Claimed by my Clan’s Killer

Chapter 4- Among Wolves

Morning came with an opportunity I never imagined I would experience since the night I lost my clan. Maybe it was the universe being good to me for once, paying me back for healing that stranger from a week ago. By decree of Alpha Valthar of the Runeblood pack, healers were summoned to the fortress to handle the spread of Pale Fever and the residents it had reached.

Pale Fever had plagued the southern lands for over two months but never touched the fortress before now, thanks to how isolated it sat in the mountains. I never imagined it would actually reach its people one day. I doubted they did either.

It was a chance I couldn’t pass up. A lifetime opportunity to get inside the fortress and see my enemies up close, to learn how they lived, how they thought, who among them held real power. I’d keep my head down and my ears open.

For years I had lived as an ordinary healer, hiding my powers and relying on herbs and potions instead. It worked in my favor now. That exact disguise was what would let me walk through the front gate without anyone asking questions.

Packing was quick. I didn’t own much beyond dried herbs, ground roots, and a few small potions wrapped in cloth. Everything I had fit into one bag.

I joined a caravan of travelers heading toward the fortress. Most of them were healers too, judging by the pouches and satchels they carried, and a few were simply people hoping for steadier work behind stronger walls. Somewhere along the road, an older man started telling a story I’d heard pieces of before, the kind that gets passed around campfires until nobody remembers who told it first.

Long ago, he said, humans ruled without challenge, until a boy was born who changed everything. He lived an ordinary life until his teenage years, when something monstrous woke up inside him.

He could turn into a wolf. Not an ordinary wolf, but something bigger, faster, and far stronger than anything that walked on four legs before him. His strength made him a terror to both man and beast.

Nobody agreed on where the name came from, his parents or the frightened whispers of strangers, but people started calling him Isabinerys. By the time he turned twenty, word of what he was had spread, and a mob came for him. His parents helped him escape. They didn’t survive it.

For ten years after that, he ran. Warriors, adventurers, bounty hunters, they all came looking for him, and he kept running rather than break the promise he’d made never to harm a human, not after what it had already cost his parents.

They tried everything to bring him down. Nothing worked, not until someone discovered silver hurt him in a way nothing else could.

He was finally caught in a fight he couldn’t win, wounded badly enough that capture seemed certain. But not everyone wanted him dead. Soldiers from a distant kingdom stepped in and pulled him out before it was too late.

That kingdom was called Pitora. It became the first place willing to let him live in peace, the first to argue that humans and whatever he was could exist side by side. Its king had no children of his own, so he adopted Isabinerys, and when the old king died, the kingdom passed to him.

Isabinerys had two sons. Both grew powerful enough that the kingdom eventually had to be split in two just to hold them, one taking the north, the other the south. That’s how werewolves came to rule over humans in Pitora.

Alpha Valthar, I already knew, descended from the firstborn. Ruler of the south. The man responsible for what happened to my clan.

I only opened my eyes again when the caravan reached the fortress gates. A long line of people stretched from the entrance back down the road, maybe close to a hundred of them, most looking like they’d come hoping for something better than what they’d left behind.

At the gates, guards searched everyone. Weapons and anything unfamiliar got taken away, and each of us was given a number. Only people traveling with dependents were allowed to bring more than themselves inside.

We were herded into a courtyard and told to wait.

“Greetings, healers. I welcome you all,” a woman called down from a balcony above the crowd.

She looked old but stood straight, nothing frail about her. A dark robe covered her, stitched with small moon symbols along the hem.

Part of me had expected the Alpha himself to greet us. That was foolish of me.

“I am Mama Yaga, head healer of the Runeblood pack,” she said. “You’ve traveled far, some of you farther than others, and for that you have my thanks.”

She let that settle over the crowd before continuing.

“We cannot take all of you. There will be a test, to separate those who are ready from those who aren’t. Whoever passes stays. Whoever fails may return home.”

My chest tightened. I’d studied medicine since I was young, but standing there in that courtyard, surrounded by strangers who might know more than me, I couldn’t help the nerves crawling up my spine. My mind ran through every possibility, most of them unlikely, a few of them absurd.

“Don’t trouble yourselves,” she added, almost like she’d heard my thoughts. “It’s only one question.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd until she raised a hand for quiet.

“You will not answer aloud,” she said. “You’ll write it down instead.”

Attendants moved through the rows, pressing a thin wax tablet and a stylus into each of our hands.

“When I ask my question,” Mama Yaga said, “you’ll carve your answer into the wax. When I call time, you’ll lift your tablets. Only those who show real understanding will remain.”

My stomach turned over. What could she possibly ask that would separate healers who’d traveled from every corner of the south?

She took a breath, calm as still water.

“Early healers in Pitora recorded that Isabinerys’ body resisted nearly every illness, except those that attacked the nervous system. Pale Fever is one such illness. Given that, explain why its first symptom shows in the eyes, and not the lungs or the skin.”

For a moment nobody moved. Then the courtyard filled with the scratch of styluses against wax.

People bent over their tablets, foreheads creased, lips pressed together in concentration. A few looked lost before they’d even started. Others carved fast, like speed alone might carry them through.

I forced my breathing steady and let what I’d learned years ago, before my whole world burned down, come back to me.

The optic nerve is one of the few points where nervous tissue is left exposed rather than shielded, making it the easiest point of entry.

I wrote it out clean and simple, nothing wasted.

“Tablets up!” Mama Yaga called.

A wave of wax tablets rose over the crowd.

Attendants moved down the rows fast, checking each answer. Some were rejected on the spot, met with groans or muttered curses as the attendant shook his head and moved on.

I kept my face still while mine was checked. The attendant paused a beat longer than he had with the others, then nodded and set my tablet on the accepted pile.

Just like that, I was in.

“Those whose tablets were accepted, welcome to the Runeblood pack,” Mama Yaga announced. “The rest of you may go.”

The crowd shifted around me. Some stayed rooted where they stood. Others turned and walked away, shoulders low with the weight of being turned back.

Then a man stepped out beside her, and I felt the courtyard change before he even said a word. People straightened. Voices dropped.

His jaw was sharp, his eyes a deep, unmoving grey, and something about the way he stood made it impossible to look away from him.

I stared for a second too long before it hit me, and when it did, my stomach dropped straight through the ground.

It was him. The man from the ravine. The man I’d healed with my own two hands.

“Healers, I welcome you all,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the crowd. “I am Alaric Runeblood, first son of Alpha Valthar.”

I didn’t hear whatever came after that. I couldn’t. My hands moved on their own, pulling the crimson scarf up over the lower half of my face, my heart slamming so hard I was certain someone nearby could hear it.

Of all the people who could have needed saving that day in the ravine, it had to be him. The son of the man who burned my clan to ash.

I kept my head down and my scarf pulled tight, praying he wouldn’t look my way. But as the crowd began to move, funneling us toward the inner gates, I felt it. His eyes had stopped scanning the crowd. They’d stopped, and they were pointed straight at me.