Chapter 159: Chapter 159
Ophelia’s POV
I entered the infirmary where Gareth was being kept, and was surprised to see that he was awake. “Gareth, how are you feeling?”
He turned to me, and I could see that he was tired. Even his smile looked weak, but genuine. “I am feeling better, truth be told. Far better than I expected to feel.” He shifted slightly against the pillows. “Luna Alana gave me a draught of calming herbs. She said it would help settle my body and repair what damage was done to my mind. The fog is retreating, though my skull still feels as if a war-hammer struck it.”
I crossed to his bedside and rested a hand briefly against his forehead, checking his temperature out of old habit more than necessity. “Do not force yourself. Is there anything you remember of the attack? Anything at all before you lost consciousness? Even fragments would help us.”
He rubbed his temples. “Every time I try to remember the moments leading up to the blackness, a splitting headache comes on. It is like trying to peer through a dense wall of smoke while someone rams a spike into my temples. I remember the scent of wet pine, a shadow that moved faster than the wind... and then, nothing but a terrible, suffocating pressure inside my own mind.”
I nodded in understanding, keeping my scent smooth and projection calm through the air to help soothe his agitated wolf. “The mind magic used against you was ancient and malicious. Do not force the memories, Gareth. They will return when your spirit is mended.”
It fit with what I already suspected, compulsion left scars behind, and pressing too hard against them rarely ended well. But even as I accepted his answer, I could see the guilt sitting heavy behind his eyes.
“I wish I could offer more to the pack,” he said quietly. “I am ashamed, Luna. To have been caught so completely, and by a vampire no less. For winters, we have hunted them. We have kept our borders immaculate. To be brought down like a defenseless pup... it is a stain upon my honor.”
I sighed softly, pulling up a wooden stool to sit by his bedside. “Has Alana explained to you what we found?” I asked gently.
Gareth shook his head, his ears twitching at the mention of the pack healer. “Nay, Luna. The only information I have received thus far was that a vampire was behind the attacks. She told me to rest, but how can a warrior rest when blood has been spilled on our soil?”
“Then listen to me, and listen well, Gareth,” I said, my voice hardening into a tone that brooked no argument. “You must not feel guilty or responsible. There was absolutely nothing that you could have done differently.”
“But I am a veteran tracker,” he pressed, his jaw tightening, and his chest heaving under the bandages. “Werewolves are supposed to be stronger, and deadlier. Our bites are lethal against vampires. And yet, somehow, I managed to get completely overpowered by a lone bloodsucker. How do I face the scouts under my command? How do I face Alpha Kayden who entrusted me to the task?”
I reached out, placing a firm, grounding hand over his trembling fist, using my authority as his Luna to command his attention. “Because whoever is behind this was not just any vampire, Gareth. The creature that ambushed you is a hybrid.”
That drew his attention. “A hybrid? Luna... that is a myth. A curse of both bloodlines cannot coexist in a single shell. The moon goddess would never allow it.”
“The goddess did not create this abomination, but it walks our forests nonetheless,” I explained, my tone turning clinical and grave as I recounted the grim findings. “This creature is capable not only of the compulsion vampires are known for, but of delivering a bite with the strength and lethality of our own kind turned against us. It siphoned every drop of blood from Mona of the Bloodwood Pack and Torin of the Winter-Claw Pack, leaving them as bloodless husks at our very doorstep.”
Gareth shook his head in utter confusion, a low snarl rising and dying in his throat as the pieces failed to fit together. “How could it have been a hybrid... How could such a thing even come to pass?”
I walked him through everything we had discovered at the clearing. I made sure he understood the gravity of what we were up against. “You are fortunate to be alive, Gareth.”
“If this creature is as ruthless and calculated as you say, Luna... why did the hybrid leave me alive? Why not drain me like the others and leave three bodies instead of two?”
I hesitated only briefly before answering honestly. “Because death was too simple a fate for what they envisioned,” I answered, a cold chill settling over my own shoulders as I spoke. “The hybrid hoped to frame you as the culprit. They drenched you in their blood, or perhaps you were compelled to do so yourself. They left you lying just paces away from the corpses. They sent anonymous scrolls to both the Bloodwood and Winter-Claw packs, timing it precisely so their scouts would arrive right as our border patrol found you. They wanted a bloodbath. They wanted our allies to execute you on the spot and tear the Alpha Alliance apart from the inside.”
Gareth’s brow furrowed even deeper, a sharp, skeptical hiss escaping through his teeth. “How could they have truly believed they would frame me when the bites on the victims obviously looked like that of a vampire’s bite? If they were drained of blood, any half-witted wolf would know a bloodsucker was involved.”
I opened my mouth to reassure him and stopped.
It was, I realized slowly, an excellent question. One I had not thought to ask myself, caught up as I had been in calming two furious packs on the edge of violence. The wounds had been close enough to a vampire's bite that only an expert, myself, Alana, Thalia with her tracker's eye, would have caught the difference at all. It would have taken deep knowledge of our history, of the anatomical differences between vampire and Lycan fangs, to see through the deception at all.
So why had the hybrid trusted that Gareth would be believed guilty when he was not a vampire?