Araceli's POV
It's been three months of endless training and playing the part of the council's little puppets. You'd think we'd have found a way to break free from the council's hold by now, but no.
We're all trying our best to play our parts in the plan, but it's starting to take a toll on us.
The once play pretend arguments between Iris, Delgado and Lauren has started to become more real and me playing the peacekeeper is weighing heavily on me.
I can't help but think that maybe this is what the council planned in the first place, to have us slowly disintegrate our pack bond until we have no one but them to rely on.
At first things were going good, we were all optimistic that the plan would work and kept working hard. But then, we hit our first crisis. Alpha Demetrius wouldn't let Delgado close to his office and kept their communication to a minimum.
We figured it would take time for him to become more open with Delgado, but then the first month came by and their communication seemed to be decreasing more than anything.
And things with Lauren weren't looking much better either. It seems that she's actively trying to sabotage us now and has completely sided with the council. I wonder if they have already gotten to her. And if so, what exactly was she promised to have her betray our pack?
Iris and I seem to be the only ones trying to hold things together, but Iris has a short fuse, so she tends to let her anger cloud her mind and keep her from making rational decisions these days.
I get that the strain being placed on the pack is taking its toll on her as our alpha, but I need her to get her shit together cause she's not the only one feeling the immense pressure from trying to keep us grounded.
As for me and my mission, you can say I've hit a very large wall that I can't seem to climb across. I got access to the library as planned and I did find books about demons and their powers but nothing on the council.
During the first month, we would train in groups of two in the forest, heading for the blindspots in the surveillance, trying out everything to discover what powers we each had.
We found out that Iris has mind manipulation, Lauren has chaos causation, - which, if we're all being honest, we weren't the least bit surprised to hear - Delgado has fire manipulation and I surprisingly have the ability of destruction.
I don't really know how our powers work, we can all use the other powers, but not as good as we're supposed to. I read that if we keep training, we could possibly master all four, but the first powers that were symbiotic with us will always be the strongest.
Chaos causation was a risky power for us to use though. It only works on other beings. Basically, we would pick out a person to start with and feed their minds with thoughts of violence and anger and then direct it at someone seated or standing close to them and they would immediately get violent and start attacking that person. Then the person being attacked would be next and so on until the whole place was in an uproar. And we couldn't use it during our secret trainings so we'd practice it during meal time or when there was a large enough crowd gathered.
Plus, seeing Lauren's pitch black eyes aimed at me was creepy as hell.
We'd join in too, of course, to make sure the council didn't know it was our doing. And also because, when we use this power for too long, we tend to lose ourselves to the chaos. After it got so bad that Iris almost killed someone, she decided to stop using it when we were so she could ground us and when she used it, we would ground her.
While the rest of us could only use it on one or two persons at a time, Lauren was exceptional at it. She could influence the thoughts of three packs at a time and cause great havoc.
But at the same time, she loses herself to the chaos faster than the rest of us and sometimes, she completely loses herself to the point where she turns on us and involves Delgado and I in the chaos, forcing Iris to use her mind manipulation to bring all three of us back to our senses.
We tried stopping it for a while, but Lauren needs a way to let out the chaos or it consumes her.
Fire manipulation was also hard to hide, cause the council is sure to notice a bunch of burnt trees if they chose to patrol the forest. Hence the duo style training.
Iris thought it'd be better if we practiced it while sparring with one another so at least, we'd be the ones taking the burns.
Thankfully, our training wear is fireproof, for whatever fucking reason, so we don't have to worry about burnt clothes.
Lauren and I would train together and Iris and Delgado would pair up. We tried switching it up, but Delgado does not know how to hold back and Iris heals faster than we do.
I don't know how she does it, sparring with him felt like he was actively trying to burn me alive and I was terrified at times that he would actually succeed. Not that sparring with Lauren was any better. She'd get mad if I was winning and her chaos would take over and she'd try to control me with it, but Iris taught us how to put mental blocks up so we could handle her.
Destruction training was definitely my favourite, obviously. It's quite simple, I just look at something and picture it disintegrating or coming apart little by little and it does what I want.
We're preparing for an all out battle, so we couldn't stick to just destroying inanimate objects, so Lauren suggested we go hunting and try it out on the animals in the forest. It helps us practice using it on live creatures as well as moving targets but that was only a challenge to me for a week or two.
The others decided that since I needed more practice and more of a challenge, I should try using it on them. I was hesitant at first, but then Lauren decided to be a cunt about it. Long story short, she had to spend thirty minutes in pain as her right arm regenerated.
I think mind manipulation was the scariest one for me.
We didn't need to go out to the forest to practice it but we still tried using it in pairs in our dorm. Like I said, this was Iris's specialty, so before long, she was controlling all of our thoughts and actions before moving on to using it on larger crowds of people.
The scary part though, was that I didn't know I was being controlled. I just thought the actions I was performing were all things I wanted to do and just absentmindedly did them. That was the thing about Iris, she was so good that you wouldn't even know that anything was amiss.
The rest of us were good at it too, but when we released our hold on someone, they'd freak out a bit because they could tell that something was wrong.
Back to the problem at hand though. After the first month and a half was when our pack started falling apart.
Training was no longer fun and it was like we were all actively trying to kill each other. Lauren started snapping more easily and her chaos would take over her so much that her eyes were almost always black.
Delgado was always running hot. He used to have more control, but I think the pack dynamic was getting to him more than he let on. It got so bad that he burnt Iris so bad one time that her clothes actually got charred. She said she saw him breathing out literal flames when he was trying to calm down.
I can't say that I'm not being affected either. I tried practicing slowly peeling the bark of a tree once and ended up blowing it and the surrounding trees to splinters. Lauren and I had to make a show of punching down trees on the surveillance cameras to cover up for me.
Our powers are growing, and while that's a good thing, we are not fully equipped to train ourselves properly and gain proper control of them.
I don't know why Iris doesn't just take control of Lauren and Delgado's minds and have us working together again. Or why she hasn't tried taking control of the council's minds, but I have to believe that she has a reason for it. She's my alpha, and if I start doubting her now, I know I'll fall apart.
