Rejection on the Alpha #1
21

CHAPTER 21: The Final Countdown

The orange blur moved differently, the faster I ran for it, the more the image blurs and I watch the sinister veil of a white door peek open, much like Alice in Wonderland, it’s white glow was more alluring than a dark path behind me. I flew straight through it. Not thinking about how I was going to land when I drop through worlds, like a time continuum of some sort. I was falling through time.

It struck like lightning bolts through my stomach, pulsating and pumping my blood through my veins before the view of black pine snaps before me. Like an arena of death with no colour, black and white, even my blood looked tainted on my fingers. I screech as I fall through branches and leaves that scrap blood, cutting through skin and tapping bone before I roll down a muddy hill and straight into a bottomless field of dead dirt and bones that scattered it.

I gasp out, holding my side at the sound of heavy breathing. I still where I am, unable to catch my bearings when that single second of air. The inhale and exhale of my lungs moving with every breath, it was becoming harder and harder to do when the humidity clogs my throat. When had the air turned from cold and eerie to a dried up desert of bone and ash.

That low growl, yet again. It tickles the air at the nape of my neck, I turn freakishly slow, feeling the thrumming of blood in my veins run their course and due to the tasteable scent of fear, I turn slowly, rotating to the enlarged cave that looked like it plagued enough nightmares of those around it. I tense, staring at it like it itself could breathe, the walls—spiral-bound and moving closer until I was swallowed in its wake.

I shiver at the heated magma air that brushes my cheeks, moving without knowing I had moved my limbs, they were doing it involuntarily. One by one, step by step, I moved with a silent dread in the soles of my feet as I follow the walls to a large structure. A creepy hole down the middle, the edges are supported by thin spikes against the walls and looking ready to snap the closer I get.

There’s white light shining down the middle, but it’s not bright enough for me to see the bottom.

AH!

I flinch at the sound of a masculine scream, and then a dark roar that I knew off-by-heart because I use to snap awake at night as a child in fear this creature was in my room, under my bed or in my closet, maybe behind the ruffling curtains by the window. This was where Kade had always read to me before bed, no matter my age of eleven to twelve, still young enough and scared enough to want that bedtime story. To want him to chase those shadows away.

The Chimera.

A mythical creature of fire, features of a Lion and a Sphinx combined. I close my eyes at its teeth crunching on bone, I don’t think, I spin around and run for the mouth of the cave, screaming when something swipes my feet out from under me, bloodied vines that pulls me from my face in the ground, ripping me straight towards the centre. I scream my lungs out, “NO! NO! HELP! PLEASE!” I scream for no one because all there is...is me and the mythical creature I could never eradicate in my dreams.

I snatch a leg bone from the dirt and whack at the vine, looking for any kind of sharp object, any possible way to get out of this. Something sinks into my leg, I cry out at the spillage of my blood on the floor, before I’m thrown sideways.

I felt the clock tick.

Was it my time already?

Three.

Two.

One.

CRUNCH!

My vision blurs at the pain against my head, I’m dragged slowly down closer and closer to the centre of the cave, choking on my own blood, it dribbles down my chin, I feel my heart pounding in my ears, ”There you are, my little poppet.”

It’s voice slithered in my ears.

Predator to prey.

I whimper, “Y-you can talk?”

The paw, bloody and sharp with thin brown fur, large and heavy enough to crush a dozen skulls in one go. I stare at it, because it’s all I could do in the line of fear. I knew that fear, I’d held blankets tight under my chin with such fear for a creature I wish I had never, ever known. And here it was, moving around me, ”No one survives long enough to speak. You however, hold something different to mortal fear. You werewolves, even vampires...you hold the same fear a human can drown in without even knowing it.”

I shiver again, his voice is deep and it’s dark and...it reminds me so much of Charles, if he was always serious and always ready to threaten, I close my eyes, I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t want to feel this way, “Everyone knows fear.”

"Correct, child. They do. But none of them directly fear my kind. So, this is the first. It’s making me feel something before a genuine kill. I must ask how you came to learn of my kind.”

I spit out the metallic taste, it’s coppery touch that swirls along my tongue, I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t move.

Choking on my own blood and I knew, with little to no acceptance of it, my spine was broken. I’d been hit so hard against the wall, he’d broken his prey before he could even truly begin playing with it. This illusion—it was cruel. But fear made me listen, fear made me believe this was real and I couldn’t differentiate it. Was it real?

I’m here, aren’t I?

I’m broken, aren’t I?

I couldn’t move my head, one side of my face in the dirt, my fingers unmoving and I was losing all feeling in my legs first, “I was read a bedtime story by the wrong man, with no sane mind and no emotion to calm a girl who’s scared of the night.” I whisper.

"Keep going, child. I love your poetic tongue.”

“You sound like him...why?” I ask, sniffling.

It’s silent for a long time, ”Because he is the Chimera you fear the most. Now, continue.”

I swallow, “The mythical monster—a hybrid with two different species, with two different kinds of DNA in your developmental nature...and the ability to burn through enough with just one breath. Breathing fire, you can kill the fears of most others, of the mutated vampires that have haunted adults older than me. No one talks of the Chimera. No one breathes a word of something they have never seen.”

“They see me now, child. They all do and it’s delectable, isn’t it?”

I close my eyes, “It’s also not original.”

...

...

...

“—What?”

The voice changed all of a sudden, I sit up and sigh in defeat, “If I say delete, delete, delete, aloud, will you poof out of thin air. Or are you just an enlarged, complicated robot that clearly has a glitch in the system since the scream from before jolted, arsehole. Honestly, I write programming for a living, this is ridiculous.” I point at the Chimera, only now seeing what was wrong. I’d whacked straight into a syringe that was suppose to make me feel like my spine had been broken.

To make me think my entire world was falling through the seams and my sanity could be thrown out the window, before I watch the Chimera in front of me dissolve, along with the vine around my leg when I reached straight into its thick chest and ripped out the blue wire in the small machine used to control the chimera.

I shake my head as the cave itself dissolves too and I’m still stuck in a red-dye, plastic-bone-filled field with fake grass too.

I scoff as I try snapping a bone by throwing it into a rock, it bounces off it like a toy retracting. I dodge it by twisting and it drop in a heap just a few feet behind me. I place my hands on my hips and wipes my eyes as the red-dye that had the right vicinity for blood was dripping through my hair down the back, “I swear if this shit dyes my hair red, you people are dead!” I snap, stomping my foot.

“Where’s the exit, arseholes?” I yell out.

I look around, nothing changes, nothing moves.

I flail my hands, “Fine, we can spend days out here, but each trial has been completed. Give me another if you fucking dare, Charles!” I feel like I’m truly yelling at literally no one around here. But in truth, I was trying to calm down from the fear that did bring me, the Chimera wouldn’t have hesitated to crunch me up like a chicken wing.

Maybe even burn me to the roast first.

But just the thought of ever being able to locate a real Chimera was more ridiculously not fathomable than having sex with Martin. Nope, scratch that. Nothing is more ridiculously untrue than people actually believing I’d sleep with that imbecile, that I’d live to serve that moronic bastard for all that a life is worth. My life.

It’s been ripped apart and shoved into dark holes for long enough. I pause at the bright, white light opening below my feet and screech when I drop through it, closing my eyes at the sudden bang that shoot through my legs and...WOOHOO!

The cheers are the first thing I see.

I’m on a stage.

My lungs barely able to expand as I stare at the first face I am forced to see, Charles sits there, clapping with a tired smile on his lips...next to Kade, who is stern, taut-looking, and staring at me, gripping the edge of the stage I’m on, when I trail my eyes behind me. Martin stands there in the middle, the bare centre of the semi circle every alpha and Luna that was in that arena. Serena, Alice, Reina...all of them. Here on stage.

Every Beta, Gamma and enforcer that was there too, was standing there, all of them were staring at me and when I look at the stadium of guests, of an audience that ranged in the hundreds of thousands of people watching, clapping with entertained joy and laughter.

The screens that lined the stadium was of me. When I defeated the vampires. Chasing the fox. Fighting and then...the chimera. Only to my utter horror, I watch the exact moment every other werewolf of every rank that was in those trials, they left the trials the moment the shield collapsed between Martin and I. They landed on this stage. I watch it.

“Celestine.” Martin’s voice is rough and intense behind me.

“Why was I kept in there longer?” I ask aloud, “WHY WAS I KEPT IN THERE LONGER?!” I roar.

Charles steps up in his grand, mother-fucking suit and tie.

“I couldn’t make it that easy for my—”

I didn’t think, I walked straight up to him and sucker-punched him right in the nose.

I roll out my wrist as the crowd gasps in shock, Martin moves in front of me when guards begin leaping up on stage, I shove Martin’s fingers from my abdomen, “Doesn’t feel so nice when you’re on the receiving end, huh Charles?” I spit darkness in his direction, before strutting past the other groups with nothing left in me to do much more than wish for a hot bloody bath and real food.

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