Alpha's Forbidden Frequency

Chapter 3: Medical Assessment

Sleep refused to visit me that first night.

I lay beneath sheets softer than anything my fingers had ever touched, staring at a ceiling painted with faded constellations, listening to a Spire that never fully quieted. Footsteps echoed in distant corridors. Wolves howled at intervals that followed no pattern I could discern. Once I heard what sounded like a massive body dragging itself across stone, claws scraping, breath rattling, and I remembered Caspian's words about his curse. A limping ancient. A terrified pup. His wolf form cycling through ages without warning or mercy.

Morning arrived grey and cold through my narrow window. I had already dressed in the blue wool by the time Lena knocked on my door. She carried a tray with bread, hard cheese, and a cup of tea that smelled of herbs I could not identify.

"Medical assessment begins in one hour," she announced, setting the tray on my small table. "My lord has arranged for his personal physician to examine you."

"His personal physician examines auction purchases?"

"His personal physician examines anything he tells her to examine." Lena's tone suggested this was not a topic open for discussion. "Eat quickly. She does not appreciate lateness."

She left without another word. I ate because my body needed fuel, not because I tasted anything. The bread was fresh, the cheese sharp, the tea warm and faintly bitter. Low District meals had been thin gruel and protein paste for so long that my stomach nearly rejected real food. I forced it down anyway. Mila's medicine depended on my cooperation. Every bite was a payment toward her survival.

Lena returned precisely fifty minutes later and led me through a different set of corridors this time, wider and brighter, their walls lined with portraits of Alphas past. Men and women with the same silver hair and pale eyes as Caspian stared down at me from gilded frames. Some were depicted in human form, wearing formal coats with the Finch crest. Others were painted as wolves, massive and majestic, their eyes following me with an awareness that felt far too vivid for oil on canvas.

"The Finch line stretches back to the original clockmakers," Lena said, noticing my gaze. "Twelve families. Twelve packs. Twelve bloodlines that have ruled Neovictoria for one hundred and seventy-three years."

"Thirteen," I murmured.

Her step faltered. "I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. A story I heard once. Probably wrong."

But her expression had sharpened, and I realized my mistake. The Thirteenth Pack was not common knowledge. Their erasure had been thorough enough that mentioning them at all marked me as someone who knew things I should not know. I filed this observation beside the hundred other fragments I had collected since Caspian's carriage pulled up to the auction hall.

The medical wing occupied an entire floor near the Spire's middle tier. Glass cabinets lined the walls, filled with instruments whose purposes I could only guess at. Charts of wolf anatomy hung beside charts of human anatomy, the two forms compared in meticulous detail. A long examination table sat in the center of the room, its surface gleaming under the cold light of chronostatic lamps that did not flicker.

The physician was waiting.

She was older than Lena by at least two decades, her grey hair cropped short, her hands gnarled with arthritis that had not slowed her movements in the slightest. Sharp green eyes assessed me from behind spectacles whose lenses were tinted faintly amber. Her white coat was immaculate, her posture rigid, her expression the kind of neutral that required years of practice to perfect.

"I am Doctor Parrish," she said. "Remove your dress and sit on the table."

I hesitated.

"Remove your dress," she repeated, "and sit on the table. I have examined hundreds of acquisitions. Your modesty is not a variable that interests me."

I undressed. Cold air prickled my skin. The examination table was even colder, its surface smooth and hard and utterly unyielding. Doctor Parrish worked with brisk efficiency, her gnarled fingers surprisingly gentle as they probed my lymph nodes, measured my pulse, examined my eyes and ears and throat with instruments that hummed at frequencies just beyond my hearing.

"Your physical health is acceptable," she announced, making notes on a clipboard. "Mild malnutrition. Signs of chronic stress. A healed fracture in your left radius from childhood. Nothing that will interfere with whatever my lord intends for you."

"Then why the assessment?"

She looked at me over the rim of her spectacles. "Because my lord did not purchase you for your physical health. He purchased you for what lives inside your blood. That requires a different kind of examination entirely."

She crossed to a cabinet and withdrew a device I had never seen before. It resembled a tuning fork, but its tines were made of a metal that gleamed with the same violet light as the chronostatic lamps. Runes covered its handle, silver inscriptions that shifted slightly when I tried to focus on them.

"This is a Resonance Detector," Doctor Parrish said. "It measures supernatural frequencies in the blood. Shifters register one type of frequency. Chronodrifters register another. Resonants, according to historical records, register a third. A frequency that does not belong to the Constant Era. A wrong note in the Symphony of Correction."

"The wrong frequency."

Her green eyes sharpened. "You have heard that term before."

"I hear a hum. Have heard it since childhood. My mother told me to suppress it."

"And did you?"

A pause stretched between us. The tuning fork device hummed faintly in her grip, responding to something in the room that I could feel pressing against my ribs. "Until recently."

Doctor Parrish set the clipboard aside. Her expression had shifted from professional detachment to something more intense. Hunger, perhaps. Or fear. "I am going to activate the Detector now. It will resonate with any supernatural frequency in your bloodstream. Most subjects feel nothing. Some feel discomfort. A few have screamed. If you feel the urge to hum in response, do not suppress it. This room is shielded. No one outside will hear."

She struck the tuning fork against the edge of the examination table.

Sound filled the room like water rushing into a hollow space. Violet light pulsed from the runes along the handle, brightening in rhythm with a tone that climbed higher and higher until it reached a pitch just beyond normal hearing. My teeth ached. My chest tightened. The hum inside me, the wrong frequency I had spent nine years swallowing, surged upward with a force that nearly knocked me off the table.

I opened my mouth and hummed back.

The two frequencies met in the air between us and produced something that was not sound. Light bent. Shadows twisted in directions that violated geometry. The glass cabinets rattled. Doctor Parrish stumbled backward, her spectacles flying from her face, her gnarled hands pressed against her ears. On the wall behind her, the anatomy charts tore free from their pins and scattered across the floor.

Silence fell like a blade.

I sat on the examination table, gasping, my throat raw, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my fingertips. The Resonance Detector lay on the floor where Doctor Parrish had dropped it, its tines still vibrating faintly, its runes fading from violet back to dull silver.

Doctor Parrish picked up her spectacles with trembling hands. Her face had gone pale beneath her grey hair. "Remarkable. The Detector registered a frequency that should not exist in any living human. You are not merely a Resonant, Miss Volkov. You are something far rarer."

"What?"

"I cannot tell you here." She glanced at the door, then back at me, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "My lord will explain when he is ready. But I will tell you this much. That frequency you carry, it is not random noise. It is a song. A very specific song. And it was composed by someone who died over a century ago."

Alaric Finch. The name surfaced in my mind like a body rising from deep water. I did not speak it aloud.

"Will my sister receive her treatment?" I asked instead.

Doctor Parrish blinked, clearly surprised that this was my first question. "The payments have already been processed. Saint Verena's confirmed receipt this morning. Your sister will receive the best care available."

I slid off the examination table and reached for my dress. My hands were steady. My heart was not. "Then my lord will get what he paid for. Whatever that turns out to be."

"He will get far more than he paid for, Miss Volkov." Doctor Parrish retrieved the Detector from the floor and cradled it against her chest like something precious and dangerous. "That is what frightens me."

Lena was waiting in the corridor. She did not ask about the crash she must have heard. She did not ask why my eyes were watering or why my hands kept trembling. She simply led me back through the portrait-lined hallways and the narrow servant passages to my small clean room with its constellation ceiling and its window overlooking bare trees.

"Rest," she said. "My lord will summon you this evening."

"Summon me for what?"

But she was already closing the door.

I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my palm against my chest, feeling the hum circling beneath my ribs like a caged animal. Alaric Finch had composed a song. Caspian Finch had purchased the only person alive who could sing it. Somewhere above me, a cursed Alpha was waiting, and I was beginning to suspect that neither of us understood what we had set in motion.