Chapter 73 Edwin

Chapter 73 Edwin
Theon.

When Callista lunged I was pretty sure she was coming for my throat. My hands were already up to defend myself, but not to fight her. I’ve hurt her enough. All I had to do was contain her before she hurt herself, I didn’t care if she managed to punch me or something Goddess knew I deserved it.

But all she wanted to harm was air.

She falls down next to me with a thud, punching at the ground. Her knuckles hurl at the stone floors over and over again at a speed that would envy a full werewolf, until blood sprouts off them. For a moment, I can only stare at her in horror and surprise, but then I snap into my senses.

“Callista, stop!” I try to wrap my arms around her torso and take her off the ground. But she squirms worse than a fussy newborn, and with her size, she manages to wiggle out of my grip to punch the floor a couple more times.

One of her elbows catches me in the jaw, making me stumble back. She’s surprisingly strong as well.

Callista doesn’t even notice what she’d done, she’s far too focused on the ground.

“I’ll kill you!” She screams, her voice crazed. Her pupils are so dilated that only black was visible. The green in her eyes is a thin ring around the sea of black.

“There’s no one there!” I lift her to the air, her wiggling making it hard to keep a grip on her, “Callista, there’s no one in the ground.”

Thunder crashes again, and Callista screams.

“Doc, she’s out of control.” I yell at the doctor, who stands completely still, shock evident on his face, “She’s seeing things, we gotta sedate her, or else she’ll break all her fingers!”

Not only that, but she is also going to damage her throat with all this screaming too, because never in my life had I heard someone scream so harshly.

I had no idea what was happening, why she was hallucinating all of a sudden. First, she asked me who I was as if I’d just sprung up in her life. Then she asked Dr. Haeger who he was. And then she’d started to talk about Ruelle.

Was this what Dr. Haeger warned us about, the effects of the torture? But why now? Why not before? She woke up fine, lucid, and now she’s lost her mind!

When I saw that she wasn’t harmed by the Mental violation before, I was ecstatic. I thought things were finally looking up. She had been the same person she was before it all started. It wasn’t as bad as I thought.

But then lightning flashed and…

Dr. Haeger rushes to me with an injection.

“Hold her still!” He orders me.

Diving at Callista again, I manage to evade her flying arms and grab firmly onto her waist. Then, I push her back onto the hospital bed, getting my face scratched for my effort, and use my body weight to cage her into the mattress, holding her still enough for him to use the injection on her.

Dr. Haeger for his part is swift, and in no time, Callista’s screaming stops. Her soft body becomes pliant underneath my own and her eyes drift close as she pants from all the effort. For a moment, there is only the sound of the storm raging outside filling the air.

Breathing harshly, I wait for a second more. Her body is pressed to mine in a way that it had never done before, and it feels bizarre. She is smaller than me and smells amazing. Even at this moment, her scent soothes me. This is the first time I’ve been so close to her without any bad intentions, and it’s strange. Even if the circumstance is ideal, it’s not a bad kind of strange.

It feels right, being close to her with every intention to protect her, even from herself.

My face is flushed as I let her go, and my wolf laughs at me.

"Shut up," I grumble, but of course, that makes him snicker louder.

“It’s worse than we thought,” Dr. Haeger’s voice brings me back to the situation at hand.

“Why was she talking about Ruelle?”

“My guess is that she Callista’s hallucination, or phantom if you will.” Dr. Haeger discards the empty syringe. “What happened before I came here?”

“She was talking normally until the rain started.” I look at the sleeping girl. “And then she asked me who I was and where she was. After that, she started talking to the phantom.”

“As soon as the rain started, you say.” The doctor muses. “That’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.”

“Do you think the rain triggered it?”

“All accounts point to that direction. She forgot who you were, and who I was, but remembered Ruelle. So, whatever the memory loss is, it’s partial. We need to run tests on her to determine it for sure.” He sighs, his fingers rubbing at his eyes. “What a mess this whole thing is. I hope the witches get this sorted soon.”

Callista’s knuckles are bright red, reminding me too much of the time she had been tortured.

“Me too, doctor, me too.”

Later, I walk towards my office in the castle, my head stuck in the rain clouds, thinking.

I can’t understand what’s happening. Ever since Callista and Ruelle came to the pack, not a day had gone by without any disaster. I’d thought that after accepting Callista, I would be able to heal Elias and life would go back to normal, to how it was before he became maniacal.

And now I’m here with a dead girl who pretended to be my mate, her tortured sister who is my actual mate, who had been given to me in exchange for land with a possibly falsified document, and a nearly rogue wolf.

Oh, add in the fact that I’d been an absolute monster to my actual mate on account of her sister’s machinations coupled with my own lack of intelligence as well as compassion, and as a result of that, there just might be a wolf-bear conflict brimming on the horizon, and my mate is seeing phantoms because her mind had been destroyed.

I am quite certain that no king before me had to face an issue quite like this.

“Alpha,” Kellin calls out and I raise my head towards him. I hadn’t realized he’d joined me on my walk until now. He looks better than I had seen him, more put together than I am at the moment. The gratitude I feel for him knows no bounds. At least I have competent members in the pack to help me through this, regardless of how horrible I’d been for them too. “Good timing. We need to discuss the incident.”

Is that what we call it now? The incident?

“Sure, Kellin. Let’s get that done with.”

“I’m sorry I’m bothering you with this, Alpha, now that you've got more things to worry about, but you know how it is when another Alpha gets killed. Especially one belonging to another race.”

If one wolf challenges a wolf Alpha to a duel and kills the Alpha, the living wolf would be allowed to be the Alpha of the pack. This was different when the duel was interracial.

“Are we looking at a pack war?” I ask him bluntly.

“I’m not sure. The Brekett pack had gone into mourning, and the word in the street is that the Luna had declined the right to be Alpha.”

I feel bad about killing the man, no matter how despicable he was. He'd had a family.

“She’d left the pack actually, with her two children. So, the title of the Alpha had gone down to the Gamma.”

“The Gamma?” I question. “Why not the Beta?”

Kellin looks as if he’d swallowed something unsavory. “Well, we injured the Beta badly in our fight. He’d died too.”

Goddess, how can this situation be more of a mess? They had started it, true, by kidnapping a member of my pack regardless of the fact that she had been outside the pack lands. But still, we had escalated it.

Not that I regret my actions. They had turned Callista, an innocent bystander in all of this, into what she is now. They do not deserve any sort of mercy.

But I hated the consequences. The side effects and the power vacuum created are going to be nightmares to deal with, and that Gamma rubbed me in all the wrong ways. And I knew nothing about the guy.

“Who is the new Alpha then?”

“Edwin Kane.”