Healer's Mate

Chapter Two: Michaela

Even with my human senses, I could smell the blood before stepping into the room. The smell of iron and taste of copper pennies assaulted me, making me glad that I didn't eat breakfast before this little house call. I spared a glance at Byron, not surprised to see the wolf inside of his human shell making its presence known by the animalistic gleam in his dark eyes. The hair on the back of my neck rose as a part of me belatedly realized that some part of him was enjoying the scent and the thought of what lay on the other side of the door. With a gulp, I steeled myself, knowing that whatever met me on the other side of the wooden barrier was not going to be pretty.

Byron didn't so much as look at me before he pushed the double doors open, stepping aside quickly to usher me into the room. I walked forward on legs that didn't seem to have any feeling in them, the overwhelming stench of fresh wounds and spilled blood overtaking me. I stood, staring, as my brain tried to make sense of what lay before me.

The name "Discipline Hall" was kind of misleading. It was less a "hall" and more of a long room. The walls were made of a dark stone that looked as though it come from the background of a Hollywood dungeon scene. The floor was made of the same cold material, sloping ever so slightly towards the middle, where a drain allowed for easy clean up. On either side of the room were metal doors, which lead into small rooms that were no bigger than cells, having a bed, a dresser and a small sectioned off area for a toilet. They were specially built to hold werewolves, and in Alpha Justin's time, they were used as safe rooms, places to help monitor wounded and newly turned wolves. Alpha Caleb, on the other hand, used the rooms as they were originally intended -- as prisons.

It wasn't a prison that Beta Byron brought me to today, but a torture chamber. The floor was sticky with blood, and as I watched, small rivulets made their way to the drain in the center of the room. Alpha Caleb stood there, half naked, his chest and hands covered with blood, it turning his usually striking face into a death mask. At his feet lay a crumpled body. At first I didn't believe that the person was still alive. They couldn't be alive, not with so much blood surrounding them. Caleb towered above the body, his gray eyes neutral, almost uninterested in the scene before him. "Michaela." He said as he took a square of cloth out of the back pocket of his black jeans, opening it to carefully wipe the blood from his hands, "Heal him."

My gaze flicked up to the Alpha and the look on his face made my mouth go dry. He was... calm. Calm enough to almost be totally unaffected. Even for someone like Caleb, that wasn't right. "Alpha -" I coughed, trying to remember how to speak, "Alpha, I cannot heal the de -"

"He's still alive." The Alpha's voice dropped an octave, lowering so that it was almost felt more than heard. "Heal him." It was an order, and although, as a human I didn't feel the same uncontrollable urge to obey, I found myself hurrying forward to the body at the center of the room, dropping down onto my knees at its side. I bit back a curse as I got my first good look at the man who was in front of me. He was a werewolf, I could tell that by the sheer force of presence that he gave off. Well, that and the fact that no human could have survived this amount of damage. It looked as though he was cut (or clawed, my mind tried to point out) almost a hundred different times, none of which were meant to cripple or to maim, only to cause the most pain possible. That couldn't be right. Sure, a weak werewolf doesn't have the same kind of healing power as an Alpha, but even the most submissive of wolves, even the weakest of the pack, could heal these cuts fast enough for it to almost be visible to the naked eye. None of this man's cuts were healing, instead they were all weeping blood, the fluid slowing as his body shed more and more of it. This wasn't supposed to happen... how could this be?

It was as though that thought lifted a veil between my eyes and my mind. Gleaming, not an arm's length away from me, were a pair of knives, the silver of their keen edge seeming to savor the blood that beaded along their surfaces. Silver. Of course it was silver. Werewolves were stronger and faster with keener senses than humans. And not only that, but they could heal almost any wound many times faster than us poor humans. The exceptions to this were any wounds that were created by another supernatural being, and silver. Wounds made from supernatural claws and teeth healed almost human slow, and were the leading cause of unnatural death in most of the country's werewolves. Silver, on the other hand, not only resisted the pack magic that allowed the wolf's wounds to heal, but acted like a poison, weakening them for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. No one realize knew why this was the case, but it was theorized that the purifying abilities disrupted the magic needed for the wolf to manifest and that it cut the bond between wolf and man.

That didn't matter right at the moment. What mattered is that the man was unable to heal on his own, and that Alpha Caleb expected him to live. He expected me to make him live. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and ignoring the blood that was seeping into the thin and ragged fabric of my robe and night gown, I placed a hand on the man's shoulder to roll him over and to get a good look at his wounds. It was harder than I thought it would be, forcing me to use both hands as he was unresponsive, nearly dead weight. When he was finally on his back, I had to bite back a cry. What could he have done to anger Alpha Caleb so? The man's chest was a mess of cuts and slashes, some deep enough that I could have sworn that I could see his lungs moving up and down with each shallow breath. He was still alive, I could help him.