Page 3 of Heart Broken Mate

They stood in the dark, looking menacing in the streaks of rain. Four of them with their eyes glowing and the claws extended.

They were attacking in groups of four. My mother turned away from them and crossed to the other side. There were another four at the other end, very close to the building we had just exited.

We were boxed in. My mother wasn’t my father. She couldn’t fight like him; she knew she couldn’t take them all.

But she could stall them.

“Come on,” my mother said, leading me into an empty alleyway with a dead end. We got to the side of a building with stairs leading up the side and into the apartments above.

My mother looked to the entrance of the alleyway, and the werewolves weren’t there yet. She removed a chain from her neck and put it on my neck. The chain held a pendant at the end of it—a heavy pendant made of brass and carved into the shape of a half-moon.

“It’s yours now,” my mother said, her voice shaky and tears running down her eyes. “Find the person with the other half. The pendant binds your destiny together. Now, go!”

“Mommy, I can’t leave you.”

“You have to, love,” my mother said and pushed at me. She pushed so hard that it hurt. “You are on your own now, Hayley. You have to learn to survive on your own. Run!”

I had no choice but to run. I ran up the stairs just as the pack appeared at the end of the alleyway.

My mother stood up from her kneeling position and walked to the middle of the alleyway. She extended her claws, and was ready to fight.

She would never survive that, I knew, and I watched as the first werewolf attacked. Before my mother could react to the attack, she got clawed in the throat.

I gasped but continued up the stair, looking back one more time to see my mother fall, limp body smacking against the wet ground.

Then, the knock on my door woke me up.

I bolted out of my bed, disoriented, and for a split second, I thought I was back in the alleyway and was a kid again. Then everything came back to me, and I knew it was a dream. It was so vivid and accurate to the letter that it felt like I was reliving the moment again. It was fifteen years ago, and I still can’t move beyond that moment. It still haunts me.

The knock came on my door again.

“Yes, who is it?” I said, and a familiar head poked its face from behind the door.

“James called for us. Be there in five minutes.”

“Alright, sure. Thank you, Karl.”

When I was alone in the room again, I walked to my dresser and looked into the mirror. I pulled the pendant from my chest and ran my hand over it. It was cold. It was always cold, and just as it had been heavy that night my mother gave it to me, it was still heavy.

I found that very strange, seeing I had grown up, and I thought the heaviness back then was due to how little I was.

There was something about the pendant, something extraordinary. It wasn’t just because of what my mother said about finding the person with the other half. I’ve been trying for fifteen years now and hadn’t found the person, and I’d given up. But the pendant has always protected me in a way.

After that night, I was thrown into a life of perdition and suffering. I became a street rat, and daily survival was what was paramount. There was no point in preparing for tomorrow because it might never come.

All I have on the street is the moment. The moment to survive, to steal, to escape people, the people I stole from, to get away from predators who hunted me because I was a girl.

That was how I lived for years—barely surviving day to day. Then James came to save me.

I stuck the pendant back into my cloth. I couldn’t remember what I had been doing before I fell asleep. But it didn’t matter. James called for us, and that could only mean there was an assignment.

Something about that sent chills through me. I had a feeling someone was going to die soon.

Chapter two (Hayley)

As I walked out of my room and down the stairs, the pendant felt heavier on me. I stopped and raised it as though to confirm that it wasn’t just in my imagination that it felt heavier. It did feel heavier, but I had no explanation for that except that, somehow, the dream had affected the weight. The memory of that day was burning even brighter now in my mind, and I was more focused on the pendant, which is why it felt heavier.

I took it off my mind as I got into the street.

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