Red: The Untold Story

  Red: The Untold Story

  Kindle Edition

  Text © 2016 by Angela M Hudson

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover image Used Under Licence by Shutterstock

  Cover design by AM Hudson

  Edited by John Adriaan

  License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9942585-5-7

  Author Website

  Other Works by Angela M Hudson

  The Dark Secrets Series

  Bound Series

  Willa Wicked

  Table of Contents

  The Beginning

  Part One

  1. It’s Darkest Before Dawn

  Part Two

  1. A Remarkable Boy Named Alex Plain

  2. The Selection

  3. The World You Live in and How to Change It

  4. Tomorrow and All the Tomorrows to Follow

  5. Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Tragedies

  6. The Offering

  Part Three

  1. Strange New Truths

  2. The Illusions of Someone Else’s Eye

  3. Beware the Wolf in a Man’s Clothing

  4. Lady and the Slave

  5. The Archetype of a (Not So) Bad Prince

  6. Now You Can Fly

  7. The Sheep Bares Its Wolfish Grin

  8. Liberty and Justice for Some

  9. Mighty Raven; Fallen King

  10. Death and All His Friends

  Part Four

  1. After Alex: The Other After Alex

  2. In the Absence of All Light

  3. Tears Don’t Fall; They Crash Around You

  4. Grim is the Man Who Holds His Tears

  5. The Strange Birds Are the Mystery Solved

  6. The Little Red Raven Girl

  7. How It Ends is Never the End

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  nce upon a time…

  Scratch that. My story doesn’t begin like this. And it doesn’t play out like a fairytale, either. It all started with a death in my family and a tragic realization. Well, two tragic realizations, actually, and from there my life split into three parts: Before Alex. After Alex. And the Disastrous Dark Days. Not necessarily in that order.

  Or maybe it was in that order, but After Alex didn’t truly happen until I “found myself” in the Dark Days.

  It will all make sense to you later…

  Part One: Chapter One

  It’s Darkest Before Dawn

  I left the bonfire feeling like an outsider. No one told me to go. No one told me I didn’t belong there. But no one talked to me, either. No one so much as even looked at me. In fact, even my closest friends deliberately walked right past me when I said hi.

  Safe to say I’d never felt like such an outcast in all my life. No matter what the Elders said, the only thing that mattered to a wolf was what the pack thought. And they had cast their judgment: I was nothing to them now.

  After a restless few hours trying to sleep, wishing I was out there under the full moon, running wild with the rest of my pack, I threw my covers back and climbed out my window. The night was cool and crisp with the promise of dawn and the moon had gone into hiding, as if it knew I was coming out to greet its rays. I jumped from the brick wall around our back garden and landed with a squeak in the great square park, taking a glance at the other fences—all crafted of different things, like painted wooden pickets and rendered bricks—wondering if anyone was watching from their darkened houses. It felt almost like I was the only person in the world. The only person in a very dark world. I couldn’t see a thing past my own two hands, but I knew my way to the big old tree with my eyes closed.

  I took up a spot on the prickly wooden seat of the rope swing, and soared as close to the moon as I would ever otherwise get, trying to kick the clouds away from it. None of my thoughts or worries could be solved out here, but somehow, as my feet swept the tickly grass, it always seemed to absorb some of my pain.

  One thing was certain though: my problems were too heavy to carry alone right now. If I hadn’t escaped that watertight box I was trying to sleep in, I’d have screamed and woken my mom. She’d have asked what was wrong, and I’d have told her. Then, she’d go nuts at my old friends for treating me that way. But it wouldn’t solve anything; it would only make them hate me more.

  When I finally stopped thinking so loud after a while, I noticed the odd quiet that made every noise stand out around me. I could paint the night with those sounds, from the crickets making up the billowy grass to the silence that would be the wisdom from the stars. A rustle by someone’s gate showed where the houses bordered the park and a creak in the rope swing gave me the grayish branch it was looped around. A few hundred paces behind me, the children’s playground caught the breast of the wind and made it howl, like a wolf at the moon.

  On any other night, I would’ve found it peaceful out here, but this was the first night I’d had to face the truth. It was the first night I went up to the Gathering in the forest and sat around the bonfire, pretending to be one of them in the new knowledge I had now that I was not. And never would be. It was the first night I really felt my dad’s absence.

  Stuck in my own misery, as if maybe the pain of letting it all go and moving on might be unbearable—the life I was supposed to have tipping the scales of the life I was stuck with now—I didn’t notice my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I didn’t hear the gate behind me open until a dorky guy in a trench coat popped out, his curly hair running a riot on his head.

  He stopped short in front of me and closed the coat over his skinny white legs and bad pajamas, doing nothing to hide the unlaced black boots that were two sizes too big for him.

  I stopped swinging and stared at him.

  Part Two: Chapter One

  A Remarkable Boy Named Alex Plain

  “I didn’t know anyone would be out here so late,” he said in a deep but youthful voice.

  A flash of white fur brushed past him then and his arm straightened out for a second before he dropped a red leash. It slipped between the blades of grass, my eyes following it to a pretty black and white Alaskan malamute.

  “She needed to go,” he added by way of explanation. As if it excused his crazy clothing combination.

  I nodded, not saying anything. I didn’t want him to hear the tremor in my voice and have him ask me what’s wrong. I could handle talking about it—the death; the loss, not one and the same but two different things—but if anyone asked me right now, I was certain I’d cry. He’d caught me in a weak moment. I wasn’t ready to be strong and I wasn’t ready to cry.

  “So?” he said, moving behind me.

  Feeling rude with my back to him, I got up off the swing for a moment to sit facing the other way.

  The boy tucked one leg under him in the grass, his back to the trunk, then finished with, “What’s a night like you doing out on a pretty girl like this?”

  I laughed, caught off guard by his mixed up question. And it was enough to make me forget how sad I was. For a second. Just a second long enough to choke out my terrible news.

  “Do you believe in wo
lves? Well, werewolves?” I asked, my voice small in this darkness. He must have thought I was a lot younger than my seventeen years, because he scooted forward and came up on one knee, propping his elbow on it.

  “I’d like to think they’re real,” he said in a gentle voice. “Do you believe in them?”

  “I was supposed to be one,” I confessed, knowing he’d either think I was crazy or that I was making up tall stories. Either way, it got this off my chest. “My whole life, my parents raised me in preparation for turning under the full moon after my first…” I’d never said this word in front of a human boy before. It was brought up openly in conversation with wolf boys, around family and the Elders, being that a girl’s change pretty much revolved around her first period, so it wouldn’t embarrass me, but it was only after I began this portion of the conversation that I realized it would definitely embarrass this boy.

  But, so what? I decided. If he was embarrassed about such a natural thing, that was his problem, so I just said it without flinching. “My first period. But it didn’t happen.”

  He flinched, speaking in such a gentle voice then that I felt like I was his baby sister. “Your… uh… your period never happened?”

  I laughed to myself. “No. It’s been nearly a year now since that, and I haven’t turned.”

  “Oh, so how old are you?”

  “I’m seventeen.” I shrugged, adding, “I was a late bloomer.”

  “Oh.” He leaned back a little, giving me more space, obviously really embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I thought you were younger.”

  My head moved in a no.

  I used the quiet of awkwardness and the returning moonlight then to take a closer look at his face. I was sure I knew him, maybe from school. He had a wide mouth and long, narrow features, his nose crooked at the dead center, as though he’d been punched and it never healed. He wasn’t cute, and he wasn’t really ugly either. And as I looked at his ear, of all things, I realized he was that guy from school that I saw drinking from the fountain once. I’d thought he was weird because, as he turned his head, he smiled at me. I didn’t even know him and he smiled at me for no reason. I never smiled back. I wondered if he remembered that.

  “Can I ask a strange question?” he enquired.

  “Stranger than me asking if you believe in werewolves?”

  “Maybe.” He sat back against the tree trunk again. “How do you know you won’t turn? Can’t it happen later?”

  “No.” I pressed my toes into the cold grass and swung myself softly, kind of surprised he actually believed me without argument, but willing to just accept his open-mindedness anyway. “I won’t turn because you have to have the gene from both parents and, as it turns out, only one of my biological parents is a werewolf.” I hated using the word ‘werewolf’, but humans got mixed up if we simply called ourselves what we were: wolves.

  “And this is news to you? You didn’t know your parents weren’t both werewolves?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Both my parents are wolves, but… my dad got sick,” I said. “And I offered to donate a kidney if I was a match, but…”

  “Right. That story tells itself,” he said gently. “So you’re not his biological daughter?”

  “Apparently not. And apparently my bio-dad was human, so… I’m half human.”

  “I’m half mad,” he offered, rocking one shoulder toward his ear. “At least, if I’m anything like my father.”

  I laughed. “You have a mad father?”

  “Yes. But he’s good mad.” He looked around the park for his dog and, when he saw her sniffing at a fence, he turned back to me. “Have you ever seen an upside-down library?”

  “A what?”

  “That’s my world. You have werewolves; I have libraries on the ceiling.”

  “For real?”

  The boy stood up and offered his hand. “I can show you my world if you like. It’s not as interesting as yours, but I promise it’ll make you forget that you want to cry for a while.”

  I took his hand. It was soft and a bit wet. “Okay. I’m Red, by the way,” I offered. “My name, that is.”

  “Nice to meet you, Red by the Way. I’m usually white, but my folks named me Alex.”

  He turned his helping hand into a shake and we both smiled at each other, the moonlight of this odd night making us both look blue.

  “I’ve seen you at school,” Alex added. “I think I’m a grade above you.”

  “I know. Otherwise I wouldn’t be going to your house.”

  “Right. Cause I might also be a serial killer.”

  “Yes, especially out here dressed like that.”

  “Well, I have a mad father and might also be slightly mad.” He eyes took in my pink nightgown and red sweater combo. “What’s your excuse for bad clothes?”

  “I have bad luck.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “Mm-hm.” I nodded. “To be caught out here in my pajamas.”

  Alex laughed, then turned his head and threw his voice over his shoulder. “Sacha. Come.”

  ***

  From the square park, boxed in by backyard fences, the big blue house had always seemed to loom, but up this close I could see it was just a house. A house with no lights left on inside.

  “So my father is an inventor,” Alex explained, leading me up the dark back steps. “He discovered that looking at things from a literally different perspective alters the way your brain processes the information.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that, if you hang upside-down and think about your problem, the different perspective gives you clarity and insight, makes you connect dots you didn’t see before,” he said.

  “And that’s why you have an upside-down library?”

  “It is.” We stepped into a long dark corridor with cherrywood panels on the lower halves of the walls and peeling emerald green paint on top. His house was large and I’d always admired its blue exterior, but over the years the bushes grew in around the bottom floor like a network of spies and you could only see the black roof tiles and the curling leafs of aged paint on the high round tower. It was always a mysterious house, and it seemed odd that such an ordinary boy lived here.

  Alex took off his coat and I laughed to myself when I read his T-shirt: Your Book Boyfriend is Right in Front of You.

  “Where did you get that shirt?” I asked.

  He laughed like he only just remembered he had it on. “It was my brother’s, before he went away to college. I took it when I took his room.”

  “Maybe you should give it back.”

  “No way.” He thumbed the shirt, pulling it off his chest a little. “This is the only way I can get girls to talk to me.”

  I laughed to myself, petting Sacha on the head as she brushed against my leg.

  “Go on, Sach.” Alex pointed to the end of the hall, and the fluffy and now a bit dewy dog ran off, shaking the grass out of her paws all down the old carpet. She vanished into a dark room at the end. “Hungry?”

  “Um…” For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me, or the dog.

  “It’s not a trick question,” Alex said, smiling.

  “Uh, yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess.”

  Alex flicked a switch on the wall and led me deeper into the old house. The floorboards under my bare feet creaked as we walked, and in the dim orangey light from nineteen-twenties lampshades, I realized with a sense of dread that my toes were covered in dirt and my red sweater made my nightgown sit funny around my hips. But then I looked at Alex and didn’t feel so bad. He was really tall and wiry—at least a head-and-a-half taller than me, the tallest girl in class—his neck slightly bent forward as though his thinness and height embarrassed him. Also, his mismatched clothes looked a lot worse than mine. So did his bed hair.

  Halfway down the hall, my mind escaped with the worries about my appearance, noting instead that the carpet was kind of dusty, which led me to think maybe Alex didn’t have a mother anymore. There was a woman that lo
oked like Alex in the pictures on the walls, with a man that looked too old to be his father, yet he was holding Alex in nearly every baby photo. His hair was gray-white and loosely curly, like Alex’s, but it had this kind of wild thing happening, a bit like Einstein—but Einstein with his fork in a power socket.

  “Is this your father?” I asked, stopping at a picture of the smiling man by a telescope and large window. I realized, judging by the view, that it was taken from the tower in their house.

  “Yes,” he said proudly. “That was when he taught me to use a telescope.”

  “No kidding?” I said sarcastically. “Who’d have guessed?”

  Alex gave a shy smile, not sure what to say. “Come on. We’ll fix a midnight snack and take it to the library. I’m sure my dad’ll be hungry too.”

  “He’ll still be awake?”

  Alex just laughed, placing his hands behind his back. “He’s always awake.”

  In a large kitchen not unlike my own, with cupboards the same color as the outside of his house and the same appliances everyone had, we fixed a cheese sandwich for ourselves and brought a glass of milk and cookies for Alex’s dad. I had so many questions about the different machines and gadgets all around Alex’s house—on the table top, the counter, the shelves and even wedged in corners beside the lounge—but Alex worked quietly and even spoke quietly, so I got the sense that this was not a noisy house, and a million eager questions would not be appreciated.

  He led me to a set of painted green doors, with elvish-looking words carved around them, like something out of a Tolkien novel. If they were round doors, I’d have been even more excited to see what was behind them.

  “He’s a fan.”

  “A fan?”

  “Hobbit fan.” Alex nodded at the markings, motioning with his head then for me to get the door, since his hands were full.

  “Oh,” I said breathily, fumbling with the knob before I pushed the door open. My eyes went in ahead of my feet to the large space, expecting to see shelves and books, but instead I almost fell down a straight drop onto a ceiling. I grabbed the edge of the door and pressed my back to it, looking down at the abyss below me. A ceiling on a floor—complete with a lampshade? I knew he said upside-down library, but… no way. This was too unreal.