Chapter 3. Hunted by Rogues

Elise’s POV

I jumped out of the elevator and ran out the front doors. I didn’t stop until I got to the woods. I had never wanted to move so badly before.

“Welcome to every second of my life,” my subconscious other half said in my mind, and I just rolled my eyes inside because we had the same soul and lived the same life.

On their 16th birthday, all werewolves changed, but mine never showed up. A few months ago, I kept hearing a voice in my head. At first, I thought this was proof that I was going crazy, but I soon realized it was just my wolf, and I called her Althea. I knew there must be magic going on, but I didn’t tell anyone.

Our wolf was a part of us, but it had more of a split personality, like when a person is drunk or high. It’s you, but with less self-control, less sense of right and wrong, and it always wants to mate. One half of you is a human with morals and logical thoughts, and the other half is a wild beast with bad intentions.

When we turned 18, we could meet our soul mate, which made our hormones go crazy. At first, you didn’t feel it or smell it right away. It was more like a constant urge to be near that person. The pull got stronger the more time you spent together.

When two people were marked as fated mates, their souls became one in every way. They had the same feelings and couldn’t be apart for too long, or they’d get depressed. We were like normal human teenagers until we turned 18 years old, but after that, our main goal was to find our mate, whether it was chosen or chosen for us.

All I knew was that when I was with Jasper, something inside me changed, and I wanted to be someone else. Maybe it was because I was so close to turning 18, or because I found my boyfriend with another girl, or maybe it was something about the gorgeous man that made me feel so alive. I did know that I was tired of being the well-behaved princess that everyone had made me into.

After running for almost 30 minutes in the woods, I stopped to rest against a tree. I had no idea who was following me or where I was. Then, a little bit of fear crept in. Shit! I could have run with Rogues on someone else’s land or, even worse, on land that had been abandoned.

I heard a faint crackling sound in the woods to my right, so I turned around and went back the way I came. I started swearing at myself because I thought a demon bear was coming after me. I knew that wasn’t real, but I also knew that anxiety and fear could make any creature think crazy things.

I jumped in front of a big brown wolf. I screamed and slid to a stop on my heels, then quickly turned around and ran the other way.

“Fuck! I’m so screwed up,” I said as I ran away from what I knew was a Rogue because it didn’t smell like anything. Because they didn’t belong to anyone, they gave off an air of loneliness and anger, and they smelled like something bad. Since they stopped following our goddess’s rules, they were mostly heartless and cruel. They killed for fun, fucked with or without permission, and mostly lived off the grid in wolf form.

I jumped in front of two more wolves. I came to a stop and turned around, but three wolves were right behind me. I could hear how excited they were about the chase, which made me swear even more. I couldn’t just stand there, but running made them want to kill me a hundred times more. When they went after their prey, it made them both angry and dangerous.

The first wolf was biting my heels and reaching for my shoulder with its claws. As the razor-sharp nails tore through my skin, I let out a scream. But I didn’t stop. As blood ran down my arm, tears ran down my cheeks, making it hard for me to see. Since I had Alpha blood, I would be fine in a few hours, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell.

As I went through the trees, I caught a glimpse of a moving shadow in front of me. It looked like shadows were moving, but shadows didn’t move. My mind must have been playing tricks on me.

I could hear water flowing ahead of me, and I prayed that it would be the border of my pack. If I could jump over the river, the Rogues wouldn’t dare cross it. I just had to outrun the three wild wolves and a mythical shadow creature that my mind was adding to the mix.

I could see the river, so I gave it a little more effort. I looked back and saw that there was now only one wolf behind me. We didn’t have time to figure out what happened to the other two. I couldn’t stop because I was too close to home.

As I pushed off the ground to jump over the river, the other wolf swatted at my leg, making me fall and stumble into the water. My thigh was bleeding so much that I couldn’t stand up.

My head was full of fear and anger, which made the water start to rise around me. I had never used my magic out in the open before, but I wasn’t going to die. Wolves didn’t have magic, but I knew from a young age that I could control everything. It was a secret that could get me killed or, even worse, sold into slavery.

As the water slowly rose, waiting to drown my attacker, I closed my eyes and prayed that no one was watching. As the brown wolf came at me, a pure black wolf tackled it to the ground.