Chapter 16: Skyler - Pack of Mine

Nine years ago, when I was 19 years old, I became less of a human and more of an animal. I became part wolf.

But my violent tendencies didn’t start after a certain event, I was born this way. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to the dark side. Maybe I was cursed before I was actually cursed.

I was always a torment to my parents and my peers growing up – stealing little girls’ dolls and ripping their heads off, hunting the nearby squirrels for sport and showing them off to teachers, just thriving on chaos.

Haha, what’s changed?

No one ever wanted to be friends with me, and that was fine. I knew I was better than them anyway. As I grew older, I became more selfish, more volatile, and started trying to see how far I could push people before they said no. I’m not a gentleman, and yet women can’t seem to keep their fucking hands off of me.

Most women will say they don’t like dangerous men, ‘til he’s tying them up in his bed and making them relentlessly cum harder than their goody-two-shoes boyfriends ever did.

Why would I ever change? I get everything I want. Sex, money, drugs. You name it, I’ve tried it. I have no shame in what I’ve done for pleasure. What’s the point in living if not for a little fun and games?

The only thing I’ve missed is romance, and that single chance for me has slipped away.

The girl I thought I could finally love just became my enemy.

The only other woman who ever cared about me for something beyond sex was my mother. But eventually, I became a pill too bitter for even her to swallow.

Octavia is the type of girl that my mother would’ve loved to meet, if she could bear to look at me anymore. She’d tell me she was proud that I found someone to contain me, at last.

My mother was weak, but I know she wasn’t always like that. I think she used to stand tall, have power and crave it the way that I do, but my father stripped her to her core. By the end of things between them, she became this woman I didn’t recognize. She let him walk all over her, do whatever he wanted with her.

He beat her regularly, like a part of his nightly routine was to make her feel small and hopeless. I see the same weakness in Tristan and it’s disappointing.

My father would berate her for the littlest things. Sometimes the dinner was too hot, sometimes she forgot to buy his favorite brand of shirt when she went to the store, and sometimes there was no reason at all. My father was a violent man and had no issue flaunting that.

One day when I had come home from school, my mother was finishing dinner in the kitchen. She was making one of her signature dishes – chicken and dumpling soup. I was starving and ready to dig into a nice big helping of it.

Then my father stumbled in through the front door.

He looked intoxicated, his glassy eyes crawled over us like a snake studying its prey and deciding which one to sink its fangs into first. His coming home drunk was usually a sign of the start to a bad night for the whole house.

My mother greeted him and did her best to pretend she didn’t smell the whiskey on his breath. And of course, he had something to complain about seconds after sitting down at the table.

Today, the food was too salty.

He shoved his chair backwards, hobbled his way over to my mother at the stove as she was already flinching, cowering at each one of his heavy footsteps.

I could feel the anger in my chest build up like lightning waiting to strike, but I sat still and watched their interaction from afar.

His fists swung down and beat her head down into the stovetop, her skin sizzling on the flame. The smell of burning flesh filled the room and I watched my mother scream for mercy until she was no longer conscious.

Her body crumbled to the floor and one side of her face was blistered in boiling burns. He stood over her, proud and strong like a true piece of shit. At this point, I had never stood up to him before, but that day I saw red.

My feet rushed me over to him and it felt like everything went into slow motion. I swung and hit his cheekbone, his drunken body taking a moment to catch itself. He tripped over my mother’s body on the floor, blood dripping down his cheek. His eyes were full of evil, they were pitch black, just like mine now.

I am my father’s son.

I shoved his body into the cabinets behind him and swung relentlessly, barely aware of anything besides red splattering onto my face and my knuckles splitting open. The steak knife my mother was using to cut up dinner caught my eye and I quickly snatched it off the counter. I shoved the blade into his chest repeatedly, slowly feeling his resistance against my attack start to break down.

I didn’t even realize until I stopped that I was smiling the entire time, a true maniac at heart.

My father died that day and my mother survived, but deep down she died with him. She became a walking shell of a human. Her own son killed the man she still loved somehow, and a piece of her could never accept that, I guess.

I skipped town before they could pin me for the murder, and I haven’t spoken to her since. I hear what she says about me through the grapevine: that even though my father was a horrible man, she resents her son. Even though I finally stood up for her and took matters into my own hands – I still wasn’t good enough for her to love me.

After the death of my father, I didn’t have much left in me in a sense of morals. I stole, killed people, took drugs and went off of the rails in every fucking direction possible.

I was constantly living to experience my next dopamine hit.

One day, I bumped into an older woman on the street while I was drunk. It was around 6 p.m.; the night had just started, but my multi-day bender was ending.

She stopped and looked at me. Her eyes were intense, a burning in her soul coming through them. Her energy felt like karma itself. She touched my shoulder and said something. I couldn’t understand it, it was in a language I’d never heard of before. My skin began to burn like hot coals and I felt ungodly nauseous.

When she let go of my shoulder, she turned and walked the other way, never to be seen again.

I brushed it off as a one-off crazy interaction with a meth head off the street and continued about my night. I drank, I partied, I searched for my next high. That’s all I cared about.

Eventually all that drinking caught up to me and I got into a bar fight. An idiot decided to push me too far and I hit him. We traded blows for a little while, but I ended up on top of him. I kept punching him while he was down and I didn’t stop until his face became distorted and all his features bent the wrong way. Then, two burly men grabbed me and threw me to the street.

I walked to the back of the building the bar was in, stumbling into the trees and looking for someone else to blow my steam off on. Suddenly, my body began to ache, I felt like I was going to throw up. My skin was itching and my teeth began to grow and hurt my lips.

I had no idea what was happening, so I clung to a tree and dug my dirty fingers around in my mouth. I thought I had taken some crazy LSD or shrooms and was hallucinating the whole thing, but my teeth were really growing bigger and sharper.

Hair grew denser on my skin, my fingernails stretched into claws and all I could do was watch.

Then the agony came. My hands and feet broke first, making me fall to my knees with an ear-piercing scream. Each and every bone in my fingers and toes broke one by one, slowly. I could hear every crack as my hands and feet transformed into paws.

The fury built up in my body felt like it was escaping through my pores. The world felt smaller and my vision distorted around me.

Next were my legs and arms, crack, crack, crack. I tried to scream, but it was the howl of a wolf instead, and my body continued to break. Limb by limb, bone by bone, I transformed into my most hated version of me – an animal.

Settle in with a love story.

Head to Lokepub for more romance novels.

I was stuck in this form for six days. I ate birds and small mammals when I could get my hands on them, and slept on the forest floor behind the bar.

Rage consumed my body every time I opened my eyes. I was ugly, cursed, reduced to a creature and not a human. And I despised every minute of it.

Silver Lake is full of forests just like that one, you could get lost in them for days if you wanted to. I’m lucky enough now to live in the middle of one similar to the first one I transformed in, hidden from the world again.

On the final night, I howled into the sky, cursing at God in my head. I figured I was stuck this way forever – my crazy, debaucherous lifestyle was over and I was being punished.

I was a bad dog and my time to be crated had dreadfully arrived.

A set of soft footsteps approached me from deeper in the woods. Let me tell you, the super sense of hearing and smell is something that takes a long time to get used to. I wish more people wore deodorant.

I heard a predator near me, maybe a bear. It sounded large, I had no idea what I was getting into. Anguish took over my body and I felt useless – a soul stuck inside a giant weapon with no idea how to use it to defend myself.

Suddenly another version of me, but black with specks of grey around its eyes, was walking towards me. No teeth were showing, I couldn’t smell any aggression coming from it, but I was still wary.

“Hi, I’m Valentine Sterling.”

What the fuck, it can talk? He sat on his hind legs like a dog waiting for a treat.

I hadn’t talked yet, could I talk too?

“Hi. I’m Skyler Vale.” Holy shit, I can.

His eyes looked me up and down and I’m sure he could hear my stomach growling, but he didn’t mention anything about it.

“How long have you been a wolf?”

He seemed calm, cool and collected. Like it wasn’t out of the ordinary for two giant wolves to be talking to each other.

I debated lying, but I figured he would see right through it.

“Six days. And it fucking sucks.”

He sat up, walked in circles around me slowly, as if he was inspecting my body.

“Have you transformed back yet?”

His words surprised me. What did he just say?

“Hold up, You’re telling me I can turn back? I’m not stuck like this forever?”

I watched him pace around me some more.

He sighed and sat back down in front of me.

“Well, as far as I know, you can transform back, but you’re going to be part wolf forever.”

He seemed older than me, darker grey fur covered his snout and the way he spoke was smooth like molasses.

“How long have you been uh… like this?”

I hesitantly asked, unsure if I actually wanted to know.

“Twenty years.”

Fuck.

We both sat in silence and his words cut through the air between us. Twenty fucking years. There really was no hope for us, was there?

“Uh, how do I transform back?” Anxiety ripped at my skin again, trying to creep out.

“It might take a while until you can control it, but for now, follow me to my house and I can try to help.”

His voice sounded confident. I was fucked and I had no other choice than to trust him.

And so I did, I followed that strange wolf home.

Fast forward to today and we have lived in his mansion deep in the woods since then. He built it by hand, including the basement to contain himself and then eventually me, for the transformations.

Valentine is a quiet guy, and hasn’t told me anything in depth about his past. But as I grew up, he seemed to submit to me easily and went with the flow of wild antics. At least he never spoke against me otherwise. I can’t pinpoint a day when I became the man of the house, but here we are now.

Nine years later, I still can’t control my transformations, but I’ve recently been learning more of why and when they happen. I tend to flip when I get extremely agitated, more than I am day to day. Or a trigger – like Octavia getting beat that reminded me of my father’s abuse.

One day I’ll get a hang of it, maybe even my emotions too, but that day is not today.

Or even better, one day I won’t be a fucking wolf anymore.