Burned Luna's Revenge

Alina's POV The first child came in at six in the morning. I knew him. I had delivered him. Held him when he was seven minutes old and still screaming his lungs out like he was furious at the world for pulling him out of the warm dark. Now he was convulsing on my table, and his mother was gripping the doorframe so hard her knuckles had gone white. "What happened?" I was already pulling his eyelids back, checking his pupils. Blown wide. Wrong. "He was fine." His mother's voice broke in half. "He was eating breakfast and then he just — he grabbed his stomach and started shaking, I don't — Alina, please —" "I need you to wait outside." "But he's my —" "Sarah." I caught her eyes. Held them. "I will take care of him. I need you outside so I can do that. Go." She went. I turned back to Tommy. His lips were going blue at the edges. His small body jerked against the straps I'd fastened around him to keep him from rolling off the table. I pulled blood. Ran it fast. And while I waited I pressed two fingers to his wrist and counted his pulse and tried to think past the cold dread spreading up the back of my neck. The results came back in eleven minutes. Wolfsbane. Refined. Concentrated so far beyond what any wild plant could produce that my hands actually stopped moving when I read the number. This wasn't accidental. I started the antidote protocol. I worked fast. I talked to the child the whole time even though he couldn't hear me, because it kept my own hands steady. "Stay with me," I told him. "You're going to be fine. You're going to go home and drive your mother absolutely insane and that's going to be wonderful." The second child came in at eight forty-five. The same symptoms. Same blown pupils. Same refined wolfsbane in her blood when I tested it. I called Ryker. "Something is wrong," I said the moment he picked up. "I have two children in my medical center with wolfsbane poisoning. Ryker, someone processed this deliberately, the concentration is —" "Alina." His voice was flat. Patient in the way that meant he'd already decided I was overreacting. "Children get into plants all the time. You know that." "Not like this. You need to come down here and look at these results yourself because what I'm seeing is not normal." "Handle it. That's what you're there for." He hung up. I stood there holding my phone for three full seconds. Then I put it in my pocket and went back to my patients. The third child came in at noon. The fourth at two. By four in the afternoon I had six small bodies in my medical center and I was running between beds screaming at my nurses to push more fluids, more activated charcoal, keep their airways clear, don't let them crash, don't let them crash — Ethan found me in the hallway between bay three and bay four. He took one look at my face and grabbed my arm. "Talk to me. How bad?" "Six children." My voice didn't sound like mine. "Wolfsbane poisoning. Refined, Ethan, someone made this in a lab, this didn't come from any plant they could have touched. I called Ryker and he told me to handle it." Something moved behind Ethan's eyes. "What do you need?" "Help. I need help right now and I need someone to listen to me when I say this is not accidental." He was already moving toward bay three. "I'm here. Let's go." We worked side by side for the next four hours. Ethan was good. Well, better than good. He was the only reason I didn't completely fall apart as the afternoon wore on and the numbers kept getting worse despite everything we tried. The first child died at six seventeen PM. I was holding his hand when it happened. One moment his chest was moving in that shallow, labored way it had been moving all day, and then it wasn't. His mother's scream from the waiting room told me she somehow knew before I even walked out to tell her. I went back inside. The second chilld died at six fifty-two. By eight o'clock, all six children were gone. I sat on the floor of the supply room because my legs stopped holding me up. I sat there with blood on my scrubs and my back against the cold metal shelving and I pressed my hands over my face and I tried to remember how to breathe. Ethan crouched in front of me. "Alina." "I couldn't save them." The words tasted like ash. "I had them right there, they were right in front of me, and I couldn't save them." "You did everything that could have been done." His voice was careful. Steady. "Whatever was used on those children, it was designed to be irreversible. This wasn't about your skill." "Then what was it about?" He didn't answer. The way he didn't answer made the cold in my chest spread further. "Ethan." I dropped my hands and looked at him. "What are you not telling me?" "Nothing." He stood up and reached a hand down to pull me to my feet. "Nothing yet. Come on. You need water and you need to sit somewhere that isn't the floor." I let him pull me up. I was too tired to push. We walked out of the supply room together and straight into Beta Cole and four pack guards standing in my hallway. I almost didn't register it at first. My brain was too full of the day, too waterlogged with grief to process why four armed guards would be standing inside my medical center at eight thirty at night. Then Cole stepped forward. "Dr. Alina Hart." His voice was formal in the way that meant someone had told him exactly what to say and he was reading it back. "By order of Alpha Ryker Hart, you are to come with us for questioning in connection with the deaths of six Silverpine pack children." The floor didn't move. My hearing didn't go strange. I just stood there and felt the cold settle all the way into my bones. "Excuse me?" My voice came out even. I was proud of that. "You're being taken in for questioning, Luna." "I just spent fourteen hours trying to save those children." "Yes ma'am. You'll have the opportunity to explain that during questioning." He didn't meet my eyes. None of them did. I turned to look at Ethan. His jaw was tight. His hands were at his sides. He was looking at Cole with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — something stripped back and dangerous underneath the usual calm. "This is procedure," Cole said, more to Ethan than to me. "The Alpha wants answers." "She just lost six patients," Ethan said. Low. Controlled. "She's been on her feet for fourteen hours. Whatever questions Ryker has can wait until —" "They can't." Cole finally looked at me. Apologetic. Like he knew something I didn't. "I'm sorry, Luna. We have to go now." I looked at my medical center. At the empty bays where Tommy and Lena and four other children had been fighting for their lives an hour ago. At my nurses standing in doorways watching me with carefully blank faces. "Okay." I pulled off my gloves. Dropped them in the waste bin. Straightened my coat. "Let's go." They walked me out through the front entrance. Pack members had gathered outside. Word traveled fast in Silverpine, it always did. I kept my eyes forward and my chin level and I told myself this was procedure, this was routine, Ryker was shaken and needed someone to question and I was the attending physician so of course it was me. I told myself that all the way to the pack hall. Then they walked me inside, and I saw what was waiting. It wasn't a questioning room. It was a full elder assembly. Every seat filled. Every face turned toward me as I walked through those doors. And in the center of the table, sealed in an evidence bag, sat a vial I recognized. My medical kit. And inside it, something that had no business being there. Ryker stood at the head of the table. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger. "Alina." His voice filled the room. "Do you know why you're here?" My eyes went to the vial. Back to his face. "No." He picked up the evidence bag. Held it up so every elder could see it. "Refined wolfsbane," he said. "Found in your personal medical kit thirty minutes ago." His eyes didn't flinch. "The same compound that killed six of our children today." The room erupted. I stood in the middle of it and felt the walls close in from every side. "This is a mistake," I said. Loud enough to cut through the noise. "Someone planted that. I have never kept wolfsbane in my personal kit, every elder in this room knows my protocols —" "The evidence is clear." Elder James' voice rolled over mine. Calm. Certain. Final. "You had access to every victim. You administered treatment to each child. And now we find this in your possession." "I'm telling you someone put it there —" "Enough." Ryker set the bag down. His voice dropped in a way that made the room go still faster than any shout. "We will hear testimony tomorrow. Until then you'll be held in the pack cells." He looked at the guards. "Take her." "Ryker." I stepped forward. Just one step. "Look at me. You know me. Fourteen years. Look me in the eye and tell me you believe I killed those children." He looked at me. And said absolutely nothing. The guards took my arms. I let them, because fighting would only make it worse, because I still believed…..goddess help me, I still believed that this would be fixed tomorrow. That someone would speak for me. That when they heard testimony, the truth would come out. I still believed that, right up until they led me into the holding room and I saw who was already sitting inside, waiting, with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her eyes full of manufactured grief. Mira looked up at me. "Oh Alina," she said softly. "I'm so sorry it came to this.”