Awakening Book 1

The Beginning

It's been thirteen days since Colton left me in the forest and I don't think I have the will to keep trying anymore, I'm tired of life and everything has become so mundane. Everything I thought I had experienced before that day is nothing in comparison to how I have been since. I feel like my family have died all over again and I am bereft and inconsolable. I have no more tears because I have cried so many. I am nothing, but a numb hollow shell and the sunlight has withdrawn from my world.

I tried to stop the spiraling depression, I fought hard to beat this feeling of being sucked free of all life, but the fates don't play when you deny them. I'm not even living anymore. Such is my empty continuous state of nothing.

I robotically move from my room to kitchen, from kitchen to chores, from chores to my room, day after day. I have to nothing to say, nothing to add to the conversations around me and nothing to do or think about beyond focus on this eternal emptiness that I drag around day after day.

I was never this girl. I survived the loss of so much more, yet I don't know how to fight this. I have read books in the library that blame the severance for my worsened state. Cast free, set afloat by a rejection of this level...it messes with you more than just the rejection of a normal union. Wolves can pick mates; it's not always fated. And normally both parties get a choice, so you have to be pretty sure to shackle your heart to someone if you are going to ask them to be mated for life.

Scenting's happen...that's when the mate you are most likely to bond with can smell out your scent among the many and identify you easily. Mates should and can smell one another no matter the distance or the crowds. So rejecting someone who syncs with your scent can be crushing as it is. Rejecting someone who imprints at the hands of the fates...there is no recorded outcome. No one has ever defied it, because quite simply...no one fights the union. Its all-encompassing 'instalove' and a need and hunger stronger than any bond in the land. Imprinting is soul mate lore. Unbreakable, pure and powerful. No one wants to deny that kind of obsessive connection and walk away to find another mate...until us.

I can confirm, rejecting from that kind of bond is like dying, only not actually letting the body fade out to black when the soul leaves you. I'm a walking shell. Zombified and unable to do anything about it at all and death right now is starting to look a hell of a lot better than this.

I don't even know if this is how Colton feels because sometimes, the rejector, they have very little in way of backlash in the way the rejected does. They made the choice and for some reason, the fates let them away with crushing another soul. I guess that's why choosing a mate is not an impulse thing and marking someone you have been dating can sometimes be a choice of many years. I mean look at Carmen and Colton. Two years and he still hadn't marked her, even though he told me he had made the choice to mate up with her. Even he wasn't ready to commit in case she turned him down and everybody knew how much she loved him.

I have tried not to wonder over the past two weeks if they have rekindled their love affair, but I guess I would know. We are bonded, so I would feel it if he had sex with anyone else, whether I want to or not. Hell, I will feel it if he even kisses anyone. Even with a verbal renouncement, from what I have read, it should make no difference to my being able to know when he betrays the fates and chooses to procreate with another. The only balance to that is, he will feel it if I do too. Whoever ordained this bullshit, they need therapy because someone up there has a twisted sense of what's right.

I jump out of my skin when the door slams behind me and brings me back to reality with a bump. I had been daydreaming again while folding my laundry and flinch when Vanka strolls in smoking a cigarette and fills our room with the putrid choking smell of her bad habit. We are supposed to have a house rule against smoking but it's not like Vanka ever does anything she is ever told.