Chapter 1 - The Day The World Tipped
Remington Lockhart, as a normal man, had grown up on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming.
Born and bred a man of the country, he had moved to the city at the tender age of seventeen years old after dropping out of high school with starry-eyed ambitions and dreams of opening up his own restaurant. That summer, he had begun to apply at every diner, bar, grille, or banana stand that would accept his applications.
That was back in the day before online applications, when a man had to pound the pavement to get his dues, where you went door to door, looked online or in the paper for work, and called every number in the hopes that the job was still available for hire.
Unfortunately, he had learned very quickly that life was an unyielding son of a bitch.
He had landed a job as a dish boy for nine bucks an hour, worked ten hours a day, and spent four years grinding in the shit. Past that, frustration had begun to eat at him when he had the revelation that his dream of being an uneducated titan of the industry with no credit and no way to land a loan was all pitted against his ambitions. Instead, he had gone a whole other route and snagged a job as a flagger for construction companies, doing odd jobs for higher pay and a hell of a lot more risk.
Once, he and his crew had been standing on the highway of the I-80 and he had turned around just in time to see a Land Rover clip over to the side of the road and had to learn to live with a hell of trauma and nightmares when he had seen his very good pal Jeff get nailed in the head with the side mirror. Needless to say, even as a werewolf, it wasn’t Remington’s fondest memory of his life.
Remington had felt for a very long time like a man in limbo, trapped in some life that meant nothing but living one paycheck to the next, spending that money to pay for his apartment, for food, never getting behind or ahead and all for no other reason than he fucking needed a place to live and he needed to eat.
It was a grind that would wear any man down, and for a long, long time, Remington had danced to that fiddle of taxes, bachelordom, and working twelve-hour days just so he could pay his way through the burden of living his own existence on the planet.
Then at the tender age of thirty-eight, he had woken up with a migraine that plagued him from that point on from sunup to sundown for six months before he had finally broke and gone to the ER.
Brain cancer, stage four, and not only was it spreading, but it was progressing at a rate that was so fast the doctors had given him a year, maybe two more to live before he met the Big Man upstairs.
A year to live.
Remington had sat in that doctor’s office and looked at the man running over his test results, listened to those bizarre words, and had almost laughed. He had wanted to tell the guy that he hadn’t lived a day in his life since he had been sixteen years old. That his version of life had always been a slow death. That this diagnosis was pretty much an acceleration to the outcome he had already been driving himself to daily for the past twenty-something years.
One year and he didn’t even have enough in his bank account to make it count.
It was a real shit way to go out in his opinion, and he had gone back to his hometown long enough to make his peace with his father, hug his mother, but kept his mouth shut about the cancer, the inevitable outcome, kept his head down at work, and started treatments the following week.
He would never forget the day that he had woken up as something different.
Remington had opened his eyes and felt better than he had in so long, at that point, he had kind of assumed he was actually dead. It had felt like a lifetime of weight, stress, and sickness had just evaporated; maybe like he breathed for the first time in his life, and all the pain?
With a snap of fingers, it had all just vanished.
For the first time since he had been a teenager, Remington Lockhart had felt like he sincerely lived and had felt reborn into a skin that actually felt like he could thrive.
It had been a good change of pace.
That December, when he opened his eyes, he had no idea what other change was coming for him.
The day had been so good too. He had stretched out, gotten some tea in, a good hearty breakfast. He had said hello around the camp before finding a fine assed little pretty thing to put it to from the ranks of the damned.
It had been a nice way to start the morning before hitting the trails to talk with Erik about the previous day’s Pack runner, a man who had come announcing the arrival of some Iowa-based group calling themselves The Flat Falls Clan. Apparently, they had heard about the open land at stake and thought they had something to offer, and frankly, Remington was glad to entertain it.
Deep down in his chest, he was concerned about this uncertain future hounding them all now.
Even standing in a camp full of men who were in it to win it, it stood that his boys, Luca’s guys, hell, all of them except for the white-painted boys from North Dakota, weren’t exactly a militant faction. Surely they all knew how to kill a man, but looking around, he’d never call any of these men soldiers or even particularly organized into one faction.
He was worried because Rowan’s Skin Walkers were coming in hot with skill sets that they weren’t a hundred percent sure about, and Cameron had made a career in the Reform with his prowess at defense, offense, and recruiting men who had been prior police, military, and probably a hell of a lot worse than that.
Hell, he knew that son of a bitch Terry alone?
Man had been a Navy SEAL, and he knew that because he had talked to the guy a few times about his time in the service.
If they were going to fight and hope to win, they needed numbers, no question about it, so people like Flat Falls were just more bodies to add to the metaphorical pyre that they would need to get an advantage.
It had been around ten pm while he and Erik were chatting in the man’s tent, that someone pounded up and called breathlessly, “Erik! Boss, you need to come out here!” He sounded almost panicked, and he and Erik had looked at each other with real question before spilling up and heading for the heavy-duty flaps.
He had to admit he had just never seen it coming.
There was a massive group converging toward the left of them, and as soon as they surfaced, a strong, very certain voice called out, “Erik!”
Remington paused dead when he heard Luca’s voice and looked from that group to the blonde with huge eyes.
Erik straightened and forged forward, but Remington felt that first thread of disquieted dread hit, and that feeling spread like its own kind of cancer through his bloodstream.
“Luca?” Erik called it back. He sounded pretty amused while the crowd of curious and very sharp-eyed Shifters split aside to let him and Remington both through.
The sight that greeted him felt like a coffin lid shutting, maybe even the same coffin he had dodged almost eight years prior, before beating his disease in the most unexpected manner he had ever seen coming his way.
Remington wasn’t sure what it was in the air that night, but he looked and found Luca Devly standing in the center of a loose circle of men, and on his left, a pace back, was Nathan, and to his right was Floyd, Erik’s second in power.
What was even more disquieting?
That little son of a bitch Tom Smith was standing a little to the side and apart but surely was included with that trio.
He had his hands clasped behind his back, that small, mean-nothing snake smile curving his lips while he watched the two of them come on through the crowd.
“What the hell is this?” Remington looked between the three men, eyes sliding over Nathan in question before gliding to Tom and back to Luca.
Remington would never forget that sly-eyed crease to those dark eyes when the man smirked at him just a touch and brushed his ear in directive. “I need you to listen, Remington.”
“Luca...” Erik snapped it and then drew up when Floyd growled. It was so deep and low in his chest that it sounded painful, gaze hyper-fixated on the man with a strange, unblinking, and very intense look in his eyes that proclaimed he was as serious as a heart attack right then.
Luca glanced at Erik and then looked around at the assembled crowd before he waved back to the two other leads. “Gentlemen, it seems the time has come to make a choice in this life!” His voice carried over the frozen landscape like a whip. “We’re about to embark on a battle, boys, no two ways about it.” He spread his arms around the Valley under hundreds of suddenly fixated eyes. “We’re going against men, I’m sure you’ve heard who seem to have a lot of the upper hand!”
He waved to Nathan, who just grinned around and waved, and a few people laughed, but Luca waved it all down. “Men who are coming at us wielding some serious punch behind the scenes. I know you all have heard the same shit as I have, about monsters in the fucking woods, birds fighting for the enemy,” He waffled a hand and turned in a circle. “I know some of you are wondering what the hell we’re doing here and what the hell we’re even fighting for.”
Luca pointed to Floyd, who was still staring at Erik with nearly dead-eyed anger. “You’ve been brought here from other states to fight for a man’s dead son!” Erik flashed teeth and went forward, but Remington caught him back, suddenly terrified when Luca turned that finger to him. “Fighting for a man who hasn’t bothered to fight his own fucking fight for damn near a decade.” Luca pointed to a man in the crowd. “Bobby, you know what the fuck you’re about to lose your life for?”
Bobby was one of Remington’s men, and up until that moment, he would have said he was one of the most loyal.
Bobby straightened up, looked to Remington with wide eyes before turning them back to Luca’s fixed stare, looked around the many, many eyes on him, and finally shook his head and spread his hands. “I...I don’t know.”
“No. You wouldn’t, because some men,” Luca tapped his temple now and narrowed his eyes back on the other pair in the makeshift ring. “...Don’t believe you should ask questions. They don’t think you’re important enough to inform on the why, just so long as you do. Well I’m fucking tired, boys, of following dictates of men who are so out of touch they don’t know what it was to grow up in this shit. They lived their normal ass lives, with their average ass families in a world that’s been long since dead.”
Luca turned back around and waved around, and Remington had a startling moment of also looking around and realizing that probably what? Eighty percent of the crowd was probably thirty or under; had probably been barely more than kids and teenagers when the world crashed and burned to the ground. That most of them had probably been sitting around getting their tears wiped off by their mommas a day before the world ignited into a hellstorm.
“They don’t understand that this world isn’t ever going to abide the same rules; that the shit that was important in the past ain’t ever coming back. I know though.”
Luca turned and fixed his stare on Erik, and those dark eyes were lit with some fire of hell. “I know what I want to die for, and it ain’t no fucking assholes dead son, and it sure as hell isn’t to pacify another man’s need for security. It’s about survival of the fittest, and about restarting a new world under a new banner of supremacy. Maybe even fighting for the chance to end our lives of separation and instead join together to make something unstoppable. Something secure while we reboot a whole new way to live.”
Remington glanced around, saw that hit like a ripple through a still pond, and braced when that long finger and a thumb pointed right at the two of them. “I’m calling you both out right now. Either break skin, or be labeled a coward and leave the fucking valley!”
You could have dropped a pin.
Floyd stepped up beside him and spoke for the first time. “I second Luca for Diamond Banks.”
Nathan signed the death warrant when he turned those coppery eyes right to Remington. “I think I speak for our boys when I say I second Luca for Lead.”
No one missed the very nervous shifting from the smaller Pack Leads in the group that was for damn sure, but for right then?
All eyes turned to the big leaders on deck.
Luca stepped forward, and his whole body rippled with threat. “I challenge you, Erik, right here and now, and ain’t no one going to dart me down like you planned on doing the other night before.”
The ripple of discomfort that one implied sentence created turned a few hostile eyes to the man in question before someone called out, “You were going to dart Rowan Fisher?”
Erik, for the first time, looked a little nervous and held up his hand. “Of course not.” Smoothest lie Remington had ever heard come from a pair of lips. “I would have killed the man fair and square.” His blue eyes looked Luca over head to toe before he just turned and shrugged out of his coat. “I accept the challenge, Luca.” He tossed the garment aside, turned back, and flashed teeth breaking to near-elongated daggers, face distorting out in a flash while he ground out, “You’re gonna die either way, you fucking idiot.”
Remington scrambled back when the man broke skin, and Holy Jesus, but Erik Arison was a massive animal. His wolf was pale brown, and the ripping shred of snapping bones, the sudden compound of muscle on muscle while that body rocketed up to over nine feet of bloody, thick-middled monster, was fucking terrifying.
Remington and by all rights, Luca, didn’t expect that sudden shift from the man, nor for all that bloodied nightmare to rocket forward in a bound for the man fast enough it was clear he was trying to end the fight fast, hard, and decisively.
The tension was so vast in the space that it was almost brittle. Luca watched him come while Floyd and Nathan bolted back to make room, and Remington was heart in his mouth watching that pale furred monster hit a few steps before launching forward with clear intention to kill a man that evening.
No one expected Luca to simply hold his ground. The second that Erik came for him like a man possessed, he reached out and caught the man by the face with both hands. Remington and hundreds of other men went rigid and still with shock when he just carried that momentum past him and hurled almost three hundred pounds of massive werewolf over a dozen feet behind him.
And then the man broke skin.
Dozens of men around them shouted out in real fear and bolted back away from the outskirts of that ring, and Remington staggered so hard he hit his ass when that bone-chilling snap of a body breaking hit the atmosphere.
He saw mouths drop open while eyes just followed Luca’s shift from human to something...holy fuck but Remington had no idea what the fuck he was looking at.
He had seen a lot of creatures shift to different things; black, white, golden, to every shade of brown, every size, and every temperament in the book, but if there was one truism?
No one had ever seen a creature like Luca morphed into.
He was tall, over nine feet of predatory, sinuous monster that whipped for Erik at a speed that almost made him a blur, motion almost reptilian with the whip of long tail that sent him skittering low and fast over the snow for the man. That tail was long, thick, and nothing but bony plate, and Remington swore to God when that mouth opened and flashed dozens of razor-sharp teeth, that what he was looking at was no wolf.
Luca Devly looked almost dragonlike. From that maw, the slash of nostrils, the pallor of silvery fur in the moonlit snowscape, even in the sinewy muscle and speed with which he rushed the man. Remington felt his blood ice when he didn’t growl, he fucking hissed at Erik before jumping for him with a jaw distending open in some grotesque parody of their people.
Remington had never seen anything like it, and it clearly scared Erik so badly it was like his body glitched, that massive form receded, and he opened his mouth and screamed like a little boy who had just found a real monster under his bed.
He got as far as “Lu-” before the man was on him, and Remington watched with horror when he tore into the man with claws, teeth, and a vengeance like his fury was burning him alive.
Erik never even got off the dirt.
Claws sank into his skull, there was a sickening pop of shearing bone, and from one second to the next, Erik went down in a slump with pieces of his head clutched by those alien-looking fingers.
Luca let him hit the snow before he made a sound in his throat that could have been a laugh, reached down, and hauled up the still-twitching corpse before heaving the body at a dead toss toward where Remington was petrified on the dirt.
He knew he was a dead man. He looked from that split, shattered skull with his breathing high, tight, and shallow, and then back and found the most alien, demonically serpentine green eyes staring back at him.
And then Luca spoke. “Accept the challenge, Remington, or give me mine.”
Remington stared back at him, jarred himself to life when Luca took a heavy, threatening step forward, and just put up what he hoped was a soothing hand, eyes huge in his face. “N-no, Luca. I...I decline the challenge.”
Luca paused, those green eyes bore into him, and for a long, long moment between them, that moment of unknown fate was real. It felt sincerely like Luca was gauging him and contemplated killing him anyway.
Then Luca said softly, “You have tonight to get out of the valley. Anyone who wishes to follow can go out and die with you.” He flashed teeth and then turned those alien eyes back to the recoiling, chittering crowd.
They were all staring at him, with various states of shock, horror, fascination, or curiosity, some mix of all of the above, before Luca just turned around in a wide circle and flashed teeth at the mix. “Anyone else?”
Needless to say, there were no other takers for Top Dog that night, and it was the night that the scales began to tip in the favor of Luca Devly.
The new faction had been born, and with it, a hell of a lot of trouble was brewing for the following Spring in Canterton Valley.
