Page 13 of Fated to the Alpha Warrior (The Wolf’s Forbidden Mate #1)
“I’ll try everything I know,” I promise them, thinking of all the moments in my life when I felt just as hopeless and trapped as the shifter handcuffed and tied to the chair.
“Someone has to try to fix this, if the packs are going to have a future. But first, I need to do some investigating to figure out what might’ve gone wrong.
Waylon, can I talk to some of the pack?”
“Of course.” He nods, hope sparking in his eyes. “Do whatever you need to do.”
The weight of his expectations is almost too much to bear. I add it to the pile already on my shoulders.
Going through the room, I ask questions of the pack: when did you first notice the madness? Have you felt off at all? What told you that your fellow pack members were going mad?
The answers come in bits and pieces.
“There was this smell, like an itch in my nose.”
“He said he saw lights dancing in the sky… it was an overcast day.”
“When she came home, she was still in wolf form. Took hours for her to shift. Said she couldn’t remember anything that happened.”
“He started to tell me and Gage that the alpha had to die so the ‘wheels could turn,’ or some such nonsense.” This I get from a former friend of Monroe, the now-dead murderer of Alpha Tylin.
“I tried to convince him that he was out of it. Thought he’d given the whole thing up when he stopped talking about it.
I should’ve known… I wish I’d gone to someone sooner.
But he said I didn’t understand since I have a mate, that only Gage really got it. And look what happened to him.”
I ask more questions about Monroe, whose name is basically a curse at this point. They all agree: he was quiet, unassuming, and generally agreeable. It isn’t until I speak to a female shifter he was desperately in love with that I start to piece together the picture of a desperate man.
“I told him that I was only going to mate with someone if they were my fated mate,” the woman, Carissa, says.
“When he asked if I’d make any exceptions, of course I mentioned Alpha Tylin and his son.
I mean, the alpha was widowed, and his son…
I don’t have to tell you. He’s the best-looking man in our pack. ”
So in the end, like so many curses, it began straightforwardly: with unrequited love. Glancing over at Kieran, who’s helping sort through the emergency supplies, I poke at the rejected bond inside my chest. It’s a fist-sized ache now, mostly dull, sometimes sharp, and full of yearning.
What would I do to make it stop, if the fae offered me a bargain?
Best not to think about it.
“As far as I can tell, Monroe was in love with Carissa, and Gage was just an innocent bystander when he made a bargain with the fae,” I tell Waylon when I’m ready to report back my findings.
“I’m pretty sure he was there when the bargain happened, although I’ll have to talk to him to figure out the rest.”
“Good luck,” Waylon says, shaking his head. “He’s been speaking nonsense just as long as Monroe has. If I hadn’t managed to lock him up before my father’s death, he would’ve been involved, I’m sure.”
And he’d be dead now too, goes unspoken.
Waylon and Kieran watch as I approach Gage slowly and crouch in front of him. Based on the accounts I’ve heard about the madness, and the things other mad shifters have done, I should be terrified of him. Or angry—shifters like him wiped out my entire family, after all.
Instead I just feel a deep well of sadness.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him, reaching out to tip his chin up so he looks at me. “I’m just here to help.”
Gage twitches, and I hear a growl. Whipping my head around, I glare at Kieran, who has no right to play the protective mate after everything he’s done.
“I think it’d be easier to do this alone,” I tell Waylon, motioning to him and Kieran. “He needs to feel safe.”
“We’ll give you some privacy,” Waylon says, dragging a reluctant Kieran away.
We’re still exposed, visible to the whole pack, so I wheel a divider curtain over and use it to give us even more privacy. Studying Gage for a long moment, I inhale and taste his emotions on my tongue: grief, sadness, despair, and… longing.
“I’m going to figure this out,” I promise him, reaching carefully to unwind the rope tying him down. “There has to be something.”
Carrie said that fae magic has to have a way to enter the body.
If the victim isn’t willing, like I’m hoping Gage wasn’t, then it enters unwillingly, without their knowledge.
In the fae realms, this usually happens when a victim eats their food or drinks their wine.
Here, the magic has to enter the body through…
“A wound.” I uncover it by turning Gage’s left wrist over. He jerks and snarls at me. I soothe him with my voice, my heart racing as I take in the oozing cut on his forearm.
It looks innocent enough, the kind of thing a shifter’s healing would normally fix. But obviously, this time, it got infected. Not with bacteria, but with magic.
Determined to help him heal, I go to Farroh for supplies, requesting all the ingredients for the poultices and charms Carrie taught me. She looks at me oddly, and when I mention Gage’s wound, she shakes her head. “We tried antibiotics, oral and ointment. Nothing works.”
“Because it’s not an infection—at least, not the typical kind,” I explain, hoping that I’ve guessed correctly. “I’m pretty sure, it’s fae.”
Kieran, who of course has been eavesdropping, jumps in. “I’ll double check to be sure of that. If it smells of fae magic, I’ll know.”
Sighing, I humor him. “Just don’t do anything to upset him. I want him nice and calm while I try to counteract the curse magic.”
“Why would I upset him?”
Of course there’s nothing I can say to that, but it’s no surprise that as soon as Kieran steps around the corner, Gage’s head comes up and he lifts a lip in a snarl. Kieran growls in response, low and threatening, and Gage starts to fight his cuffs, irritating the wound.
“Kieran—”
“Just give me a minute,” he snaps, taking a few big steps closer, setting Gage even more on edge. “If I can just…”
I watch him close his eyes and inhale, his nostrils flaring, the midday sun striking the smooth line of his jaw. Many shifters have special talents, but Kieran’s is rare: he can smell magic. Not just fae magic, which he says has a strong scent, but also witch magic as well.
It isn’t much of a surprise, since his mother came from a line of proud female warriors from Pack Granite. I never knew her—she died giving birth to Kieran—but Carrie said she was a tracker like no other from the time she could walk.
Watching Kieran use his human nose to detect fae magic, I can believe it. He backs off from Gage just when I think it might be too much for him, and gives me a sharp nod. “You were right. It reeks.”
“Sure that isn’t just your unwashed pits?”
He gives me a look. “We had access to the same lack of running water last night, as I recall.”
“But only one of us was so sweaty during sixth grade PE that he slid down the ropes course.”
I can’t help needling him in moments like this—moments when he reminds me how skilled he is, how much I wanted him to be my mate.
Kieran just rolls his eyes, huffs, and walks away.
Once he’s gone, I step behind the curtain divider, take a deep breath, and place the palm of my hand over my racing heart.
The sooner this is all over, the better.
So I get to work making various curse cures for Gage.
Since the fae magic entered through a wound on his body, and not a direct bargain, I should be able to counteract it.
Ringwort doesn’t work, and neither does ice water and rosemary.
I spend hours trying different combinations, temperatures, ingredients, and methods of both cleaning and dressing the wound.
My eyes are starting to cross when Farroh brings me lunch, and I gulp it down with a thanks.
“We have to up his sedatives again,” she says as Gage starts to twitch and move. “Waylon has tried calming him down through the pack bond, but it isn’t even there anymore. He says it’s like he just… died.”
Not died. Death would be better than this half exile.
As soon as they’re done sedating him, I run more tests. Nothing works.
“I’m starting to feel like I’m just irritating you,” I murmur, looking up into his wide and wild eyes. “But let’s try one more.”
I’m de-seeding a pomegranate—the seeds feature in many myths and fae tales—when the knife slips and cuts across my palm.
Hissing, I press down on the wound and count to ten.
When I let go the skin has healed, and there’s only a little blood in the mixture.
I use a spoon to fish the droplets out and mix the rest up, then turn it into a poultice.
It’s late now, so dark that the sun has set. My eyelids are heavy as I press the mixture to Gage’s wrist, murmuring an apology as he flinches.
“Last one, I swear.”
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I lean back in my chair and stare blankly at the wall. If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what to try next..
A gasp draws my attention back to Gage. He’s staring at me with clear, focused eyes for the first time.
“They’re gone,” he says in a voice filled with wonder. “The voices, they’re just… gone.”
“I’ll go get Waylon,” I tell him.
As I stand, he reaches for me, his movement aborted by the handcuffs. “Thank you.”
The gratitude in his eyes is all I need to make this hard, long day worth it.
Waylon looks him over, checks through the pack bond, and confirms that, as far as he can tell, the madness is gone.
He’s so thrilled that he claps me on the back more than once.
Kieran looks at me with an unreadable emotion in his eyes, but all I hear is Waylon instructing us to the pack’s guest house, and ordering someone with an ATV to go fetch my bike.
I barely clock the trip to the house. I don’t even notice when Kieran slides my backpack off my shoulder and takes it up to the guest bedroom himself. If I had, I would’ve stopped him.
All I really feel is the exhaustion as it takes me, drowning in the comfort of a soft mattress and thick sheets, Kieran staring at me with something like concern in his ice blue eyes.