughed at everything and stumbled back onto the bus. It was nearing 1 AM and my first race was at 7 AM. I knew I would be fine but the rest of my team would be suffering.

I started the bus and turned back towards Campbeltown. The guys were singing some awful kind of team building tune and I was laughing too much at how terrible they were. The road we were driving on was straight and I knew we were about fifteen minutes from the school.