Chapter 2: Will

Chapter 2: Will

An ancient German folk saying went something along the lines of: “We are all blessed with the ignorance that comes with death. For no one, not even the dead, know what happens inside the lifelessness of the grave.”

This suffocating dark could mean one of two things. If this was the afterlife, then it was the bleakest afterlife I could have ever imagined, and whoever was the architect of the transitory location between life and death had done a piss poor job of acclimatizing the recently departed to the next realm. However, if this was not the afterlife, then it meant that I was in a coffin within my grave.

Alive.

It could not possibly be.

I was injected with the Wolf’s Bane. It was pain beyond what I could have ever imagined. All that torture that Edward Beckett had done to me for all those years paled in comparison to the excruciating agony that I felt when that liquid entered my veins. I had felt my life force leave my body. My soul had transcended from beyond the mortal plane and somewhere where there were familiar faces all around me. I could remember it so clearly.

I had met so many people in that purgatorial place.

Ariana.

Ah, yes.

I had called out her name, and she had sought me out from a sea of souls. Behind her, my parents, whom I had not seen for almost a century, stood happily, smiling wordlessly. My kin and kith from Germany, were all there. All the old members of my pack. These were white plains as far as the eye could see, shining overwhelmingly bright.

“Wilhelm. You’re at the precipice of the spirit realm,” Ariana had said, beaming ever so affectionately at me. “You only need to cross over. Your life will seem like a distant dream. All your sorrows will be over. Your pain will be a faint memory, nothing more. Come, join your ancestors, your clan, your friends.” She had then extended her hand to me, beckoning me to take it.

“And leave those I am in charge of? Take the shortcut, as it were?” That had been my response, stern, prompt.

“You are dying, Will. There remains no point in struggling. It’s a futile gesture. Look at all your family coming here to welcome you to the ancestral planes. Here, there is no pain. Here, there is only contentment. Come. Your time is here.”

“For a long time, I thought you were the woman I loved. Now that I have found the woman I truly love—she’s your granddaughter, by the way—I cannot just leave her to fend herself against all the forces that are conspiring against her. My pack needs me. More than that, Alexis needs me. And I need to fulfill my fate as her mate. There is so much I have yet to do,” I’d said.

Ariana’s face bore no smiling countenance after I said this. Instead, a different emotion, one that I could not fathom, overtook her, and she said, “Go then, Wilhelm. If this is indeed not your time, and if it is indeed that you have unfinished business back on earth, then go with the blessing of your ancestors.”

And then I was thrown into the darkness of the cosmos, where each moment stretched itself into an eon, and I did not know for how long I fell. All I knew was that my soul was descending from some holy echelon back into the chaotic reality of earth.

Now that it had all come back to me, it made sense that I was in a grave. My grave. What baffled me was how I was here in the first place. While I was having my spiritual epiphanies in the afterlife, those left in charge of my body had taken to it to bury me urgently. It must have been Maurice, of course, who else? Had there been a funeral? Had Alexis made it out alive? If so, was she there at my funeral?

These were the questions that I could not find the answers to if I stayed within my grave any longer. I would get out even if I had to claw my way out of here.

The troubling part about being in this dark confinement was I did not know what was up and what was down. What was even worse was the pain that was still coursing through my body. I might be alive, but the chemicals that had seen me to my apparent death were still running in my body, trying to finish the job.

Despite all that anguish, I regained control of my limbs and began battering against the lid of the coffin. First, I did it with my legs, hoping to create some wiggle room for my arms. Once I had loosened myself within the coffin and was no longer lying, I pushed against the coffin lid, expecting dirt to slide down and fill my coffin.

As I had anticipated the dirt, I was able to hold my breath and keep the existential dread of being buried alive at bay while I shoveled with my hands and climbed up from the coffin, and broke through the ground.

The dirt had been recently dumped on the grave, making it loose and easy for me to climb out. I grabbed fistfuls of dirt and threw them aside as I clawed my way out of the grave.

When my dirt-covered body finally came above ground, I saw that I was buried in Eternal Abode, and it was nighttime. The moon hung low in the blue sky with just a faint smattering of stars on the endless horizon. The gentle waves of the sea troughed near the beach as a weak wind blew, causing the trees to whisper and shiver.

They had given me a proper burial, complete with a wreath and a headstone. I wondered as I crawled out of my grave what they had said about me at the funeral and if the pack members had wondered why there had been a funeral on such short notice. What had become of Maurice, I thought? Had he positioned himself back at the pack as the Alpha? It drove me into a rage, thinking about the lies he must have told the pack to regain their trust. Surely, a man of his level of deceit will have had no trouble charming the pack members.

By the time I dragged my battered and aching body out of the cemetery, some coherence came to my thoughts, allowing me to think of my next move. I had to find Alexis. This much was certain. But besides that, there was the matter of Blair, Maurice, and Ralph. For all they knew, I was dead. This was true for everyone else as well, including my mate. I could use this to my advantage with my enemies. But as far as my mate was concerned, I had to put her emotional anguish to ease and let her know that I was alive.

In the aftermath of the battle that had taken place in the Beckett Pharma tower, the town looked unnaturally calm, as if someone had showered the whole place from above with some placating agent like the numbing gas that the Nazis used to use back in the Second World War.

My body felt drained, making it impossible for me to shift into my werewolf form. At least they had buried me in a proper suit. It was covered in dirt and grave grime, but after brushing myself off a lot at the cemetery’s entrance, I saw my reflection in a parked hearse, and, to my surprise, I did not look half bad. My hair was matted with grave dirt, and all the veins in my neck, hands, and forehead were blue and protruding, but other than that, I was pleased to see that no one could quite put together that merely moments ago, I was a man buried alive.

My vision came and went in flashes, and as my feet quivered to find their footholds, the journey back to Grimm Abode felt impossible. It was at this moment that I told myself a message that I desperately needed to hear: I had not come back from the dead to give up now.

My path, no matter how arduous, was yet ahead of me, as daunting as that was.

***

The air was that of mourning in the commune. All lanterns and lamplights were doused at night, a recognizable mark of bereavement. Black velvet cloths hung from the doors of all the houses, and silence prevailed as shadows crept ever so darker. Not a single soul was in sight, leading me to question whether I had come back from the dead at all.

Once I was inside the commune, I headed straight to the only person’s house that I could trust. As I passed through the darkness, I saw that there were no lights inside Alexis’s house, nor were there in mine, for that matter.

I snuck around the back of the houses and knocked on the backdoor of Vincent’s house. At first, there was no response, but upon further rapping, there came a sound from inside.

“Hold your horses, I’m coming,” Vincent’s familiar voice finally broke through the silence.

When he opened the door, I saw that his eyes were bleary red, and his face bore the mark of grief. But it took less than a moment for all that to change as he saw me standing in his doorway.

The man was about to faint, his mouth hanging wordlessly open. I quickly grabbed him, even though I was in no better condition myself, and stepped in through the door, closing it shut behind me.

“But…I buried you myself…How?!” Vincent inquired, his voice breaking. Then, without delay, he threw himself on me and hugged me fiercely. “When I learned that you had died, oh Christ!”

“Pull yourself together, man,” I said, holding him by his shoulders. “As you can clearly see, something has gone colossally right for me and just as monumentally wrong for my foes. I still draw breath. Although, how I still draw breath is still a mystery to me.”

“Dad…I mean, Maurice, he came in at dawn, holding your lifeless body, telling us a completely bullshit story about your death. No one bought it, but what could we do? You were dead, completely unbreathing, unmoving. There was a funeral at daybreak, followed by a burial in the early hours of the morning,” Vincent said, wiping his eyes. “And there’s no sign of Alexis anywhere.”

“Before anything else, you must swear to secrecy that you are not to tell a single soul that I am alive. Do you swear?” I whispered.

“I do not know what you’re planning, nor do I completely fathom how you’re still alive, but I swear. On my life and the life of my mother, may God rest her soul, I’m not telling anyone,” Vincent said. He held me and stared at me in disbelief for a complete minute before saying, “I wonder if….”

“I am wondering the same thing,” I said.

“You know, whatever experimentations that Edward fellow did upon you, they must have built some sort of long-term tolerance. Or maybe the potion that I gave you had some effects that we were unaware of back then,” he whispered.

“Or perhaps, just perhaps, the Wolf’s Bane was not as powerful as Blair had intended,” I said.

“You must tell me what happened. I…there’s no sign of Lexie anywhere. Do you know what happened to her?” Vincent asked.

“How would I know, Vince? Not more than an hour ago, I regained consciousness and clawed out of my grave.”

‘Right. Sorry. It’s just, it’s never happened to me before, having someone close to me come back from the dead.”

“I’ll remind myself not to make a habit of resurrecting myself now and then,” I said, trying to smile but finding it impossible to do so. Now that Vincent had told me that there was no sign of Alexis anywhere, my heart tremored at the possibilities. Was she safe at all?

Before we could talk about anything else, there was a loud knock on the front door.

“Vince! What did I tell you about locking the door? I hear noises. Who the hell are you talking to at this time of the night?”

That voice made my blood boil. My first impulse was to go to the front door, drag Maurice inside, and beat the living hell out of him, and right before I killed him, I’d find out what he had done to Alexis.

But my depleted level of energy and the resolution I had come to earlier about me keeping my resurrection secret stayed me from acting too rashly.

“You gotta get out of here, Will,” Vincent whispered frantically as the knocking on the front door became more forceful. “He can’t ever know.”

Vincent pushed me out the backdoor just as Maurice brute-forced his way through the front door. I crouched behind the wall and tucked myself right under the window where I could hear what was happening inside.

“Didn’t I tell you to stop moping around? What’s all this? Have you taken up talking to yourself? Like I needed to add yet another fucking concern in my life?”

“Don’t worry, dad. I haven’t gone psycho or anything. I was just saying a prayer for the fallen,” Vincent said.

I heard Maurice scoff loudly.

“So it’s even worse than I thought. You’ve gone religious. And what’s that shitty smell?”

“He became my best friend, dad. I get that the concept’s hard for you to understand, but he was like a brother to me. I was by his grave, trying to make sense of it all. I’m tired of burying people I love. First mom, then him.”

“Now is not the time to become sentimental. Whatever happened to Will was a travesty, I am sure, but we must look to the future instead of sulking about the past. You can be the alpha of this pack one day. You will soon know what it means to make hard choices,” Maurice said.

Vincent sneered derisively, then said, “He was twice the man you are. Don’t think me and the rest of the pack don’t have our suspicions about how you came walking through the commune with his corpse in your arms. Lexis’s missing too, which makes it all even more doubtful.”

“I would flay you alive were you not my son for this insolence,” Maurice said.

Not wanting to take any more of Maurice’s vitriol, I crouched back and disappeared into the trees. The backdoor opened just as I had hidden myself, and out stepped Maurice with two of his men. They scoured the surroundings, looking for someone, something, but when they were unable to find anything damning, they went back inside.

The night was not so silent and dark anymore. Ever since Maurice’s arrival, his men—men that I had not seen before, no doubt under his and Blair’s joint payroll—had started combing through the commune in an attempt to tie any loose ends. How ironic was it for Maurice that his biggest potential undoing was his own son?

I could trust Vincent with my life, but to be near him right now was extremely risky. Besides, there was someone whom I needed more than anyone else. Even though I could not morph myself into my wolf form, I discovered that I could still use my bond with Alexis.

It was faint, distant, and hurting. Wherever she was, she was in pain. I could sense the heartbreak, the sorrow, and the wounds that she was trying to recover from. I wondered momentarily if she had tried to tap into her bond with me, but then it occurred to me why would she? She had seen me die. There was no cause for her to use her bond anymore.

But of all the scattered and fragmented information that my bond was giving me, two things were clear. She was not in Fiddler’s Green anymore, and she was in mortal danger.

While still tucked away behind the tree line, I tore off my coat’s sleeve and wrapped it around my face. Stealth was my only ally now.

Although the pain in my body had subsided, the effects of Wolf’s Bane still debilitated me from moving too swiftly or traveling for long distances. I was already exhausted as it was. I needed food, a good night’s sleep, a bath, and new clothes.

Now, whom did I know who could provide me with all of that while remaining discreet?