Perception Read online

  Perception

  by Breukelen Girl

  Smashwords Edition

  ©opyright 2014

  Editing by Wonderdog Writing Soloutions

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may contain violent and sexual content. By reading and purchasing this book and downloading it, you consent to being of legal age for such material.

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  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. You can find more of Bg’s free writing on her blog “A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn”

  http://altijdbreukelen.wordpress.com

  1

  The first lycan I ever came across was a female alpha that hunted me down when I was fourteen years old.

  I did nothing to provoke this encounter. Other than prove an opportunity too good to pass up for her and her pack. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Prior to her attack on me , lycans to me were just some bogey-man I’d heard about, like a scare tactic designed to keep werewolves in line. To show young werewolves what we didn’t want to become. Ever.

  To demonstrate to impressionable werewolves what was so beneath the very nature and biology of the werewolf. And to illustrate to pups like me and my four siblings how good and great werewolves, Breukelen werewolves in particular, truly are.

  I never doubted myself as a werewolf until that encounter. Everything I had ever been told about lycans up until then was proven completely true by that attack. I never have had any reason to doubt my pack. Or my pack leader or the werewolf way of life. But it turns out not all wolves are created equal.

  Lycans aren’t a concept. They’re humans who have become wolves. Not true werewolves as such. They’re not born a werewolf. Werewolves are born . We carry a genetic legacy that is aeons old. And passed down through our bloodlines.

  Lycans are made not born. They do not have a genetic advantage of the human race like us. They do not possess a werewolf gene. They’re a problem created by werewolves.

  They’re kind of like a basterdized offspring of a werewolf. The problem with this is that werewolves don’t care about lycans. Well, we’re not supposed to care about lycans. Even though werewolves are at fault here.

  Of course being a werewolf myself, a true werewolf, I’m not supposed to say such blasphemous things out loud. Or you know like ever. The general rule for lycans is they just can’t be us. Therefore they can’t be a part of us. Can’t be a part of our packs or our way of life or our culture. They’re beneath us. They’re nothing.

  So you see the problem?

  Werewolf attacks and bites a human. Human manages to survive the werewolf attack. Human becomes infected by werewolf’s bite. Werewolf creates something it doesn’t want, a lycan .

  Lycan has nowhere to go because lycan lacks identity. Because it is the werewolf way is to deny the lycan such a thing. Strip it of what it would otherwise be entitled to if it were a werewolf, or even a human.

  Therefore the repercussions of lycanthropy are put into their otherwise, unprepared for it, body’s system. Human gets past stage one, infection. Survives to live and tell whoever will listen and believe them, that they were attacked by a werewolf.

  Human gets ridiculed and become ostracised from everyone and everything around it as a result of this one event affecting them, that they can’t let go of. A month later human goes through first shape shift. Human somehow manages to survive the shape shift. Human is no longer a human, but a lycan.

  This new lycan does not understand what has happened to them or how it works. Has no information to go off. Has no support network. The werewolves they find out about, turn them out. All but run them out of werewolf territory.

  Any time the lycan runs into werewolves, they fight, and are met with hostile intentions for no actual reason, other than they carry the scent of a lycan. Lycan is made to go it alone. Because lycan is not a werewolf by nature, intention, or biology.

  When I was just a pup, I lived rather naively amongst my pack. I was just part of a collective community that looked after me. I was just a pup from the leading pack alpha’s family.

  My father is the alpha leader of the Breukelen werewolf pack in Brooklyn, New York. I adore and admire my father. I thought he could do no wrong. I thought he was amazing.

  He loved me, loved his pack and he was rather brilliant at leading our pack, through business decisions as well as strategic decisions and understanding the personalities of our pack. Not that I would figure that out until I was older and began to glimpse the inner working of our pack at play.

  I didn’t know there were politics to work through because I never saw that side of our world. As a pup, I didn’t need to be.

  But after my first run in with a lycan I changed . I guess you could say I grew up. Not that long after the lycan attack on me I met Booker Parish. I was fifteen and Booker was seventeen.

  My world was about to be tilted on it’s well structured and known axis. All because of a boy. But not just any boy.

  Benico Parish, Ben for short, Booker to his friends. Booker was the first lycan I met who didn’t want to kill me. Didn’t want to harm me. Booker Parish is to this day the only lycan this werewolf has ever been in love with.

  2

  The shape shift breaks me. My bones snap and shatter . I howl in agony, my voice straining between my clenching teeth. It’s hard to tell if I sound like a wounded animal or a woman screaming with every ounce of what is left in her.

  My jaw is aching, my muscles are pounding and blood is surging in me. I try to remind myself, that the pain is temporary, it will leave me when the shape shift is complete.

  The werewolf in me is pulsating under the surface of my skin, rushing me to get out. I have no control over this. Pain assails me roughly and without regard for my human self. I don’t fully understand it yet either. It’s been four months since I first shape shifted.

  This hasn’t gotten any better or any easier than the first time. It’s just as bad, as hard to fathom as hard to get through the pain as it was then. Just like then, I’m alone. Only this time, I had a say in whether I got to be alone or not.

  Not that it helps the shape shift become any smoother for me. It is the night of the full moon tonight and all werewolves in Brooklyn are shape shifting. All except the immature pups. My muscles spasm. They strain, they pull and pull until they almost snap. Then the tearing begins, fibre from sinew and sinew from bone.

  There is so much agony that comes from this. And I endure it all. I’m not really sure how. I just know I am. My heart pushes up through my breast plate, straining to bend my ribs before pulling them inwards on me again. I’m waiting for them to pierce my internal organs. While my temperature bakes me from the inside out.

  Then there is the thrashing, whilst all this internal conflict is going on inside , I move, I thrash, spasm and have a fit. But I’m conscious of the fit, I’m aware, my eyes are open and my mouth is gaping while spittle drools out of the corner. My throat is parched. It aches like skin that is too dry and splitting.

  I never knew the human body could endure so much. I never thought I would have to. I really didn’t know what to expect when it came to shape shifting. But I’m fairly certain it wasn’t this.

  I don’t think any other werewolves go through as much pain. When I would ask my siblings, prior to my shape shift, what it was like, they made it seem like it wou
ld be child’s play.

  I thought it would be more like I collapse down on bended knee and have some intense cramps. Then somehow I’d double over and change. Transform. Shift. Become one with my baser nature. To evolve into my werewolf self. Not that I could change anything if I wanted to. This was always going to happen. I would have eventually had to shape shift.

  Maybe it’s only this horrific because I’m new to it. Maybe it’s always going to be this horrific because those lycans attacked me on and brought on my first shape shift. Maybe that has affected it.

  The air strums with the tension of the moonlight through it. It seeps into my pores and feels like a heart starter fuelling adrenaline. It keeps my mind awake and thinking. Ever so aware to every single breakage in me.

  I hope for completion but fear rides me that will never happen. My anxiety has not lessened each time I’ve gone through this. I should not be anxious to be in this state. I should not fear myself, my true self. The werewolf within me.

  3

  The cold metal of weapons weighed heavy in my hands. The first weapons I’d ever handled.. What fifteen year old needs weapons? Ever. Especially if they’re a werewolf? Answer: me. Some werewolf I am.

  “Do you know what they are?” My instructor asks me as I turn the odd hand held devil’s pitch forks instruments over in my hands.

  My hands are wrapped around the cast iron handle as my eyes trail over the two short prongs and the long prong protruding from the centre of it. I shrug my shoulders quickly. I’ve seen a few kung fu and samurai cult movie classics. But I can’t recall if I’ve seen these weird things before. A word came to mind but it’s because of a video game I’d played with some kick ass chick in it.

  “Tonfas?”

  “No. They are Sai.” my instructor replies in a bored, monotone voice. I looked over at my instructor and back at the Sai still in my hands. My instructor doesn’t seem to be unimpressed by my lack of knowledge. Probably expects me to be completely ignorant of any hand held, Asian weaponry knowledge.

  Fair enough. I look like any other fifteen year old female. Nothing terribly special to look at. But I’m not like every other fifteen year old female. I’m a werewolf.

  “Sai.” I repeat still getting used to the feel of the weapons in my grasp. I’ve been under constant guard at my father’s orders. I can’t go anywhere without an older, stronger, warrior wolf accompanying me. My own personal unwanted, body guard.

  What had been a fairly carefree life previously is now completely scheduled and structured for me to be surrounded by at all times, pack. Even in school. It’s ridiculous. Whilst my father’s intentions are good meaning, to protect me, they just reminded me all the time of why my life is the way it was.

  I can’t move on because I can’t forget. Because I’m not being allowed to. Because now I have a body guard, a constant reminder . Now I am undertaking weapons training. My father told me it was self defence training. He wants me to be strong. This is his version of strong for this beta werewolf.

  Part of me wants to remind him that I undertook my first shape shift as a full grown werewolf, alone. The reality is, nothing would have changed what happened to me four months ago. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was outside of my control. I drew the short straw to walk from the Breukelen pups' camp to the older teenager’s camp to ask for a jaffle iron.

  Pretty sure Joel feels bad about that now because I’m pretty sure Joel rigged the draw cause Joel felt lazy. It could have just as easily been him or any of my friends if they’d walked to the teenagers camp fire. Turns out it was me.

  My father hasn’t said I’m weak. Not out loud. But I wonder if he thinks it. After all, I’m his daughter and a Breukelen werewolf from the leading pack family. To say I’m weak because I was attacked would be undermining himself as much as me. As both a parent and a leader.

  So no he hasn’t said that to me. Not that he has to. I can sense enough on my own. I can read my father as well as if he was speaking. That’s my true talent, reading people. I don’t mean being psychic or anything. I mean, my intuition is sharp and I think, getting sharper. I’m not so naive any more. I pay attention to everything around me now.

  I look at the Sai and grip the handle a little tighter holding them out before me. The long prong is blunt, not sharp as I’d expected. But I’m told that is rather traditional and still as lethal as if it were sharpened. I just have to know how to use it.

  “I’m going to teach you how to be lethal as per your father’s instructions.”

  That makes me stare at my instructor. My father wants me to do more than be able to defend myself.

  He wants me to truly come into being a Breukelen werewolf. Does he want to give me the ability to kill because he doesn’t think I have it in me?

  Because I’m still just a pup at fifteen. I might always be a pup in his eyes. I’m one of the youngest kids in the family.

  Lethal. The word hangs in my head. That’s just as good as saying I’m worthless because I don’t have fighting skills isn’t it? Can’t help but wonder if my instructor’s been told to tell me that deliberately.

  Then it occurs to me, My father, the pack leader and alpha werewolf, he wants to protect me, and this is how it’s done.

  4

  My family insisted I have my fifteenth birthday party. Even though I didn’t want a party. It was held against my wishes. I didn’t feel there was anything to celebrate. The family held the opposite opinion that there was in fact plenty to celebrate about me. Namely that I’d “really” become a werewolf.

  I didn’t think that was as much something to celebrate as it was to forget ever happening. Not that it appears anyone around here is likely to let me do that. They hold the opinion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  My brother Markus is the only one who gets me. He tries to help me out with them, but...

  Things have changed. Not only in me and because of the shape shift, but because that’s what life is, one big change after another that you just get swept up in and carried along.

  My friends, the pups from the camp ground no longer speak to me. All of them. Including Jeanie Holloway who’s family I had driven to the camp ground with. Jeanie had enough decency to tell me she wasn’t allowed to associate with me anymore. But she wouldn’t say more than that. That was the last thing she said to me and it’s been four months since I saw her last. I think she even had to change schools because of me.

  But now my eyes have been opened. The first shape shift of a werewolf is usually painful to endure. But not hard to get through if you have help. I’ve heard my mother and father talk secretly when they think I’m not listening about how my shift was probably brought on. Because I was bitten, repeatedly on a lunar night. Of course, there’s no way to tell if that was the case or if I was just finally due to shape shift. But I hear them speak and they don’t think I do.

  My family seem to think I’m made of glass and will break sometime soon. I think the birthday party idea was to bring whatever normalcy I am supposed to have back into my life.

  What’s normal to a werewolf anyway? A damn good question considering I never really thought of it before. When my pack came searching for me I saw the werewolf way. It’s not normal to my human mind. But to the werewolf inside me it makes perfect sense.

  You feel compelled to approach them the way the werewolf in you would. It’s smart, it’s logical and it makes sense to the predator inside me.

  Prior to my shape shift, I didn’t have this sensation. Nobody told me it’d be like this. Not afterwards at all times anyway.

  It’s not that I’m not curious, or wanting answers. It’s that I can’t bring myself to ask my brothers or sister any more about shifted werewolf things. I no longer feel open to them in that sense. Although all of us, except my youngest brother, the baby of the family – Joss, have shape shifted, none of them went through what I did. So it isn’t the same. Will never be the same for them as it was for me. They all had what is
the werewolf equivalency of a text book shape shift experience.

  It came on and there was enough time for each of them to alert someone to assist them. To be there to help them get through the trauma of the body’s first change. They were taught techniques to help them through the shape shift.