The Son of Red Fang

Warning: This book contains scenes and discussions that may be triggering for some readers, including sexual abuse, rape, torture, physical and emotional abuse, and allegations of pedophilia and sexual violence. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

***

Cole’s POV

Monday, January 22, 2018, 9 p.m.

It’s the jarring of the bus as it turns off the main road onto the gravel drive that wakes me from my slumber. It’s been a grueling twelve-hour ride from my home pack, Red Fang, southwest to Crimson Dawn. I’ve heard rumors about this pack, both from those who have visited through the warrior prospect program and just the general rumors that float around about every pack.

It’s one of the hardest packs to get into, and a warrior from Red Fang has yet to be offered a position here. Now that I think about it, I don’t think any of our warriors have ever made it into the second run anywhere, at least not during the year and a half since my father started allowing me to attend. This makes me wonder how much of the selection process is based on skill versus the negative rumors that float around.

Crimson Dawn is said to be a strict and unforgiving pack. That, just like my own, it’s easy to find yourself lying over a desk on the receiving end of a stiff leather belt. These are the only packs my father allows me to go to, the ones with the harshest reputations for killing rogues and intolerance for anyone weak or different. The rumors I’ve heard about us are no different: that every pack within the maximum twelve-hour drive sees us as barbaric and cruel. I can’t help but agree, as my father is both, at least he is towards me.

Every pack that joins the prospect program has three choices: accept warriors into their training program but not send any out, send warriors out to other packs but not accept any in, or do both. After five years with no one from other packs requesting to come to ours for training, my father changed his status in the program so that he simply manages warriors from his own pack, plus White Fang and White Moon packs. This year is the first time Crescent Moon has joined us since we allied with them.

This run is the first time that my father has one hundred and twenty wolves between four packs participating, which means we have a full roster of twenty-four wolves between Red Fang and our newest ally, Crescent Moon, on this bus. My understanding is that membership in each costs money, and it was cheaper for my father to simply send warriors out than to continue waiting for them to come in.

I am the youngest son of Alpha Charles Redmen, the Alpha and sole leader of the Red Fang pack. I am the youngest of his six kids. I was born prematurely and, unlike my twin Chloe, struggled to breathe on my own. I guess that’s where everything started. My father wanted nothing to do with a weakling like me. So, I became the son he didn’t want, the son he felt was undeserving of my very life.

I yawn and slowly stretch, careful to stifle the yelps desperate to jump from my throat, as the injuries from the beating I sustained Saturday night have yet to start healing. I peek outside the large window of the charter bus that had been sent to my pack to pick us up for the ride to Crimson Dawn. It’s the first time I’ve been on one so large and comfortable. To reduce the time prospects were on the road, the council recently mandated that only charter buses could be used for trips over three hours, so drivers only had to stop for meal breaks.

The darkness outside deepens my unease at being away from home. I was one of the first ones on the bus, eager to get away from the place that has never been home for me, yet my anxiety spikes every time I enter unfamiliar territory. I’ve been to three packs since my father caved and started allowing me out of the territory. The alphas of all three packs were like my own, intolerant of my medical and mental health weaknesses.

I look down at my hands as I feel them start to shake, silently cursing my father for preventing me from walking to Red General, where I had several months of asthma and anxiety medication waiting for me. It’s been a grueling three and a half months since I ran out of most of my medication. I ran out just two weeks before returning early from the Red Moon pack, and it’s been impossible for me to get over to the hospital to pick up more. He has gone out of his way to force me to participate in our private training sessions, at least that’s what he calls it when he talks to the rest of the pack about me.

Even as a young adult, I’m subjected to his abuse, his torment. My body still aches constantly from Saturday night’s beating, and I haven’t quite shaken off the concussion Andre gave me. Recently, even my oldest brother and his Luna have joined in his sick game.

All my life, I’ve been called weak and undeserving of the alpha title, that his beatings were designed to strengthen me, to teach me how to be the brutal alpha he feels is proper and respectable. He ruined my chances of ever being an alpha when he took a whip to me on my fifteenth birthday. It will be eight years since he changed my life completely in just five more days. On Saturday, I will turn twenty-three, not that it matters much. Unlike the rest of my siblings, my birth has never been celebrated.

I know that at five feet ten inches, I’m on the small side for an alpha, where the average height is six feet to six feet two inches, but I am not tiny. When I’m in my best condition, I’m a stocky but muscular two hundred and twenty pounds. I’ve been to three packs since I started the program. All three packs sent everyone in Red Fang home after only three months, and anyone who gets booted early must wait for the next run to start. Every run is a total of six months, with some prospects hopping from one pack to the next for eighteen months before returning home. To my knowledge, that has never happened to a Red Fang warrior.

I steady my shaking hands by starting into my most common stim, squeezing my hands into tight fists before relaxing and doing it again. It doesn’t take long, as I absentmindedly look out the window, to develop the calming stimulation that I need to deal with my growing anxiety. Oddly, the last pack I was at, Red Moon, was the first time that I was on medication during the run. It did help with the initial meeting and testing, but it wasn’t enough to keep my nightmares away.

The full moon is a blessing as it illuminates the dense forest that borders the long drive into Crimson Dawn’s territory. My wolf whines lightly in my head, as my peaceful beast has never had the true ability to simply run through the forest as other wolves have. We found out the hard way that I will never be a “normal” werewolf. My father’s hesitance to allow me to join the program makes me wonder if he’s discovered my biggest secret, one that I want no one to know, that the whipping eight years ago permanently damaged the nerves in my lower back, making it impossible for me to shift safely. This has resulted in me doing everything in my own power to keep everyone, both my packmates and anyone involved in the program, from finding out that I’m a non-shifter.

Normally, non-shifters are werewolves who are born without their wolves. True non-shifters are quite common in the omega and gamma ranks, with about fifty percent of the omega rank being affected. It is extremely rare, only around five percent, to find a non-shifter in the alpha rank, and even those that are found tend to be in a comparable situation to mine, with permanent damage that keeps their shift from being safe.

Their ability to inherit and retain the werewolf’s super-fast healing depends on when their injury happens. If it happened before their first shift, then their ability to heal remains in a child-like phase. While werewolf pups still heal quickly compared to humans or hybrids, it still takes four weeks for a pup to heal the same injury that takes an adult only one. Which is the situation I’m in: when in good condition, it takes about four weeks for me to heal a broken bone. No matter the circumstances, a non-shifter cannot be a warrior, as a non-shifter is just as vulnerable to being killed in battle as a pregnant she-wolf or a pup. Fortunately, my end goal is not to become a warrior.

My desire is to gain two things and two things alone. I’m using what little training I receive from each pack and incorporating it into my own self-defense. Since all training is geared towards the shifting wolf, I must modify it to fit my needs, but I’m a fast learner and very creative. It’s in this way that I intend to formulate a means of defending myself strictly in my human form. My second goal is finding my mate, the one and only she-wolf that the Moon Goddess has created just for me, my other half.

I started asking my father about the prospect program when I was eighteen, the youngest that you can be accepted into the program. My plan was to use the program to find my mate. It’s a common method used to get into other alphas’ territories, which is usually the best way to find her. My plan, once I find her, is to join her pack if she has a decent alpha, or to run away to the human world and live peacefully among them.