Finally Her Turn

Chapter 26: Kane

I think it’s been thirteen or fourteen, maybe even fifteen years since I last interacted with Owen Carter. I’ve been vaguely aware of him most of my life, since he’s only a couple years younger than me but somehow ended up in my grade in school. I’m also vaguely aware that he’s distantly related to me somehow, though I couldn’t tell you for sure how that works out.

I just remember it being something we both discovered in junior high, when our massive extended family decided to have an equally large gathering. We were both there, and that’s all I know about that. My grandpa explained it to me, but I stopped caring pretty much immediately. I was content just to learn that my relation to Owen is only a distant one. I convinced myself that “distant” meant “not really family” and was relieved to hear it. Owen was a nerd, and being associated with him in any way would have been tragic for my social status, something that I cared about far more than I should have in those days.

Finding out that we were kind of family seemed to have the opposite effect on him, though. Suddenly, he was popping up everywhere that I was, trying desperately to get me to acknowledge him. I even had to go and give him a mild beatdown at one point to stop him from spreading it around that there was any connection between us. He’d been blabbing it to anyone that would listen.

But now, I know that my behavior then was despicable and uncalled for. Honestly, I realized it almost as soon as we were done with school. Once the artificial social groups magically disappeared and I started to think more about my pack and becoming their Alpha, I vowed to stop being that guy, and started trying to make amends with the people I’d treated badly over the years.

Owen was one that I could never bring myself to seek out and apologize to, though. Even as adults, he annoyed me. He’d never stopped hovering just out of reach, observing everything that I did and mimicking whatever he could. My hair, the way I dressed, he even came to my father and applied for a job in pack administration. I never said anything to my dad about Owen, but he didn’t seem to like him any more than I did, and decided all on his own to deny that job to him.

That’s about when I noticed that the look on Owen’s face when he was near me had changed. The smile was gone, and in its place was an almost permanent scowl accompanied by incessantly bitter and sarcastic comments, many of them aimed in my direction. I ignored him though. I’d always been aware that his eagerness was an act, and he was just trying to land himself in my good graces and secure a spot in my inner circle, so it didn’t surprise me when he finally gave up on trying and let his inner self out.

What did surprise me was the drinking. It’s quite a feat for a werewolf to develop an addiction like that, considering what it takes to get one of our kind drunk in the first place. A drinking habit is an expensive one, and it also requires a commitment to spending a good chunk of each day on alcohol intake.

And yet, only a year or so after I became Alpha, I started receiving a lot of complaints about him. He was becoming a nuisance to local businesses, and he’d lost his cushy job in one of the corporate offices in the human town, which meant that he not only had too much free time on his hands, but no income to speak of. So, in addition to just being a rotten person to have around, he’d taken up stealing to make ends meet and keep up with his new habit.

He had a baby girl at home, and that’s the only reason that he didn’t end up in the cells. Instead of punishing or banishing him, I went to him and offered him a job. He came from a long line of warriors, and though he was smaller and weaker than his father and brothers, his wolf was still of warrior stock. That’s how he’d been placed when he came of age, but he’d chosen to take a different career path instead.

That was fine and well then, but once he was unemployed and headed down a dark path, I decided to get more forceful about encouraging him to join the family business. It took some convincing, but he eventually agreed to set the booze aside and get himself up for training in the morning. His daughter was able to join the other pups at the pack daycare, and I thought that everything was back on track.

Until a few years later, when he started showing up to pack events again, something that he hadn’t done since he’d lost his chosen mate shortly before his daughter was born. The scandal of his affair with a human woman was one that the local gossips loved to whisper about, and he’d kept himself out of the public eye for a while. Understandably so. But I guess he was suddenly craving some togetherness with his pack, though he certainly had a funny way of showing it.

He’d show up already drunk and just keep going, passing his daughter off to anyone who would take her so that he could partake of all the free booze. And a drunk Owen is a mean one. He’d shout insults at the servants, mostly about them being omegas, which he quite obviously had a problem with. That’s something he might have gotten away with in some packs, but that’s not how we do things here. We also don’t tolerate the way he’d talk to and treat women, or humans. And as a final cherry on top, he liked to start fights with anyone who’d take the bait.

The first time he got unruly like that, I sent him home and kept his daughter at the packhouse nursery for the night. He came and got her in the morning, and showed up a completely different person than he was the night before, all full of apologies and gratefulness for the care and compassion I’d shown him and his daughter.

But after the second event that he spoiled with his loud and unruly behavior, I felt I had no choice but to permanently ban him from the packhouse and all pack events. I also advised him to get himself into some sort of rehab program, offering to care for his daughter in the meantime if he needed the help, and told him that the next complaint I received about him from anyone in the pack would most likely result in his banishment. He assured me that he was going to get his act together, and I haven’t heard from him or anything about him ever since.

Other than when Marissa came of age, and he came to watch the ceremony, although he kept his distance. Technically, he wasn’t allowed to be there, but since he was behaving himself, I wasn’t about to deny him that and pretended not to notice him. His only child was entering adulthood, and it was his right as a father to see her shift for the first time and discover what sort of aptitude the wolf showed. Warrior, of course. No surprises there.

But that was the last that I ever saw him. Marissa turned out to be a punctual, responsible young woman completely unlike her father and probably in spite of him. She is also a promising young warrior, but she has always seemed content to just be average. It’s like she purposely puts forth only enough effort to be a solid, basic warrior while being careful not to let herself excel at anything in particular. I also suspect that she’s been restraining her wolf, forcing her to take a back seat so that Marissa can always be in control, which makes for slower reflexes and a less impressive overall performance during drills and aptitude tests.

Whatever her reasons, if she only wants to be a patrol guard, I’ve always been content to let her. Chris and I gave her what coaching and encouragement we could, but it pretty quickly became clear that our effort would be best spent elsewhere. She has always wanted to be average, and I suppose that’s okay. An average New Horizon warrior can hold her own against a ranked wolf from just about any other pack anyway.

What I probably didn’t spend enough time wondering about was why. Why was she content to blend in and live in the shadows? What might have been going on at home that would make her want to spend every spare moment volunteering for extra duty and assignments, and yet never want to achieve anything or gain any recognition or advancement?

But after what I saw from her yesterday, I’m anxious to find out. Whatever is going on, whatever it is that she’s had to endure over the years, it’s as much my fault as anyone’s. I knew Owen was a problem, and I recognized that he had a pretty serious issue with alcohol, and yet I was so relieved that he finally fell off my radar that I never bothered to check in on him and Marissa beyond an occasional question here and there to see what her teachers and daycare providers thought of her.

Even as a baby, she was too calm, quiet, and meek for a pup, especially one that wasn’t an omega. One of the daycare teachers actually pointed her out to me at one point and told me that she was concerned about how Marissa liked to hide. She’d disappear for hours, and she wouldn’t answer when they were calling her. When they’d serve her food, she’d quietly swipe it off the counter and disappear with it. Whenever she would talk, it was only to whisper.

I didn’t think much of it then, but I should have. She didn’t get more outgoing as she grew up, and the hiding and keeping her distance from other kids never went away. I just chalked it up to her being overly shy. Owen was kind of like that when he was younger, until the point that he decided to become my permanent shadow. I figured Marissa would grow out of it too, but I guess she never did. She even somehow managed to hide herself amongst the warriors.

I’ve noticed her though, of course of I have. I’ve just always taken the approach of not wanting to make her uncomfortable by drawing the attention to her that she was so obviously trying to avoid. So now, I’ve earned myself this harrowing trip out to her childhood home, a place that I’ve only been the once, back when I first offered Owen a place with the warriors.

It seemed like a nice place then. Nothing extravagant, but most of the homes around here aren’t. It’s a basic one-story, two-bedroom home. We call houses like his our “starter homes” because it’s mostly the newly mated that live in them. Usually, once they’ve had a couple pups or so, most couples have outgrown them and want something bigger.

Owen never has. He never did take another mate after his first one left, though I vaguely remember hearing that she’d left because he found his fated mate, the human mother of his child. Shortly after that, I was informed that even she had left. I guess they never completed their mating, despite the daughter they share. And so, here he still is, right where I left him.

Though I have a feeling that what I’m about to find inside that house is going to haunt me. I also have a feeling that I’m not the only one who will be kicking themselves about it. I’m not the only one who hasn’t paid the Carters enough attention. No one has. This place is far enough outside of the town in a rather remote section of our territory that there are no neighbors near enough to have ever seen or heard anything going on in there, and Marissa has always done such a good job of keeping her secrets to herself that Owen has managed to evade suspicion for a long time.

As I draw closer, that feeling of dread intensifies. I can’t really spot anything that seems amiss from the outside, other than that there isn’t much evidence of Owen taking care of the yard recently, probably not since Marissa left, but mostly I think my dread comes from how Marissa was acting yesterday. I believe she said that he can no longer hold down a job and hasn’t been sober since she was about 15, and she also said that he destroyed the place while she was away. That kind of tells me that he never did get his act together, and his behavior hasn't changed much over the years.

But what really haunts me is the look that was on her face when she asked me not to tell Owen that she said anything to me. She’s scared of him, and I’ve been trying not to let my imagination run away on me thinking of why that might be. She didn’t hesitate much when I surprised her with her mate’s offer to have her join his pack, and I have to wonder if it was the distance from Owen that inspired her to seize that opportunity so quickly. She seemed uncertain about her mate, but she wanted to go anyway, especially since I promised to make sure that her dad was looked after in her absence.

That's another thing, though. After the conversations that I had with her yesterday, I can't stop thinking about how she calls him Owen. She’ll say that he’s her dad, but she won’t call him that the way that most kids do. Just Owen. That tells me that whatever is on the other side of this door is something that no kid should ever have experienced, and I feel like a failure as her Alpha for letting it happen on my watch.

It’s when I finally drag my feet all the way up to the door that I start to get the first hints of why she’s concerned about him just rotting away out here without her. There’s a faint smell of something unpleasant – partly the smell of old whiskey, partly the smell of an unkept man, but mostly the smell of … is that urine? I shudder to think of how much worse that smell is about to get once this door is opened, but it’s as much my fault as Owen’s. I shouldn’t have left him to his own devices all the way out here, not when the only person to hold him accountable at the time was a little girl.

I give the door three firm raps, forceful enough that the door shudders on its hinges, and then wait a few moments to give Owen a chance to answer. I’d imagine that if things are as bad as Marissa hinted at, then he isn’t likely to answer, but it’s only right to give him the chance anyway. But as expected, there’s no answer, and no movement of any kind from inside. Looks like I might have to let myself in, then.

And as his Alpha, I not only have every right to enter and make a welfare check, but he also hasn’t paid on his mortgage yet this month. Being a couple weeks behind is usually not a big deal, but it is when you’re Owen Carter. I glanced through his records last night, and the reason why Marissa was so eager for the money from the special assignment stared right back at me.

Owen’s p*****t history was sporadic at best up until a few months after she came of age. She lived at the packhouse until then, and after that was when for the first time since he was mated, the payments on this house actually started coming in every month like clockwork. That girl has been paying his bills for him for years, which is probably why he also seems to have quit his job shortly after that.

So, one month late when it’s Owen Carter who isn’t paying is too big of a risk to take for any lender, and if it weren’t for the fact that I put a note in his file all those years ago when I told him to get his life together and offered to support him in whatever way I could, including preventing him from losing his house even when he gets behind on his payments, somebody else would have already been knocking on this same door. At least, that’s the argument that I’ve been rehearsing in my head.

I don’t know why I’m even bothering, though. I’m his Alpha. Even if his payments were all caught up, he lives here because I say he can, and I have the right to say he can’t whenever I so please.

When there’s still no answer after my second and third round of knocking and then pounding on the door, I calmly take the key I brought with me for this purpose from my pocket and use it in the lock. And after a deep breath filled with dread and anticipation, I open it.

Just as I feared, the full force of that stench smacks me in the face. I feel bad for Marissa having to come home to this, although I suppose it may not have been as strongly repugnant for her since she’s not an Alpha. Even so, it’s not an inviting scent, to say the least.

The sight in front of me is even less welcoming. The place is destroyed, just as she said. There’s only one piece of furniture left that I can tell, and it’s the old, somewhat dilapidated recliner that Owen is currently passed out inside of. I’m pretty sure that he’s the source of most of the stench as well.

The walls are ripped apart to the point that they’re little more than exposed studs, and the carpet that used to be on the floor lies in a shredded heap on one side of the room. The other side is shredded and bare in spots, though it’s still mostly laid out the way it’s supposed to be. It looks like he knocked down a wall or a divider of some sort that used to separate the kitchen and the living room, and the kitchen is just completely trashed. I don’t even bother going in there because I can already see that it’s little more than dirty and broken dishes, trash, and empty liquor bottles.

I should wake him, but something in me wants to see more before I do. I want to see if I can piece together what life was like for Marissa, though I’m also aware that the current state of the house is probably a recent thing. She made it seem like the destruction came after she left. But still, there might be clues that remain, probably in her bedroom.

Though I’m not sure which of the two bedrooms is hers, I am familiar with the layout of these starter homes and can take an educated guess. The smaller bedroom is usually at the end of the hall, the master bedroom on the left. And I can tell just from the scents down this particular hall that I’m probably right. Owen’s scent grows thick just outside the bedroom on the left, and fades once I push past the putrid smell of the bathroom across from it.

The door just after the bathroom gives me pause, though. It should be the one that leads down into the basement, but there is graffiti scrawled all over it in a bold red paint. “Get out of my sight” is one of the messages that I can actually make out, and the other is “What you deserve,” although the name Mary is written quite a few times as well. The rest of whatever is written on the door seems to have been done in black marker, and the lettering overlaps so much that I can’t really read any of it.

It’s bizarre, to say the least, and a bit foreboding. Just looking at it makes me shudder, and I don’t really know why. I rack my brain trying to remember if either of Owen’s mates were named Mary or if the name should hold any significance to him that I know of, but I can’t think of anything that would explain it. It’s possible that it was the name of his human mate, though.

I think that what really bothers me about this door is that those messages almost seem like labels. He labelled this door as what someone named Mary deserves when he can’t stand looking at her anymore. I don’t know why that’s the conclusion that my mind immediately jumps to, but once I’ve had the thought, I can’t shake it. I have to know what’s down there, so I open it and start heading down the stairs to find out.

The really strange thing is that I can’t seem to find a light switch or a pull cord or anything to provide some light down in this cold, damp room, so I pull out my phone to use the flashlight. It really is just a room down here, just a blank, barren room with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls that haven’t even been painted or anything. There’s no washer or dryer, no workshop, no nothing at all. The stairs are basic wood, the railing broken and missing in places.

And that’s when it hits me. This is the only room in the house that doesn’t stink. In fact, it smells faintly of bleach. But why? There’s not even anything down here. I mean, I suppose it makes sense to give this room a good cleaning every now and then to prevent critters and pests and things like mold from happening, but why does this empty room receive that level of care when none of the others have?

I’m obviously missing something, but I’m not sure that I’ll find it with just my phone’s flashlight … wait. It smells like bleach because there’s a bucket and a mop tucked under the stairs. Just out of curiosity, I walk over and take a gander inside the bucket.

I can’t be sure what it was used to clean because the water is dirty and brownish, but the rags sitting beside the bucket tell a story of their own. They would be white if not for the red of whatever they were used to clean up. Could that be blood?

Now I’m studying the floor and the walls with renewed interest, trying to find spots that have been missed. Some parts of the floor look darker than others, and it’s possible that blood was spilled here, but I’m going to have to come back with better equipment to find out for sure. And I will. I most definitely will.

I head back to the stairs and hurry out of what now seems like a dark, ominous place that I shouldn’t linger for any longer than I need to. I don’t know what happened down here, or if it was someone named Mary that it happened to, but all the unknowns have my skin crawling with unease. I suppose it’s also possible that it’s the lack of a light source making everything seem darker and more twisted than it really is. Maybe it’s just dirt that’s been cleaned up down there, or more of that red paint, and I’m just getting in my own head because something seems so off about the outside of the door.

Once I get back up to the top of the stairs, I see all the dirty claw marks on the inside of the door, and that shiver of dread returns in full force, especially since those claw marks seem to have been made by someone or something much smaller than a full-grown werewolf. That someone or something may have been trapped in here at some point. But if it was a dog or some other animal, I’m pretty sure I’d smell another scent, though I suppose that the bleach might have taken care of that.

I almost can’t open that door and get back to the hallway fast enough. I kind of just want to leave and drag Owen’s unconscious body along with me, but I also want to finish what I started. I still haven’t been inside Marissa’s room yet, and though I don’t wish to invade her privacy, she left whatever is still in there behind when she left the pack yesterday. That tells me that she doesn’t care much for whatever it is.

Which turns out to be nothing, as far as personal belongings go. Owen’s destructive tendencies have been at work inside this room too, and even his daughter’s furniture is gone just like in the rest of the house. I remember her saying that he sold it all to afford his habit while she was away, though I had assumed that she meant his things, not hers. What she didn’t mention at all, though, was the graffiti. It’s just the like the basement door, but worse. I’m almost in disbelief of what I’m seeing, of what he wrote in his daughter’s room.

Almost the entire carpet is covered in big, bold, block lettering of that red paint. He very carefully and neatly spelled out the word “w***e,” and I can only assume that he meant it for her since this is her room. He got more creative with the insults he wrote on the walls, though. “Freak” is probably the most common besides “mate-stealer” – which is something that I’ve heard slung around in Marissa’s direction a time or two, but could never make any sense of.

I’ve never seen the girl with any man that she wasn’t assigned to share a shift with, and even then, I never witnessed her so much as touch any of them. But what I really don’t understand is why her own father is slandering her with this insult, in her own room of all places. I can only hope that this happened after she left, and not before.

I hazard a look inside the closet and find nothing but a few empty hangers dangling along the closet rod, although miraculously, the closet walls are free of graffiti. Of Owen’s graffiti, I should say. What I do notice in there and only because I’m looking so closely is something written in black pen, low on the wall behind the left door. It’s so small that I have to crouch down to read it, relying on my trusty phone flashlight again to see it better.

“My name is not Mary. It’s Marissa!” is written in a small, impossibly neat child’s script, her own practically microscopic version of rebellion.

I suppose that helps solve the mystery of who Mary might be, though I don’t like the answer it gives. I don’t like that Mary was written all over the door that might lead to a bloody basement if Mary and Marissa might be the same person.

Wondering if Marissa might have left me any other clues in her closet, I scour every inch of the walls and doors, my heart breaking a little more every time that I find her perfect little handwriting.

“Owen is a monster.”

“Why does no one love me?”

And the one that absolutely shatters my insides, “I wish I was never born.”

I am now more convinced than ever that I should have followed my gut all those years ago. I should have just kept Marissa with us and sent Owen off to get his life together on his own. Whether he did or didn’t never mattered to me except for his daughter, and it was negligent of me to leave it to a drunk to make sure that she was looked after.

“What are you doing in my house?” I hear an angry, growling voice demand from outside the closet.

Remembering how impulsive and unpredictable Owen can be when he’s had too much to drink, I rise to my feet, ducking my head to avoid the closet rod and preparing myself to come out swinging if I need to.

Then I open the door and step out, coming face-to-face with the man himself, who is glaring me down and waiting impatiently for my response.