301- Strange
POV Viktor Averwyn:
Strange, but something we were forced to get used to.
The Elders tried to help me. They recommended herbs and teas, used their telepathic powers to calm my racing thoughts. For a while, I became calmer. Then everything returned, and I stopped telling them anything. I kept it to myself.
Like her.
And that somewhat crazy, one-sided conversation.
Maybe it was age—my 413 years beginning to weigh on me.
I looked outside again. The village, the forest, the central buildings.
And the cemetery in front.
Several human bodies there, decomposing for more than a hundred and fifty years.
The promised ones.
I let out a humorless growl of laughter, tired of that shit. I had believed the black-haired she-wolf, in those conversations of hers about my destined mate. A human, from an ancient and magical people, marked to appear in my destiny at the right moment.
Even though everyone knew we didn’t recognize our destined mates until they became pregnant. With a human it should be different.
I had let myself be influenced by madness without explanation and by my old feelings of loneliness and of something I had never had: family, love, communion.
Or rather, by the sensation that I had once had them and lost them.
I ran my fingers through my hair, irritated that I still allowed myself to be impressed. Humans were not compatible with wolves—at least not with alphas like me. Some possessed wolf DNA in their molecular structures, and there were cases of them being transformed through bites.
But they were aggressive, uncontrollable, and weak.
Very few adapted.
All those in the cemetery had died after some time. Only one endured firmly.
But I killed that one.
It was a closed case.
Fifty years ago I stopped searching and only related with she-wolves for physical satisfaction and a bit of entertainment.
There was only one time in those decades when I lost control.
Almost thirty years ago, I had a dream about my possible mother, and she seemed desperate. She warned me to go to the village at the foot of the Tharnak, the one I had sworn never to set foot in again—and that always drew me there.
She screamed that I had to save her.
I didn’t even know whom. Still, I fell into a kind of trance and woke already transforming. I ran into the forest without coherence or rational thought, driven by a greater force. Until I turned completely into a wolf and found myself on the gypsies’ land, prowling around a blue house I already knew.
The female voice still screamed within my being:
Warn that you are here!
I let the man in that house see me. I noticed his terror.
Then she fell silent, and I didn’t even understand why I was in that place, furious when I remembered the many gypsy women who had followed me, the last damned one I had torn apart.
And who had lived there.
I returned to my lands.
And I swore to myself that I would never believe that talk about the destined one again.
Not anymore.
There, in my room, rage swallowed me completely.
The story repeating itself.
Fruitless.
I pushed the recent vision from my mind, turned off the sound, and went to take a shower, to get rid of it once and for all and move on with my life. It led me nowhere to believe in that—in the good and bad memories, in my suspicions.
Not even the Elders escaped my suspicions. I even considered plots and traitors.
But without proof, I remained the same.
Daciana said goodbye. Adelina continued shut away in her room.
I analyzed some documents in the office until past seven in the evening. I was ready to go to bed, taking some reports to read, when the scent struck me.
I froze, trying to figure out where it came from.
What it was.
A perfumed wave that seemed like lilies—a mixture of the white ones with the rare ones I liked, tiger lilies.
And something more subtle and spicy, like nutmeg.
What the fuck was that?
My nostrils flared as I moved closer to the window. Sounds and scents of the night invaded my hearing and my sharpened wolf senses, but that different smell hit me hard, leaving me suddenly alert and affected.
My heart pounded.
The hairs on my body stood on end.
For a moment, I didn’t move.
I didn’t even blink, my gaze probing the dense forest, the lights of the houses farther away.
Everything was the same.
I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to run into the forest, to search for where that soft, delicious perfume was coming from—the one shaking me inside. It was as crazy as what I did that time when I woke up twenty-three years ago, turning into a wolf and ending up in the gypsy village.
But I restrained myself, irritated, tired of all that shit without explanation.
I slammed the window shut and went straight to bed.
The fucking scent wouldn’t let me sleep.