Forever Yours, Kitten

CHAPTER 1 AURORA“Do you think you’d ever be able to tame the hounds?” a beautiful woman from my left said to me. Sunlight glinted in her dark eyes, and strands of her indigo hair blew gently into her sallow, cadaverous face. I lay back in a field filled with moonflowers and breathed in the fresh scent of dew on the leaves and grass, my mind buzzing with hundreds upon hundreds of thoughts about those charming wild animals. Taming the hounds? There was no such thing. Why would someone ever think that I could tame them as I was? Those beasts might love spending time with me, but they were wild animals and shouldn’t be tamed for war or violence. They should do as they pleased. But an unspoken war had been brewing, and I’d wanted to save them from it for so long now. I glanced over at the woman with indigo hair and smiled. She was the only person who knew how much those creatures loved me and my undying love for them. “Maybe one day,” I whispered. Maybe if I tried hard enough or loved hard enough, I might be able to tame those monsters. But I would never truly know because I didn’t belong in the depths of the underworld, where they lived during the darkest of nights. I belonged under the sun and moon, with my family in these woods. Sunlight flooded the field, flickering through the surrounding trees in the Sanguine Wilds and glistening against a couple of rogue wolves’ fur in the forest. My breath caught in my throat as they ambled through the woods toward me, their usual deadly and vicious expressions softening when their gazes landed on me. I sat up and watched the beasts with a flutter in my heart. The woman sat up beside me and smiled. “One day? All the wolves in the Sanguine Wilds love you. Why don’t you think they’d love you in the underworld too? They might be vicious creatures, but all they need is to be tamed. And the ones who pay you a visit in this world love you so much more than these rogues do.” Something in her voice didn’t sit right with me, but I trusted her—maybe a bit too much. “I’d rather not go to the underworld. My home is here. My life is here. My brother and sister are here, and so are these wolves.” The rogues hurried a bit faster toward me; the wind blowing through their thick fur. When they reached the edge of the forest, right before the moonflower field, they sprinted and leaped in my direction. Instead of shielding my face and rolling out of the way from their attack, I let them jump onto me and lick my face with their coarse tongues. One put his head in my lap, piercing golden eyes staring up at me. I rested my palm against his ratty fur and smoothed it out, loathing how knotty he had made it since the last time I had seen him. Rogues deserved more than this, so much more. “The wolves are your sister’s creation,” the woman said. “They worship her, not you. You should have a species of your own to tame and make them fight for you. You should have a species to call your own. Your bond with beasts and monsters is so great that sometimes, I mistake you for a goddess from the underworld.” “Not all wolves like me, Nyx,” I said, smiling down at the beast. “Just the broken ones.” I didn’t have any problem with my sister having the wolves as hers. I just gave the rogues a little extra love because that was what they deserved. They hadn’t asked for a lonely life, but that was what they had been given by their peers, and I understood how hard it was to be alone. “Fine.” Nyx pursed her lips and stared down at the moonflowers … angrily. I didn’t know what I’d said to make her so furious. She knew that I would never leave this world to live with those awful gods in the underworld. “So, how’s Ares?” “Ares?” I asked, brow furrowed. Something about this suddenly didn’t seem right, and I realized I didn’t really know who this woman was or why she was asking about Ares. He was the one person who could bring me back to reality, the one person who should never be asked about by a random woman with indigo hair. “Don’t play dumb. Ares, as in your secret lover?” My heart raced, and I glanced around the field, trying to find any trace of Ares’s scent or to find him watching me the way he always did to make sure I was okay, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was alone out here with someone I suddenly didn’t recognize, someone those gods had warned me about. “Why’re you freaking out?” Nyx asked, grasping my hand. Her touch was so cold and chilling that I recoiled. She moved closer, the sun dancing in her eyes like a single spark of hope. But her irises were so dark they nearly consumed all light. “Are you okay?” The wolves around me cuddled closer, and I found myself taking a huge breath of fresh morning air. I relaxed further against the wolves, memories that I knew I had never experienced with Ares rushing through my mind. This wasn’t my life; I was sure that this wasn’t real. It could be a figment of my imagination or a memory that I’d sort of … unlocked from whoever the hell had had this stone inside of them before me. That was the only way that this could be, right? Unless … this was all a dream. A flaming chariot led by horses with wings on fire flew through the air. A man leaning over the edge smiled down at me and waved. “Dawn.” He nodded to me and then let his gaze linger a bit too long on the beautiful woman beside me. “Nyx.” “Morning, Helios,” Nyx said, a slight smile curling on her face. Helios landed his golden chariot in the clearing on the edge of the field and hopped out of it, running his fingers across the horses’ silky coat without burning himself with their raging fire. “You stayed?” Helios said to Nyx, one brow raised slightly. “You said you were leaving.” “I wanted to talk to my best friend,” Nyx said, gaze playfully narrowing. Best friend? Nyx is my best friend? “You guys saw each other last night?” I asked, staring between her and him. They both looked surprised, as if I should’ve already known that they were together. It was obvious in the way that they interacted, their light and darkness clashing and bouncing off each other. Helios narrowed his gaze at me, eyes intense, as if he was scolding me. “No,” he said, but his eyes said otherwise. He walked closer to me, making the rogue in my lap stand over me in a protective manner, and then he lowered his voice. “You know not to say it out loud.” It was a secret. What other secrets did I have? What secrets was I supposed to keep? Did gods keep secrets? Was I talking to gods themselves? Who even was I, and what was I doing here? Where was my Ares? Why wasn’t he here, watching me closely, like he always did? I needed him right now. “Ares?” I asked, unable to hold myself back from saying his name. “Where’s Ares?” I had so many damn questions that neither of these people could answer. Had I lived for thousands of years? And who the hell was Nyx? I had never seen her before, but I felt such a connection with her. Helios’s horses neighed loudly, as if they were ready to leave. Helios hopped back into his chariot and grabbed the reins. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I have to go fly across the sky.” The chariot lifted into the air, the wind from the horses’ wings flapping and making the rogues’ fur sway in the breeze. Nyx stood. “I have to go too, back to the underworld. If I’m gone for too long, my brother, Erebus, will come looking for me,” she said. “Then, he’ll start asking questions.” She looked up at the sun and squinted. “And I can’t have him asking questions about my whereabouts or about your brother.” When they both ran off, I lay back in the meadow again, my gaze shifting between Helios in his flaming chariot and the moon fading in the sunlight. More rogues walked out from the forest, lying around me—one with his snout in the crook of my arm, another with his paw on my thigh. I stroked the rogues’ fur, my fingers curling into it. “One day, I will tame the hounds,” I found myself saying. “One day, I’ll save them.” I woke up in my mother’s old king-size bed, with my chest heaving up and down, and a thick layer of sweat rolling down my back. My stomach twisted into knots, and I felt both disturbed and startled at the mere memory. Because that dream had felt real. It wasn’t something my mind could have fabricated unless my pregnant a*s had some weird fantasies or something. Though I was almost sure that this hadn’t been just a dream, and it was beyond odd, looking into intimate memories that weren’t my own, but feeling as if they were. Something about them made me smile yet recoil in horror. Everything had seemed a bit too fine in that world—wherever or whenever it was. Nyx, the goddess who wanted to kill me now, was my best friend. She and Helios were hooking up. Helios was somehow my … brother. And Nyx had desperately wanted me to live in the underworld with her for some reason. Orange sunlight flooded in through the thin, sheer curtains. Ruffles shifted on my stomach, curling around my growing baby bump and resting her head right over my navel, like she was listening to the baby inside. “Meow,” she purred, voice chirpy. “Can you hear my baby?” I whispered down at her, careful not to wake a sleeping Ares. “Meow.” “I know.” I stroked Ruffles’s gray fur like I had stroked those rogues in my dream, my fingers remembering how knotty and unkempt their fur had been in my palms and how calm their mere presence had made me. “She’s growing quickly.” “Meow.” I ran my other hand over my bump. While humans tended to have their babies within a nine-month period, werewolves had their babies in three months, which meant that our baby would be here sooner rather than later, and we were not prepared in the slightest. My bump was still small enough that it could be hidden with the right kind of dress. It’d probably stay that way until about a week before the baby was supposed to be born—at least, that was how Mom had told me her pregnancy was with Jeremy. Wanting to forget about her and my dream, I slipped out of bed. “Come on, Ruffles. Let’s do our morning routine before Ares wakes up. You still remember it from when we used to live here, right?” Ruffles licked my nose with her rough tongue and hopped off the bed, her pregnant belly nearly brushing against the ground as she headed toward the door for our morning stroll to the porch to watch nature at its finest. We tiptoed past my old room, where Marcel and Charolette were now staying, and walked down the creaky stairs to the porch. When I opened the front door, we both squinted our eyes at the blazing sun. I glanced up at the sky, wondering if Helios—that man from my dreams and the God from the hound fight a couple weeks ago—really was driving his golden chariot across the sky. But Helios was in the underworld, trapped and fighting for our lives. Shaking the thought away, I followed Ruffles to our rocking chairs on the porch. Instead of jumping on hers, she sprawled out in the sun, her little mouth pulled into a joyous smile. She rolled onto her back to sunbathe and chirped along with the birds. My lips curled into a small smile, and I glanced around the front yard, remembering the way that Jeremy used to chase me around, how we would play with all the pack pups all day long. One time, we had even come home with dirt and sticks in our hair before dinner. That day was the first time I’d heard Mom scold Jeremy, and I’d never forget it because Jeremy was always the prized and praised child. Sometimes, Mom treated me so badly that I couldn’t even fathom I was her child. She’d never treated Jeremy as poorly as she treated me. As I stared out into the desolate and quiet forest, I wondered if Mom would’ve treated me any differently if I’d had the power I did now. Would she have appreciated that I could shift? Would she have loved that I could heal not only myself but also other people? Or would she have used me for her own selfish desires? I balled my hands into fists, feeling both immense sorrow and pain firing through me. I would never f*****g know the answers to those questions because like the majority of my old packmates, she was dead now. She’d never come back. And if Fenris somehow brought her back from the dead, I would relish in killing her hound body. Dad would hate me for it, but he wasn’t here either. They had both left me to die because I was nothing to them. Suddenly, to my left, a figure moved in the forest. Ruffles and I both sat up taller to get a better look, my heart racing at the thought of hounds. They hadn’t shown up in two long weeks, and every day, I feared that they would show up stronger and faster than before. “Ruffles,” I whispered, “if this is a hound, run back into that house and get Ares.” Ruffles stood on all fours, her teeth drawn and a growl rumbling from her throat. The figure moved between two trees and finally revealed himself to me, standing n***d and suspended in time. I froze in the spot, my entire body tensing and an indescribable feeling shooting through my limbs. No, this can’t be. It really can’t be him, can it? “Kitten,” a distant voice drifted through the mindlink. “Mars …”