Serepta looked at him, unfazed at the frustration in his voice.
“If you would just let me examine him, Alpha,” she said, not for the first time. “Only powerful magic could cloak him as well as you say, even from the Pack’s senses.”
Serepta was Pack. She was talking about all their senses. All their concerns. The lack of awareness of a foreign wolf in his territory, the lack of boundary threshold warnings, the lack of smell. The question of why the threshold accepted him in.
“Maybe tomorrow, Serepta,” Luke said, and Seath’s attention went to the Pack physician.
“I have asked Caine to join, so it will be in the evening, when he returns,” Seath added. The Pack included a vampire, which was strange to most people but Seath and Caine got along easily and always had. If anyone could sense something beyond the witch, it probably would be the vamp.
Serepta nodded. “In a month or so, I’ll convene a coven. We can know more then than what I will be able to tell myself, most likely. I will need a full moon. And I would remind you that magical investigations take time.”
“A month,” Seath said in agreement. “In a month you check him and the border with the coven. Alpha Greene agrees with that as well. You can see Jamie about the contracts to do so; we will pay the price you set for the conven’s work. Anyone you need can stay at the Brightwater House and we will take care of their accommodations.” Seath gestured to the young omega, Jamie, who served as his secretary or personal assistant. Something in between there. Jamie nodded, and Seath knew the arrangements would be taken care of.
The witch nodded in agreement, too. Serepta always tempered Seath’s expectations of what she would deliver. Many Alphas thought a witches’s magic had no end, and although Seath or Greene rarely acted as if witch magic cured everything, she wanted the expectations he might have to be managed.
“I think the crossing was accidental, or an attempt for help, to alert us, assuming he could sense the territory boundary,” Ronin supplied. “Shifters passed through to the north of the boundary, not all wolves, not much scent to identify anything after the rain. But that was days prior, and we did check in with the group as they had pass-through rights. He didn’t come from them. Unless he dropped from the sky, he must have portaled outside the boundary. He had been running for a while. Days. He simply may have been in no shape to sense a boundary or not.”
“You agree?” Seath looked to Luke, turning over the image of the man he found. It was burned into his brain.
Easily the wolf could have run for days. The area where he was found was old growth forest, dense and rarely frequented. But from whom was he running? How had they not found him? How had the creatures of the forest not found him?
Death had known, but had anyone else?
“I do,” Luke said with a decisive nod. He looked exhausted. Likely, Luke had gotten as little sleep as Seath himself had since the find the morning before. Instinctively, Seath placed his hand on Luke’s neck, lending him his Alpha strength before he even consciously thought about the act.
Seath could feel the flow of his energy into Luke. It would drain him, but the strange wolf needed Luke at his best. Luke leaned into the touch; the lead doctor for the pack taking comfort from his best friend and future Pack Alpha. Greene would have done the same.
“The man is in his early twenties. A shifter, but he hasn’t shifted since being here or attempted to do so. I’m beginning to wonder if he has the ability or if he is just too weak for it. Normal physiology for an omega,” Luke paused. “Everythingis normal, except for the lack of scent, although all scent glands are intact. There is no physical reason for the lack of scent and lack of connection to the Pack consciousness. He should have reached out, once he was in our territory, and I have no explanation for why that didn’t happen.”
“His injuries,” Luke’s voice cracked as he continued, and Seath placed a heavier hand on his friend. This news would not be easy for anyone to hear, even about an unknown shifter, that much was clear. “His injuries are . . . extensive. He has been malnourished, but with clearly built muscle underneath. So he wasn’t always kept weak. He was a healthy wolf, had a healthy body, but something happened to him. He has extensive bruising throughout his body, and some of the bones were broken and had to be reset. There was extensive blood loss, some from . . ..” Luke took a breath. “Some from what appears to be trauma . . . repeated . . . trauma. Not rape, but he was physically injured multiple times and unable to use any preternatural healing.”
There was a lull where the table erupted in low growls all around. Luke shook his head quickly. If the group didn’t like that news, the rest wouldn’t be any easier to stomach.
“There are markings on his wrist consistent with silver restraints, same for his ankles,” Luke paused for the next low growl to circle to table. Silver restraints were one of the few things that would keep a shifter at human capacity. Unable to shift, unable to tap into any extraordinary strength. If left long enough, there could be scars. “His hands were broken, maybe he was able to slip out of the restraints?”
A low murmur went around at how painful such a thing would be.
Seath felt a chill, even deeper than the one left by Death, at the prospect of the wolf breaking his own hands for freedom, just to offer himself to the death bite.
“There are still traces of Wolfsbane in his blood,” Luke finished.
Even Seath’s head snapped up at that. “Still?”
“Still. I can’t tell you if that is due to how high the concentration was, or if whatever is keeping his scent obfuscated also slowed the metabolization . . ..” Luke trailed off, trying not to put the group into a medical discussion.
“Wolfsbane,” Briar said, her head shaking. She didn’t even like the word on her tongue.
Luke patted Seath’s hand and removed it carefully from his neck.
“You need your strength, Alpha. Can’t be giving it all away,” Luke said as Seath processed all the information.
The broken hands were disturbing because Seath could sense that Luke believed the man broke them himself. And with Wolfsbane in his system, he would have broken themknowinghe couldn’t mend them. The act spoke to a raw sort of desperation. A shifter could break a bone while in human form and then shift and heal. Almost instantly. But, Wolfsbane was called that for a reason. And prohibited for the same one.
“What conclusions can we draw? He’s not conscious, yet, for questions,” Seath said.
“Someone wanted him to be kept,” Briar spit out the word with distaste. “The silver and the . . . nature of the trauma suggest that.”
“And someone wanted him hidden,” Serepta said. “The masking of his scent at the very least tells us that.”
