Taking Power With The Alpha's Daughter

Chapter 1: The Antidote is Done!

***MICHAEL POV***

    “Alpha, we’ve got something you’ll like.”

    At last, one thing that I had been waiting for.

    In the four weeks since Mira’s Luna ceremony, one of the first things I had jumped into was trying to figure out how in the hell Fabian and his team had engineered a plant as highly toxic as Wolfsbane to show up in liquid form, stable enough to be added to vampire venom.  In early trials, a team of chemists from the Vegas campus had teamed up with one of the companies that Phil made contact with. This happened at the Grand Tacoma Council “Prince of Wales” ceremony to see if any of the substances in the poison could be successfully treated. The initial thoughts were that if one of the substance’s symptoms were eliminated, we could just treat the symptoms for the other; that wasn’t working well.

    Then I got that video message from one of the lab workers in Vegas.

    Justin, Phil, Mira, Kristy, get your asses in here.  We have an update from Vegas, I quickly linked the other members of my team.

    Justin Daniels was the Beta of the Crescent Woods pack.  A cocky, wine-loving, charismatic wolf; Justin was the ultimate wingman. He was the guy you wanted on your team if you needed someone to give you the facts straight, call you on your bullshit, and anything else you’d need. As a byproduct of him getting his ass kicked by Bradley Bessenhoffer--one of the wolves who joined the faux pack of rogues led by Richard Robertson and Maggie Dominaska--in interrogation, his wolf Wade had become a bit stronger as I had to rejuvenate him with some of my Phoenix wolf powers. Justin also became a bit more careful with trusting some of the house workers as a result.  I could tell he wanted payback on both Bradley and Natalia Jenkins, but that was going to be a long way away.

    Phil Jessen, the Gamma, was the first to show up to my office.  A deeply intelligent, incessantly thoughtful, driven man with sandy blonde hair that fell to his shoulders, which he was always working back with his fingers and would make any surfer dude jealous, Phil was the secret weapon of the pack.  Although naturally quiet, he was definitely the brains of the operation most of the time.  I loved playing ping-pong with my ideas with him, behind closed doors with the rest of the team, but especially when no one was around, usually over pints of Irish beer.  I noticed that he also loved deeply, which he showed through his dedication to Justin and Mira, and more recently, to me.  The poor guy was becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that he hadn’t found his mate. He had the most tender heart of anyone here and was becoming convinced that his mate wasn’t alive.  Despite the assurances that that was not the case, Phil was absolutely convinced there.  His mate, whoever she was, needed to show up soon.

    Hot on his heels were Kristy and my wife and Luna, Mira.  Kristy Daniels, the Beta Female, was a valiant warrior who complimented Justin’s fun-loving and cocky attitude by being defensive, loyal, and hilarious. The way her heart was firmly on her sleeve toward everyone and everything was infectious, and I could tell that Mira was trying to take some advice from her.  Kristy’s first action back to the pack after giving birth to our future Beta Female Miracle was the battle, and she was determined to not miss anything else. Justin was waiting for the “baby factory” to be back in business because Mira and I were expecting, but with Kristy being only a month postpartum, that was on hold.

    “Where the hell is your husband?” I asked Kristy.

    “Bringing Miracle to the meeting,” Kristy replied.  “Justin says we’re getting her in the habit of being in these meetings right away. This is her future after all.”

    “I can’t really disagree with that logic,” I replied with a smile on my face, looking forward to the days where Mira and I could bring our little ones into these meetings.  With Mira pregnant at that moment, I found myself daydreaming quite a bit about that.

    “Sorry I’m late,” Justin stated as he came into my office and sat at my conference table with a half-asleep Miracle in her front carrier on Justin’s chest.  “We had a blowout on the way over here.  Thankfully, we just put Miracle in a white cotton onesie that we bought 20 of for $3 on sss, and it’s made out of recyclable materials as well.”

    “I’m assuming you just cut her out of that shitty one, hosed her off, changed her diaper, and came over here?” Mira asked.

    “It’s like you were there with me,” Justin replied with a smile.

    “Okay, I’m just glad you made it because it would be really crappy if you didn’t,” I told him with a smirk on my face, standing up to turn on my 55” Smart TV with a webcam.  Phil actually smashed his head on my conference table as Mira groaned at my terrible dad joke.  I kept telling her that I was telling them to practice for when our baby arrived in May.  It drove her crazy, but I always found it worth it.

    “Alright, let’s see what we’ve found out,” I said as I walked back to the head of the table with the remote in my hand.  Once I got my pack’s private video conference program to turn on, we put a call into the Las Vegas campus lab, where I understood the supervisor of the lab was going to be joining us.  In addition to him, the lead researcher who found out about the antidote, our campus captain, Eric Winston, and his lieutenant, Cody Williams.  Sure enough, all four faces popped onto my screen from different parts of the lab.

    “Good afternoon, Vegas campus!” I loudly greeted.

    “Good afternoon, Alpha Bartholomew,” Eric replied.  “I’m glad that you could spare a few minutes to talk with all of us.”

    “Well, in a way, we’re all working for the same thing,” I stated.  “All of us here in this room, plus you guys in the lab, you all out in Vegas on that campus, and our Northeast Corner personnel… we all are.”

    “That’s a very good point,” Eric replied.  “Okay, let’s get down to it.  The antidote is done!  I’ve included our two main chemists that have found something useful in our pursuits, Jack Ryan and Benjamin Brewer.  Boys, hold up the concoction that you all have made.”

    The two proud chemists each held up Erlenmeyer flasks of their mixture, which looked like the results of rinsing a brush out in elementary watercolor painting class.  I looked around my table and saw the color draining from Mira’s face as it was held up there.  We were about to have a problem.

    “Good job, boys,” I said, “but could we please put that stuff down a bit?  Your Luna is currently pregnant, and she’s about to baptize my conference room table with the contents of her stomach.”

    Eyes as big as saucers, the boys each lowered their concoctions, so they were out of sight for all of us.

    “Sorry, Luna,” said one of them, whose name I could just make out as Jack since it was barely visible under his mane of red hair that fell down nearly to the pocket of his coat. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

    “Don’t worry about it,” Mira replied with her eyes closed.  “I could handle it.  Your Princess Royale or Alpha-in-Waiting couldn’t.”

    “Could you tell us what in the hell is in that stuff?” I asked.

    “As of right now,” the other one, who was wearing thick black-framed glasses and was obviously Benjamin, stated, “it consists of dhampir blood, garlic, sage, flecks of silver, magnesium sulfate, and activated charcoal.”

    “Gross!” Kristy exclaimed.  “That almost sounds like something that could blow your ass up!”

    “Well, the thing is, Madame Beta, that’s almost the point, but not in the fiery, explosive way you might be thinking of,” Jack stated.

    I looked at them curiously, trying to think back to my own experience in chemistry class, and couldn’t figure anything out at all.  “Activated charcoal is probably used to dispel the Wolfsbane part of the poisonous s**t we found, but all that would do would be to purge that out of a wolf’s system, and that is if it was made correctly.”

    “That’s why we made sure it was,” Benjamin replied.

    “And oh my gosh, was it fun!” Jack stated enthusiastically.  I saw Phil roll his eyes with a slight grin on his face, and I could anticipate what his question was going to be.

    “Please tell me you guys didn’t make it yourselves,” he stated in a tone of voice that was exactly halfway between completely amused and defeated because of the sheer nerdiness that would have been used in order to have pulled this off.

    “We did!” Benjamin said with excitement, and I couldn’t help but laugh.  “We gathered a large pile of hardwood, and we ensured we asked Captain Winston to see if we could use part of the Vegas area patio so we wouldn’t be disturbed.  We also needed to make sure that the decent spot was close enough to the lab so that way we could feed the fire continuously.  We ended up using a big-ass burn barrel we found behind the Vegas campus’ smokehouse.  We then chopped up the hardwood into small pieces, partly to experiment on how much we could fit into the damned thing at one time.  According to our best calculations, the barrel that we used was about 55 gallons, and we packed that jackass as full as we could get it.  When it took off, it was a rager!  We were so damned proud of ourselves that we didn’t burn anything down that was close by.”

    The short abridged version of the scientific method is now “f**k around with science and see what happens,” Justin linked me.  I laughed back in the mindlink before I asked my next question.  “Is that the end of the process?”

    “No,” Jack stated.  “We kept the fire going for a full 5 hours.  Once it naturally went out, we let it sit overnight to contemplate its life choices.  After we brought it back inside, we had 20 pounds of raw homemade charcoal!”

    “How’d you activate it?” Justin asked.

    “I’m so glad you asked that!” Benjamin exclaimed.  “Long story short, we added calcium chloride solution to some of the charcoal we made and mixed it in a metal bowl, and heated it.  We initially mixed it all together in an aluminum bowl, but the aluminum mixed with all the carbon and the calcium, and we blew up an entire fume hood.”

    We’re not paying for that, Kristy told me.  I ignored it.

    “But we got enough to act as the base for our antidote,” Benjamin continued.  “From there, we added magnesium sulfate to repair cell damage from the purging of the Wolfsbane and the plant itself.  The flecks of silver are to cauterize the repaired cell damage to scar up completely, and then the garlic and sage are designed to mix with the vampire venom and purge it out where the sun doesn’t shine, and because dhampir blood has human elements in it, we’re banking on our wolves recognizing the human antigens.”

    “According to our campus’ nurse practitioner, in theory, our wolves will create antibodies as a result of the dhampir blood and then combat the vampire venom-laced blood,” Jack finished.  “With the Wolfsbane being taken care of as a result of the charcoal, any wolf who takes it will be severely dehydrated, but they’ll live without any lasting damage.”

    “Excellent work!” I exclaimed.  “Phil, do any of your contacts have any ability to mass produce this stuff at all?”

    “That jumped to the top of my to-do list for this afternoon,” Phil replied.  “We have to have some sort of infrastructure with some of my friends to get this stuff pushed out.  However, we also have to make sure of something else.”

    “What’s that?” Justin asked.

    “We need to make sure that all of us, including the Vegas campus and Northeast Corner, don’t leak this at all,” Phil stated while looking at the camera.  “With all of us being summoned here to the main campus for the summit with Phantom Grounds and the Grand Tacoma Council, we have to do our best to make sure this doesn’t get back to Fabian.  We all have plenty of evidence that shows that this poison is Fabian’s child.  If he knows we have a way to combat this bullshit, he’s going to strengthen it, and that’s really going to kill someone.”

    “Point taken, Gamma,” Eric replied.  “This is officially considered classified.  The only others who need to know that this s**t even exists in the first place are Marissa and Steve.”

    “Exactly,” I replied.  “I’ll call them tomorrow with this update.”

    “Perfect,” Eric replied.  “That’s it on our end.  Phil, we’ll talk later when it comes to getting manufacturers to go with us.”  With that, he disconnected, and all eyes turned to look at me.

    “Well, we have an answer,” I stated.

    “Yes, we do,” Phil replied.  “My hope is that it works.”

    “Count me out as being the one who’ll get hit with that Goddess-awful poison,” Justin replied.

    “Understood,” I replied as I leaned back, lost in thought.  Part of me wanted to call Fabian and mock him because of what my team had found.

    I just hoped we never needed it.