Rejecting the Alpha Prince

ERIK "So? What do you think?" I looked over the vast green sea of the Oregon forests. Part of that forest, a large part, truth be told, belonged to me. I could see it, I could feel its borders in my blood - the land that was rightfully mine. And right in the middle of that territory, I could make out a small dot. The pack house of the Red Blood pack. From which, if only I wanted, I would have ruled. I kept my gaze on that land a little longer, to see if something happened - if the disgust and utter revulsion I felt for that place and the people who dwelled there would magically disappear, giving way to a sense of responsibility, but ... nothing happened. That place, that pack, was where my mother had experienced hell. Where she'd been abandoned by everyone and left at the mercy of a bastard whose blood I wanted to rip from my veins. It was the place she'd fleed to save me, to give me hope for a better life. That she'd found it in herself to forgive them made me very happy for her, but it didn't mean that her forgiveness automatically constituted mine. Especially considering the malicious whispers about her and me I'd heard the first and only time I'd been there, years before. I looked at her, standing beside me on the top of the mountain - people called her Luna, or Princess, but to me ... she was just Mom. My eyes fell on the hand that held mine: her wrist was covered by her jacket, but I knew that, under the layers of clothing, the scars that Clayton had carved ran across her skin like a cobweb. No, I decided. And I repeated the same word aloud. My mom nodded, with a small smile of understanding. She didn't try to convince me to assume the title of Alpha or to forgive them: she held me tight and pressed a kiss to my forehead. "Good for me," she chuckled, "I can still have my baby around the house." I smiled at those words, at the clear happiness in her voice, and I hugged her back. "Shall we go?" she asked, a playful smirk on her face, tipping her chin to the cliff below our feet. There were several slivers of rock, I noticed - useful for various landings. I shrugged. "Let's go." I took her hand and we dropped into the void, shifting in mid-air and jumping from sliver to sliver until we reached the ground. Dad was right where we'd left him, lounging on the wide branch of a pine. At first, I thought he was asleep, but as soon as we shifted back, he jumped down from the branch and beamed at us. "Welcome to Primark!" he exclaimed, pulling spare clothes for us out of his backpack. Totally unconcerned by our laughing, or maybe because of that, he continued with his little theatre. "How can I help you? The fitting rooms are on the right, but you can't try on over five items at a time". Goddess - who knows what people would have thought upon seeing Prince Xavier, the future king of wolves, doing stupid comedy sketches? Dad stopped only when he realized that mom and I were gasping from too much laughing: as soon as we calmed down, he handed us our clothes and we put them on, still trying to swallow our giggles. "You're an i***t, you know that?" mom smiled, hugging him. He smiled back at her and pressed a kiss to her lips. "And you're a tremendous pain in the ass, McNamara," he grumbled with a grin. "I'm a dad - it's my job to make dad jokes." Dad pulled her in, kissing her again - and from the look of it, they weren't gonna stop anytime soon. Seriously? "Hello? There are children here," I huffed, clearing my throat. "I have no interest in watching a tutorial on how to make babies, I already have enough experience with that." Mum widened her eyes, shocked. "E-excuse me?" I rolled my eyes, hiding - though not so well - an amused smirk. "I'm twenty-three and a prince, mom - it's not like having s*x is such an impossible task for me." "B-but you've never brought anyone home," she stammered. "Prinzessin," Dad intervened. "Please, let it go. Knowing you, it's obvious he hasn't introduced you to every girl he's had ... encounters with." That, thank the Goddess, shifted my mother's attention from the obvious fact that I was having s*x to Dad's words. She narrowed her eyes, squaring him. "Knowing you?" she hissed, demanding an explanation. Dad suddenly seemed to find himself very, very uncomfortable, and emitted a nervous giggle, rubbing the back of his head. Take the chance and go for a walk, kid, he said. I don't want to suffer the humiliation of your mother's scolding right before you. Ok, I'll go get the popcorn and come back, I giggled. You're worse than your sister, you know that? he hissed. And Astrid, my sister, was the personification of the Wicked Witch of the West. Okay, okay ... too bad, I'd have enjoyed that. Get. Reluctantly - because I really wanted to see Mom scold Dad for the umpteenth time - I walked off into the forest. It'd take a while to get back to the car, but I could use that time to put my thoughts in order and relax. Although Dad's joke had relieved the tension, my shoulders were still tight, and now that I was alone, surrounded by silence and peace, it was impossible to ignore the thoughts and the awareness of why I was there. In the land of the beast who'd fathered me. My parents had told me that Xavier was not my biological father when I was six, a few months before I started school - and this was to avoid me finding it out from other kids. My siblings and I had attended a prestigious private school from elementary to high school: it wasn't an easy environment, and Dad was sure, knowing many of the parents of the children in my year, that they'd make unpleasant comments about me and my mother in front of their children, who would naturally repeat them at school. Being adopted, or almost, had never given me any trouble: I had fantastic parents who loved me, siblings I adored, and a wonderful family - and I'd always made the kids who dared to say anything about my mom and me shut up. No, the actual problems had come when I'd turned eighteen and my mother had told me the whole truth: who my biological father was, why she had run away from him, and what I was entitled to as his natural heir. Five years had passed since that day, yet it was etched in my memory. The tears in my mom's eyes, the horror I'd felt as soon as I realized where the scars on her body came from, the deep disgust and sense of rejection I immediately felt towards my inheritance. Alpha of the Red Blood pack - the pack who'd seen and ignored my mother's suffering. Son of the animal who'd brutalized her. I'd sworn to never accept that position that very night. A blood oath that would kill me if I ever broke it. Not that I intended to. Mom and Dad, of course, knew nothing of this: they'd have gone mad with worry and then looked for a way to break the spell, finding nothing. I'd looked up a lot before making the vow: there was no way to revoke a blood oath. And I'd done it precisely because of that irrevocability. The only thing she knew was that I had no intention of taking the title. It was she who'd insisted that I join her and Dad on the royal tour: they did it every two years, to a different continent, to meet up with the packs over which my grandfather ruled. My siblings, unlike me, were busy with school, and anyway, that might have been a good chance to see the Red Blood land, to see if I felt any special connection to it, if being there might change my feelings about becoming Alpha. I'd only accepted to not make her sad. And so, for a fortnight now, we'd been wandering around the States, meeting friends and not-so-friends, making and renewing agreements, working for the welfare of our race. It was exhausting. Planes every two or three days, parties, the responsibility ... it was heavy. The good food and the almost endless line of still-unmated she-wolves throwing themselves at my feet eased the weight a bit, but all in all ... I was glad that Conrad was the Crown Prince. He was everything I wasn't: serious, responsible, and smart. A perfect future Alpha first, and King later. I took a deep breath, in and out, in and out, as grandma had taught me: between the breathing and the silence, the tightness started to ease. I won't be Alpha, I thought. We're at the Red Blood's, tonight. I'll make the announcement. It'll be the only thing I'll do for that bunch of wretched sons of bitches. Then I'll wash my hands of them forever. I sniffed the air, sensing Dad's trail: he'd walked to the base of the mountain, while Mom and I'd climbed it, so she could show me, in full Lion King style, what I could have. It wouldn't be hard, now that I had a trail to follow, to find our car again. The sun was setting quickly; I had to move if I wanted to make it back to the hotel in time for a shower before going to the party. I quickened up my pace, paying little attention to my surroundings: I wasn't going back there, anyway. I'm gonna need a drink, I grumbled, feeling the tension build up again. I couldn't keep my thoughts in line. I focused all my mental energies on that thought - on the drinks I'd soon be smashing myself with, on the imminent weightlessness and bliss they'd give me ... but not even those thoughts could stop me from feeling it. Blood. The air reeked of it. And when a terrifying scream echoed through the forest, I started to run.