He’s a young man with tawny brown skin and auburn hair, his head hung low toward his knees, a vacant expression in his golden-brown eyes. He’s been tied to the back of the chair with massive lengths of rope, and not only are his arms handcuffed to the armrests, but his ankles are handcuffed to the chair legs as well.
“Gage is the source of it,” she says in a bitter voice, “at least as far as we can tell. He’s the only one who hasn’t gotten better at all. He showed signs weeks ago, long before any of the rest went mad. And the worst thing is, we didn’t realize it, even though it should’ve been obvious—he can’t even shift.”
Her offhand words, so easily spoken, are like a punch to the gut. I’ve been accused of being mad myself more times than I can count. Teasing by my classmates, sneers from fellow shifters, “concerned” murmurs about whether or not I was contagious—all because I don’t have my wolf.
Seeming to realize too late what she said, Farroh throws in a tired, “Sorry, Aurora. But he’s not like you. He’s been saying the craziest things.” She glances toward the back of the clinic, then breaks out in a smile. “My brother is here.”
Kieran sees Waylon before I do, and strides across the waiting room to greet him. They share a big, manly bear hug, their deep voices reminiscing, and I distantly hear Kieran share his condolences. But I can’t take my eyes off of Gage, his shoulders curved with defeat, his eyes barely showing any emotion at all. If it weren’t for a dozen things going a certain way in my life, that could’ve been me. Worse, it still could be.
Waylon—Alpha Waylon now, if the self-assured dominance rolling off him is any indication—walks up to me and gives me a small nod of recognition. “Aurora. I’m sure we’ve met, but my apologies for not remembering. Kieran says that you’re a bit of an expert in fae lore.”
“He’s overestimating my abilities,” I tell Waylon, feeling self-conscious. “Although I do know more than most. The woman who raised me insisted that they were going to come back one day—that we hadn’t hunted them to oblivion or forced them back to their realms as was claimed.”
“I’m afraid she was right,” he says sadly. “I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes, although I have no idea what motivates them.”
“Power. Greed. Pure, unchecked desire,” I tell him. “The fae aren’t like us, or humans, or even witches. They don’t feel shame, guilt, or regret. Gran always said that they were hungry things, half-wild and mindless.”
“And their spells? Their bargains?” Waylon’s eyes, a deep hazel, are intense with desperation. “Do you know any way to counteract them at all?”
Dozens of ways, but none that apply here, as all of them are only useful to the bargainer themselves. Most fae bargains aren’t meant to be undone by an outsider—and they’re almost always impossible to break. Usually there are loopholes, but only in favor of the fae making the bargain, and I’d have to know the words that were used to make it.
But if the hopeless, heavily sedated shifter in front of me wasn’t the one who made the bargain, just a bystander—it’s happened before in other packs, Carrie said that a poorly-worded vow, one of her fellow hunters made, resulted in three spontaneous pregnancies and two star-crossed mate bonds—just being near a fae bargain as it’s made can result in runoffs of magic, although usually it’s those who meddle in the bargains who find themselves on the wrong end of an unbreakable curse.
Kieran and Waylon are looking at me expectantly, and even without a wolf inside me, my shifter side is desperate to please both dominant men.
“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.
