Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

Floating in a sea of darkness, I couldn’t move or see anything. Like waves in the ocean, my hearing came in and out. One minute I could hear what was going on around me and the next only the blood whooshing through my head in synchronized with my heartbeat.

“What have you done, Lyka?” a deep voice asked.

Strangely, I felt like I was floating in the water, rocking back and forth. I was lying braced on something firm, wind rushing past me. Moving?

Another voice joined. The rocking never stopped. “What the hell is going on?”

“She ran into the wards.”

“Where was she going?”

“I don’t know. I need to get her back and get her head looked at.”

“Give her to me—I can bring her to the tent.”

Something shifted, tightened around me. “Don’t touch her.”

Opening my eyes was painful. My head felt like I had been on a rickety roller coaster one too many times, my brain jostled. I rolled my head to the side to look at my surroundings. I was in the pack’s main tent, on one of the floral couches. Someone had draped a tan fleece blanket over me. I tried to sit up, but the pulsing in my head immediately humbled me, so I lay back down.

“You’re awake!” Kleio’s voice rang out. “You had us all scared, Elise. How are you feeling?” She came over to the couch and sat down next to my knees.

“Not great. My head hurts,” I managed to mumble. “What happened? I was running, and then I hit something.”

“You ran into the wards. I wasn’t kidding when I told you that you were stuck here for the weekend. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out until Sunday afternoon.”

Groaning, I tried again to sit up. Wards? Was that what I had laughed off as a bedtime fable? I hadn’t run into a solid wall, that was for sure. But I had definitely hit something. My pounding head was evidence of that.

“Thank goodness Everett found you,” Kleio said.

Everett had found me? I hardly remembered anything from when I’d hit the ground to now.

Confused, I tried to gain some clarity. “I didn’t see any walls.”

“Of course not, silly. You can’t see the wards,” she said. “Most humans can sense them. They give them the feeling of unease, and they usually turn around. You must have been running so fast that your body didn’t have enough time to sense them. Coming at them with some speed can really do a number.”

My hand felt my head. There were some paper towels on the back of my scalp. Hissing at the stinging contact, I pulled my hand away.

“The escapee awakes!”

I turned my head to see Gavrill entering the tent, having to duck down to fit through the entrance. “Boss says one of us has to keep an eye on you the rest of the weekend. Doesn’t want the human to get hurt again. Too much of a liability with all the pheromones around here.”

“You should’ve seen it, Elise.” Kleio giggled as she reminisced. “There was blood from your head on the ground—okay, that part wasn’t funny—but the other shifters came out in droves. Everyone was wondering what had hit the wards and who the pretty human was lying on the ground. Gavrill, Kostas, and Everett had to get all tough and growly to get them to back off.”

Suddenly Kostas sat up on the couch next to me. “Glad you found it so entertaining.” He had been lying down, and I hadn’t even noticed him there. “Everett and Wilder are out hunting for the day. You’d better hope they come back with more rogues than yesterday. Their hunt got cut short.” The look he gave me told me he thought that was my fault.

I groaned, trying to sit up. The sun coming through the windows on the sides of the tent was evidence that I had been unconscious the entire night. The back of my head throbbed. My mind went into problem-solving mode, taking stock of what I had with me to help my recovery. When I’d gone to the bar Thursday night, I hadn’t planned on being in the middle of a shifter tournament by Saturday. I didn’t have any first aid supplies with me.

I could feel Kostas taking stock of me as I finally managed to sit up and tried lifting myself into a standing position. “Take it easy there,” he said. “Everett isn’t close enough to rescue you this time if you take another fall.”

“I didn’t ask anyone to help me.” I glared as I spoke.

“You should be glad he was there. Those other wolves would have torn you apart just based on instinct. Head wounds bleed a ton.” Kostas got up from his couch and went to grab a bottle of water from the cooler against the tent wall. “Where were you going anyway?”

Everyone paused what they were doing to look at me, curious as to my answer.

“I was trying to get back to my cabin. I have roommates who must be wondering where I am.”

Gavrill shook his head at me. “Everett took care of it. As far as they know, you’re spending the weekend with Wilder. He had one of Wilder’s roommates go over there and let them know.”

“Oh, great.” I face-palmed with my hand. “Not only do they think I’m shacking up with Wilder all weekend, but you also sent shifters to my cabin.”

“The shacking up you brought on yourself, but I didn’t send a shifter near your friends. Wilder’s roommates are human, locals who are aware of…us.”

I scowled at Kostas and Gavrill. They looked at me like I was a burden. I didn’t want to be here. I hadn’t asked for Everett to come and save me. I was sure I would have been fine. Lying there, bleeding out on the gravel, surrounded by wolf shifters… My head pulsed at that moment. I needed to find something to treat my head wound.

“Do you guys have a first aid kit?” I asked. They all looked at me with blank faces. “You know, something with bandages, antibiotic ointment?”

“Well, no,” Kleio answered. “We don’t really need one. Most of our wounds heal quickly.” She chewed on the side of her cheek for a second thinking. “Jack’s performing his required healer shift at the chief tent, but I don’t think we should bring you up there.” She turned to the men in the tent. “Gavrill, Kostas, go see what you can find for Elise. She needs something to treat her human injuries.”

They both grumbled while they walked over to the coolers along the side of the tent, flipping them open and slamming them closed.

Standing up, it took a minute for me to gain my balance. I was wobbling enough that Kleio came over to grab my arm. I appreciated the gesture—and that she hadn’t lectured me about trying to run away last night.

“We’ll get you fixed up,” Kleio said. She looked behind my head and sucked in a sharp breath. I winced, not even wanting to know what it must’ve looked like. She patted my arm. “The boys will find something.”

“This is all we’ve got,” Gavrill said. He was carrying a roll of paper towels and some masking tape.

“I got some ice. That’s good for head wounds, right?” Kostas emerged behind Gavrill, holding a few cubes of ice in each hand. They had already started melting against his skin, the water running between his fingers and dripping onto the ground. Great. That was super sanitary to press against an open wound.

I took the paper towels and tape in one hand, and Kostas rolled the ice cubes into my other. They continued to melt.

Kleio sighed and took the paper towels and tape from my hand and set them on the table. “I’m sorry we don’t have anything for you to use. I don’t?—”

I cut her off. “Can we go for a walk? Close to the forest?” I knew enough about the vegetation here that I could find something to help me. There was a wide array of plants native to the area that had medicinal properties. I just needed to get close enough to find them.

“Of course. Just hold on to me. I don’t want you falling again.” She guided me out the back of the tent. I threw the melted ice into the grass.

We walked across the field toward the forest in silence. Glancing down, I saw some yarrow growing near our path and slowly bent down to gather some. I could prepare a paste with the yarrow, put some against my head wound, cover it with paper towel, and wrap it up with the tape. It seemed like a bad idea to be stuck here with wolves and an open cut.

Kleio gave me a strange look as I shoved some of the plant into my pocket, but she didn’t say anything, and so we kept walking.

When we made it to the edge of the forest, I took a deep breath. It looked so peaceful. The green foliage and bird sounds were inviting.

A snarl interrupted the nature’s sounds. I turned my head toward the noise and saw more snarling and the rattling of metal. Just past the edge of the forest, the ten metal cages that had held the rogues during the opening ceremony sat in a row. There were more rogues in the cages than there had been yesterday evening. Each cage had a banner in front of it representing the name of the ten packs that were competing. Some cages had two or three rogues in them, whereas some were empty.

I scanned down the line of cages until I found the Cedar Moon banner. The cage behind it had three rogues in it. Up close, the rogues were extremely unpleasant. In their wolf forms, they paced and snarled at anything that came close to the metal bars surrounding them. They also picked fights with each other inside the cages. The fur on their bodies looked matted and greasy. Many of the rogues had entire chunks of flesh missing or pieces of muscle that hung off their bodies, only hanging on by a single tendon. The sight was enough to make me nauseous.

Grunting and yelling commands at each other, two men caught my attention a couple of cages down from the Cedar Moon’s cage. The two naked men were struggling to subdue a rogue they had caught. The rogue wolf was in terrible shape. It was missing an eye and had a large gash on one of its hind legs. That didn’t stop its aggression, fighting for its life against the two big, strong men in their human forms. They both worked together to contain the rogue and shoved it into the cage, then quickly closed the door as the rogue recovered and launched itself at the metal gate.

The two men bent down with their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breaths. It had clearly taken all their energy to get the rogue locked in. They looked at each other as they stood up and stalked back into the forest, ready to find their next catch.

“So, Everett and Wilder are out there doing…that?” I looked to Kleio for conformation, and she nodded her head.

I didn’t get the point of this competition. Why release the rogues, who were wild and dangerous, only to catch them again? I asked her about this.

“I wish I had the answer, Elise. It’s a hundred-year tradition that the True Alpha upholds,” she said. “The pack laws require us to join. If we didn’t partake, he would come after our pack. It’s important that we win to protect the pack and show our strength.”

Still, I had a hard time not feeling sympathy for the rogues. It appeared they had no thoughts or control over their emotions or bodies. It was pure survival for them, clawing and biting their way to live.

Kleio went on, “There have been more rogues showing up in the different pack lands for the past several years. We don’t know why they’re…like that. Some think it’s because they don’t have a pack. It can drive a Lycan insane if they don’t belong to a pack, but others think that the land is changing and causing a disruption in the natural order, physically changing the makeup of Lycans, causing them to decompose as they mature.”

I took Kleio’s words and stewed over them. It looked like the rogues were being taken advantage of because of their reduced mental and physical functions. They were being used as pawns in the True Alpha’s games.

I turned away from the cages, shaking my head, and looked into the forest. There was a sense of peace that beckoned me. One more day and I could head into the foliage and get back to my research. I couldn’t wait to get lost in the trees and find some solitude. If this weekend had shown me anything, it was that I needed to stay on the path I had laid out for myself before I’d arrived in Minnesota. The one time I’d tried to not care and do something without really thinking it through had led me to a weekend stuck in a shifter tournament. I wasn’t making that mistake again.

Having seen enough, we turned around and walked toward the city of tents. Kleio invited me to come play a lawn game with her pack to pass the time, but I decided I wanted to rest in my tent.

Stopping in the pack’s tent, I took the roll of paper towels and the masking tape from the table. I grabbed a bottle of water from the coolers and walked to my tent. I fingered the leaves and flowers in my pocket as I bent down to enter my room. Using a small amount of water and a couple of rocks I found on the ground, I made a paste with the yarrow leaves. Then I carefully peeled the paper towels off the back of my head. Dried brown blood covered the white paper. It didn’t seem super serious, but I would need to keep it clean.

I blindly smoothed some of the yarrow paste over the cut and covered it with a clean rectangle of paper towel. I pulled strips of masking tape from the roll and taped it to my head the best I could. I would probably be losing some hair when I removed it. I lay on my side, listening to the muffled conversations going on around the tent. The warmth of the tent in the afternoon sun and the ambient noises lulled me into unconsciousness.