The Last Lycan

Chapter 2 - Run and Never Look Back

1 month later

My father jumped from the port side of our small boat and onto the little dock to secure our spring line. I was busy double-checking that our sails were secure so they couldn’t come loose in the strengthening wind that had aided our return home.

“Papa? What is it?” I asked from the bow.

He had come to a halt, midway in looping the line, simply staring in the direction of the pack village on the horizon.

“Stay with the boat, Konstantin.” He made his way down the short jetty in long, purposeful strides, never turning his head towards me.

What had gotten into him? We still had our fish to unload, and I couldn’t haul the basket off the deck by myself. The light was starting to fade fast behind the gloomy clouds and, even with my knife at hand, I didn’t want to be out here alone.

“Wait! Papa, the catch—”

“Konstantin!” he bellowed, his clipped tone softening as he spun around. His gentle smile did nothing to hide the strain underneath his beard and black curls, which whirled around him chaotically, caught in the gusts. “Something isn’t right at home and I want to check as quickly as I can. Do as I say and stay here, my little wolf.”

“If something’s wrong, I should come with you. I can help.” I jumped from the boat and onto the jetty, my feet sliding under me in my haste.

“No. I’m sure it’s nothing. Start fixing the hole in the net you found.” He marched back to me and thrust said net into my chest. “Promise me, you’ll wait here until I return.”

I nodded earnestly, having never seen my father so serious and unnerved.

“That’s my good boy.” He tugged at my chin playfully and left faster than I could utter another protest.

I watched his silhouette disappear over the dunes and up the worn path our boots had eroded day after day.

What could be wrong at home?

My fingers tightened around the net in my hands, my mind racing with possibilities and coming up blank with an answer. Nothing ever raised my father’s hackles like this, except us: his pups and our safety.

And just like that, the answer hit me, melting the worry out of me with a long exhale.

It had to be my sister, and my mother must have mind-linked him. It was still early for Galina’s return home, but perhaps she had hit an issue; after all, she was approaching her shift.

Eight moons ago, Galina had begun to hear her wolf within her mind. In the coming luna cycles, she would shift to her lycan form once her human body could cope with the agonising transformation. It was one aspect of my own wolf’s emergence that I wasn’t looking forward to.

Because she was so grouchy lately, Galina had been allowed to go to the human towns to our north to trade the pack’s produce. Our fields were the most fertile because of the volcanic soil and yielded the best harvests, so were easily traded for resources we couldn’t make or grow ourselves. She was even permitted to take the pack vehicle, a new addition that only a few knew how to drive. This was the start of change within the pack, the type many of the older members were resistant to. All I wanted was a chance to drive the four-wheeled machine, but they all claimed I was too young. I had turned sixteen years old, moons ago, and I was still treated like a pup.

I didn’t understand why my father wouldn’t just tell me what was wrong with my sister, but he must have had his reasons and I trusted him for it.

So, as my father instructed, I sat myself down at the end of the jetty, with a netting needle in hand, and got to work. I knew how to knit a repair seamlessly in a net and I would have most of it done before he returned with word on Galina.

My flat, wooden-carved needle deftly followed my fingers, weaving in and out of the netting with the spool of willow fibre unravelling as I stitched.

The wind thrashed at my skin, lashing it with sand and debris from the beach. No storm clouds were gathering over the waves, but the weather was painting a different story; the net in my hands was becoming harder to focus on.

Without warning, the gusts that had been blowing in off of the sea changed direction in an abrupt and violent burst, nearly knocking me off our small wooden dock. I picked the loose strands of my dark blond hair out of my face and squinted against the wind, trying to catch a glimpse of my father returning. There was something else upon the land breeze, something that collected and sank in my stomach with a growing unease. The shifting winds felt far more ominous than just a change in weather patterns.

Where was he? What could have kept my father for so long?

He could have returned twice over in the time I had taken to patch the hole.

My ears pricked at the sounds of voices carried over on the changing winds. To drift this far from the village, they had to be loud, yelling.

Why would so many of the pack be shouting?

When I rose to my feet, the net in my hands tumbling to the wooden boards beneath my feet, I caught the faint wafts of smoke blowing in my direction, adding to the prickle of apprehension clawing its tendrils at the base of my neck. As I approached the high path that led over the dunes, the sky faintly glowed in the distance, a blend of orange and red licking the dull overcast clouds, and it wasn’t from Kronotsky volcano either.

The emergency at home being my sister was seeming less and less likely.

My feet took over, moving me forward and towards the path I had promised my father I would stay away from. But with a rebellious curiosity fuelling my disobedience and the nagging fear that he might not be coming back, I couldn’t wait any longer.

Just as I was about to crest the top of the dune, the sounds of howls growing quieter with each gust of wind, my father burst over the top and almost toppled me backwards. Without a word spoken, he drew me into his arms and crushed me in a bear hug, lifting my feet clear off of the sand. Each ragged breath from his lungs rattled my ears, and a dampness saturated my hairline.

Unceremoniously, my father dropped me back to my feet and gripped my upper arm in a vice, jerking me back to the boat.

“Come.”

“Papa?” I stumbled in disbelief, barely keeping up with his strides. “Papa, what happened? Is it Galina? Why can I hear shouting? What—”

My line of sight followed his torso, which was now exposed, to a slick shine glinting in the dying light spilling from a type of wound I was unfamiliar with.

“Are you bleeding? Why aren’t you healing? What did that?”

The skin across his ribs hung torn apart, the edges melted as if a searing blade of flame had split his flesh. And now that I took in his appearance further, he looked as though he had been through a battle. Marks that resembled claw slashes littered his chest and arms, staining him in blood, but they were already healing and knitting back together. A few more of the same melted slices, albeit smaller in size, were scattered across his chest, refusing to repair as they should.

“Papa! Stop!” I’d had enough of his silence to my questions and dug my heels into the grit and rock sand, wrenching myself free from his vice-like grip. “What’s going on?”

“Those damn marauding wolves our Alpha talked to… they’re here.” His dark eyes, more obsidian-grey than I had ever seen them, cut to the fiery glow hanging above our village. “They came with weapons I’ve never seen before: a strange dart fired from a device that changed our lycans to their humans, and a metal that hurt worse than any fire.” He pressed a palm over the gash along his side, the blood continuing to flow in a worrying dark red.

Wolves… the ones I was told who looked like us but shifted to a four-legged wolf. Our Alpha had been seeking help for our pack for the past ten years, and the wolf of a pack far past the mountains in the west he found recently had sparked optimism in most of us, if only for a brief second. The wolf wanted warriors for his pack in exchange for his help, a trade our Alpha would never have agreed to.

“But our Alpha turned them down! He said no—”

“Konstantin!” My father gripped my shoulders, painting my shirt with a crimson handprint, and shook me to stop. “Our people are dead… our home is gone.”

“No,” I choked, shaking my head and trying to rip free before it was too late. “Mama, Galina… we need to go back for them!”

He cupped my face in his rough palms, his wild eyes, heavily rimmed red, dissolving in such anguish that it would haunt me forever.

“Everyone is gone… your mother…” My father’s lip trembled, rippling his dishevelled beard. “That’s why I need to get you out of here. You’re the last of us.”

Grasping my wrist, he pulled my numb body back to our boat, unfurling the sails while I stood by quietly, stuck in a paralysis on the sand and unable to walk my feet over the planks of the jetty. The sights, scents and noises of the world around me were deadened in a blanket, a frozen bubble I was terrified to burst.

A blurred flicker of movement in my peripheral vision hooked my attention and snapped the unseen cords that rooted me in place. My bubble popped and sent me free-falling back into the world I should have been paying mind to, and what stood behind me had me wishing it was the tiger returned to settle a score.

In place of a tiger stood a man I didn’t recognise and two wolves, far larger than any wild ones I had seen; one a dusky brown and the other a dark gold. Their jaws snapped in my direction, barking their warning when I brandished my knife tucked in the back of my trousers.

(“Drop it, boy.”) The man thundered a yell in words I had never heard before, and lifted the object in his hands: a long cylindrical barrel.

As the man extended his arm, holding what I could only gather was a weapon, his sleeve raised, revealing something I did recognise: a tattoo, but not in a design my father would have inked. This was nothing like our pack bands; it was an eye.

The creak of wood and heavy thuds from behind jostled my legs under me. An almighty roar battled the wind for dominance in my ears, and my father’s partially shifted arm coiled around my waist, spinning me around before I knew what was happening. A monstrous howl tore from his throat, deafening me and shuddering the soft earth under the soles of my boots. His howl gurgled to a human cry of pain as his half-transformed limbs reverted back from a partial lycan shift, his dead weight dragging me to the sand with him.

“Papa?!” I tried to push his heavy, convulsing body off me by his shoulders. “Papa, wake up!”

A metal tube, short in length and with a red tuft that fluttered in the wind, protruded from his back. Black tendrils of venom weaved their way outward, defacing his tan skin with a pattern of dark, raised veins.

What poison was this that could stop a lycan such as my father in his tracks?

(“Get the boy while the father is incapacitated on wolfsbane, quickly.”) The attacking man yelled more strange words that I couldn't understand.

But it wasn’t his words that clenched their freezing talons around my chest and leeched their dread to swallow my breath. It was the two enormous wolves who set their eyes on me that seized my blood.

I scrambled to find my knife, but it was useless. Wherever it lay, it was lost in the sand or the rising tide. What I did have was the net I had fixed and then dropped when I innocently decided to go wandering for my father. With a final heave, I managed to free myself from under his weight and frantically reached for it, yanking with all my might.

As the nearest dusky brown wolf closed in, aiming its jaws for my legs, I threw the net, tangling it in its teeth. But as its loops left my fingertips, I was knocked on my backside again. The dark blond wolf with grass-green eyes had leapt, sinking its teeth deep into my right arm.

Blinding fire lanced and pierced me to the bone, snatching my breath and stealing my vision. I had never experienced pain like it or the nausea that followed. My mind and reactions finally caught up as the wolf’s teeth tugged, dragging me by the arm and furrowing the sand with my body and blood trickling from the open punctures.

My scream echoed in my head and rattled the air, my arm tearing beyond its limit and threatening to rip from my body at any moment. Desperate to get it off, I swung my left fist into its snout, and its grip slipped from the shock of my strike. But its canines sank deeper with a vengeance, searing my arm in more pain than I could stand.

“Papa!” A hoarse cry burned my throat, pleading to the trembling mound of my father’s figure for help.

As my vision began to blur, a momentary flare of agony erupted from the teeth embedded in my flesh, only to be extinguished a breath later. All I could make out were the fuzzy outlines of the dark gold wolf being ripped from atop of me and thrown through the air, pummelling into the unshifted man with a sickening crunch.

A sharper image of my father hovered over me, trembling and wobbling on his feet, with a gaunt, lifeless glaze behind his eyes and a ruckling sound from his chest.

“Little wolf… run…”

And my body was tossed like a leaf on the wind, landing in something hard and cracking my head against it. A black hole swamped my senses, claiming me in a raging swell.

*

*

*

A salty tang twitched my nose, and the breeze that carried it tickled my skin by ruffling my hair across it. I squinted against the overpowering sun, which split my head in two with its strength. The sound of the surf surrounded me, lapping the cradle encasing me and grinding underneath as it ran aground, pitching me in its motion on each wave breaking against it.

I swung an unsteady hand through the air, attempting to find the lip of the wooden rail to my right, and bitterly regretted placing any weight on it. A shooting pain rebounded up my arm and along my shoulder, reminding me of how I received the two curving rows of fresh puncture wounds and why I was in a boat.

With my thoughts still groggy, I attempted to sit up, expecting to see the beach I had been attacked on and, instead, found another. This one lay desolate and exposed, awash in black mud, rock and sand and edged in rolling swaths of green. Sharp, high-pitched honks drew my attention to small geese, similar to ones I had seen before, sporting a black head and neck with a white patch. They waddled about, oblivious, as though all was normal.

I recognised no landmark on the horizon, nothing familiar, and all of it new, unsettling.

Where was I?

…My father…

“Papa?!” I yelled at the top of my broken and parched throat and through cracked, dry lips.

The call vanished, unanswered, confirming what I wanted to deny.

“...Papa.”

My voice caught and strangled, and the weight of the mist collecting in my stinging eyes broke, trickling their rivers down my cheeks. I swiped them away as fast as they fell. Tears and sobs wouldn't help me now.

Slipping around the spilt fish, upended from the basket, I cradled my crusted, bloodied arm to my chest and I hauled my body over the side, crashing into the sloshing shallows of the frigid waves. I tried to steady myself and find my balance, pushing off the bow to make my way to the drier shore. The spring line whipped about on the breeze, frayed where it had been ripped in half.

Whatever strength I had left, I put into grabbing hold of what remained of the line with my good arm and heaved the boat farther into land to keep it from drifting back out to sea. The main sail flapped in the gusts, torn from being tossed around all night. Without repair, it would be useless, leaving me no way to get back home.

But what home did I have to go back to? I didn’t even know where I was to plot a route back if I could.

Everything I knew… everyone… was gone.

My mother.

My sister.

My father… he wouldn’t have lied.

His warning, the promise he had made me repeat, circled around my mind.

“If you have to run, you run and never look back. Promise me?”

As much as I wanted to, I wouldn’t disobey him, nor would I break my promise.