“No.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “No, he’s a shifter. He’s already a wolf. Can he even…”
“It’s uncommon enough that there are no formal records,” Villeneuve says carefully. “But it is possible. I’ve been alive long enough to have witnessed it several times.” His jaw tightens slightly. “Unfortunately, while a natural-born wolf is more resistant to the madness than a turned human, they eventually succumb to it all the same. The process simply takes longer.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the fucking chest. Like all the air has been sucked out of the meadow and there’s nothing left to breathe.
“Letting him die now,” Villeneuve continues, his voice gentle in a way I’ve never heard from him, “may be a mercy.”
“No.”
The word comes out harder this time. Stronger. Rowan makes a low, anguished sound, and I feel the conflict rippling through the bond—their love for their alpha warring with their fear of what he might become.
A fate worse than death to a wolf.
“We’ll figure it out.” I’m gripping Killian’s fur so hard my knuckles are white. “We’ll find something. A cure. A way to stop it. There has to be.”
“Regina—”
“Please.” I look up at Villeneuve, and I don’t care that I’m begging, don’t care that I’m showing weakness in front ofsomeone I trust even less now than I did before. “Please save him. I can’t… I can’t lose him. Not like this.”
Villeneuve studies me. Those green eyes see too much, know even more. But there’s a gentleness in them that seems so out of place for who he is.
Whathe is.
“Very well,” he says finally.
He raises his hand, and the world dissolves.
The transition is instant and disorienting. One second we’re in a blood-soaked meadow, the next we’re standing in?—
An alchemist’s laboratory.
I recognize the setup immediately, even through my shock. The long wooden tables covered in glass apparatus. The shelves lined with jars containing things I don’t want to identify. The sigils carved into the floor, the ceiling, the very walls. There’s a massive fireplace on one wall with flames that burn an unnatural blue-green, and the air smells like sulfur and herbs.
The wolves stumble, clearly disoriented by the sudden transportation. Rowan shifts first, his human form appearing in a ripple of silver light. Then Micah. Then Sean, who immediately lists to one side and has to catch himself on a table.
Killian is still a wolf.
Unconscious. Barely breathing.
I barely have time to process anything, but the differences between this and a witch’s lab strike me immediately. The energy is different. More controlled, more organized. Everything here is designed totransformrather thancreate.
“Put him on the table,” Villeneuve says, already moving toward a massive bookshelf.
Micah and Rowan exchange a look.
“It looks like a sacrificial altar,” Micah mutters, but he’s already moving to help lift Killian’s wolf form.
It kind of does. The table is stone, carved with more of those strange sigils, with channels cut into the surface that I really don’t want to think about. But they get Killian onto it anyway, his black fur standing out against the pale rock.
Villeneuve pulls a thick leather-bound book from the shelf and lets it hover in the air beside him as he gathers ingredients, each with a wave of his hand that lifts it from its carefully appointed place on its shelf.
A vial of a silvery liquid, a feather, a jar of dried herbs, and a small container of what looks like crystallized blood.
I’ve never seen him use his powers so freely.
Not since that first night when Kyle’s coven showed up to claim me and Villeneuve stopped everything with a gesture.
Watching him now, moving through his laboratory like a conductor leading an orchestra, I finally understand why the wolves were so afraid of him.
