Page 63 of Her Feral Beasts

Eighteen years ago

“Come on, pup. Put your hands up,” my dad growls at me from outside the octagon.

I quickly put my tiny fists back up, determined not to get hit again as the tiger cub opposite me snarls through a broken lip. He also has the beginnings of a black eye, but I’m not much better.

We move around the ring, our eyes fixed on each other like eagles. It smells like ciggie smoke and weed in here, as well as the blood of the cubs who fought before us. They wiped the plastic mats of the ring, but I can still smell the iron of it.

The cub rushes at me, and I duck and swing out with my wolf claws out. I get him on the belly and he cries out, lunging back at me. I’m too clumsy and he swipes at my side. Fire burns through my skin and I realise that he’s got me.

“Fuck!” I cry.

The men and women outside the ring laugh because they like it when the pups swear. My dad gives a low warning growl.

I know what that means for me. That growl.

I attack the other cub with everything I’ve got, landing punches at his head, his neck, his chest. My knuckles split open, but I keep going, smearing blood all over him. The cub’s face becomes covered in his own blood, shiny as new paint, and I hear crunching, but I keep going because all I can hear is my father’s growl in my head.

“Enough, pup,” comes a low rumble by my ear. I’m lifted off him, right into the air as grown-ups jump into the ring to check on the tiger cub, now lying all floppy.

“Let me go!” I scream to the wolf who has me by my scruff.

“Calm down, pup. Fight’s over. You won.”

Relief is a warm shower over my head, and I stop flailing. “Really?”

He sets me down and I look up at him through my swollen eyes. Reuben is super massive, bigger than my dad even, and he doesn’t hit the pups like the other grown-ups do, so we all like him.

“Savage,” my dad growls, and I hobble back to him as he gives me daggers from the side of the ring.

“He fought well, Fengari,” Rueben says, following me. “Managed to get his claws out. But he needs to learn restraint. Control.”

Pups usually can’t pull out parts of their beast form until puberty. You gotta beat ‘em until it comes out, and it hurts every time because my skin is soft. But dad got them out of me quick smart. I puff out my chest because Reuben’s words sound good.

My father grunts in reply as I hop off the platform and onto the ground. “Let’s go, Scythe.” He flicks his fingers at my brother, where he sits next to a nice serpent lady. My brother is so pretty, and even at my age of five, I can see how the grown-ups think he’s pretty, too. He’s not allowed to cut his long silver hair, and it’s down to his elbows now, though you would never think he was a girl. Eyes as blue as the morning sky check my injuries and he reaches for me.

Scythe takes my bloody hand as we leave the warehouse, and I think he does it so I don’t lick my knuckles. It’s not until we get home and my dad pulls me into the garage that I get into trouble.

My mother huffs as my dad punches me in ribs. “Don’t cry, Savage,” she calls out in a voice like a tin can. “It’ll only be worse if you do.” She sits on an old milk crate with Scythe on her lap, and she brushes his hair with her best brush. She used to be pretty my mum, but now her eyes are all sunken in and her teeth are all yellow with the white powders she takes.

I try not to, I really do, but I can’t stop it when the tears fall. My tummy is already bleeding, and when I fall backwards, I skid along the cold concrete of the garage floor. Scythe cries out and tries to leap off my mum, but she grabs him around the neck and sits him back down. Scythe makes a choked sound, and from her special corner, Scythe’s mum wails.

“Don’t do that,” my mum coos to Scythe. Then she throws an empty beer can at Lily. It bounces off her cage and I flinch at the sound.

“This is what Savage gets when he doesn’t fight properly,” my dad says angrily. He’s a beastly rex, my dad, with dark hair and eyes like me. He’s got big muscles covered with tattoos that he uses to hurt people. No one likes to speak out against him because they’ll end up six feet under.

I lie still on the floor, bleeding, as my dad prowls out of the garage and back into the house where he throws himself on the couch and turns on the TV. I lick at the blood on my knees, but Scythe tuts and says, “I’ll get the antiseptic.”

“No, you won’t,” my mum says crossly. She glances at me. “Get the tape, cub. The dirt is good for you, and so is the pain. It’ll make your wolf come out better.”

Silently, I obey, heading over to the table where Dad keeps the medical tape and the tools he uses on me.

Through the bars of her cage, Scythe’s mum looks up at me with those big blue eyes, the exact same as Scythe’s.

“Please,” she whispers to me. And then I realise that she’s not talking to me, but to someone I can’t see behind me. Dad says that she’s ‘as mad as a hatter, just better looking.’

Scythe thinks she’s beautiful and I think she looks like a mermaid, only one who’s always crying. She reaches up with a long-fingered pale hand and touches the lock to her cage, then touches her heart. Her weepy eyes stare at mine and she smiles, but it’s sad.

Lily hardly ever talks because she is mostly rabid, but for some reason, she says a full sentence to me now. Maybe she’s been listening to the TV, or maybe it’s just the voices in her head.

---