UNEASE

WARNING: THIS BOOK WILL CONTAIN STRONG SEXUAL SCENES, FOUL LANGUAGE, PHYSICAL AS WELL AS EMOTIONAL ABUSE. THESE MAY BE TRIGGERING TO SOME VIEWERS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Chapter One

I am the pack whore, at least that's what they call me.

My stepfather makes a decent living by selling me to the horny pack teenagers that haven't found mates yet. Virginity is a huge thing in the werewolf community. That's why call girls make so much money. If a female is not mated then she's still a virgin. Only mated people are affected by the Haze. It makes wolves fuck it up the whole day, twenty-four hours, during full moons.

Now my virginity is the only thing I'm proud of, the only thing I'd die for. Of course some would say I'm naive, waiting for my mate to come to save me. A knight in shining armor sort of romance. But I'll be eighteen soon, the only age a female can find their mate. My mate has known about me for three years now as boys find out who their mates are when they turn Fourteen.

Mine hasn't claimed me.

Maybe he doesn't want me.

It doesn't matter though, I'm still saving myself up for him. Until I know why he kept quiet all these years he deserves a chance. That's why I use wolfsbane to drug the men that pay for my services. In the morning they wake up without a clue what happened. They pay me and everybody is happy.

There's a sudden thundering knock at the front door. Probably a drunk, hairy dog with a few hundred bills coming to hire me.

I know he won’t leave, besides I won’t be that neighbor with crazy customers, my reputation is already down the toilet no need to taint it further.

It's night and I put on my robe and hurry to the front door but not before grabbing some wolfsbane injection and hiding it in the palm of my hand. Bill might not give me a chance to come back to my room to grab it. My mother and her boyfriend are rounding the corner of the hallway, I ran after them.

My mother opens the door and I freeze. It's Sebastian, the man that rejected his mate last year just because he's a HE. The Gods choose mates for us, mating knows no bounds -- race, gender, and age all-inclusive. That's why it's not rare to find a fourteen-year-old boy mated to a seventy-something-old woman. Sebastian hired me last night and I drugged him and left while he was still sleeping this morning.

Bill smiles at him and says, "I can prepare the VIP bedroom for you, Mr. True."

Sebastian doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, eyes red and his face is like I’ve never seen, rage. I start shaking my head, I'm not going with him anywhere, not with that look on his face. Swiftly he reaches through space on the burglar guard and grabs my arm, goes for my hand and snatches the injection.

I let out a scream, rattled by the way he grabs me in no time he’s shoved past my mother and is walking towards me, his eyes groaning murder. I move back towards the couch, I’ve never seen him like this.

He comes towards me, he still hasn’t said a word but his face says it all. He found me out. He knows. The next thing I feel is a throbbing pain across my face, I fall on the couch and land on my side.

This is not happening, not to me!

I am not one of those girls.

My first instinct is to get up and try to run to the bedroom but he is standing over me and sends me back on the couch with another slap. I’m crying now, my face is burning, I cover it with my arms, it’s the only defense I have.

I try to move my body but something is pressing me down, he has his one knee pressing over my ribs as I lie on my side. I stay in that position, I’m scared of getting another slap if I move my arms from my face.

My crying and screaming don’t stop him from hitting me on the back and thighs with his open hand.

I know only one thing could save me from this.

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry…..I’m sorry” I keep screaming as he continues battering me.

It seems to be working. He grabs one of my arms, leaving my face exposed.

He looks me in the eye and says: “Don’t ever do that nonsense again”.

He storms out.

My mother spits at me and leaves with Bill, arm in arm. I can't move. Pain throbs from every inch of my body.

It takes about 10 minutes before I stand up and go lock the door. I don't bother to take off my clothes as I go into the shower. The blood makes me dizzy as it runs down the drain. I don't know how long I stay there, I don't come out even when the water starts running cold.

I couldn't help wondering about my happy place, to a time in the near future when I'll find my mate. Someone that could get me out of this. Someone that could love me.

I couldn't help but wonder why mate hadn't claimed me. Did he not love me?

In the morning I get into my school clothes and peek outside.

I live in a small town called Port Edward in the state of Kwa-Zulu Natal, where the summers are mostly cozy and partly murky and the winters are a widow’s sky, bedarkened and weeping. It's enchanting and authentic. Quirky, really. The images were always so vivid that they stayed with me all through summer. So of course, this is where my mother decided to settle. She picked a landscape that would freak my uncle out, should he ever come looking for her. From Bizana, Eastern Cape my mother escaped with me four summers earlier when I was thirteen.

The sky suddenly darkened further, the clouds were a dark, bitter gravel-gray over the western horizon, tarnishing out the butterscotch color of the sun, creating spooky shadows on anything they fell on. A shiver that had nothing to do with the blizzard rolled through me, momentarily stopping my heart, I quickened my pace at once.

Flickers of snow began to drip from the skies. They sprinkled onto the road like a gardener’s hose. The freezing wind beat around my face and the frost tried to bite through any cracks in my clothing. I barely noticed the rays of the dimly lit sun slip through the wet branches of the tall nameless trees I passed by; I didn’t care about the emptiness of the streets I walked through; in the distance I could see my destination. And a spasm of panic washed over me.

It's a thirty-minute walk from my house to my school and I would've asked Jennie — I mean mom — to drive me to school, but I didn't want to spend anymore time with her than courtesy absolutely demanded. So here I was, walking to school, on a freezing Friday. The maroon brick buildings looked like something out of a horror movie and white bold, underlined letters announced it as Port Edward High School. A school in pain sight that only enrolls werewolves.

I was suddenly claustrophobic and tried to ignore the queasy feeling that settled in the pit of my stomach — and I just knew I was unnatural somehow. Who hyperventilates at the mere sight of their school except me? I was missing something, a piece that would make me normal somehow. At night when I tried to sleep but couldn’t — and I did my best to be philosophical about life, though seventeen; so a complete absence of extensive experience right there — that is when I knew it.

If I was merely a klutz, one those girls who tripped over something as stupid as a shoelace, then I'd have fit in in some such way, attracted one of those boys who love saving damsels.

But I was Nuru Lynn, the girl who hardly finished a sentence without stuttering, the girl who sometimes spoke to herself, the girl who sat at the back of her class fighting to be invisible, the girl who was so shy and afraid of saying the wrong thing so I rather said nothing at all.

I hurried into class, cold and exhausted. When I walked into biology, class had started, but Mr. Cooper was hunched over his desk, searching through a pile of pages. Teenagers were still whispering among themselves, giggling softly.

I sat in my usual seat in the back, facing the window, and hugged my old sweater tighter around me, my hands were trembling and numb with frost. Mr. Cooper called the class to order then and passed pages around, our last test. Olga, the only werewolf in our pack that cant control the shift walks in. She can't shift back to human form. She now lives in the woods full time.

The rest of my classes passed in a blur. It seemed impossible, but the icy winds outside only got worse as the day dragged on.

I was particularly agitated in German, the last class before school was over. I tried to convince myself it was because I was starving. But I knew better. It had a lot more to do with the dreaded thought of seeing my mother and Bill, her recent boyfriend, then the vicious growling of my stomach — those were embarrassing — I tried being nonchalant about it, to make it look like they weren't coming from me. But I don't think I fooled the class.

Lesson learnt—no more skipping breakfast... or lunch.

I looked straight ahead at Mrs. Green without seeing, trying to look like I was giving her the attention I owed her. As soon as the shrill of the bell sounded, I swallowed my heart, which seemed lodged firmly in my throat and shoved the books roughly in my bag and took flight.

The parking lot was empty when I got to my mother’s car. It began raining. I attentively surveyed the parking lot to make sure no one saw me and as swiftly as I could, climbed into the old Mazda.

Jennie and I have never been close. There was always a starchy dark cloud of tension hovering over us when we were together. Even though she was somewhat... kind of... my friend, in some strange way. Our relationship was missing the most important element of all; communication. Jennie was fat. Taller than your average female, with thin wavy blond hair and blue eyes that shimmered with some inexplicable malice. I have a lot of Carmine, my father, in me; green-eyed, red-haired, tan, willowy.

And she had an apocryphal taste in men. Bill, no last name, was a terrifying, cold-hearted man, he made it impossible to love him, to feel in harmony with him. He believed that his fist or belt, depending on his mood, would creep any slight form of adultery, which was always imaginary, out of my mother.

He was tall and big, a combination of muscle and fat, his skin a russet, ochre color, much like the mellow-brown light that bathed the forest reddish-brown.