Page 4 of Brutal Alpha Bully

The voice is shrill, and a moment later, the boy’s sweaty skin is unpeeling from mine, the weight of him rising up and off of me. I look up blearily through the smoke to see his mother looking like she might suffocate him herself, his face pressed thoroughly into her bosom.

“Oh, my baby!” she cries.

With Nora’s help, I’m able to raise up onto my elbows so I can see the mother clearer. She’s one of the meanest on the block—something of the queen bee. Leading the charge in ensuring we’re never invited to community barbecues or included in weekend parties.

I’m not expecting her to get on her knees and thank me, though that’s what I would do if someone had just saved Nora’s life. I’m not even expecting verbal gratitude, or an apology for everything she’s done to us over the time we’ve lived on this block. If anything, all I want is some sort of acknowledgment—a look in her eye, or a little nod to tell me that I’m not as bad as she thought. That I’ve proven to her that I’m a person, and even a good one, at that.

But I don’t get any of that.

I should have known better than to ever expect it in the first place.

Instead of any of that, she just curls her lip back in the way that I’ve come to recognize from her, a look of total disdain and disregard that makes my blood go cold.

“Don’t youever,” she spits, taking a step toward me, close enough that she only narrowly misses stepping on my bare foot, turned black from the soot and asphalt, “touch my son—or anyone in my familyagain!”

“Come on, Mom,” Nora whispers, her arms snaking under my armpits to pull me to standing. I wish I could snap something back at this woman, say something to make her hurt for once. “Let’s go.”

I just saved her son, and she still can’t get past her hatred of me.

“Ugh,” she coughs as we walk away. “Itreeksof magic out here.”

It doesn’t—the only thing you can smell is the suffocating, blanketing scent of sulfur, slightly sweet and rotten. The smell of a daemonic fire burning strong.

When Nora and I make it across the street, me limping and leaning on her far too much, I manage to get a good look at our house. The house that belonged to my grandmother before me. The one that kept Nora and I off the streets for years, safe and with a roof over our heads, even if we weren’t psychologically safe from the neighbors.

And now, all that’s left of it is a considerable pile of shifting, fine, almost silken ash.

Unable to stop myself, I reach down and pinch some of it between two fingers, shivering at the slide of it, how tempting it is to bring it to my lips. Like the urge to chew on electrical wire, or eat one of those laundry pods.

“Mom?” Nora questions again, putting her hand on my back and helping me to sit in the somehow wet dew of the lawn.

I wrap my hands around my knees, feel my body hurtling toward collapse. “Yes, dear?”

All around us, the daemonic fire continues to burn, this time writhing and biting its way into the trees, dancing along the canopy with a bright blue hue that dazzles through the sky. Distantly, screams echo in the dawn.

Nora shifts from foot to foot, and in looking at her, I realize that she had the presence to grab her go-bag, while I absolutely did not grab mine. Finally, she clears her throat and finds my eyes with hers. “Where are we going to go?”

I let the truth of our homelessness settle over me. In all this time of us being alone, I have never lied to her. And I’m not about to start now.

So, I do like I always do, and tell her the truth. “I have no idea.”

Chapter 3 - Xeran

When I get to the firehouse the next morning, my body is itching with the torture of confinement.

If you’ve ever worn a pair of shoes that were too tight, felt that infuriating squishing of your toes together, or been forced to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger on a far-too-small flight, then you know a fraction of the itch to shift.

Since moving to Chicago, this feeling is something I’ve become accustomed to, though it never fully fades into the back of my head.

After getting an apartment here, I only shift when I can get a long weekend away and drive out to a state park. Get a cabin, wait for low visibility at night. Sometimes I’ll go to Starved Rock, though that park is smaller and can feel claustrophobic when families are out there on busy weekends. Mostly, I go to Pere Marquette. It’s a five-hour drive, but if I can get a few good nights out there, away from the city and with the freedom to roam, I’ll feel a little more comfortable in my skin.

The nice thing about Illinois is that there are no local wolf packs, so no chance for me to accidentally upset the natural order of things with the non-shifting variety. The shit thing about that is that I have to make sure nobody sees me, especially when I’m down south near Pere Marquette.

It’s one thing for a hiker to spot the occasional wolf on the northern side of the state, maybe peeking in from Michigan or Minnesota. It’s another for someone near St. Louis to spot me, shit their pants, and run back to their group, claiming they saw a grizzly bear.

“Morning, X!” Peter calls to me the moment I step into the kitchen. It’s thick with the scent of cherry-smoked bacon andsausage patties sizzling away on the griddle, and Peter stands in the center of it all, wearing aKiss the Cookapron that none of the other guys find even remotely funny. “We missed you at that party, man.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that,” I lie, rubbing my hand over the back of my neck, knowing my voice is likely too flat to even come close to convincing. “Not feeling great over the weekend. Needed some time to recover from that big job.”

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