Shattered - Completed

35 -Nuts

Gavin

My love's Knowing has betrayed me again. Sent her from me, from her guards, from the safety of our den and pack.

She is gone and with her, my son. The bond twists and stretches between us, thinning into filaments of pure emotion, before thickening again as it flexes brutally. The fiend gnashes his teeth and throws himself at his cage, howling to the sky in pure fury as we burst from our skin.

Our female is afraid for a long moment. Her fear sends me reeling, shifting to paws and racing into a storm so viscous that night descended hours early. Where is my family? We are blinded by the storm, the fiend and I, but we follow CeCe anyway.

My father is on my heels. Typically, the sensation of being chased by a TrueBorn would incite a fight. It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters but her. After a while, even the TrueBorn can't force his way through the swirling, white madness. I am left alone in the deadly storm unlike anything I have ever known.

Her fear eclipses all other emotions. Then confusion. Then sorrow. Then... nothing but the bone-deep exhaustion she felt so often during our shared dream where I locked her in our tower for her safety and my fiend's selfish, obsessed pleasure. I pad to a brief stop, my snout high in the air. The fiend is desperate, his golden eyes begging me to let him out again. The world is howling madness, but I am silent. The urge to release the fiend makes every limb tremble. Under the screaming wind, I hear the faint hissing of a serpent.

I set him free. CeCe is all that matters. Her and Salvatore, and they are lost in this maelstrom. His cage explodes into ash and flame in my mind. It will never return. I will never be able to rebuild it. We are a fiend. A monster. For her. So be it. It consumes us just as our beautiful mate's love filled up the hollow parts of us.

When we race through the storm again, the bond drags us toward her. It takes no time at all to find her. The cave is dark and oddly familiar. It's my little she-wolf's den. The one that exists in my love's shared consciousness with her she-wolf. We know it intimately, from all those times she hid from us so deep inside the shadows that we couldn't make out a single strand of her fur.

We pad inside, hesitant because under the recent scents of my family, is the hint of another female, and the magic fouling the wintery world outside. Our lip curls back, showing our sharp teeth to the unseen threat. Too late, we realize that our female will misinterpret our expression. Then we see her and know our cruel face doesn't matter.

Our CeCe is curled up on a mat of woven sticks. A pitiful bed, if we had to guess. Her beautiful green eyes are closed. Her cheeks pale with no color. Her lips are blue with cold. Our son bares his teeth at us, slung over her frozen form, shivering and crying.

"She won't wake up," Sal whimpers. Fear wafts through the air, smothering all of the other scents but his. He is too young to hear her faint heartbeat. Our pup bends his ear to her mouth but is sniveling too loudly to hear her soft breath. His weeping drowns out the hiss of the snake, but I know she's here.

With a growl and a gentle nudge, I topple him flat from our female. Grabbing the edges of the sodden, frozen cloak draping her frame, I rip with teeth and claw until it's off and she is wearing nothing but her pale, beautiful skin. Laying down next to her, I nudge his spindly arms, until he receives the message and helps drape CeCe's head on my side. "She doesn't have any blankets, Da," our pup sniffles.

We curl our lip at him, thinking of blankets, one in particular, as we look around the cave. It is nearly empty but shows all the signs of our female's life out here, alone on the very edge of existence. Rage trickles through us, but we control it, just barely. Our family needs us to be sane.