Chapter 22

ALPHA TRISTAN 

The transition from the battlefield to my pack was a blur of agony and the metallic stench of my own failure. Every breath was a jagged blade scraping against the inside of my ribs. I had led my men into the borderlands to crush the Moonshadow pack, but we hadn't met just wolves. We had met shadows—warriors who moved with a lethal, untraceable precision that felt less like Moonshadow and more like a nightmare.

Something was not right. On paper, they were not a strong pack. "What happened out there?" I asked Kaelen and Jaxon who ran point on the mission as we pulled up at the front of the pack house.

Kaelen and Jaxon shared a concerned look. "You are bleeding Alpha, now is not a good time to be talking the past. Regardless of the casualties, we won. That's all that matters." Kaelen said with a measured tone. "We need to get you inside and find a healer to patch you up."

"Yeah," Jaxon concurred. "We'd have time to analyze what went down by then. It's a good thing this is not the full moon, else we would have been scared that you'd come down with the wolfsbane infection."

At the mention of wolfsbane, it dawn on me that that was how Claudia had died and immediately my anger for Sara was instantly rekindled. "Yeah, take me in and send for Na....nayo...yomi."

"He's about to fall, grab him." I heard and everything else was darkness. 

When I regained consciousness and woke up. I found out that I was laying on my back, and the mattress and the bed sheets beneath me soaked through with blood that refused to clot. A deep, ragged gash tore across my chest and my side, the edges blackened by some foul toxin the healers couldn't identify.

"W.....what?" I managed to get out with a grunt.

"He's awake!!" Someone in the room yelled and soon Kaelen was with me.

"Welcome back big guy, you gave me a scare. Stay awake this time, you are losing so much blood. The healer is scared that you might go under if you close your eyes." Kaelen explained and told someone to bring some whiskey. But why was he the one tending me? 

"Where's Harlan?" I didn't know I had thought out loud and it seemed everyone paused for a minute or so and suddenly went hyper.

"His brain is becoming foggy." I heard a voice with authority say. "More pressure! Apply the poultice!" The voice voice shrieked. It was Nayomi, the head healer, her hands shaking as she pressed a wad of herbs into my wound. 

"Fuck!!!" The pain was an explosion behind my eyes. I roared, the sound catching in my throat and turning into a wet, hacking cough that sprayed crimson across her white robes.

Kaelen gave me something to bite on if I'm going to shout, then motioned for me to drink and douse the pain. "What's that look? Is something wrong? I don't like the look that you are wearing." 

Nayomi didn't say a word. She just focused and had her senior apprentices hand her any medical tool she needed. I don't know how long she stayed like that but she raised her head again, she was drenched in sweat.

"What's going on?" Jaxon asked and I scanned the room again, Harlan and Yvonne were not here. They were the closest to me in the pack even though they always against each other and I had often encouraged the rivalry. 

"I... I don't understand," Nayomi stammered, her face pale in the torchlight. "Your Alpha healing should have closed this hours ago. The toxin... it’s acting like a parasite. It’s eating the magic in your blood."

"English, please." Kaelen pleaded. He was our best tracker but could be impatient a times which was at odds with his profession.

"There's something wrong with him that I can't fix. We have the ability to heal, yet he is not healing. And even if he was human, his blood would have clotted by now. I've tried to stop the bleeding but I fear for him. He's lost so much blood, he needs a blood transfusion. Our blood bank can't take care of that, but the real fear is that he could be licking out blood as we transfused him." She explained.

I'm not sure I fully understood what she said, but there was someone whose job it was to understand these things and explain them. I reached out, my fingers clawing into the edge of the bedframe. "Where... where is she?" I managed to growl, the words feeling like hot coals.

I didn't mean a healer. I meant Yvonne. My Right Hand. My steady shadow. I needed her to tell me the state of the pack, to take the burden of leadership while I fought to stay in this world. And I wanted the girl. I wanted to see Sara’s fear, to remind myself that even as I bled, I still held her life in my hands.

"Ms. Yvonne is not here, Alpha," Nayomi whispered, refusing to look me in the eye.

"Not... here?" I struggled to sit up, but my muscles gave out, dropping me back into the blood-soaked sheets. "She... she was left in charge. Where did she go? Who abandons their duty post?"

"She left two days ago, Alpha. She took the girl, Sara. They left in an unmarked car under the cover of night. No one has seen them since." Nayomi replied mechanically while tending her work.

"Okay, if she's not here, where's Harlan? One of them needs to be here to run the pack." I spoke in the loudest voice I could muster. 

They all paused and stared at me again. "Harlan is locked up in the dungeon." Nayomi said matter-of-factly.

"Dungeon? Who put him there?" I asked, angry that someone would dare put him in a dungeon.

"You put him there." Kaelen said and I felt my world tilted. I finally remembered that I put him in solitary confinement. The agony in my chest was suddenly eclipsed by a cold, hollow vacuum in my gut. Yvonne had fled? With my prisoner? The one person I needed for leverage, the one person whose suffering was supposed to justify everything I had lost?

"Search... the rooms," I choked out, a fresh wave of nausea rolling over me. I knew it was pointless, since they said she left two days ago, but I couldn't just do nothing. 

The silence that ensued was deafening. If Yvonne had vanished, it meant she knew something I didn't. It meant the shadows I had encountered on the battlefield weren't just a coincidence. I tried to rationalize, but in my current state, I was not thinking straight.

"We’ve searched, Alpha," a guard said, stepping closer to my bed. He looked terrified. "Their rooms are empty. Most of Ms. Yvonne’s personal effects are gone. She left no word. No destination."

I closed my eyes, the darkness rushing in to meet me. I was the Alpha of the Twilight Zone, a Conqueror in my own right, yet I was lying here, dying in a bed of my own making while the woman I trusted most had abandoned me, taking my prize with her. She was my right hand, especially now that Harlan is gone. The betrayal felt different. 

The healers continued to fret around me, their tonics tasting like ash, their prayers sounding like insults. I could feel my strength draining into the floorboards, the lights in the room growing dim and distant. 

"If this is what you say it is, then only Sara, the former Healer will be able to heal him. I have seen her heal someone with similar issues in the past." One of Nayomi's apprentice whispered and I heard. 

"Is what she's saying true?" I asked Nayomi.

"I don't know. Sara and I wasn't very close but if what she says is true, then we have to find her as soon as possible. This wound could get infected any time from now and you'd die." Nayomi stress and I became scared of my life. 

The idea that someone I hated was my salvation was the biggest 'fuck you' from the moon goddess. Just then, the alarm bells began to blast. "Oh, fuck me." I muttered as the door bust open. 

"Members from Crescent Moon pack has been sighted in the borderlands. They'd be here in six hours or less. It is rumored that Alpha Rune, the Conqueror himself leads them." The guard revealed and panic spread throughout the room. With six hours heads up and in my condition, there was nothing I could do besides facing him.