Feral Wolf by Caroline Peckham

Praise the stars in the sky and the moon up above.

Praise the heavens and fate and the turn of the wheel.

Praise destiny and the toss of the dice.

Praise the light up above and all those who stand in it.

Praise life.

The prayers my mother had offered up at the Temple of Eternal Hope throughout my childhood kept floating around and around inside my brain as I closed my eyes and kept shuffling along on the thick water pipes which ran along the roof above the gym.

It was dark up here. Dark and damp and there were a lot of spiders. I hadn't quite realised how much I disliked spiders up until this very moment, but here it was. There were currently eight hairy legs crawling across my cheek while I was frozen in place because the Lunar Brotherhood pack had all just poured into the room beneath me and I didn't dare move.

I was shrouded in some basic illusion spells and hidden within a silencing bubble, but I didn't have enough magic left to do any more than that. Soon I wouldn’t even be able to keep this up.

Fucked. I was fucked.

The spider just kept creeping across my cheek as I clung onto the pipes, my whole body trembling with a mixture of terror and adrenaline.

I couldn't let the inmates find me. They were monsters. Monsters unlike I'd ever really allowed myself to appreciate before now.

Cain had warned me. He'd said it time and again that the Fae down here were animals. That they'd lost all semblance of decency long before they'd been banished to this hell beneath the ground. But I hadn't wanted to listen. I hadn't wanted to see it. Not when some of them seemed so nice. So normal.

Like Bert. Number sixty-two. He'd been making a joke with me last week about the way the oatmeal in here tasted like an idiot's brains. I'd laughed. He'd laughed. It had been this funny little joke. Except it wasn't. Because I'd just seen Bert while I was hiding in a vent above the Mess Hall and he'd been using the same spoon he ate oatmeal with to eat Officer Kato's actual brains. Straight from the skull.

I'd seen such things.

Such.

Things.

I'd watched a Griffin who had been playing wall ball out in the Magic Compound a few weeks ago like a carefree dudebro tie another inmate to a table and choke him with handfuls of turd. His own turd. I'd been there to smell it.

That smell would never completely leave me in all my days left on this cruel earth. I knew that in my soul. Even if I lived to be two hundred, I'd never ever forget that smell. It lived in me now.

"They have to be with the Oscuras!" one of the Wolves beneath me cried as I tried to ignore the progress of the spider with all my might.

"I want that bitch's head on a spike for what she's done," another yelled.

"We should cut her open and spell her name out on the ground with her entrails."

"Isn't that gonna take a lot of entrails?" someone else interrupted. "Rosalie Oscura is a pretty long name-"

My gut lurched with panic at the mention of Rosalie as I realised who they were hunting for. Was that what this riot had been about? The Lunar Brotherhood and The Oscura Clan going head to head against one another to fight it out for the top spot amongst the Wolf packs? If that was the case, then I really hoped the Oscura Clan came out on top even though I knew I shouldn't have been hoping for any such thing. But I couldn't bear the idea of anything happening to her. Rosalie wasn't like the rest of them in here. She was sweet and innocent despite her criminal inclinations. She didn't deserve to die down here.

"Does she have a middle name?" a guy asked. "That would make it even longer."

"I say we just stab and stab and stab her until the whole room is covered with her blood."

"I don't care how the bitch dies so long as she's dead."

"I'm gonna cut off her hands and stuff them up my ass!" another Wolf yelled loudly and everyone in the room stopped their baying for blood as they all turned to stare at him. "That'll teach her," he added, not seeming the least bit embarrassed by what he wanted to do to the beautiful leader of the Oscuras.

The spider suddenly took off at speed across my face and a cry of alarm escaped me which was thankfully concealed within my silencing bubble. But as I jerked my head, the spider was sent flying and I sucked in a breath as I watched it tumble all the way down until it fell into one of the Wolves' hair.

I froze as she squealed, batting her hair and looking up at the roof where I was hiding as she started yelling about something falling on her head and bunch of the surrounding Wolves looked up too.

Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-

"Someone said they think they saw the Oscura bitch up on level two!" a guy roared from outside and the Wolves all took off howling for blood as they tore from the room, leaving me behind with my heart thrashing and my pants somehow miraculously dry because I'd thought for sure I was going to piss myself then.

I'd always thought of myself as a brave man. I'd trained to take on these criminals and had grown into my role in this place. But I hadn't been prepared for this. There was no preparing for this.

I had to get out of here. I had to make it back to the guards' quarters. But there was a long, long way to go between here and there and this entire prison was filled with Fae just waiting to kill me if they could.