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| Jackson |
Jackson's heart shattered into a million pieces. He stared at the ledge, and he watched as the tsunami of cadejo swarmed the place where Wilson fell. He tried telling himself that it wasn't real; he tried to fight off the shock and dismay, but he saw it with his own eyes. His friend was gone.
"Wilson..." he breathed as his throat swelled and tears formed in his eyes.
He heard Damon yell, and Raphael was torn off his back. Their arguing voices and savage snarls echoed around Jackson, but all he could hear was his racing heart and the sounds coming from the cadejo pit. The ripping. The tearing. The groaning. He scowled in dismay, letting his tears fall, and the longer he lay there staring at the place he last saw his friend, the more it hurt.
Why? How? Wilson couldn't be gone. He'd spent so long trying to find him—he'd nearly died several times—and he only had him back for a few days...and now he was gone again, and this time...Jackson wouldn't be able to recover him.
But anger quickly began creeping through the cracks in his suffocating despair. It evolved into rage, and when he took his eyes off the pit and set them on Raphael, who was getting ready to pounce at Damon, every ounce of fury that Jackson felt focused on him.
It was his fault! If he'd just let him run to Wilson's aid, this wouldn't have happened!
Jackson didn't hold back. He lunged at the orange wolf and sunk his teeth into his back leg.
Raphael yelped painfully and then snarled when he tried to yank his leg free, but Jackson wouldn't let go.
"Get the fuck off me!" the orange wolf growled.
"This is all your fault!" Jackson replied angrily as tears streamed down his face, and his voice muffled because he still had Raphael's leg in his maw. "He's dead because of you!"
He bit harder...and harder...and hard—
A loud snap was followed by Raphael's pained shriek; Jackson felt the bone snap under his teeth, and as the orange wolf's blood seeped into his mouth, his anger and rage were accompanied by bloodlust. This blood tasted unlike anything he'd had before; it blessed him with euphoria, and it urged him to take more. So he bit harder—
"Jackson!" came Damon's voice.
But not even that could make him stop.
"Get him the hell off me!" Raphael demanded, yanking his leg.
Damon grabbed Jackson's sides with his huge, furred hands and tried to pull him away from Raphael, but Jackson snarled in hostility as he gulped down the delicious, intoxicating blood.
"Jackson!" the Alpha insisted again.
"I swear to fuck, if you don't get this brat off me in the next five seconds, I'll break every goddamn bone in his body!" Raphael yelled.
The Alpha tugged harder.
He was starting to piss Jackson off. The rage consumed him, and he didn't even try to control it. What was the point?
But then Sebastien landed twenty feet away and raced over. "Oh, my fucking God," he growled, and when he reached Jackson, he helped Damon, and together, they managed to pull him off Raphael.
The orange wolf snarled angrily and swung around, and he immediately went for Jackson, but Damon stood defensively in front of him, and Sebastien pinned Jackson down with his wings.
"Do you have any fucking idea what you've just done?!" the hound exclaimed to Jackson.
"Get off!" Jackson roared. "He killed Wilson! It's all his fault!"
"I wasn't my fucking fault! I saved you from being a fucking brainless moron and dooming the entire wolf walker race to death!" the orange wolf yelled back.
"You just attacked a fucking Reiner-Blood!" Sebastien shouted with both anger and panic in his voice. "Do you even know what kind of a shit storm you've brought on yourself?"
Damon looked back at them. "What are you talking about?"
Jackson didn't care. "Get off!" he yelled. He wasn't finished with Raphael yet.
Sebastien shifted his sights to Raphael. "You're not gonna report this...are you?"
Raphael scoffed and backed off.
"He's just a kid!" Sebastien insisted.
"Let me fucking go!" Jackson screamed.
Sebastien then snarled and thwacked his head with his paw. "Calm the hell down; I'm trying to save your ass!"
"What the hell are you talking about?!" Damon demanded.
"Your little mate just attacked demon royalty," Sebastien snarled. "The last guy who did even less than you did was fucking executed."
"What?!" Damon exclaimed.
"Oh, calm the fuck down," Raphael sneered. "He isn't getting executed; he's the fucking miracle wolf or some shit, right? They'll probably just send Lucian to smack him about."
Damon snarled protectively. "If that white-haired brat comes anywhere near—"
"What? You'll hurt him?" Raphael scoffed. "Yeah, okay."
The Alpha growled angrily.
Jackson squirmed around and tried to escape while they argued—but then he saw something. He stared into the pit, watching as what looked like a lump of fur and flesh moved through the ocean of corpses, which were busy devouring the Amarok. He had no idea what it was, but it was huge. Maybe it was a brute. Maybe it was some other kind of variant. Whatever. It was stuck down there.
He scowled and kept trying to break free, but then the mound of fur jumped. He watched it latch onto the cliff face, and the creature's fur and flesh melted away, revealing white, orange, and black...stripes.
"Wilson?" he breathed.
The tiger was climbing up the cliff, using his huge claws like ice axes.
Relief hit Jackson so hard that he choked. "Look!" he insisted, but they were too busy arguing. He scowled and tried to pull free. "Get off!"
Sebastien paid no attention to him.
Jackson grunted angrily, and at the top of his voice, he yelled, "Will you shut the fuck up?!"
The three of them stopped and looked down at him.
"It's Wilson!" he told them, pointing his paw in the tiger's direction.
Sebastien scoffed. "Of course he's still alive." He then took off and raced towards the climbing muto.
Free at last, Jackson eagerly sprinted towards the tiger, too. He panted and gasped as he ran, his heart still aching, but this time with relief. He didn't know how Wilson survived—it didn't matter, to be honest; what mattered was that he was alive, and Jackson had to help him up the cliff.
"Wilson!" he called desperately.
The tiger kept climbing, now halfway up. He grunted and snarled, but he didn't give up despite the blood dripping from his paws.
Sebastien reached him; he hovered behind the tiger, grabbed his body with his front and back legs, and then pulled him off the cliff face. He carried him to safety, landing ten feet from the tree line, and when he dropped the tiger, Wilson collapsed.
Jackson hurried over to him. "Wilson!" he exclaimed.
But before he could reach him, Sebastien seemed to notice something, and he held out his wing to prevent Jackson from getting any closer.
"W-what?!" he exclaimed.
Raphael and Damon quickly joined them.
Jackson crouched so that he could see under Sebastien's wing, and that was when he saw it. A gaping, bleeding wound on Wilson's side. He shook his head in disbelief, his throat tightening and his heart breaking once again. "N-no..." he breathed.
Why was this happening? Why would the world let him think that his friend was okay only to shove in his face that he wasn't? Why would it let him see Wilson climbing to safety only to reveal that he was dead anyway? He scowled despondently and gritted his teeth; he could feel his rage returning, clawing its way to the surface—
"R-relax, man," came Wilson's breathy, tired voice. "It's just...the fucking Amarok. I'm good."
And then relief banished Jackson's growing rage. He tried to get past Sebastien—
"How are you sure?" the hound questioned, keeping Jackson back.
Wilson groaned irritably. "The fucking...thing bit me on the way down. It landed on top of me...and I just...snuck away while those things were too busy eating it. I used one of the dead cadejo to hide."
That was what Jackson saw falling off Wilson's back when he jumped up onto the cliff face. "Like camouflage?"
"Exactly," the muto mumbled.
"Not gonna lie, it's a good idea," Raphael admitted.
Sebastien folded his wings against his sides, letting Jackson through.
The moment he got to Wilson, he threw his paws around him and buried his face in his fur. "I thought you were dead," he lamented, sadness breaking through his relief. For the few minutes he thought he was dead, he felt as if he had nothing. He thought he lost his best friend, the one person who'd stuck around through all the shit his life had to offer, the one person who he trusted more than anyone else. He didn't know what he'd do without him.
"Where's the inimă?" Damon questioned irritably.
Wilson exhaled deeply and lifted one of his huge paws. "Don't worry, man. I got it."
Jackson backed off a little and looked down at him. "Can't you heal him?" he asked Raphael.
The limping orange wolf scoffed. "Even if I wanted to, no. I can only heal wolf walkers."
With a roll of his eyes, Jackson looked back down at Wilson. But then he shifted his sights to Raphael once more. "How far away is the manor?" He looked at Sebastien. "Can you carry him?"
"That's the only way getting back doesn't take seven years," the orange wolf muttered.
Jackson said to Wilson, "Can you shift back?"
Wilson nodded. "Yeah." He shifted out of his tiger form with a pained grunt, and then he gripped the wound on his side with both his hands. "Hurts like a bitch."
"Don't worry, there're doctors back at the manor," Sebastien said as he got Wilson onto his back and held him between his wings.
Jackson picked up the inimă and put it into his bag.
"Now let's get the hell out of here before something else happens," Raphael muttered, shoving past Jackson to lead the way.
Jackson was too relieved by Wilson's survival to care about Raphael's shove. He hurriedly followed behind Sebastien, keeping his eyes peeled for danger. He felt so suddenly protective of his friend, and he'd do whatever he had to to make sure that he made it back to the estate safely. He'd already almost lost him once today; he didn't want to have to face that again.
But as he followed Raphael and Sebastien with Damon at his side, he was struck by that unsettling feeling of eyes on him...again. A cold shiver ran down his spine, and he tensed up when he recalled the moment someone hiding in the dark called him Salvator. He didn't know who they were, nor did he know why they said that he was the one, but he had a horrible feeling about it, and he knew that he should tell someone. He had a lot to tell the people around him, and there would likely be time once they got back to base.
Before anything, though, he wanted to make sure that Wilson was going to be okay. That wound looked serious. But he trusted these people; they helped him and saved the lives of his pack, and he was certain that they'd save Wilson, too. They had to. If he lost him.... No, he didn't want to think about it anymore. He hadn't lost him. Wilson was fine. He was alive. He was breathing. He just needed a little help to recover. That was all. He'd be okay. He had to be okay.
"Hey," came Damon's voice.
Jackson snapped out of his thoughts and looked to his right, where Damon was walking in his normal wolf form.
"Are you okay?"
He frowned a little. "Yeah, I'm just worried about Wilson."
"It looked like you lost control back there," he said with a concerned tone. "You attacked—"
"I know," he interjected, shaking his head. "I...I didn't mean to, I just...I thought Wilson was dead. If Raphael just let me try to help him, then maybe he wouldn't have fallen in the first place."
"What would you have done?" the Alpha asked with a frown. "You wouldn't have reached him in time, Jackson. Raphael stopped you because you might have gotten yourself hurt...or worse."
Jackson huffed irritably and glared ahead. "It wasn't like I was just gonna dive into the pit."
"No?"
He scowled and glanced at him. "Why do you say it like that?"
"Because there was nothing else you could do, Jackson."
"I could have used my demon form; I could've swooped down there and grabbed him, and—"
"But you don't know how to fly yet," Damon said.
He was getting more and more irritated by the second. With an annoyed snarl, he shook his head. "I don't wanna talk about it anymore. Wilson's fine and that's what I wanna focus on."
Damon didn't argue with him. "All right."
Jackson was relieved that the conversation was over. It didn't matter what he could and couldn't have done. Wilson made it out, and that was what mattered.
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