“Owen,” she repeats, trying to lift me up. Her hands are weak and shaking, and when I look up into her face, I see her skin is deathly pale and her eyes are dull.
“We’re dying!” she cries. “It started a couple of hours ago. Patients just went critical within seconds. We couldn’t save them—”
“I can’t believe this,” I groan, willing strength back into my body. “What caused it?”
“We don’t know!” she wails. “At first it was just the people who were already sick, but now all of us are practically falling apart.”
I take a deep breath, bracing myself against the pain and forcing myself to stand tall. I take Laura’s arm and move her over to the line of chairs, pushing her into one.
“No, Owen,” she mumbles. “You’re sick, too. You have to rest—”
“The hell I do,” I growl, forcing myself to walk down the aisle. Some of our healers still look functional, but no one looks okay, and there are far too many lying still in their beds with the sheets pulled across their faces.
“How many are dead?” I ask, not expecting an answer.
“Too many,” a soft voice says from the next aisle. I look up to see Merle.
“Can you make sense of this at all?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “You don’t look so good yourself, Alpha.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you aren’t, but I’ll let you be.”
“What can we do?” I ask hopelessly.
She shrugs. “At the moment, the one thing we need to do more than anything else is move the dead.”
I stare at her for a moment, and then I turn around slowly, casting my eyes around the entire room. Rows after rows of beds with still bodies in them assault my vision until I’m forced to cover my eyes.
“We need help. I’m calling Rhys and Shane.”
“They won’t come, Alpha,” Merle says gently. “The council has forbidden it.”
“On what fucking grounds?” I demand.
“The curse is moving faster than ever before,” she replies. “They don’t want to see Silver Valley come down with the sickness again. Shane is also fighting it in his own pack, but it’s not as bad there as it is here.”
The pressure builds up in my temples again, and I have to struggle to stay on my feet. Merle grabs a nearby table to steady herself, and I know she felt the wave of weakness, too.
What the hell is going on here?
“Just do what you can,” I say to her, walking towards the front of the hall. She nods, her face tense and drawn as she watches me go.
Out front, there is a small group of people. None of them looks well, but all of them are supporting family members who look critical. It suddenly dawns on me, the full truth of what Merle just said.
If we can’t move the dead, we have nowhere to care for the sick.
“All of you,” I say in a commanding tone. “Who is still well enough to work?”
Even though all of them look exhausted, a few of the men and women volunteer to help. I ask them to get on their phones and call in anyone they know who still has enough strength to work, then all of us start moving the bodies from the beds into an area at the back of the hall.
Every time we empty a bed, a sick person immediately takes it over, and it looks like we aren’t doing anything at all. As my body weakens and the pain gets worse, I start to wonder if I actually died at some point and have gone to hell.
The stone of Sisyphus, but it’s emptying beds instead.
As I work, I hear people muttering angrily, and it takes some time for me to realize they are shooting glances at me as if this is somehow my fault. Guilt rises in my stomach like bile, and I taste despair in the back of my throat.
