Blood Ties: The First (A Bane Pack Novel)

“Conor!” Kendra said, her voice a choked whisper. The werewolves, they were getting closer. She could feel them. She could hear and even smell them. Her heart hammered in her chest and her legs suddenly felt like rubber.

She slipped behind Conor, cowering there and visibly shaking. She closed her eyes, squeezing them shut as tight as she could.

“Kendra,” Conor said, shouting a bit to get through her wall of fear. “Kendra!”’

She wasn’t listening. The only thing she could focus on were the werewolves. There were eight of them. And now…now they were here. She could see them. Her breath caught in her throat and no matter what she did, she couldn’t get it back. She struggled under the panic attack while Conor shook her and tried to calm her down. Her wide, staring eyes could only see the eight enormous wolves pawing their way toward the two of them.

“It’s okay! It‘s okay!” Conor was yelling at her hysterically now, trying to get through to her. “Breathe, Kendra! Just breathe!”

But she couldn’t. Her throat was locked tight and her lungs refused to work. She shook her head emphatically, her fingers scrabbling uselessly at her neck. Then her eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she collapsed. The minute she blacked out, her body sucked in a large lungful of air reflexively.

Conor watched her breathe and let out a sigh of relief. He leaned down and picked her up. He held her in his arms, carrying her weight like she was nothing but a toy doll. He checked her again. She was still breathing, thankfully. She just passed out. Scowling ferociously at the wolves on his way past, he carried her up the stairs.

“Why did you all shift?” he growled.

The giant wolves only stared at him with their luminous, amber eyes.

Conor continued up the wide stairs. When he got to the top, he went down the right-hand hallway. He followed it to the end where a set of double doors waited for him. He pushed them open and stepped inside. The room was dark, but it was hard to miss the huge four poster bed to the left. He went to it and laid Kendra on it as gently as he could. Her face was relaxed now, almost peaceful.

A beautiful face, Conor thought to himself.

He reached out a hand and brushed a tendril of hair off her forehead. His fingertips slid over her smooth, soft skin. She groaned softly and twitched her head a bit. He stepped back and went to the other side of the room. There was a collection of plush furniture there and after some debate, he chose the couch. He laid down on it full length and watched Kendra’s sleeping form. He never took his eyes off her.

He stayed that way for a long time, just watching over her. She never stirred and looked eerily like a dead body occupying space on the bed. The notion was so strong that he got up several times to make sure she was still breathing. There was nothing physically wrong with her. He knew that. It was just the shock and trauma of the night’s events and everything she’d learned. He really would’ve preferred to do this Merle’s way. Start with a conversation to ease her into it and then explain everything else. But Merrick robbed them of that plan along with Merle’s life. If Merrick had been the one to kill him…

…he shuddered. That was a thought he couldn’t let himself entertain. He knew asking Kendra to finish off her own father was going to scar her for the rest of her life, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The situation had gotten so far out of control and the solution, although morally wrong on so many levels, was the best they could’ve hoped for. Kendra probably wouldn’t understand but given enough time, the pain would fade.

Hopefully, anyway, he thought, just before he dozed off.

It felt like a second, maybe two, that he’d been asleep. Then a scream cut through the foggy landscape of his dream like a knife. He jerked awake, his reflexes kicked up into overdrive. It didn’t take long for him to find the source of the scream. It was coming from the bed, from Kendra. He ran to her, jumping over furniture and tables without missing a beat. To an outsider, the performance would’ve been very riveting. Some of the things he leaped over he missed by bare inches.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, although judging by the way she was gripping her arm, and the snarl of pain on her face, he already knew.

“My hand…,” she struggled to say, her words coming out in a breathless gasp. “It hurts, it hurts. IT HURTS!”

Conor took her hand and struggled to pry the other one off. The fingers clasped onto the burning hand’s wrist were locked in a death hold. He finally managed to get it loose. He took her hand, still smeared with Merle’s blood, in his own. He sat down next to her, put his arm around her and held her tight.

“It’s going to hurt, a lot.” He rocked her back and forth, trying to give her tired, pain-filled mind something else to focus on. “It’ll be over soon. I promise.”

“What’s happening to me?” she wailed. Big tears blossomed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He watched them pool along her jaw and then fall onto her shirt.

Conor would’ve given anything in the world to take that pain from her. She’d already been through so much; she didn’t need this on top of everything else. But there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. The process had to finish. That was the only way to end the pain.

Conor looked at the dried blood on Kendra’s hands. Tendrils of white smoke were drifting off them. Then the blood started to bead up, looking like droplets of water on a freshly waxed car. Kendra’s screams got louder, but Conor held onto her. He rocked her back and forth, back and forth. A steady, almost hypnotic cadence. Kendra tried to focus on that sensation. On the back and forth, but the pain in her hand was unbearable. The shards of her concentration first buckled and then fractured altogether. She wailed again as her burning hand got worse. She felt like she’d dipped it in lava and then after that, just for kicks, stuck it in a vat of boiling, hot grease.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked.

Her hand was curling itself into a harpy’s claw now. She was crying even harder. She didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t understand the pain or the why, only that it hurt.

“Shh…shh,” Conor told her, ignoring her pleas. He wanted to tell her everything, but in her current state it wouldn’t help. In fact, it might make things worse. “Just fight through it. Fight through the pain, Kendra.”

She tried. She bit down on it, even as it heightened to an appalling degree. Then, with horror stricken eyes, she watched the blood run together, the individual beads forming into a cohesive unit.

“What…what?” she cried, her heart thudding and pounding.

Her hand burned and continued smoking. She watched as her father’s blood beaded up, swirled together, and then covered her hand like a glove. She yelled out her fear and pain to Conor and the empty room.

Other people started coming inside, hesitatingly at first, and then in numbers. They watched the proceedings. Some did so with wariness and fear, while others stared at her with something like hope, and still others with anger or revulsion. She tried to remember their faces but they soon swam behind a cloudy haze. In the end, however, Conor and she were the only ones left.

“It’s almost over, Kendra,” he whispered to her, smoothing her hair and kissing her forehead gently. It was hot to the touch. It burned almost enough to hurt him. “Almost over.”

She watched the blood flow into the pores of her hand. That was the most volatile feeling of all, she reflected. It was invasive and vulgar. It was almost like a raping of sorts. She had no choice in the matter. Her will was not important. The blood seemed to have a mind of its own. It was directed by that will, and it wanted inside her.

All of the veins in her hand bulged and burned, turning bright red as the blood flowed into them. It crawled sluggishly once inside her, and she watched it with horrified fascination. She turned her hand around so she could see her open palm. The blood was coalescing there, gathering in the middle and forming a pattern of some sort.

“Almost done,” Conor whispered to her. His voice was far away.

“Make it STOP!” she yelled.

The pattern was something fuzzy at first. Her concentration wavered under the blanket of pain. She wanted to black out, to escape, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t and she thought she would go insane. If it didn’t stop soon, she knew she would. She imagined herself in New Haven Asylum, pushed right up beside her mother. The image tore another scream out of her, but this one was born out of fear rather than pain.

Finally, the pattern finished forming. When it did, the pain stopped immediately. All the burning snapped off like someone just flipped a switch. It was weird.

She sat up slowly.

“I feel…much better now,” she said and she did.

With the pain completely gone, she felt energized and full of raw power. Her body practically sang with it. It didn’t fade or go away. It swam through every inch of her.

“What was that? And what is this?“ she asked, showing Conor her palm.

She realized he was still holding onto her. She let herself be enfolded by his presence a little longer, finding that she actually enjoyed it, and then coughed slightly. The two of them broke apart with sheepish grins and muffled apologies. When the awkwardness faded, she looked at him.

“I apologize for your pain,” he told her. The gentleness in his voice was deep and sincere. “I didn’t want this for you. Neither did your father. You have to understand that.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, shaking her hand a bit. It didn’t hurt, but there was a persistent tingling sensation radiating out from the center of her palm. “You’re acting like it was your fault.”

He cast his eyes aside, not wanting to look at her, but she didn’t miss the blatant guilt on his face.

“Conor?”

He turned back, unshed tears in his eyes.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she asked, insistent. “What are you talking about?”

“This,” he said, almost shouting.

He grabbed her hand and showed her the palm. In the center were three rings of blood red, one inside the other. In the middle of this was a symbol that looked vaguely like a Triskele, a Celtic symbol she recognized from one of her past classes from college. It was a formation comprised of three spirals.

It meant…something. Something about the moon, she thought.

“What is it?” she asked, dread welling up inside her. Her body was still full of that weird, rushing energy. She could feel it changing her, rearranging things. She didn’t like it.

“It’s the mark of an Alpha,” he answered, his voice grave. “Every pack has one. Merle was ours. He was the oldest, most powerful werewolf among us.”

“So what does that mean for me? Am I next? Because I’m his daughter?” she asked.

She couldn’t hide the hysteria in her voice. She tried to calm herself down so she could think. She stared at the symbol now inked in her skin like an unwanted tattoo. Realization hit a moment later. Conor’s guilt and his rush to apologize like it was his fault suddenly made sense to her.

“It’s not, is it? It’s not because I’m his daughter. It’s because you made me kill him.”

Conor didn’t say anything, but that look of guilt and shame deepened on his face.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she cried. She pushed him away from her and got up. There was rage in her eyes. “I never wanted to be a freaking werewolf and now you’ve made me the leader?”

“You had to be the one to kill him,” Conor said. He was trying to get her to calm down, but it wasn’t working. Her anger only got worse. “If the other wolf killed your father, he would’ve become the Alpha. We couldn’t let that happen. It was wrong. I know that, but there was no other choice.”

“Then why didn’t you do it?” she yelled.

She stood with the bed between her and Conor but that distance didn’t seem far enough. She wanted out. She wanted to run away from this place and its unwanted obligations. She wanted to run from Conor. From everything. She never would’ve thought she’d be praying to have the old, boring Kendra back, but that was what she wanted in that moment.

Anything but this, she thought miserably to herself.

She shuddered as she recalled how it felt to bury the knife in Merle’s body. She remembered the feeling of the knife hitting bone before sliding in deeper and piercing his heart.

“Why didn’t you kill him?” she asked again, her voice even louder this time. She wanted to throw something heavy at his head but she didn’t have anything handy next to her.

Conor didn’t answer her question. Instead, he looked ashamed of something. She thought he was still feeling guilty about making her kill Merle, but the more she watched him, the more she thought that wasn’t right. It was something else. Something he wasn’t willing to tell her.

After a long silence, Kendra spoke up.

“I’m leaving. I don‘t want to be the Alpha. I don’t want to be a werewolf. I’m not anything to you or your pack. All I want is for you all to leave me alone.”

She stalked toward the door, never looking at Conor and the pain on his face. If she looked at him, she would hesitate. If she hesitated, her anger would start to dwindle…like a flame blown out by a gust of wind. And she wanted to be angry. She was entitled. After everything she’d been put through, after everything that was done to her, she deserved that much at least.

So she kept walking, never thinking about the dangers she would face. Never thinking about the fact that someone had tried to kill her already. She was so angry, she didn’t think about much of anything except leaving.

She wanted to escape the craziness her world had suddenly become. Again, she pictured herself in New Haven, rolled up next to her mother in a wheelchair, both of them staring at nothing.

“No,” she said harshly to herself. “That won’t happen.”

She was so entrenched in her own thoughts that the scream she heard felt like it was coming from her own head. It wasn’t until its piercing wail kept rising in pitch that she realized it was coming from outside of her. She snapped out of her dark thoughts and saw a figure racing toward her.

It was a woman. She was very beautiful even though her face was streaked with tears and mottled with bright red patches. There was an anguished quality to her cries, something that suggested a deep, agonizing loss. Kendra stopped in her tracks and waited for the woman to get to her.

She collapsed at Kendra’s feet.

“Help!” the woman gasped. She was in so much anguish. So much despair.

Kendra felt sorry for her. She bent down so they were both at eye level.

“What happened? What’s going on?” she asked.

Despite everything she’d said to Conor about wanting nothing to do with the pack, the minute the woman ran up to her crying something in Kendra connected with her. It was a bond she hadn’t felt before and something she didn’t think she could break.

It’s because I’m her Alpha, she realized. The knowledge of that angered her even more, but for the moment being the Alpha overrode all her other feelings. One of her pack was hurting and it was her job to help.

She heard Conor running down the hall. When he got to them, he crouched so he could join them on the floor. He grabbed the woman’s face, gingerly Kendra noted, and looked her in the eyes.

“Deirdre?” he asked her.

For a long time the woman wouldn’t focus on him. She was lost in her own private hell. Kendra saw sadness and grief warring with outright terror and fear on the pretty woman’s reddened face.

“Deirdre!” Conor’s voice was firm now, insistent.

Her breath hitched in her throat. Her deep green eyes gazed up at Conor through a veil of fiery, red hair.

“It’s Patrick,” she cried out in keening, wailing tones.

“What about him, Deirdre?” Conor asked, concerned. “What’s happened?”

“He’s…he’s dead!” she shrieked.

As if to accompany her grief, a high-pitched, braying alarm suddenly went off with a riotous explosion of sound and blinking lights.