Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Tyrant alpha: Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 170

“No,” she snarls. “Stay the hell away from me. You stay with your people. I’ll stay with mine.”She gathers herself, making herself as tall and fierce as she can, stepping to me, staring me down, but the top of her head doesn’t clear my chest. And she trembles.The scent of her fear burns my eyes. I step aside. I let her go.I have no choice.She’s right.My hands shake as I pick up the cloth, rinse it, wring it dry, and fold it, but once I tuck it in my pocket, I’m steady again.In control.And empty.The solstice has passed, but the worst of winter hasn’t shown itself yet. There’s no snow on the ground, so we’re still outside for Human Sport. Arnold, the instructor, believes this is excellent weather to run marathons. It certainly makes the humans bitch.Today, we’re running the track. No one feels like chasing down the scavengers who inevitably use the opportunity to ditch if we run the path around the lake or the trails in the woods.Rosie’s not bothering to try. She’s strolling w

Nia leads us parallel to the lakeside path and past the entrance to the boards, almost as far as the Narrows. It isn’t until she elbows through a stand of brown marsh grass, revealing the pilings of a long-vanished dock, that I realize where we’re going. The Empties.We hop from piling to piling, snapping the brittle marsh grasses as we pass. At the end of the old dock, in the murky water, at least two dozen abandoned trailers float on their old, cracked platforms, creaking and swaying, held together with ropes and rusted chains. A platform in the northernmost corner split, the trailer tipped and took on water, and now the whole mess tilts at a downward angle, too vast to sink.When I was a pup, we’d come here on a dare or to find a bolt hole where we could snarf down food we lifted from our elders. I haven’t been in years.“This way.” Nia picks her way past empty metal hulks to a small trailer with white siding speckled with mold, pale blue trim around the bottom and around the windo

But it’s like I’ve come to the end of a road—no, the end of a bridge like the one Nia, Pritchard, Bevan, and I watched being built that summer before we moved to the upper school. The nobs were having it built, and we loved to watch as it stretched from one bank to the other, closer and closer every day.There was a point when it was about halfway done when Bevan started talking about jumping the river on his bike. Every day, he’d go on about whether he could make it, or if he should leave it another day.Finally, after a week of listening to Bevan run his mouth, Pritchard showed up with his bike, pedaled as hard as he could from as far back as he could, and while the construction workers shouted and scattered, he sailed for a brilliant moment against the blue sky before he plummeted into the river with a mighty splash. We still bust his balls about it.I feel like Pritchard on that bike, facing a yawning chasm, palms sweating, heart pounding.I’m never the one on the bike. I’m always

And also, despite my fear, a certainty is settling on me. This is the right path. Maybe it comes from my wolf’s blasé attitude or what Abertha said, but in the part of my not-at-all-magical-self that knows where the moon will be when the wind blows the clouds clear and where the dragon tongue grows in the thickest brush, I know I need to go.“I’ll come back.” I know that, too.Bevan shakes his head, sniffs to buck himself up, throws the door open, and swings himself down. “We siphoned a few extra cans of gas for you. They’re in the trunk.”“Thank you,” I say as I slide over to the driver’s seat.“What are you gonna do out there?” Bevan asks as he peels off his shirt and drops his drawers.“Make maps. Forage. Birth a baby.” Puke. Cry. Go crazy.“We took up a collection. You’re stocked when it comes to food for a few months, at least.”For a moment, a sadness intertwined with love replaces the iciness in my chest. A cut in rations will hurt the Bogs even more if I’m driving away with ou

I’m the enemy.My eyes burn. My fists clench, but there’s nothing to swing at.I fucked up, and my arms are empty.I had her, and I let her go.My father, my mother, Howell Owens, every instructor I’ve ever had since I could walk has beat me with the shame of failing the pack. Failing in my duty. Failing in judgment. Courage. Foresight.They were all wrong.There’s no greater shame than this, and the shame is nothing compared to the fear.Rosie couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag. She files her nails short and paints them. Pink. I don’t think she can even run in human form. She sits on the bleachers when we do sprints. She needs me.And I can’t live without her.A shadow darts in the woods beyond the barren patch where the trailer was.“Rosie?” I step forward, heart leaping.“No.” A hovering form in a white dress appears between two rowan trees, their bare branches outlined by fresh snow, the berries red in the moonlight.The witch.Her long silver hair and thin white gown float