The Second Covenant

On the way down the stairs, he put on my father’s shirt and I gave him my cell phone to call his pack. My dad was pacing, and while I could smell his agitation, it didn’t make me feel feral. I had a death grip on Druex’s hand when I looked at my mother. I didn’t want her to be afraid of me. But she came right over and slipped her arm around my shoulders. “Better?” She asked and I nodded, letting her steer me over to her favorite chair. She sat and I sank down at her feet, curling my arm over her knees to rest my head in her lap. “Start talking.” My dad snapped at Druex and I looked up at him. He gave me a small smile.
“I didn’t know what Cherish was, other than the wolf I scented in her.”

And off he went into a small history lesson.
“My family, my whole family, are wolves. Twelve lines, packs, but we’re mostly scattered around the less populated areas.” I could understand why. “So what made you show up here?” My father was being very gruff, angry and protective. He loved me.

Druex made a waffling motion with his head, “The Trengereid’s breed mostly males. Which in any pack is hard. To many dominants. My father has eleven brothers, and all of them had boys, I’ve only got seven female cousins, no sisters, and the rest about…forty cousins my age are male. We tried for a long time to be one pack, live together and work to find some kind of balance. But almost a hundred wolves and only twenty percent of them female…” he shrugged. “To many cooks in the kitchen. You heard Cherish ask me what a Lupa is.”

My father nodded shortly and my mom started stroking my hair. A gesture that made my eyes feel heavy, my muscles relax. “That would be THE dominant female of a pack. There’s only one every generation or so, but in my parent’s generation there isn‘t one. Think of it as a Queen among wolves.”

My mother, ever intelligent asked the next question. “So who’s the King?” Druex sighed. “My Uncle Darren is posing as Ulfric, king, of his generation and for most of the family. There was an argument a long time ago about the fact that our bloodline was the only known to carry Lycanthropy genetically. Your average werewolf is bitten by someone else who’s infected. So since we’re born into it, we’ve had to find our females outside of the family.” Yeah inbreeding was a bitch.
“The argument was that some of the uncles and the grand parents were of the mind that biting women left and right was the best way to get as many women infected and then possibly be chosen as mates by the younger generation. But it doesn‘t work that way.”

He sighed wearily and rubbed the back of his neck. “My cousins and I, the wolves who were with me last night, we’re the ones who didn’t agree with the others. So we got kicked out of the pack. My Uncle was afraid I’d challenge him for control of the pack, so that I could veto the vote. And he was right. I was planning on it. Got my butt banished though first. Ipswich just kind of…called to me.” He cast me a look.

They kicked him out because he had morals? I wanted to growl furiously at that. “How should it work then?” He gave a pensive frown. “We can smell our true mates. The way regular wolves do. There is one mate, for life, period. So by biting some random woman, who doesn’t carry the scent marker for a mate, is wrong. You just screw up her life and she gets furry once a month, goes nuts and needs to hunt, and risks exposing us to the humans.”

My mom waved her hand like she was pushing that aside. “Okay, so far all I’m hearing is back ground here. How and why does this affect my daughter?” Druex looked down at me, still frowning. “She was either born with a dormant strand of Lycanthropy, or she was bitten. Her scent is familiar to me, but you,” He turned to my father. “You don’t smell like a wolf. At all.”
I felt my mother twitch and I lifted my head. “What mom?” She looked down at me with huge eyes and I could smell, fear, but not of me or Druex. She was remembering something. “You got bitten by a dog when you were five. You don‘t remember it.” I shook my head and tried to draw up that image. “No, I don’t.” I looked at my father and he was frowning. “I don’t remember that either.”

My mom shook her head. “You weren’t home, you’d just started up the firm in Salem. Some business meeting kept you away for the weekend. Cherish was outside playing in the yard and I was sitting on the terrace, watching her. There was this big dog, I thought it was a dog anyway, and it bit her. On the arm. But within a few hours the bite healed like nothing happened and she didn’t remember. I thought maybe I’d seen something, hallucinated. I told you about it later,” She said to my dad and he frowned harder. “You started putting wards on the house after that so things couldn’t get in.”

The light bulb went on for my dad and he recalled that event and Druex started pacing. His bare feet soundless on the wood floors. “And she never changed?” My mother shook her head. “No, she’d get moody during the full moon, especially after she turned thirteen and gained her powers. But that’s all.” Druex looked absolutely furious, and I wasn’t sure why. But his voice was calm, level even though I could smell the wolf prowling closer to the surface for him. “Do you remember anything special about the wolf?”

My mother shrugged. “It was black and grey. Sort of the way a older man’s hair goes salt and pepper with age. I thought it was just a really big dog with weird blue eyes.” A Trengereid trait. The rage swelled around Druex, but he didn’t say anything. He just nodded like he was filing that away for later. “Who’s the…er, Ulfric?” My dad said, looking at me questioningly and I nodded. “Of your generation?”
“Me.” Druex said absently, still thinking. “And who’s the Lupa?”

“Me.” I said and my father’s eyes flashed black before he could control himself. “So by biting you, that wolf gave you lycanthropy and more power?” My mom asked me and Druex shook his head. “Not really, Cherish already had the power as one of your bloodline.” He said to my father. “She had the potential from day one to go either way, be a dominant of the pack or not. But the way she grew up, the experiences that shaped her into who she is have made her...more dominant that the dominant females. Lupa.”

I sighed and put my cheek back on my mother’s lap. “He means I have the ability to be a total bitch.” I said with a smile and Druex scowled. “I don’t mean that at all.” I pointed my finger at him. “But it’s true.” His lips twitched just a little. “Whatever.” Tactful. Not admitting anything.
“So she’s a really dominant, half a werewolf, which means what to us humans?” My father said tightly, he already knew what it meant but he wanted to hear Druex say it. Druex looked at me and his expression softened. The rage and the wolf was still there, but he let none of it touch me when he looked at me. “She is Queen to my King.”

My mother gave a dreamy little sigh and I smiled, blushed a little under the heat of Druex’s eyes. “She just turned eighteen for god sakes, I don’t even know you and you expect me to just blithely be okay with this?” My dad fumed but the way I stood up, a fluid roll, like I had muscles a normal human female shouldn’t have, made him blink. “No daddy, I don’t expect that.” I went to him and he wrapped me up in his arms.

My dad. Witch, like me. Human like me. But not wolf. “He knows I’m not ready daddy.” I murmured, breathing in the soothing smell of his aftershave. My wolf was content to sit in the back seat and lay her head down. Roll back inside me. My father sighed into my hair, I felt his frustration, not knowing how to correctly deal with this. I was wolf and I was witch. A hybrid. An idea exploded through my brain and I went totally still. I was a hybrid…My dad let me turn around, but kept my hand as I looked back at Druex. “How many years does a werewolf live for?” Druex shrugged. “Anywhere from five to five hundred.”

Whoa. “How?” I asked, the thoughts flying through me so fast I was getting dizzy with excitement. “Mostly because we heal so fast, our bodies keep us in peak condition. We‘re extremely hard to kill.” I touched my arm, the healing wound under my sleeve. “Our family, we’re hereditary witches. Only the boys are supposed to have it, first born sons. I’m the only girl. Ever.”
“And like that wasn’t shocking enough.” My father muttered. I was almost jumping up and down. “You’re saying lycanthropy keeps us in peak condition, young?“

Druex nodded. “My Oldest living relative is two hundred years old and looks in his forties, just. Where are you going with this?” I did jump up and down, just a little. “I…sorry daddy, have used probably enough power before I ascended that I should not be looking like I do. What I did to Taylor should have probably drained the hell out of me. But it didn’t.” Druex’s brow lifted slowly, arrogantly. “What did you do?”

I smiled sweetly. “Bad things. Tell you later. The point is, what if the lycanthropy stops the after effects of our magic?” I lifted my brows importantly at my father and he blinked, before he had to sit down. “Oh. OH!” My mother said with huge eyes and Druex was looking around at us like we were crazy. I was elated. I wasn’t going to get old and die because I used to much power. “But Cherish, you could just be a very special case, it might not work on the rest of us.” My dad said slowly, like he was trying not to get his hopes up. Damn, I hadn’t thought about that.
“What won’t? I’m not getting it here.” Druex said and I waved my hands up. “Okay, the way our power works, it’s very, very addictive. Seductively addictive. The more you use, the more you want to use. We constantly have to control the urge to do everything with magic. I’ve not ever had that problem,” I said flippantly, I think it was because I was a girl and better at resisting temptation than men.

But I didn’t say that out loud. “We get some of our powers at thirteen, and when we turn eighteen, we Ascend into our full powers. But if we’ve used to much magic, it ages us. The body weakens and dies but never the power. Our human bodies are to frail to contain so much.” Druex was starting to get it. I think. “I am the youngest, but out of the four of us, Tristan and Riley and Peyton, I have the most power. The warding thing I did to your Club, I shouldn’t have been able to do that without help from the coven. The spell I did takes at least four.”

My father came out of his stupor enough to add to that. “The power takes bits of your life away. Minutes, hours, days. My father died at forty four and he looked like he was well over a hundred. It aged him to the point that he was living on a respirator.” The light bulb went on and Druex looked at me with fear. “So if Cherish wasn’t part wolf, the spell she cast to keep that…thing out of my club?”
“Could have killed her.” My father said tightly and I gave a cheery smile. “But it didn’t and I’m fine so, moving on.”

“No we’re not fucking moving on, Cherish, you couldn’t possibly have known…and you risked what you did anyway?…That’s unacceptable!” Druex yelled furiously. I narrowed my eyes slowly at him. “Druex, you want anything resembling a nice happy life you better stop growling at me. I know my own limits, thank you very little.” My father sighed heavily. “See what I have to put up with?”
“Daddy!” I growled. “What? It was reckless, and you…you’re setting a bad example for the others.” He said, grasping at something to say. I heard my mother trying not to laugh. She was on my side, at least. “They’ve all had the lecture too dad. They’re afraid of you.”

He grumbled and slumped down in his chair. “And you’re not. Not the least bit afraid.” He muttered. “No I’m not.” And now that I had used up all my brain power, fought the shadow, yet again, and had discovered I was Druex’s Lupa…I was damn tired. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Are they coming tomorrow dad?”
“The boys? Yeah. Tristan doesn’t think it’s safe to have us all spread out like we are. I agreed.” Peyton thought that, not Tristan. I didn’t correct him. “So then can I get some sleep before we have to do this all over again?” I sighed and he nodded as he stood up. “Yes. Sleep is good.”

He looked tired too. And then he looked like a protective father. “Druex is not leaving while it’s still dark.” I said firmly and Druex gave a light smile. “But I can make it easier for everybody.” And he shifted. Two legs one minute, for the next in a swirl of color and light. It was lovely to watch. I wondered if I’d ever get to do that, know what it felt like to become that little black wolf inside me.

I sank my fingers into that think fur at his nape and he rubbed his head against my thigh. “This okay?” I asked my father and he nodded. “Yes. Sara? Bed?” My mom nodded and kissed my cheek, even gave Druex a tentative pat. He was very still for her.

We all climbed the stairs and parted, my parents to the West wing, and me and my wolf to the East. I left my sweatshirt and my cotton pants on and slid down under the covers. Druex hopped up and stretched out beside me, resting his head across my belly, nose between my breasts. I gave him an arch look but he snuggled closer. Basically telling me he wasn’t moving. Fine. I liked it anyway. The warmth of his body didn’t seem to affect or suffocate me, rather, the pulsing power of him soothed me, made me drowsy.

I knew he could smell my contentment, but I narrowed my eyes at him anyway. “Don’t get used to this.” He gave a soft ruff and I sighed. “Shut up.” I grumbled and wrapped my arms around him, scratching his ears with soft strokes of my fingers. He gave a long, drawn out doggy groan and his eyes closed. We were both asleep in minutes. And I had no dreams of evil shadows. Yay.