Page 61 of Burdened Bonds

Through the haze of pain, I watch him. He’s alive; hischest expanding and deflating feebly and the occasional groan rumbling in his throat.

I can tell he’s a werebeast by his scent but I look for other signs too. Is there a way to know? The build of his body, the configuration of his face. I don’t see anything obvious, but as I examine him, he begins to stir.

I’ve never met another werebeast outside my tight family circle. Of course, I know they exist. But my mom has kept us away from them.

His eyes flicker open and with a great effort he lifts his head and peers through the gloom in my direction.

“Spencer Moreau,” he says, his voice raw with pain. “I thought it was you.”

“D-d-do I know you?” I ask.

One corner of his busted lip curls upwards. “I doubt it. Your family’s always been too good to socialize with the likes of me.”

I stare back at him blankly unsure what he means.

“My family is dead.”

The man stares at me with little emotion. “Be thankful you had a family to begin with. Be thankful you aren’t dead with them.”

I scoff. There have been moments, moments when the pain has sucked me into its dark, dark depths where I’ve longed for death, prayed for it, anything to stop the agony.

“Why aren’t you dead?” the man asks, wincing sharply as he shifts his body. “Why aren’t we all dead?”

“All?” I say. “There are others?”

The man smiles, the teeth he has are scarlet with blood.

“I was one of six they captured. There are more in the cells down here.”

“Six?” I say, amazed. That many.

“My pack,” he says, for the first time the bravado fading in his eyes, sadness lurking beneath. “Three killed.”

“I’m sorry,” I say and he lifts his eyes from the ground to look at me.

“Your sympathy means little when you have done nothing to help our cause over the years, Moreau.”

“Cause?”

He spits a mouthful of blood onto the hard ground and glares at me. “Maybe you are more of a pup than I realized.”

I don’t have the energy to rile at the insult. It sails right over my head. Everything hurts too much to care what some stranger thinks of me, not when I think so little of myself. But I am intrigued. Packs? Cause?

“I’ve never heard of weres living in a pack before,” I admit. Although maybe pack is just a fancy way of saying family.

“Some of us have refused to play by the authorities’ rules and restrictions,” he hisses. “Some of us have chosen to live our own way, even if it’s branded us exiles and criminals.”

I stare at him. Is this true? “And why have I never heard of this?”

He snorts. “You expect me to believe you haven’t?”

I growl at him, my beast for once stirring inside me. The other man examines me.

“Your parents were collaborators–” I start to argue, but he ignores me, plowing onwards regardless. “Happy to live in luxury while the rest of our kind suffered.”

“It wasn’t luxury,” I mumble. “They suffered too.”

I think of my dead brother. Of my dad, lost to madness by his grief, rarely returning to his human form, and my maman trying to hold the family together. I think of the scars on her body.