Chapter 10. The Crimson Blood-Hounds
"Remember the name of the wolf who will defeat you." Lorcan Whitelaw, had howled viciously at me through his wolf form. It wasn't a battle I had been intending to have to fight. It wasn't even a battle I was expecting to have to fight.
This was- er, had been my Beta.
My second in command.
The one within the Pack who had held my most trust and confidence... the one to whom I had told everything.
No Alpha ever wants to have to admit it to any fellow Pack member when they have any sense of genuine fear about, well, really any given situation. No Alpha wants to have his Pack believe that they wouldn't have any threatening or harmful situation under control.
Yet, the very real and terrifying threat that the re-emergence of the Dark Ones' had brought with it... what was an ominous cloud of dread for what was going to be an inevitable blood bath. If not now... if not next week... if not next month or next year... they would eventually come for the Pack when they believed their numbers or skill had the strength.
While I had silently harboured this fear and confided in only a single soul, Lorcan Whitelaw, I had already began preparations' for the worst case scenario with the Dark Ones. Contacting the Alpha's of other Packs which owed an allegiance to the Crimson Blood-Hounds.
Our Pack was widely upheld and respected, for the ancient and long-standing role we had played as a pack, as a bloodline and lineage, in keeping the Dark Ones' and their numbers in check. Plundering any gatherings of strongholds that any of the Scouts reported back on.
Hitting them hard consistently, to ensure their numbers and skill would never again grow to a mass that threatened the very basis of every creature on this earth's existence.
A certainty with the Dark Ones', was indulgence... and over-indulgence to a gluttonous height and dizzying proportions.
I allowed my thoughts to take me back to one of the plundering parties I had led as a young wolf, with my father's permission and caution, but yet had also brought him immense pride. It was not long after my first shift, and one that my father, - the old Alpha, had been so keen on me leading and attending. Why not both in one?
As a pup, I used to protest against the constant killing of the Dark Ones.
"...Surely they have a family too? Aren't we just making more enemies for the sake of making enemies if we keep killing them, with no reason to?" I had only been ten years old, or around then, when I would begin to protest that line. Right up and after my first shift at 16.
My older brother Samuel, 7 years my senior, would always side with father, and I could never understand his reasoning... his justification and how he made sense of such senseless bloodshed - at least, through the eyes of childhood and innocence.
That Plundering Party... the true nature and horrors awaited by those ill-fated enough to fall victim to a Dark One was laid before my eyes. They only fed off blood and made no use of the meat of their carcasses. The scent of rotting corpses was a distinct marker of any stronghold the Dark Ones' tried to establish.
The more of them there were to feed, the more bodies of animals, humans, shifters, and other creatures would be piled high outside, or sometimes in a subterranean cave. The higher the level of feasting, the stronger they were. They had begun adapting recently, in this way. Hiding the corpses of their victims in ways that masked the scent.
This was the type of stronghold I plundered that day. I led it so naively, going in truly believing that the Dark Ones' had any hint of goodness in them. That they may have families and live a reasonable life, as other creatures do.
Bodies towering in a pit, with varying stages of decay, were laid bare. This was one of those that we finally detected, and until that point, we had had no true scope of their size, numbers, and overall strength until we were in the belly of the beast. Out numbered and largely overwhelmed.
A female shifter child, although not a wolf-shifter, was no older than 5 and lay on a blooded slate. One of her arms had been completely cut off. The more mature and powerful Dark Ones were cleverer and also more cruel than those more mindless of their kind. They knew that if they kept their victims alive, they could feast on them longer. Yet the poor child remained alive. She whimpered almost inaudibly. Her tears mixed with the bloody fingerprints of the Dark One, which had begun to butcher her alive.
Samuel had made a point in showing me this, even though I had led this party: "Do you still believe that these creatures deserve your sympathy or any, Brother? When they show none for a defenseless child?"
The young girl wasn't a werewolf specifically. Not all shifters were.
Werewolves had no birthmark to show their shift creature. However, other shifters did have this, and these shifters tended to live in nomadic tribes. Moving from place to place. Only a select few had stopped that way of life and succeeded territories from some territories of other werewolf Packs, long, long ago.
The little birthmark on the bloodied ends of her shoulder, where her arm used to begin, revealed the shape of a sparrow. Although sparrows and other avian shifters weren't necessarily Harpy clans, their leaders tended to treat them as their own kind.
While werewolf Packs and Harpy Clans rarely spoke these days. His clan had not had communication with the Raven Clan that bordered their territory since the death of their old King. It had been rumoured that he had taken a general of his army as a wife and had children, but not much else was heard after that. They often got on well enough to know about each other, or at the very least, entertain mutual and civil respect for one another.
Samuel and I knew well enough that there was no Sparrow Harpy Clan. Such a thing didn't exist. The closest to this was the Hawk Harpy Clan, which had sparrow hawks within that clan, but they were very different and no Harpy bore a shifter's mark either.
This young Sparrow was a true sparrow shapeshifter, and this hoard of Dark Ones had cut off one of her wings at such a young age.
If she had ever flown before, being so young, she might have before now... yet if she had? Unfortunately, she would never again feel the joy of flight.
If she had never flown before, now, she never would.
The only comparison I could think of back then for such a crime... was cutting of the feet or hands of any werewolf. Remove the primal and wild thrill of running and hunting within a pack.
The poor child was so very young.
It was for that reason she was lying in the abysmal condition she was. Her young and youthful blood was one of the most sought-after types of blood when Dark Ones' weren't being picky.
My inexperience also failed to pick up that this meant that there was an older and more experienced one leading this horde, and the one responsible for such atrocities.
It was the rage from this sight before my eyes, and the processing and understanding of just how disgustingly cruel these Dark Ones really were. How void of humanity they were and only filled with one drive - hunger. Their cold, malicious, and brutal ways... wrongs, so wrongful like cutting the arm, and therefore the wing off of a young sparrow shifter... it had no rhyme or reasoning that would ever justify it.
Watching other members of the Crimson Blood-Hounds assist the young girl under my brother's commands as second in command, and sent to oversee this party, they began to dress her wound with an emergency supply brought for the pack, just in case. Though she lay limp and unmoving. Terror and pain had frozen her, and the atrocities committed to her sealed the truth, any shred of childish naivety which remained, lingering was minuscule if any. Remaining limp and without expression as they had lifted her from the bloody stone slate and carried her away.
She was such a small and fragile seeming thing. If we could not locate her family, the Crimson Blood-Hounds would take her in as their own and ensure she had everything she would ever need... we just wouldn't be able to give her that wing back...or the ability of flight.
Taking the little sparrow in was exactly what happened... Swiftly had turned out to be her name. Over those years, she became an honorary member of the pack and was loved by all, but had settled in reasonably quickly.
More than anyone in the pack, she had the deepest hatred of the Dark Ones and more reason than most of us.
"Dark Ones were abominations, and for the sake of every creature... they must be managed, removed, and extinguished from this earth." Is what she would say. What Swiftly experienced, and that very sight itself, had sealed any empathy which I had for the Dark Ones.
"Do you understand now why we must eradicate every hoard of the Dark Ones we can locate, track, and find?" Samuel sighed and his hazel eyes softened in understanding, as he placed a comforting hand on my shoulder, "I used to think the same way as you, Nikolas. Until my father brought me around the same age as you are now, to a Purging Party like this- almost exactly like this- but with him. There was no mutilated little sparrow child, with an arm- or, eh, wing, cut off. There was a room full of mere humans, kept in a pit and gravely malnourished. Some even died in that room. They were living, if you could call them that, among their own dead... the Dark Ones there had been keeping them as stock for food. Though they weren't doing a good job at feeding them, rather than feeding themselves."
Samuel stopped, realising he was rambling to a memory that such a Purge Party had brought back, given that I, his own little brother, was now seeing the true nature and terror of the Dark Ones'.
Once we had made it back from the Hoard's Purge Party, Father had come over to both of us. Seeing the grave and solemn expressions on both of our faces, his own expression fell. "I am sorry you boys are in a world where such violence is necessary to combat horrors that are only equal," He started. "The young sparrow... Swiftly, you say her name was? She will be made an honorary member of the pack, and she is safe, here with us."
When he had been Alpha of the Crimson Blood-Hounds, father had been absolute and never faltered in his appearance of strength and dignity. His reign over the Pack was assured and no one dared question it... and yet even he was appalled and feared the Dark Ones'.
"You boys should know... that it is the duty of the Crimson Blood-Hound's to uphold an ancient pact made between our ancestors and the ancestors of the Royalty of the Raven Harpy Clan. They may no longer hunt the Dark Ones, as we do, but believe me. They were very close to extinction before the ancient oath was made, and it is why they are so militarily prepared - even if they do not remember why." There was a cool righteousness emanating from Father as he spoke about the entangled history and origins of the Pack like this, even being older. It had always made Samuel and me feel like children again. "For as long as there is a true descendant of the original oath makers, the Crimson Blood-Hounds are bound to a duty of purging Dark Ones' from this world."
"...And what of the Raven Harpy? What about their duties?" Samuel seemed slightly irked; it had always bothered him that the Ravens no longer hunted the Dark Ones' as they used to and that they no longer aided the Crimson Blood-Hounds in the ancient endeavor.
Father smiled at Samuel. Understanding coloured those hazel eyes all Von Kassin shared.
The lack of assistance the Pack had been getting from the Raven Harpies, frustrated father to no end. It was apparently due to a King with pacifistic ideals, who had never seen war; had war waged upon him or even seen the horrors committed by the Dark Ones'.
That cool, righteous aura father emitted while he spoke about the Pack's ancient oath, our duty and how our honour was bound to it. It was the aura that as an Alpha I would always aspire to attain and fail to achieve... I would end up being jumped on a scouting expedition, looking for any sign of the Dark Ones, by my own trusted Beta.
My naïve leadership, inexperience, and failings would cost my older brother Samuel his life. Once Swiftly was settled back at pack territory with the best Doctors we had available, though none of ours had any familiarity with avian-shifter physiology, they had done their best. Samuel had set out once again to track the Older and more experienced leader of that hoard of Dark Ones'.
The pack had slaughtered maybe two to three dozen lower-level and newly turned broods. Those newly turned would never have had the sense to hide the bodies under the earth, and a group that size was a clear sign and indication of a will to increase numbers and strength.
Samuel went out to track the leader of that brood down... his last words had been, "I leave you in charge of the birds while I'm gone." Ruffling my hair playfully, he then nudged me before returning to some semblance of restraint, from childish play. "Take care of Swiftly. Father and I will be back soon."
That day I lost my father and my brother... they had walked into a perfectly laid trap.
That day, the Crimson Blood-Hounds gained an Alpha who was inexperienced and always felt like there were things Father Hand never shared about our history. Something in my gut had always said there was something more to it... and now I would never know, and he would never be able to tell me.
The experience I would gain would be through repeated Purge Parties and strategic scouts. After 5 years, Swiftly began assisting with strategic plans to strike back at the Dark Ones. She was a natural strategist, fed by her hatred for those monsters. For a child, it was both a marvel and heartbreaking at the same time. As every member of the pack knew why she assisted as she grew older, and why she was so keen and jovial every time she got news of another successful Purging Party.
My naïve leadership would cost Samuel his life and our fathers, from not knowing that the numbers might have been too great or the forces too much... and now it had cost me my own, with my Beta betraying me for the position of Alpha... my chest grew heavy and I sputtered blood.
Collapsed at the base of an old redwood tree, I had refused to die where he had left me. Where he had jumped me without any honour.
He had known that in a fight between our wolves, as custom to a fight for dominance, for Alpha of our pack... that he would lose. This left deception and betrayal as his only route to getting what he wanted.
Throughout the whole of one side of my body was wrought with the intense and fiery agony. I had been an Alpha... an Alpha of one of the oldest and most feared, yet well-respected werewolf packs.
Yet, I had been beaten in an underhanded and cowardly attack by him for dominance... no, not dominance, power hunger- by my own Beta. "Give the Moon Goddess my best regards! Eh?!" He had snarled, a cruel smile curling at the edge of Lorcan's lips. Gleeful that he was about to get everything he ever wanted as Alpha... and doom the Pack and possibly this world in the process. "Swiftly will be so upset to hear about your loss." He mused, "She has grown into such a fine young woman... perhaps she could use someone to bring her comfort after your loss."
Swiftly had grown up with me, after the loss of father and Samual. She had become like a sister, and we had depended on one another like family. Despite losing her arm and therefore her wing, she had grown into a gorgeous young lady at 17. Petite and slender, but her agility rivalled even the best combatants in the pack, making her lean with envious agility. Her hair went to her shoulders, and was dark blue, her eyes a hazel brown - almost burgundy. She had even adopted the family name, Swiftly Von Kassin - even though she was not blood. "You bastard, Lorcan," I spluttered as more blood came up my mouth. The metallic taste sharpening the dagger in his words, "Leave Swiftly alone..."
Without looking at the fallen Alpha again, Lorcan turned to leave, knowing that the wolf wouldn't heal itself from those wounds, not without aid or treatment. Neither would ever come, "We'll see what Swiftly thinks, once I tell her that a horde of the Dark Ones overcame the last Von Kassin... she'll be the last of the name, only in name. I wonder if she'd take mine as a... concubine, perhaps? Although when she turns 18, of course."
Another splitter and cough, "Leave her-"
"A sparrow shifter could never replace a true mate. She'll have her place in the pack." Lorcan' mused with cynical bass. "It'll be her own choice...as always." With that Lorcan was becoming bored with the pathetic sight of the last Von Kassin son's light fading.
With one last kick to Nikolas' stomach, forcing more blood up to the fallen alpha's mouth, Lorcan spat on him, "Pathetic, you were never supposed to be the Alpha." With that, he turned and left. Back towards the pack. To claim the prize that he won by cheating.
Me dying here, that would be the bloodline ending...
...so this is how and where the Von Kassin bloodline ends? I thought, as my lungs felt hot and heavy. Blood continued to trickle out of my sides where Lorcan had gashed through them. Not ending by the cruel ways of the Dark Ones' or on a Purging Party... but by senseless human greed that contaminated even the hearts of werewolves.
This is how the ancient oath comes to an end, huh?