Enoch, who’d been watching Anais silently, said quietly, “There is no cure for Wildlight, Thayer.”
“There has to be,” Thayer snapped, lips trembling, as he grabbed Anais’s shackled hand. Her nails had curled into claws, and she dug them into Thayer’s palm deep enough to draw blood, but Thayer didn’t seem to notice. Or care. “You have to dosomething!”
Lucien stepped back from the bed, his face so haunted, gaze far away, and said nothing.
I didn’t know what to do. My heart was hammering in my chest, especially from the constant inhuman growls coming from Anais. But also because Lucien seemed as if he had just seen his worst nightmare come to life.
Thinking of Kate, I shivered.
When no one responded to Thayer’s plea, he suddenly turned to glare at Lucien. “Right before the full moon rose,” he now said, trying to catch Lucien’s gaze, “we found a solution for the thing on your back. The Spellscript.”
At once, Lucien’s gaze became focused and landed on Thayer, eyes wide. “What?”
Thayer pursed his lips and nodded. “She said she now knew how to neutralize the Spellscript’s effects,” he said, both urgent and cajoling. “She’s the only one who knows how.”
Despair filled Lucien’s face. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said hollowly. “Wildlight is incurable, Thayer.”
A cleared throat made us all turn to Enoch. He seemed paler than before. “I ...,” he started, swallowed hard, and turned to look at Lucien. “There might be a way ... temporarily ...”
Lucien looked back at him, and they seemed to have a silent conversation, which caused Lucien to tense and Enoch to become distraught, yet determined, too, at the same time.
I held my breath as I watched the wordless exchange until Lucien, face grave, bitterly said, “Fine.” Without another word, he turned and walked out of the cabin.
I glanced, confused, at Enoch, who seemed just as grim faced, and Thayer, whose face lit up with hope, before I followed Lucien outside.
He was almost at one of the other cabins in the plaza when I grabbed his arm and made him stop. “Lucien,” I said, heartbeat so loud, I wondered if he could hear it. “What just happened?”
Lucien whirled around to face me, his face stormy. “Enoch is going to do something he shouldn’t,” he snapped harshly, but I knew his anger wasn’t aimed at me. “Something that will do far more harm than good.”
I searched his gaze. “What is he going to do?”
He laughed humorlessly, the sound scraping my ears like sandpaper. “He’s going to use forbidden magic. The kind that comes at a cost. All so he can neutralize the Spellscript on my back.”
Lucien’s eyes were filled with misery, begging me to understand, almost, when he hissed, “I’m sick and tired of people sacrificing themselves to protect me as if I’m not an Alpha who’s naturally, genetically capable of enduring far more than the average werewolf, or any other Otherborne.”
Belatedly, I realized he was talking about something else. Something about Anais catching Wildlight brought something else to the surface, something Lucien was obviously struggling with.
“Lucien,” I murmured as calmly as I could, before I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him close. “Talk to me.” I closed my eyes. “Please.”
For a moment, I thought Lucien would push me away. He was so tense, his body was like a hard mass of skin and muscles. But to my utter relief, he put his arms around me and pulled me close, burying his head in my throat. “Do you know why I joined the Imperative for Transparency and Symbiosis? The organization that believes in revealing our existence to the human world?”
While I knew it was a rhetorical question, I still shook my head. I’d never really questioned his motive behind why he wanted the supernatural to be exposed. I’d simply accepted it as it was.
But nothing was ever so simple.
“I used to be an Alpha of a werewolf pack in Paris,” he suddenly said, voice hoarse, as he tightened his hold on me. “TheMontvoiléwerewolf pack, it was called. ‘The veiled mountain.’ It was named that way to put an emphasis on our secrecy. Our hidden existence.”
I felt his hands fisting on my shirt. “I was born with the Alpha Marker. It’s a genetic marker that makes me different from regular werewolves. It makes me stronger, faster, and deadlier than any werewolf. It also gives me a strategic mindset, and an analytical one. All for the sake of protecting my pack to the fullest.” He almost spat the last words.
“I was appointed Alpha officially at fifteen,” he continued, voice growing darker, and impossibly, even more bitter. “Too young an age for this position, especially in a pack that had been one of the top largest packs in Europe. But only a werewolf bearing the Alpha Marker can become an Alpha, and the Alpha before me was already old, and so he passed away. Thus I became the next Alpha, as the only Alpha Marked werewolf in the pack.”
I took it all in silently, listening closely, smoothing my hands over his back, trying to calm him down. Because I could feel his distress. I could feel him recalling the memories. And I knew the ending was not going to be good.
“As the years passed, I settled into my role as an Alpha,” he continued, derision dripping from his voice. “I appointed a few Betas and ran the pack as I saw fit, believing in the political philosophy of treating the pack as one big happy family.” He laughed, but it was so brittle and humorless, I felt myself shiver. “And that was my mistake.”
He suddenly leaned back so he could face me, and his eyes were bright with despair. “Because I insisted my pack was my family, I didn’t realize one of my Betas was aiming to overthrow me and bring another Alpha from another pack in my place.”
His auburn curls fell down over his face like a curtain. “That Beta, Jacques, was my closest friend. A man I considered a brother.”