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I glared at her, standing up and towering over her, unable to stop myself from yelling at her.“Shut up!You tried to poison me!”
Breaking our gazes and staring at the ground, I clenched my hands into fists and lowered my voice, “I begged you over and over, but you kept trying to kill me.You pushed syringes with tiny doses of Wolfsbane into my body and once I was too weak to fight you, you stopped using the syringe and started stifling my breathing to force me to drink poison.And I’m supposed to be happy to see you?”
Number 1 took a shaky breath and said in a whisper.“It wasn’t me.I was the one who used the syringes.Reuben was the one without a syringe.I’m sorry.Thinking of killing you slowly with Wolfsbane so we could hide your cause of death was ...I just wanted to protect Nyra, and you were an unknown entity.I’ll go get Nyra now.”
With a single blink, Nyra’s demeanor changed.She no longer had the cold and almost haughty air that Number 1 had.She returned to the warm Nyra I knew and loved, albeit with a little gloominess about her.
When she saw me, Nyra stood up and embraced me tightly.
I wrapped my arms around her too, putting my chin on her shoulder and staring at the white padded wall opposite me with blank eyes.
“I thought you were going to die ...”She muttered, withdrawing from our embrace and allowing me to gaze into her eyes that were brimming with unshed tears, which she tried to hold at bay by blinking.
I knew she had been unconscious when my mother saved me, so I asked, “Didn’t they tell you I was safe and sound?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really believe them.They could have just been lying like my Alpha lied that my mother was safe and sound when she’d already died because he hadn’t taken her to a hospital like he promised.”
I knew how badly Nyra’s mother mattered to her and her father, so I was curious about how she died.“So that’s how your mom died?”
“Mm-hmm.At the Whitaker pack, the Alpha was such a ...bastard.He wasn’t as bad as my previous Alpha, the one who likes little girls, but he was way too greedy.He made every working pack member pay 50 percent of their salaries into his bank account.And during the summer, every teenager in the pack had to work.He ...had this opinion that maternity hospitals were an evil invention made to steal money from families when bearing children was supposed to be a woman’s job.We ...only knew about it after they had admitted us into the pack.It was better than our previous pack, so we just decided to stay until my mom got pregnant.She’d had such a hard time bearing me even in a hospital that we knew she’d have to go to the hospital.So we decided to bribe our Alpha.We gave him everything we had, all our savings and earnings just so he could permit my mother to go to a hospital.I ...even slept with his son to get him to intercede for us.But they didn’t.”
Her gaze turned cold as she trained it on the padded floor.“For about two weeks, they kept informing us that my mother was still recuperating.Until one day, our Alpha came to our house with a woman.She was dressed in a robe and had a strange headpiece.She sat down to speak to me and used a strange necklace to compel me.She told me that my mother was dead and ...our pack observer was responsible for it.She only needed to say a few sentences once, and after repeating them, my memories warped.I truly thought that our pack observer killed my mom.I changed my eating schedule and went to the cafeteria to eat at the same times the pack observer went to eat.”
Her voice shook as she said, “Before I could kill him like I intended to, the Supernatural Council came to our pack and took our Alpha away on the count of murder.They found my mother’s body in one of the vacant houses on the outskirts of the pack and accused our Alpha of her death and the deaths of several other women and sick pack members in the pack.While my father and I sort of knew that it was our Alpha who took our money and promised to take my mother to the hospital, we couldn’t believe it.Because our memories made it seem like the pack observer had done it.So we hated the pack observer and the Supernatural Council for lying on his behalf, even though they knew what he’d done.In the days before our pack’s disintegration was completed, I thought I was going insane.I hated my Alpha and his family for an unknown reason, but when I thought of my mother, I couldn’t help blaming our pack observer.I ...”
She raised her head and locked gazes with me before asking, “Promise me you won’t hate me if I tell you the rest?”
I placed my palms on her head and smoothed her disheveled hair as much as I could before promising, “I won’t hate you.”
How could I hate her when she’d had so much done to her?Even now, she was still hurting for her mother, whom she hadn’t even been able to mourn properly.
“My memory gaps got worse.I used to have them once in a while, but it became really bad.I was losing time, but I didn’t dare to tell anyone other than my dad, but my dad was in awful shape.He was drinking every minute he was home, and he didn’t want to see me.He avoided me and was always locking his doors.One day, I woke up in the shower with no memory of how I got there and I remember that single moment before I went under again because there was blood in the water flushing down my body and down the drain.The next day, we learned that the Alpha’s son had been wandering in the woods and seemed to have been mauled by a bear, but I couldn’t help feeling weird about it.The next time I gained consciousness and found myself somewhere I couldn’t remember going was the day I watched my father kill the pack observer of the Whitaker pack.After that day, a weird peacefulness fell over my father and me.We slowly returned to normal.After our pack was disintegrated, we were sent to the Crawford Pack by the Supernatural Council.I thought everything was over, but I guess my father was still harboring resentment.”
I nodded, wrapping her in my embrace.Even though she didn’t talk about her former Alphas, I could tell that she had been through hell and back in the hands of corrupt Alphas.
From the earpiece in my ear, I heard Rebecca say, “Aurora, ask her about her former packs.Not the nitty gritty, just a summary.”
Adjusting my legs so they didn’t go to sleep, I allowed Nyra to pull out of my embrace.
“What else do you want to know?”She asked, putting her head on my shoulder.
It was then I realized that, for Nyra, telling me everything I wanted to know was her way of apologizing to me for her personalities poisoning me with Wolfsbane.
“Can you ...”I paused because I knew this was going to be a tough question for Nyra.“Can you tell me about your other packs and Alphas?”
She dragged her head off my shoulder, looking up at the camera at the corner of the room opposite where we were seated on the padded floor.“Can I not tell you this part?”
I knew what she was apprehensive about.She didn’t want to share her experiences with those packs and, frankly, I was afraid to hear about them.It made me a terrible friend, but I just ...already thought she’d been through hell and I didn’t even know her full story.
I grabbed her fingers and intertwined them with mine.“You don’t have to tell me everything.We just want to know the names of the packs, the Alphas, and their vices so we can conduct investigations on them and bring them to justice.Is that okay?”
She hesitated before nodding.“I guess so.”
The tension bled out of her body as she laid her head on my shoulder again.
“The pack I was born into is back in India.Our Alpha wasn’t the worst.He was just ...probably still trying to adjust to the modern age.He was always trying to train warriors.Our pack was filthy poor, yet instead of trying to improve our economic situation, he was always making every member of the pack train to be warriors.One of the ways he earned money for the pack was by giving newborns a serum that either killed them or strengthened them.I survived the serum, but it was only after I got to the US that I realized that the serum gave us the ability to shift into a halfway form between wolf and human form, something regular werewolves saw as freakish.That wasn’t the worst part, though.The worst part was that every fortnight, he picked a pack member for a duel to the death with some of the other packs in the area who had the same practice.Our packs’ death duels served as entertainment to some of the bigger and richer packs and in exchange, they would give us meager resources that we could have earned by just working.That pack was called the Jodhpur pack.”
“My parents and I ran away from that pack when I was twelve.We moved to the US, thinking we’d find greener pastures here and a perfect pack, but the pack that took us in, the Fanning pack, was even worse than our former pack.The Alpha of the Fanning Pack liked little girls and sometimes little boys who looked pretty enough.The pack council members also treated regular pack members like slaves.We escaped that pack after a year and got into the Whitaker pack.”
