Did you notice how they responded to you?
I had noticed. I just didn't understand why.
By morning, I knew I needed answers. Real answers. Not the clinical explanations Rae gave during staff meetings, not the carefully worded reports Neal compiled. I needed to understand what was happening to me—what I was doing to those ferals without meaning to.
There was only one place at Frosthaven that might have that information.
Chapter five
Tomlinson's private study was smaller than I expected.
The room was hidden behind his classroom office, accessed through a door disguised as part of the bookshelf. When I asked if Ivy and I could research feral recovery, he studied me for a long moment before opening it.
The shelves were crammed floor to ceiling with books that shouldn't exist. Texts on pack dynamics. Feral classification systems. Histories of bloodlines that the human world had never heard of. Tomlinson had spent decades building this collection.
It was the most complete supernatural library at Frosthaven. Maybe anywhere.
"This place is unsettling," Ivy said, running her finger along a row of cracked spines. "It's like he's been preparing for the apocalypse."
"Maybe he has."
She shot me a look. "That's not comforting."
"Wasn't trying to be."
She pulled a heavy tome off the shelf and dropped into one of the worn leather chairs. The thing had to weigh ten pounds. She opened it like it was nothing.
"I'll take bond theory," she said. "You start on feral classification. We meet in the middle."
I grabbed my own stack and settled onto the floor, back against the radiator. The metal was cold through my shirt.
Three hours later, I had nothing.
Not nothing exactly. I had plenty of information about ferals—their causes, their symptoms, their treatment protocols. I knew about the different stages of regression, the markers that indicated whether a wolf could be saved. I knew about the history of ferals, the packs that had been decimated, the wars that had been fought over territory and bloodlines.
But nothing about what I could do.
Nothing about why they responded to me the way they did.
"Anything?" Ivy asked.
I shook my head. "You?"
"Bond theory is fascinating, but it's all about established bonds. Mate bonds, pack bonds, familial bonds." She flipped through her notes. "Nothing about whatever's happening with you and those ferals."
"Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place."
"Maybe." She chewed on her bottom lip. "What exactly happened during the run? You never gave me the full story."
So I told her.
The gray wolf sitting at my feet the moment I walked up. The other feral pressing his forehead to my thigh like I was something holy. Stone's vicious growl when another wolf got too close. The way they'd all arranged themselves around me like I was the center of something.
Ivy's face grew more troubled with every word.
"And Cal said they were treating you like pack?"
"Like I was their pack. All of them." I pulled my knees up to my chest. "Not just the ones I'm bonded to."
