Revenge

by Girl, Breukelen

  “I didn’t actually know he had any weapons in the house, as such.”

  “Yeah, he kept them for me. Said they were mine to use whenever I needed them, after I’d gone through that training.”

  “Have you ever used them?”

  “No, not outside of the training I was given. I mean, I guess I never really thought to.

  Or more correctly, wanted to have to think to. It’s….a blow to this werewolf’s ego to have to admit to doing, what comes very naturally and easily to the rest of the wolves in this family.

  Father wanted to make me feel safe again.” I say shrugging my shoulders. “That’s the only reason he kept the weapons. I think, the idea of them just being around here, at my disposal, was like re-establishing that sense of security again. Stupid, I know. I mean, I’m not supposed to think like that. Supposed to think like a wolf.”

  “You’re just supposed to be you, you know.”

  Markus gives me a quick tight hug and we look around us again. This is me, some part of me., a small part of me. The part that says - I am going through with this plan and that I need my weapons.

  But I can’t tell Markus that. He’d be so disappointed in me. And I can handle outright hatred from a stranger, but I can’t handle disappointment aimed at me from my brother. I pretend to sniff and wipe an imaginary tear from my face. That’s when I pick up the scent of air dried dirt. Dust.

  “Oh snap. I know where they’d be!” and before Markus can open his mouth to ask, I’m sprinting down the hallway towards the back of the house. Thoughts of disappointment are gone, as I remember dust and metal and cardboard and cotton. I know exactly where my weapons are.

  The year after I was hunted, my father got me to undertake some rather extensive weapons training. I don’t mean he got me a gun and took me out to the range.

  No, he wanted me to retain a sense of self, to reclaim myself back from the horror of being hunted as a teenager who’d just gone through the first stages of shape shifting into werewolf-hood.

  I was trained to use sai. I remember my first lesson well, I was shown these metal weapons, that looked like a cross between a dagger and a devil’s pitch fork.

  The teacher asked me if I knew what they were. I said yes, they were tonfa’s. The teacher said no they were not. Tonfa’s are like a police baton, a defensive weapon, designed to fend off attacks from other weaponry.

  Sai are both defensive and offensive weapons, used at the same time, designed to be used with lethality. I was taught to use the sai as an offensive weapon, to attack, to wound, to kill.

  I remember my breath leaving me then for a stunned moment. My father, in all his wisdom, was having me trained with weapons, but with a high sense of werewolf in the training.

  Remember, when under attack or in a fight, werewolves do not defend, they attack outright. I guess now, looking back, I could see why Markus was upset over the whole thing. He’s such a sweet soul.

  There’s just one problem with my sai, when I unwrap them from the cotton material around them. They’re not silver. They’re metal. Sure, they’ll absolutely hurt like a bitch regardless of the metal covering them. But that’s not good enough for my purposes.

  I don’t want to just hurt Gabby. I want her to experience what those first few seconds of an attack are like. They way it grips your mind. The way, in her werewolf mind, it will be forever recorded when she smells the mixture of her own blood and me at the same time.

  I want that sensation locked into her olfactory, a little gift from me to her. Kind of like the silver scar she left me with. I want to do this, so if she ever thinks to come after me again, she’ll hesitate. Hesitation is not in the werewolf’s nature. Especially an Alpha werewolf like Gabby.

  Yeah it’s a bitch fight. Werewolf to werewolf.

  5

  I’ve returned to this holding pattern over the fallout from Gabby’s attack on me. The world intruded again.

  Like a reminder of my place in it. The world at large in light is just a big city, a city of humans. But there are wolves amongst them too and I’m on the trail of a particular nasty werewolf.

  It was only ever going to a matter of time before everyone and everything caught up to Gabby Colton again. I enlisted the help of my sister, her posse, my ex boyfriend and some fellow Breukelen werewolves, to ensure that Gabby’s time in hiding, was severely lessened.

  Because my plan is contingent on time too. But mostly because I was sick of feeling like I’d been labeled a victim. Like I had to wait for someone else to come and clean up the mess I’d been thrust in. To make it go away and make everything alright again.

  Yeah, I got impatient. Then I got angry.

  There’s only so many do-se-do’s you can dance around the issue, when you’re constantly watching it play back and forth between your family and pack and your boyfriend, before something gives.

  Paris doesn’t know. Yet.

  The scents of sweat, deodorant, laundry detergent, pollution, petrol, urination, the fresh ink smell of newspapers, alcohol, hot dogs, all mingle together. You think it’d be hard to define one smell, a scent when there’s so many. Urban landscapes are filled with them. They emit life, and leave trails. A calling card on what’s happening around you, if you pay enough attention to them.

  A werewolf can scent pretty much anything. An exceptional werewolf, can track, by scent alone. I haven’t had to put much investment into my tracking skills through out my life.

  I’d like to think I lead a fairly normal life, for a werewolf. Girl by day, werewolf by moonlight, it’s a balance thing that you have your whole life to get used to working out and around.

  But I can remember scent things like a library catalogue. Scents lock onto images and my brain just locks it all in together like jigsaw pieces . And so when I smell that exact scent again, the memory of whatever that smell is like, is recalled with ease.

  Every werewolf has a scent.

  Just like every human has a body odor for lack of a prettier description. Today’s werewolves have a base scent, their “human” smell if you will, inter-laced with their wolf. For Paris, it’s almonds and amber to my snout.

  He says I smell like vanilla and marshmallows. For Gabby Colton, it’s something like ginger and brandy swirling around fur.

  I know her scent well. We’ve had several up close and nasty encounters with one another which have lead to bloodied noses, claw marks and bitch scratches on one another. We really don’t get along at all.

  The thing with scent is no two are exactly alike. They are unique like a finger print if you will. There are subtle similarities when the wolves are from the same family. But you can still differentiate between siblings from one family.

  That’s why I know, when my nose twitches and picks up the trace lingering of ginger and brandy on the air, that Gabby is close. Instantly my inner wolf stirs. I stand stock still and start surveying my landscape, scoping out the layout and those in it.

  It’s called going into wolf mode. The werewolf in me has an ability to take over my otherwise human thinking, if I let it. And in times of searching for an enemy, a predator or prey, letting the wolf take over, is a very good idea.

  The mindset of the werewolf is different to the human side of me. The human side of me will balance and weigh options, over think and analyse. The werewolf in me, is more fine tuned to knowing, than having to think, about how to entrap its target. About how to come out the victor.

  My enemy is here, in the same place as me. My enemy, Gabby. Gabby, who no one has seen or heard from since the attack. I’m close to her, I know this because her scent lingers. And it’s unmistakable to me. My eyes start looking for Gabby. She’s rather unmistakable, not like she could really blend in, unless she tried to go incognito.

  A tall blonde, that looks to me like a Californian blonde. Beautiful and boring. Exactly like a copy of every other beautiful blonde around. There isn’t anything exotic about her.

  But as a result, there isn’t anything terminally avera
ge about her either, which makes spotting her in a crowd of blended, normal looking people, and werewolves so much easier.

  This isn’t a chance encounter. So it wouldn’t matter that much if I didn’t catch a whiff of her scent. I’ve done something, that wasn’t expected of me. That nobody asked me to do. That nobody wanted me to do.

  So I say- screw this overly protected, waiting around for something dangerous to happen to me shit. Again. I’m not a China doll, and I’m not all together human and breakable.

  Gabby already got her chance to go at me. And she did. She stabbed me and kidnapped me in front of pack. And nobody did anything to help. They just let her. Then she caged me and force fed me silver, so I couldn’t shape shift. I had to suffer as the silver coursed through my body, poisoning me while I lay bleeding.

  She had a good shot at me. And she took it and she tried to cover her tracks when she up and left New York, running away from what she’d done. And she did a pretty good job about that too. Pretty good.

  But Breukelen werewolves are better than pretty good at tracking. Every werewolf pack is different.

  The Breukelen pack,is the third largest in New York. Most packs would look at us, as a working class pack, filled with many Beta wolves and only a handful of Alpha werewolves. Most packs would look at us, like we’re just a regular urban werewolf pack, incorporating our wolf selves amongst the humans, living as best we can in harmony, with them.

  Our pack is solid, strong and highly underestimated. We are made up of fighters and warriors and leaders. Our pack leaders are chosen with high regard, to continue to uphold our pack’s status.

  They raise us wolves to not be complacent, and sloppy. We’re a pack that hasn’t forgotten our history or tried to just live a human life, to be like the humans. We blend, but we do not change ourselves for conformity reasons, like the Manhattan Maen seem to have.

  Those wolves, the majority, have become soft. They’re so busy being wolves in a human world that they only ever acknowledge their werewolves when Paris requires them to be wolves.

  Werewolves like Gabby, forget werewolves like me are more schooled in the old ways. Scenting, tracking, and hunting what is ours. Of bringing the fight to our enemy instead of avoiding it, or waiting for the next strike.

  I’ve taken the fight to Gabby. I planned to attack hard and fast and with my pack. An usual tactic by today’s werewolf standards.

  Most werewolves, even Beta wolves like me, like to prove their superiority and reputation by fighting one on one, to show how skilled they truly are. I’m not much of a fighter by werewolf standards. But by human standards, I look like a damn champion.

  But I’m no match for Gabby Colton, one on one. Alpha against Beta. My strategy wasn’t about safety in numbers it was about improving the odds, when going up against an Alpha she-bitch. It was about making sure everything went right according to my plan.

  The plan is simple enough. Mission statement: My turn to hurt Gabby. My reputation amongst the Manhattan Maen werewolves, needs to be firmly cemented as a Do not fuck with me association, around my name.

  And I’m itching to deliver this message to those that witnessed my attack and did absolutely nothing to stop it or help me afterwards.

  I’m a Breukelen, not some yuppie, soft bellied wolf from the upper east side who’s only real advantage is she’s taller than me in Stiletto heels and has a different bloodline.

  Fighting is not how the Manhattan Maen handle most things. And I’m dating their pack leader, the werewolf that Gabby would much rather she has to deal with. Probably, I’m guessing, because she thinks she can use her feminine wiles on him, to get not much more than a slap on the wrist for what she’s done.

  Gabby has status in the Manhattan Maen pack, because she’s only one of two Alpha females. Where as me, by comparison, is just an average, common, Beta wolf.

  Of course, the fact that she attacked her pack leader’s girlfriend, might ruin that standing for her. Well, lessen her value to them. Not that Paris was ever going to mate with her. No matter what her deranged little mind might think.

  In Brooklyn, baby, we know how to rumble.

  Which is part of the problem of being a Breukelen wolf, our reputation for fighting is big. We’re very well known for it. For our fighting being the core strength of our pack. Literally. So you see, I feel as though I have to do this. There’s not much choice in the matter. Because not only does it look poorly back on me, if Gabby is let off the hook for what she did to me. But it lessen my pack’s standing amongst the greater werewolf community if I, do not make an example of her.

  My resolve is firmly planted in my very human mind and my werewolf agrees with the thinking that I plan to do more than make an example of her. I’m going to destroy her.

  It wasn’t so hard to figure out where Gabby was. I knew she had a sister who was no longer with the Manhattan Maen pack. I knew this because her sister and Paris once dated. See what I mean about my love life being complicated?

  Werewolves, sometimes I think we give humans a run for their money when it comes to relationships and love. Werewolves love hard. We fight just as hard.

  So when I saw Gabby lift her head a little higher than eye level, tilting her nose upwards to sniff at the air, I knew I was in for a hard fight too. She turned around just in time to witness me pouncing down atop of her.

  She managed to shoot a hand out, shape shifting it to a wolf’s claw striking out at me as I came down atop of her. Women screamed, the humans scattered away from the fight.

  Gabby’s claws rips into my upper shoulder blade, tearing the top of it open, like it’s made of paper. Gritting her teeth and growling, like a mad dog at me. I’m aware enough to feel her claws curl and tighten into my flesh, cutting into my bones. She keeps the pressure on that claw curling around me, even as she fights, tries to fight me off her, with her still human, right hand and arm.

  I have to say, that’s kind of impressive. To keep focusing on that one particular action whilst fighting the rest of me. Because she’s kind of immobilizing me at the same time. I can’t essentially get off her or move away because she’s keeping us joined together. Punching, clawing it out on the street.

  I hear my collar bones snap and feel my shoulder automatically sag in giving way as she kept pulling at me with that claw. I grunt loudly, clamping my mouth shut hard, quickly. She’s trying to tear me, quite literally apart.

  Gabby didn’t get to do worse to me, because Bodil jumped in and pulled me off of her and took Gabby down faster, and harder, than the other woman knew what was coming. Gabby is no match for my Alpha sister whose dominance fights around Brooklyn, are somewhat of legend.

  But Gabby did manage to break my collar bone and put in me in a fair amount of pain.

  Lunar week special, I guess. But I can live with that, because a day out from the eclipse, I can still shape shift and heal. There’s still some time left. But more than that, I can live with it because now I have Gabby, not just in my sights, but in my grasp and this thing between us, is almost over.

  “Wait.” I pant at Bodil.

  She stands up over an unconscious Gabby Colton, sprawled out cold on the street. I walk back over and look back at her and lean down. Slamming my fist into her cheekbone and snapping it back.

  Gabby’s faces bounces with the impact. “That’s better.” I say shaking my fist quickly. The skin on my knuckles has split open and is stinging. But I don’t care.

  “I’ll take care of this. You start shape shifting. Get ready for the next part of the plan. You’ve got to be at full strength for this.” Bodil says. She looks at me as if to sink in the meaning of what we’re doing. “I’ll help you get out of the shift in time, don’t worry about that.” I nod my head back at my sister.

  “You’re going to take your enemy down.” She reiterates back at me, punctuating her words with depth and meaning. Bodil knows a thing or two about warring with werewolves.