ROMANCE: CLEAN ROMANCE: Summer Splash! (Sweet Inspirational Contemporary Romance) (New Adult Clean Fantasy Short Stories) (104 page)

              When the light broke, they finally realized the gravity of what was going to happen. They were going to go against the most respected warring werewolf pack in all of the Americas, but they were not at all deterred.

              They had received a message from the Alpha of the Khiones inviting them to meet at the park when the time of the truce expires.

Dominguez and Storm,

It is a surprise for us to hear these two names together. You, Storm, should know better than to betray the memory of your family who were slayed by these treacherous leeches. But you have made your decision, and that is to die in battle with the ones that killed your own family. I hope your kin’s spirit will reject you as you rise to whatever realm your soul is meant to be in.

To you, foul Dominguez, for whatever reason you have not taken the sacrifice yourself, I do not care, but as tradition states, if another pack discovers the sacrifice alive with another owner, there is fair game.

So you best be prepared. For winter is indeed rolling over your city. Central Park, after the tradition of the truce dies out.

-
        
Khione

*****

              There was nothing to do but fight, they knew this too well. As the tides of the moon shifted and turned, yet again its brightness lured its people into the darkness of the night.

              Hailey was just any other girl with a broken past and a future she was desperate to make into something better. It was beyond her to be what she was, but the fates had decided her ending, right when she had just barely begun.

              Her face – her sad and broken face, was painted with a look of forced courage. As they drove to the park and followed by a dozen or so black vans and hummers carrying the Dominguez most vicious and skilled warriors, she felt the pain of regret and of curse guilt. This was going to be bloody and even if this was all out of free will, she knew it was all due to the fact that their alpha was in love with her.

              Through this whole situation she had played such a passive role, letting the two boys call the shots and make all the decisions. This time, she decided she would take things into her own hands. This was the end of it. She was going to end it all. They got there just an hour before the truce was to expire. Hailey decided she needed to go to the bathroom because nature was calling.

              “Are you sure Hails?” Caleb said.

              “Yes. I need to pee. You don’t have to come with me. It’s still an hour. They still can’t touch me isn’t that correct?” Hailey said in a matter of fact tone.

              “Okay.” Caleb replied. “Take your phone though.”

              “Okay.” Hailey promised.

              Caleb turned to Anton to review the plan.

              “We need you at the back. The Khiones can control fog and mists too. We need you to be our eyes.” Anton said. Caleb nodded. This was exactly why the Storms were so powerful, there was no camouflage or cloak or even natural cover that could hide anything from a Storm’s sight.

              “Eye of the Storm.” Caleb merely shrugged.

              “Exactly.” Anton smiled at the pun.

              “It’s time. I can hear them marching.” Caleb said.

              “Alright. Let’s all form our flanks.” Anton yelled in an almost howl like state.

              Group by group, the men transformed into wolves of different sizes and shapes. Caleb and Anton looked to each other before they shifted themselves.

              It’s time.” Caleb said.

              “It is.” Anton said.

              “Caleb. If I die…” Anton said.

              “I know. If I die?” Caleb asked.

              “Of course.” Anton interjected.

              With a howl from the lone Alpha, Caleb and the howl of the Pack Alpha, they transformed into the great wolves they truly were.

              The bell sounded.

              “Ding…!!!”

              The silver wolf looked to the wolf which was Anton. “Let’s go.”

              And so the two wolves parted ways as the Storm wolf began to circle to the safest flank. He needed to be kept secure; he was their eyes, while Anton was their strength. They knew that although Anton was going to be on the frontlines, the Khiones would concentrate their attack on Caleb, because with him around, they could not take advantage of the powers they had.

              They could hear the war drums of the Khiones forming in the distance as they both marched with much intent in each step.

              All of a sudden, they stopped. The marching, the drums, they all stopped. A flash of bright light erupted just a few meters away from the frontlines of the Khiones.

              It was not light at all. As the dust settled, it became clearer.

              “Electricity!” Caleb howled.

              Anton knew what that meant. It was Hailey.

              The whole Dominguez army raced to the source of the lightning and found Hailey hovering a few inches from the ground, her face glowing from so much energy.

              “Kitsune!” The Khiones screamed as they tried to approach the pure one.

              “She is now ready for sacrifice, the alpha said with blood lust in his voice.

              The light died out as the electricity became nothing more than just sparks. Hailey descended, her feet touching the ground.

              “Take me and let this war end.” Hailey said as she opened up her arms wide in an act of surrender. Anton and Caleb ran to her as fast as they could, but it was to no avail at all.

              The Khiones got to her first.

              “Great harvest moon, take our sacrifice. Let your stolen magic return to you and so you shall be at peace with us. See favor in us!” The Khiones chanted as the Alpha raised his paw, his claws sharp as they shimmered in the light of the harvest moon.

              “See…” The alpha howled as he mustered every jolt of strength he had been saving.

              “Favor…” The Alpha’s eyes burned with so much evil.

              “In us!” As Caleb was just a few feet away, he saw his paws descend upon Hailey, whose face was carved with tears.

              Caleb howled in pain.

              Anton lunged at the Khiones and with one swift blow – a blow empowered by anger and sorrow – he sent the Alpha tumbling through his horde of wolves. But they did nothing. They did not retaliate because they knew what was to come. A few seconds from that moment, the gift of the moon would descend upon them.

              “Hailey!” Caleb yelled which made Anton jump around to look at what was happening. He had not noticed at all that the girl who lay bloodied at the hands of the Khiones was not Hailey, as they all thought.

              “Why?!” Hailey screamed as the golden blood of the girl who shielded her from the attack of the Khiones laid there in her arms trying to gasp for her last breath.

              The Khiones backed off still waiting for the gift. They had not yet realized, not even their Alpha, that they had killed the wrong girl.

              “This is your salvation, my Hailey.” And with that, the body of her keeper shimmered into a thousand beautiful butterflies as blue as deep waters.

              And as River’s life force fluttered away, Hailey’s body began to glow.

              “It’s happening!” One of the Khiones yelled, still oblivious as the Dominguez wolves encircled the threesome.

              “Hailey, are you okay?” Anton gritted.

              “I feel okay.” Hailey said.

              “I understand.” Hailey said.

              Her light, all her lightning began to rise from her and glided effortlessly into the moon. And as the stream ended, the Harvest moon slowly disappeared behind the clouds of the night sky.

              The Khione Alpha howled with intense anger. “What have you done you Dominguez scum?!”

              Hailey walked towards the disappointed man with the whole Dominguez army behind her and the two Alphas at each of her sides.

              “Alyssa told me an old saying last night.” Hailey said.

              “What can stain white cloth, but not blood?”

              “I understand it now. To taint what is most pure, is to taint it with the blood of another who is willing.” She continued.

              “I’m no longer a sacrifice.” Hailey said.

              “I am tainted.”

*****

              The Khiones retreated not wanting to risk their lives for nothing. And as the days went by, the realization of their victory had finally set in.

              The question of who Hailey should choose between Caleb an Anton never came up. They did not need for it to come up. It was a question that they left to the fates to decide.

              Caleb returned to his hospice, where he was most happy, while Hailey went back to school. She wanted to know more of the world, now that it was not so much a mystery after all her secrets were finally revealed.

              Anton ruled as Alpha – one that was respected and loved. He showed much resilience and loyalty in the battle that never came to be, earning him the admiration and more importantly the allegiance of his pack.

Every year since the affair at the park happened, they would come back and lay flowers at exactly where Gustav and River had passed away. They gave their lives to set Hailey free from the bondage of destiny.

              Caleb, Anton and Hailey, finally were able to live in true freedom.

THE END

Double Play

              Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved the movies.  I follow the lives of celebrities as if I can call them up on the phone and say, “Hey, girl, did you see what they wrote about you in
People
?”  Researchers have proven that self-esteem goes down in girls around the time they reach puberty, when they start blossoming, so maybe my problem is that I never blossomed.

                      It’s an old story.

                      In the movie, the skinny girl always grows into this super-hot babe that all the guys who once wanted nothing to do with are suddenly clamoring all over themselves to get a taste of her cherry pie.  Because of course, she grows up free of bitterness and is able to put her ugly little past behind her.  She’s beautiful now—what does she need to hold onto that adolescent rage for?  Doors open for her as if by magic, people give her free stuff; somehow she never seems to think about the fact that looks are a transient thing, something that is evidenced by her own personal life story.

                      It’s a myth that it’s good to be skinny, by the way.  My dad always used to say, “A man’s not a dog, he’s not going to go chasing after a bag of bones,’ but then, my father has never been particularly sensitive to what was going on in his household.  Never mind the fact that I weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet and was the exact embodiment of the “bag of bones.”

                      Men crave curves, and so, I crave them, too.  Curves are substantial, curves are power.  This pop psychologist once wrote that men like women with bigger breasts because the older they get, the easier it is to tell their age—and therefore their fertility—by the droop of their mammaries.   So pretty much, if we were all going around braless in these modern times, I would be the one that would confuse all the men, given that I’ve been a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee ever since high school and never managed to evolve into the far reaches of my bra cups.  But in this day and age of push-ups, the caveman inside the man can no longer tell the difference between an old, less fertile female and a fecund one, so all the big, beautiful women of the world stay big and beautiful, marked by the ancient mark of femininity in all the right places for far longer than they would ordinarily have.

                      With curves comes confidence.  Take my friend Marissa, for example.  People who say big girls aren’t for everyone haven’t met Marissa.  She’s a big girl—never diets, never goes near an elliptical if she can help it, but she’s got those plus-size model curves that belong plastered on billboards everywhere.  Instead of selling those full Jolie mouth tubules and fine stretches of gorgeously tanned skin, she decides to go and become a reporter.  Seriously.  I see men go damn near looney tunes when they realize that the substantial woman with light green eyes framed by a hedge of dark brown lashes has a brain and if they don’t stop staring at the fold of her cleavage sometime soon, they’re going to be portrayed in a deeply unflattering light in a bigshot newspaper column.

                      Not that Marissa’s a monster, not by any means.  She writes the truth with a dash of tact, if not mercy, and it’s this in addition to the generous swell of her hips that gets the guys.  Every time she interviews a man, from a hotdog stand owner to a famous hockey player, the variety of reactions falls somewhere on the continuum of anywhere from a long, lingering look to an offer to have dinner in Paris.

                      Marissa laughs about it all.

                      “I’m a novelty to them,” she says of the more famous of her interviewees.  “They expect big girls to shudder into their Blue Bunny ice cream because nobody loves them, and then they meet me and I love me.  Men can’t resist a challenge, and they perk up at novelty.  It’s a scientifically proven fact.”

                      Told you she was smart.

                      Before you say anything, I would just like to point out that a little healthy competition is good for friendship.

                      Marissa and I met when she was interviewing the head of my company, which tests new cleaning liquids before they’re sent out to major warehouses.  I watched her waltz out of the president’s office like she owned it, and he followed her like a dazed puppy dog, which was certainly a big change from the man who was screeching at me to fill my quota just an hour previously.  He was trying to chat her up, and I could see his eyes lingering on her ass as she walked, a fact that didn’t seem to bother her one bit.  She had just taken the elevator to the first floor when I realized she had dropped her scarf, some white, lush, silky thing on the ground.

                      Before I knew it, I was chasing her down the parking lot, that gorgeous scarf in my hand.  I finally reached her when she was unlocking her car, and she gave me a minute to collect myself before speaking.  Since I couldn’t stop huffing and puffing like an inbred dog, she solved the matter for the both of us.

                      “Oh, that’s mine!” she cried out in this honey-toned voice, and scooped her scarf from my outstretched hand.  “You’re a dear, thank you!  You know, this was a very important gift from a very important senator, and I would have missed it very much—are you okay?”

                      I stopped huffing long enough to nod and bend over at the waist, propping myself up on my knees.  Skinny I might be, but in shape was certainly not something I could add to my resume.

                      She considered me for a moment.  “You work in there, don’t you?”

                      “Chemical engineer,” I finally managed to sputter out, a little in awe of the head to toe white on white suit she had on.

                      She nodded.  “And you came out all this way to give me back my scarf.  That’s the sign of a good person.”  And then she got into her car and drove away.

                      When she called two days later asking me if I would like to go to this fancy gala dinner she was invited to, I didn’t even think about how she got my number at the office.  I was so glad to have such an empowering female friend that I nodded empathically into the receiver for a full minute before realizing she couldn’t see me.

                      It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

                      I watched her handle people.  Handle as in they were putty in her well-manicured, smooth as honey fingers.  She glided through that gala introducing me to people as if we had been buddies for years, for which I was eternally grateful.  For the first time, people looked at me.  So what if their eyes quickly slid off of me in my shapeless black dress to Marissa, who glowed like a jewel in her pale lavender gown?  If I was popular by association, well then, I didn’t care.

                      Did I?

                      As I sat at the gala table stuffing myself with paper-thin slices of roast beef, I wondered who it was that Marissa reminded me of.  I mean, I knew, even then, but I didn’t want to admit it out loud.  It was only when I saw Marissa lean on this guy’s arm that I finally knew.  Watching her, gorgeous white teeth flashing as she gripped his muscular arm, made me realize she was like Chrissy.  Except, as I was to find out, significantly kinder.  They both had that thing about them, the one that made men hang on their every word as if it was a pearl exiting the lips of an oyster shell.  Except Chrissy had used it for what I considered evil.

                      It all started with Rob.

                      Have you ever seen that movie
Riding in the Car with Boys
?  Well, picture me being Drew Barrymore and Rob being that jock she’s got it bad for.  Except that I was a bony little thing and Rob was actually nice to me.  He had it all going for him, I swear to God.  He had this long blond hair and these squinty little blue eyes that were the same color as my lightest jeans.  His mouth was the stuff of daydreams; it was sour-looking and hot, as if he rode a motorcycle and could drive you to madness with little nibbles of his teeth.

                      Needless to say, he was the stuff of my daydreams.

                      I can’t even tell you exactly when it began.  I mean, obviously I noticed him first—he was easily six feet tall and had these wide, graceful shoulders off of which he slung his backpack casually, as if he didn’t give a single damn that he was in school.  He was never afraid to speak his mind in class, which ironically, made our creative writing teacher love him.

                      “I don’t get poetry, okay?” he burst out at the start of one of our units.  “Why can’t people just say what they mean?”

                      That stopped our class short.  He had a point; poetry is always couched in these vague, half-certain terms, perfect for the passive-aggressive sort like me.  I looked at him with new eyes.  Sure, he was the head quarterback and nobody had any idea what he was doing in the middle of such a “feminine” class, but because he produced the necessary work and never talked about the work of his classmates outside of the class, nobody minded much. Besides, the rest of the guys in that class were a reedy-looking bunch, all messed-up hair and huge glasses, mouth-breathers, every last one of them.  So yeah, he was our eye candy, and I would base most of my male leads off of him and those ripped Metallica T-shirts he wore, exposing adolescent rippling biceps.

                      The day he said that, though, I forgot myself for a moment and treated him like he was any one of those other male nerds.

                      “Sometimes, it’s hard to say the things you want to say.  Not everybody is that brave, okay?”  I hissed at him in response, loud enough for the class to hear.  Everyone turned around and looked at me in shock; you don’t piss off beauty for the danger of scaring it off, and now it seemed I had just done that.

                      Rob just looked at me curiously, though, his blue eyes mild.  As I slunk lower in my seat out of embarrassment, I noticed his sustained gaze and wondered whether or not I would be hearing from the cheerleaders, the football team’s groupies soon, and whether or not I should just vanish from this Earth altogether.

                      After class, I gathered all my books to my chest and tried to slink out of the class without anyone noticing.  I had just entered the hallway and breathed a sigh of relief when Rob stepped towards me and I realized he had been waiting for me the whole time.

                      “I get what you said in there,” he told me, as my heart thudded inside my chest and the blood roared in my ears.  “Sometimes, using other words lets you say what you wanted to say all along, but were afraid to.  You’re not hiding from what you feel, you’re gearing up to be direct.”

                      Mutely, I nodded, unable to look him in the eyes.  He took that as agreement and seemed to gaze off thoughtfully.  “Claire?’ I heard him ask, and tentatively, I looked up at him.  His eyes threatened to swallow me whole, to drown me in a sea of tenderness, so soft was the look he gave me then.

                      I cleared my throat.  “Yes?” I asked, hardly above a whisper.

                      “I hope you finally find the strength to be direct,” he said, and walked away.

                      It was one of those moments that you never think can actually exist.  One of the ones that changes you forever.  It’s that moment when you get a look inside somebody’s soul, and you find that no matter what your external differences are—here, it was that I was a skinny little nobody and he was the school hunkathon—that underneath, you’re really all humans, after all.

                      It was slow going at first.  He would volunteer to be in my peer-review groups in creative writing class, and give me truly insightful commentary.  Then he mentioned that he liked to go walks after every game, and invited me to one.  Before I knew what was happening, we were talking all the time.  I would gather up my courage and call him on weeknights after football practice, and he would tell me about how his dad had split after his mom started drinking, and now he lived with his uncle, who was pretty much never around.  I would read him my poems, still not brave enough to tell him that they were all about him.

                      I didn’t think I needed more, not back then, you know?  I was still too shy, too uncomfortable inside my own skin.  During gym, I would watch the other girls, their blossoming bodies spilling out of their bras and panties like so many sea anemones, the hair between their legs poking out from the sides of their bikini bottoms, the faint smell beneath their arms reeking of pheromones, the tiny bulge above the line of their tights a source of embarrassment for them, one of envy for me.

                      So Rob and I continued to talk, and it was only when he wasn’t looking at me that I could bring myself to crack jokes, and the reward of his laughter quickly became the highlight of my day.  It wasn’t a friendship we acknowledged much, just something that seemed to have occurred naturally, but in the darkest recesses of my mind, I knew that it couldn’t naturally survive for long.  Still, I fooled myself, over and over, into thinking that this could go on forever, that we could talk like this over summer breaks, choosing to spend the long weeks walking along the line of woods on the edge of town, and that one day, we would stop by this great golden pond where the ducks like to swim on Indian summer evenings, and a silence would fall between us so light and profound that we would both not notice as our first kiss happened.

                      Silly, foolish, dreaming girl.