Chapter 28

Mira

Now I had two side projects: to discover more about Dominic’s rage, and to figure out how to awaken my wolf.

I didn’t want to abandon my work at the hospital, but I knew I needed more time for myself. The staff seemed almost excited when I told them I would need to cut back on my hours in person for a while, citing the upcoming Luna trials.

Whether they were showing support for my new position, or just thought I looked like I needed more sleep, there was no pushback at my lighter schedule. The new reforms in the hospital were helping a lot, so I felt less guilty about my absence.

I was thrilled when Dominic told me about the library.

Not the public library— of course anyone in the Pack had access to that.

It was the private library that one needed special permission to visit and peruse.

The Alpha Stacks.

It was down a secluded corner of the Pack house, through a nondescript door, down a spiral staircase into a subterranean vault. An ancient cavern with a controlled atmosphere that seemed to work like magic to keep books and documents in good condition.

I was in Heaven, and began splitting my time between there and the hospital, doing research and studying histories in order to prepare for the trials that lay ahead.

It had been a long time since I had tried to understand what happened to me. Most of my teenage years were a blur, or completely blacked out.

After my parents were taken and later murdered by rogue wolves, I went into a post-traumatic fugue state. I don’t remember anything that happened in the month afterwards, though sometimes I have odd flashbacks to events I cannot explain.

I didn’t speak for months after that, had no appetite, and was terrified of anyone who tried to come close to me.

Ward was the only one I trusted, the only one who put in the effort to help me come back to myself.

He encouraged me to get back outside, out in the world, and eventually back into school. When I finally started paying attention again in my honors biology class, I found my passion in understand the natural and medicinal world around me.

I devoured books on anatomy and botany with a voracious appetite, and started wondering how to link these studies together to understand and heal people around me.

It wasn’t surprising that I went into medicine, fast-tracking my studies and adding in military medical trainings whenever they were offered.

Some thought I was a weird prodigy kid. I just said I had mysteries to solve.

And all of that had led me here.

Currently, reading a book on urban legends of the Alpha families. The royals were known for inbreeding across the globe throughout centuries, and of course wolves were no different.

As modern medicine developed, so did the desire to manipulate genetics and keep the bloodlines powerful and pure.

This led to some horribly failed experiments, and many lives cut short for no reason.

I remember growing up hearing the spooky stories and believing every word.

Now, reading them as an adult with a critical eye for medical anomaly, I wasn’t so easily fooled.

But, still. In some cases, the truth can be stranger than fiction.

There was a legend dating from the 18th century of an Alpha male born with the strength of ten, who was uncontrollable and was set upon by humans to save their community.

It seemed like a common horror story of monsters and mayhem, but the book went on to compare later scenarios with a familiar characters.

Mothers taking certain herbs to produce stronger heirs.

Supplements given to children to increase their virility and provoke their wolves to develop earlier than normal.

In some cases, sacrificial rites and rituals to call the powers of mother nature down into a single body. Attempting to create gods among men.

I thought of Dominic, they way he acted that first night we met.

His eyes were almost purely red, all the way through, and they didn’t seem to focus on the physical world in front of them.

His voice was pitched oddly, deeper and more grating, and almost like it had an echoing affect.

His body seemed twice the size as normal, but I never saw him actually grow or shrink.

Could any of these past practices have affected this current Alpha?

Had someone interfered with Dominic’s development?

And now— were they provoking his rage in order to ruin him?

The next day, while at the hospital, I took advantage of some down-time to question one of the nurses. Cinda had been working there for almost 30 years, and while she wasn’t exactly a gossip, she seemed to know everything about everybody.

“Do you remember Dominic as a child?” I asked her, trying to seem casual in my curiosity.

I watched the smile on her face grow to crinkle around her eyes.

“Of course, he’s been a big personality since he first arrived on the scene,” she said with a chuckle. “Hard not to be with a family like that, but even so, Dominic always seemed to attract attention.”

“Was he a trouble-maker?” I let myself smirk a bit, playing along as the girl getting the dirt on her boyfriend.

“Somewhat,” Cinda paused to think. “No more than any young wolf, but sure he had his own scraps and mishaps. He always knew his place though, knew that the eyes of the Pack were always on him.”

“It takes a village to raise a child,” I said.

“And to keep one from straying down the wrong path,” she added. “By the time he was ten, he’d become a serious boy. And after that— I always thought he grew up a little too fast, but I suppose after the incident, anyone would.”

“What incident?” I asked, maybe too quickly.

“Right, you wouldn’t know about that,” she said with a sigh. “It happened so fast, and he was really never the same.”

I waited until she was ready, not wanting to say the wrong thing that might prevent her from telling me the whole tale.

“Well, he got sick, I guess you could say. He was maybe, fourteen, fifteen? A sudden sickness, a sickness of the brain and the heart.”

She paused, and the look in her eyes told me she was reliving that time long ago.

“He’d been in school, seeming normal, until all of sudden he wasn’t. It was like he was replaced by someone, something else. He started growling, screaming, and when his wolf took over it seemed like it was taking over completely. As if it was trying to consume him and everything around him.”

Cinda looked me right in the eye.

“He was pure rage and fury, fire and brimstone— broke the ribs of one guard and dislocated the shoulder of another when they tried to restrain him. Eventually, they got a sedative in him and brought him to the hospital.”

She gestured around the place, setting the new scene.

“He was here for a week,” her voice was full of sadness and regret. “We had to keep him tied to the bed at first, and then into solitary confinement so he wouldn’t hurt himself or others.”

“And then what happened?” I jumped in. “Was he cured? Or it just, what, went away?”

“I can’t really say,” Cinda’s face looked heavy. “One day the Alpha and the old Luna, Elena, came in and told everyone to empty the whole floor of the hospital. At the end of the day, they were gone, all of them, and we never heard about it again.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, not a word,” she answered. “And then the next time we saw him, he was normal again. Well—a bit more subdued, less light in his eyes, but nothing like the animal we’d seen in him before.”

“And it’s never happened since?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she said. “I think the family did a good job of sweeping it under the rug.”

“Wow, that’s…”

I didn’t know what it was. It answered some of my questions while bringing up a whole list of others.

I left the hospital after an hour in my medicinal lab, thinking over herbal properties and pharmaceutical remedies that would bring any relief to Dominic’s symptoms.

After a few messy trials, I thought I was getting closer to a type of sedative that would have both physical and psychological effects without turning the patient into a vegetable. I took a few small samples along with me and headed home.

I arrived once again to an empty room. The office was also empty, and the cooks and maids and rest of the house staff had not seem Dominic all day.

Returning to my room I picked up my phone to call him when I saw missed calls and messages from Wyatt.

“Mira!” his voice was shrill in my ear when he picked up the phone.

“Hey, Wyatt, sorry I missed your calls—“

“We have a situation,” he cut me off. “The Alpha, Dominic, might be in trouble.”

“What do you mean? You’re not with him?”

“No, we’re not, we’re looking for him,” he said. “Earlier, he had… he wasn’t feeling well, as you know happens sometimes…”

I could read between the lines.

“Where is he?” I asked desperately.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt admitted. “He went to his enclosed area, and when we came back later, he was gone. We haven’t seen him for hours.”

Dominic was in a rage state, and he was missing.