3

“You see, I am a bit of an anomaly. A half-breed: part shifter, part fae. My mother had a tryst with a wolf from a random unofficial pack. That was a year or two before she met the man who would be my younger sister’s blood father. The pairing between fae and alpha created offspring.” Simon touched his own chest. “Myself. Quite rare indeed. A one in a million chance, as you well know.”

I stared at him, horror-struck. I’d never met someone with that type of lineage. They were whispered about, but rare enough that they were thought impossible. It all began to make sense.

I glanced around the lab again, Simon’s purpose becoming clear. “You wanted to access your inner wolf?”

Simon snapped his fingers and leaned forward hungrily. “Exactly. And you were the first step in my process. My dear girl, you have no idea how important you were to my research. I’d spent years developing a concoction that would unleash a suppressed latent wolf. A potion that would be strong enough to bend the will of nature herself.

“I believed the special tincture to be ready, but I needed to test it first—”

“So you forced it on a child?” I snarled, cutting him off.

Simon waved my outburst away and frowned in annoyance. “Not important. What matters is that I was right to test it first. When I lured you deep into the forest with a bit of fae glamor and gave you the potion, there were immediate and violent side effects.”

“And those were?” I asked. As angry as I was, I wanted—needed—to hear everything that had happened that night.

“The induction of ferality,” Simon whispered. “Almost instantly, I knew I’d been successful.” He bobbed his head back and forth. “There was a bit of… screaming and shouting. Pain, yes, but you shifted. The problem was that the wolf that appeared did not come into this world peacefully. The thing erupted, fully formed and mature, yet completely out of its mind. Feral beyond belief. I, being a scientist by nature and not a warrior, was not well-equipped to fight for my life in such tight confines as the cave to which I’d lured you. Had I not been anticipating some side effects, you very nearly would have done me in. As it was, I received numerous and rather severe injuries. As a last-ditch effort, I cast a somnambulism spell on you. You sleep-walked out of the cave and ran into the forest while I writhed in pain and neared death.”

Rather than looking sad, he had the look of someone giddy with happiness. “With nothing else to risk, I took the potion myself. It forced my own long-repressed latent wolf to step forward and show itself to me. You see, being a half-breed, I never had the gifts of most shifters. No enhanced senses, no inner wolf to bond with—the enhanced speed and strength were all nowhere to be seen. Also missing? That wonderful rapid shifter healing. Once my wolf revealed itself, all of that came to the fore. Isn’t that exciting, Kira?”

Swallowing hard, I nodded hesitantly. “Yeah. Amazing,” I said dryly.

“Still, it was a slow process to heal. Even for a shifter, my wounds were grievous. In my agonized stupor, only one thought kept me going: I had been successful. I’d brought about a shift in a latent shifter.” Simon clenched his fist in front of his face, staring down at his knuckles. “I had harnessed the power I’d sought for all those years. I would survive. Which was good, because I had too much work to do.”

Simon was lost in thought for several long seconds, almost like he’d put himself into a trance. Every second I spent with the man showed me more and more how crazy he was. Not only crazy, but possibly fully psychotic.

A giggle from his mouth broke the silence, and he looked at me again. “You were a fiery little thing. Yes, you were. Robust and powerful. Not only had I managed to pull your wolf free from you, but some part of my magical potion had also converted you into an alpha. A female alpha. Rare beyond words. By my own hands, I’d pulled a wolf from its prison. Not any wolf, either, but the most powerful and rare of its kind.” Simon held his hands out, palms up for me to inspect. “You see? I have the power of a god in these hands.”

The way he described that night, it was as though he were talking about some happily nostalgic evening we’d shared as friends—the polar opposite of how I’d always viewed that day. My stomach churned as I remembered how terrified I’d been, how I’d hated myself for years. All that time I’d wallowed in self-loathing, this psycho had been thinking fondly about the day. When I’d run, I’d been drenched in blood, enough that when Wyatt found me in that smaller cave, it had looked like I’d butchered someone.

Simon had to be telling the truth. He’d lost too much blood for even fae healing spells to have saved him. Nothing made sense, other than the fact that he’d become a shifter that night. Had he become an alpha, too?

I thought so. I could catch the whiff of his scent in the air.

“Anyway,” Simon said, grabbing a clipboard and scanning it. “After recovering, I used the little incident to fake my own death. It worked perfectly. I’d been trying to figure out a way of slipping away for some time. I needed time and freedom to continue with my experiments.” He chuckled and glanced up from the clipboard to pin me with his eyes again. “Things truly worked out for the best. Honestly, I should thank you for almost ripping me to shreds. You should thank me, too.”

“I’m not thanking you for anything,” I said, momentarily unafraid.

“Kira, don’t you see? You should thank me, because without me, you still wouldn’t have your wolf. I granted you the greatest gift anyone could give a shifter. My experiment that night unleashed your true self—a self that never would have been there without me. Right?”