Chapter Five
They had mostly left Danny alone, which he was grateful for. Any time one of them stepped into the room, the hair on his arms and neck would stand up. He could smell them, too. A scent that spoke of wolves, of monsters, of teeth. Every time he closed his eyes, images of Becky or Mike or Cindy flashed behind his eyes, filling him with a shuddering horror he didn’t know how to escape. He was all alone now.
These people, these police—‘Monsters’ his mind whispered. ‘Animals’,—seemed in no hurry to do anything with him. They’d even left him food and water. Offered him use of a restroom. All so normal as if he was just another person and it was just another day.
The Alpha, the first one, the one who’d hunted him, never came. Each time the door opened, Danny was afraid it would be him. He was different to the rest. He wanted something and Danny thought that something might be him though he didn’t understand why.
As he lay there, curled up on the floor, the joint pains started again. First in his wrists, spreading to his elbows. Uncurling his body, he tried to ease them, moving this way and that. Nothing helped, nothing made it better.
His doctor had been baffled by them, test after testing coming back normal. Cindy had talked about contacting Doctor Hollis but Danny didn’t know why that would help. His specialty was infectious disease, not rheumatology.
The sound of the door opening coincided with the peak of the pain, and he whimpered, curling tighter, trying to block the incessant agony from his mind.
Hands on his head, on his back, had him desperately trying to move away, to escape the foreign touch. But he was too slow and too weak, finding himself turned over onto his back, Chris, the Alpha from before looking down at him.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
He checked Danny over, his eyes looking him up and down. “You’re sweating, your heart’s racing. Are you in pain?”
Danny could only whimper and try to curl up as the pain hit his shoulders and his spine.
He heard the Alpha shout and the door being thrown open.
“Call Heidi, tell her we need her here, now.”
The pain in his spine crescendoed, and he was grateful for the reprieve as he passed out.
He woke lying on his side, one arm stretched out in front of him, a white bandage on his wrist.
“Easy,” a voice said when he tried to move. “Stay still for now.”
The pain was there, but it was quiet. His whole body felt muted, like someone had turned down the volume.
He was lying on a bed, the mattress soft and springy beneath him and a blanket covering him. Glancing down at himself, he realized he was naked and gripped the blanket, suddenly very awake.
There was someone sitting on the edge of the bed beside him, and when he tried to move his bandaged arm, he pressed down lightly on it. “Keep still,” he said again.
It was the Alpha, Chris. His heart started to thump, as he was all too aware of how vulnerable he was, lying naked on a bed with a man —a wolf— he didn’t know holding him still.
“How are you feeling?”
It wasn’t the question he was expecting, and he answered it with a question of his own. “Where am I? What’s going on?”
“You’re safe. You’re at a hotel for shifters, in one of the bedrooms here. We moved you from the other room you were in to make you more comfortable.”
Why would monsters care about his comfort?
“You haven’t killed me yet.”
“Have you done something to deserve that?”
“I told you.” His voice came out more like a whisper. “It was my fault. They’re dead because of me.”
“But you weren’t the one who killed them.” He sounded so certain, like he knew.
“I went for a walk and for once the wolf wasn’t there, wasn’t following me. I thought it was a good thing, that he’d finally lost interest. But when I came back to the house, I could smell him, his scent. And then I smelled the blood. I went upstairs and I found them. It was too late, there was nothing I could do. I thought I’d be next, so I ran.”
He turned his head into the mattress, his tears leaking into the soft sheets.
The Alpha’s hand settled on his back, rubbing up and down his spine. The touch reminded him of the terrible pain and he flinched. The hand disappeared. “Are you still hurting?”
“It’s better.” It was dull and far away.
“What was that? What caused it?”
He shrugged, regretting the motion as it made his shoulders ache.
“I don’t know. It’s been happening for months. Our family doctor thinks it’s stress.”
“What do you think?”
“I wasn’t stressed until the wolf came and wouldn’t go away. The pain started before that.”
“We spoke to your great aunt Marcia.”
Aunt Marcia. Danny had forgotten. He struggled to sit, shrugging off the hands that tried to help him and turning to face Chris properly for the first time.
“How is she?” He’d wiped out her whole family in one swoop. She must hate him.
“She’s very sad. And very worried about you.”
“She won’t be once she learns what I’ve done.” He dropped his gaze to the blanket.
Chris caught his chin, tipping his head up.
“Unless I’ve missed something, Daniel, all you did was not tell anyone you thought you were being followed by a wolf. That’s not a crime, and it doesn’t make you responsible for what happened to your family.”
Chris went to let Heidi know Daniel was up, stopping by the kitchen to get him some food. Colin was there and heated him up a bowl of soup. Chris returned with it, and Heidi, keen to see Daniel’s reaction to meeting a female wolf.
It wasn’t any better than his reaction to Chris or Will. He watched her with wary eyes as she moved around the room and was reluctant to let her near his arm.
“What did you do to me?”
He and Heidi exchanged a glance before Heidi took a seat on the chair next to the bed. “When I got here, you were in a lot of pain. Do you remember that? You were in and out of consciousness, you were curled up trying to ease the agony. Your heart was under strain from the pressure of it all.”
Daniel was nodding slowly. “It was in my shoulders and all along my back. It had never been that bad before. It was like my spine was trying to push out of my body.”
“I put a line into your arm. That’s a small plastic tube that goes into a vein. Chris and Will had to hold you down to keep you still while I got it in. And then I gave you morphine through it for the pain. We had to keep giving it to you because your body was breaking it down so quickly we could barely keep up. You seem better now.”
“It’s a lot better.”
“But it’s not gone?”
“At the start, it used to go away in between. Now, it’s there all the time, just sometimes it gets worse, like it did earlier.”
“Is it usually that bad?”
Daniel shook his head. “It’s never been as bad as that.”
“I’m going to take that line out now,” Heidi said, leaning toward him. “It won’t work for much longer anyway, shifter bodies tend to close over them or push them out within a few hours.”
Chris took a step forward as if he could stop the words after they’d left Heidi’s mouth. She winced when she realized what she’d said.
“I’m not… I’m not infected. I’m not one of you,” Daniel said, his voice a harsh whisper. “When I was a kid, I was treated, cured.”
Chris took a seat at the end of the bed, pressed a hand over Daniel’s ankle.
“We spoke to Marcia about that, Daniel. It looks like it’s not so clear cut as you getting infected and the infection being treated. You weren’t bitten to become a wolf, you were born one. Your father was a shifter when he got your mom pregnant. It’s just another way lycanthropy is passed on.”
They could see from Daniel’s wide-eyed shock that this was the first he’d heard about it.
“But… it doesn’t matter. I was still treated. Doctor Hollis said I was cured.”
“When humans are cured with the serum, they’re just like any other human. They look like them, smell like them. There’s no evidence that they were ever infected,” Heidi said gently. “You’re not like that. Your scent tells us that you’re not the same as every other human.”
“That’s why those wolves were so interested in you,” Chris added. “They could sense what we can. That you’re more than human. That you carry shifter blood.”
“But I’m not a shifter. I’m not a monster like that… that…” He looked from Heidi to Chris in desperation. “I’ve never changed. I’m just a normal human, like my family. There must be some mistake.”
“We’re going to find that out,” Heidi said. “We took some blood from you and we’re sending it off to be tested. That’ll tell us one way or another if you’re carrying lycanthropy.”
“So if I haven’t changed, that test will be negative?” Daniel asked, his expression hopeful.
“It doesn’t work quite like that,” Chris explained. “It just screens for lycanthropy markers in the blood. It doesn’t tell those who shifted from those who haven’t, it just tells those who are werewolves, from those who aren’t.”
“Can I have that scent thing you were talking about but still test negative?”
It was an intelligent question and a sign Daniel was actually taking in what they were saying.
“I don’t believe so,” Heidi answered. “I would stake my reputation on it that the tests will come back positive.”
As she spoke, she unwound the bandage and carefully removed the line from Daniel’s arm. The gauze in her hand went unneeded as the puncture wound didn’t even bleed.
She stepped outside, leaving Chris and Daniel alone.
“Not all shifters are monsters, Daniel. Most of us are normal people, living our lives like anyone else. We’re just a little different, that’s all. A kind of different that’s both good and bad.”
Daniel didn’t reply, staring vacantly at the blanket.
Heidi was sitting outside, her bag by her feet.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “This isn’t anything I’ve ever seen before. He’s a shifter, but it’s like he’s stuck in a state of prematurity.”
“His scent, what little there is of it, seems to suggest he’s an Omega.”
“Yeah, I got that too. But again, he hasn’t matured yet, so that would go part and parcel with his scent.”
He took a seat next to her. “I know that in the first few years after the condition became recognized, there was a drive to treat it as a purely infectious disease. In some states, treatment after a bite was mandatory.”
“It still is in places but at least the success rates are up and fatalities down. Back then the failure rate was forty percent, and one in five died either from the infection or the serum.”
“Have you heard of anyone born a wolf and treated with serum?”
“No, but I would have been five or six at the time and our family was still in hiding, wondering if any of those mandatory testing programs were going to be written into law. Most shifters I know were doing everything they could to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities for any reason.”
It had been a terrifying time to be a shifter, the rest of the population worked up into a frenzy and ready to exterminate them to stop the ‘disease’ from spreading.
“What might happen, if you treated someone who was born a shifter?”
“Well, nothing really. The serum might have produced a mild flu-like illness, like in humans but less intense. It might briefly dampen down the effects of being a lycanthrope, so a temporary reduction in energy and strength. But then the body would break down the serum and replace the shifter proteins. At a guess, seven to fourteen days and you’d be good as new.”
“I think I’m going to need to talk to this Doctor Hollis. We’re already coming under a lot of pressure for having taken Daniel into custody in the first place. If the bloods prove he’s a shifter and we can’t prove he hasn’t ever changed, they’re going to want him to pay for a crime we know he didn’t commit but can’t prove.”
If Daniel was guilty, then Chris agreed in principle that he should pay for his crime. But the man had said himself that he hadn’t done it, only carried the guilt of it. Chris wasn’t content to let him be condemned to death for someone else’s evil. They would try to track the Alpha responsible, but even finding him wouldn’t necessarily save Daniel. They had no clear proof the Alpha they met was the culprit. It was as important, if not more important, to prove Daniel couldn’t have committed the crime as to prove someone else did.