Angel of the Damned

AotD - 16

Drake woke up on Leneath’s couch and saw Nathan leaning up against the wall, his head hung forward and his arms crossed across his chest. He sat up and cracked his neck.  Nathan had lifted his head and pushed off from the wall. “Well, I am surprised you aren’t up there with Leneath.”

Nathan laughed and rolled his eyes. “I can be a gentlemen."

Drake laughed, standing up and rolling his arms.  The muscles in his back popped and bulged as he stretched them out.  With a groan, he rubbed his back. “Nathan, I’m getting old.”

“You’re what?  Forty-five?” Nathan asked.

“And I’ve put my body through hell.  Fifteen years of the hardest fighting in the war and five of brutal training.  You’ve seen the rest,” Drake said.

Nathan knelt down and grabbed one of the packs.  He hiked it onto his shoulder and tossed Drake the other. “Leneath is getting supplies at the market and meeting us at the rover,” he explained. "She's also getting some travel meals, so we will eat on the way."

"Alright," Drake said.  Nathan walked past him and dropped made it to the door when Brock popped his head out of his room.

"Drake, can we talk with you?" He asked.

Nathan looked back, reaching for one of his swords.  Drake held his hand up and Nathan paused.  His hand hovered right over the sword and Drake knew well how quickly Nathan could draw it and bury it within either Necrowolves chest. "Nathan, I'll meet you at the tunnel."

"Alright," Nathan said.  He dropped out of the container and vanished from sight.  Brock extracted himself from the lower container and Marcus followed in quick succession.

They both looked down and Marcus was the first to speak. "You asked us how we could live together without tearing each others throats out.  We haven't told anyone else, much less Leneath." He looked to Brock for support.

"It's not that we don't want Leneath to know," Brock said. "its just that, we really don't understand her and how her brain functions.  We don't know how she would react."

"To?" Drake prompted.

They both looked at each other and began an unspoken argument about who should say it.  Little twitches and grimaces told the entire argument and by all appearances neither was winning. Then, they spoke in unison. "We're twin brothers."

Drake looked them both over, they were both very similar in features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, jawlines, but the tribal markings said they were each from a warring pack. "And how is this?"

"Our mother fell in love with a Necrowolf from the Northern pack and vise versa," Marcus explained.  "When our mother got pregnant, she never revealed who the father was.  After our birth, our mother gave Brock to our Father to raise in the Northern pack and I lived with our mother.  She was the Alpha's daughter and life was easy until we were attacked when I was sixteen.  She was killed."

Brock took over, "after that, Marcus became one of their top fighters and led several raids against my pack.  The pull between brothers is strong, much stronger than the pull of a pack.  His raid slaughtered my patrol.  By the time we realized we were under attack, three of the six us were already dead, slain in their human form and there were four Southerns around us.  The other two were dispatched quickly and I was about to be when Marcus spared my life.  It wasn't without injury-"

"I am sorry about that," Marcus muttered.

"You weren't at the time," Brock retorted before continuing, "We captured Marcus on a retaliation attack.  He gave himself up to protect a woman, we assume his mate, he hasn't told me to this day who she was.   We held him for two days before my father told me who he was, but he already knew who I and my father were.  We left in the middle of the night and came here under my-"