Alpha's Forbidden Frequency

Chapter 5: Doctor Parrish's Verdict

Medical wing lights burned brighter than I remembered.

Doctor Parrish had activated every chronostatic lamp in the examination room, their combined violet glow casting harsh shadows across her lined face. She moved around the examination table with quick, precise gestures, her gnarled hands somehow steady despite the hour and the urgency. Instruments I could not name clicked and hummed as she passed them over the small silver-furred body curled against my chest.

"He refuses to leave her," Darian said from her position near the door. Arms crossed. Jaw tight. Sword still strapped across her back. "I tried to separate them. He clawed into her dress and whined loud enough to echo through the entire training hall."

"Then she stays." Doctor Parrish did not look up from her instruments. "Hold him still, Miss Volkov. This next scan will feel uncomfortable."

A low vibration passed through the pup's body. His small claws dug deeper into my dress, pricking the skin beneath. I did not flinch. His pale blue eyes, Caspian's eyes trapped in a face too young to hold them, stared up at me with an awareness that felt increasingly desperate. He understood what was happening. He simply could not speak to stop it.

"Fascinating," Doctor Parrish murmured. "The Resonance Detector registers his frequency as stable for the first time since I began monitoring him six years ago. His Temporal Dysplasia has not vanished, but it has paused. Your song, Miss Volkov, whatever note you produced in that training hall, temporarily arrested his condition."

"Temporarily." Darian pushed off from the wall. "How temporarily?"

"Impossible to say without further testing. But his vitals are stronger than I have ever recorded. His wolf form, despite being neonatal, shows no signs of the deterioration that usually accompanies his shifts. He is healthy. For now."

"For now." I repeated her words because they needed repeating. "What happens when it wears off?"

Doctor Parrish removed her spectacles and polished them on the edge of her white coat. The gesture looked habitual, something she did when stalling for time. "When the effect wears off, his body will attempt to resume its normal pattern. Given the severity of his condition before tonight, that resumption could be violent. Shifts cycling faster than ever. Pain beyond what his current medications can manage. There is a reason I have not been able to cure him, Miss Volkov. Temporal Dysplasia is not a disease. It is a fundamental instability in the bond between his human soul and his wolf spirit. Something fractured that bond many years ago. Your frequency temporarily bridges the fracture. It does not heal it."

"Then I need to keep singing."

"You need to understand what you are before you sing another note." She replaced her spectacles and fixed me with a stare that carried the full weight of her decades. "What do you know of the Thirteenth Pack?"

Silence crashed through the examination room. Darian went rigid near the door. The pup in my arms stopped trembling. Even the chronostatic lamps seemed to dim slightly, as if the question itself had drained energy from the room.

"Nothing official," I said carefully. "Stories only. Fragments overheard in Low District markets. A pack erased from history. A thirteenth clockmaker who refused to participate in the Correction."

"A thirteenth clockmaker named Alaric Finch." Doctor Parrish pulled a stool toward the examination table and sat down heavily, her joints protesting the movement. "Alaric was Caspian's ancestor. He was also the creator of the First Pendulum, the device that allowed the original twelve clockmakers to merge with wolf spirits and overwrite reality. What the official histories never mention is that Alaric did not merely refuse to participate in the final ritual. He built a countermeasure into the Pendulum itself. A frequency that, if sung by the right voice, could unmake everything his colleagues created."

"Song-Wolves," I whispered.

Darian inhaled sharply. Doctor Parrish nodded slowly.

"Song-Wolves. Female shifters whose wolf forms manifested as sound rather than physical transformation. They were the Thirteenth Pack. Alaric's pack. His daughters, his nieces, his granddaughters, every woman born to his bloodline carried the ability to sing frequencies that could stabilize or destabilize temporal magic. The other twelve packs hunted them to extinction a century ago. Or so they believed."

I looked down at the silver-furred pup nestled against my chest. His pale eyes stared back at me, and I saw knowledge in them. Caspian had known. From the moment he bid five thousand chrono-marks, he had known exactly what I was.

"My mother," I said. "She was erased in a Correction sweep when I was ten. My sister Mila lies in a hospital bed with temporal sickness. We are the last Song-Wolves, are we not?"

"You are the last Resonant. Your sister's blood has not yet been tested, but her illness suggests dormant ability rather than active power." Doctor Parrish leaned forward, her green eyes intense behind her spectacles. "Your mother was not erased by random chance, Miss Volkov. She was targeted. Someone within the Synchrony discovered her bloodline and ordered a Correction sweep to eliminate her before she could pass her knowledge to her daughters. They failed. You survived. You hummed in your sleep for years, and eventually, a seer detected that frequency."

"Caspian's seer."

"Madame Flux. She was once a member of the Synchrony Council. She recanted after the m******e of the Thirteenth Pack. She has been searching for surviving Song-Wolves ever since, not to destroy them, but to protect them. She believes restoring the Thirteenth Pack is the only way to break the Synchrony's stranglehold on the Constant Era."

Darian strode forward, her scarred face tight with anger. "You are telling me my Alpha purchased a Song-Wolf. The one creature in existence that every other pack will unite to destroy. He brought her into Finch Spire. He bound her with a silver contract. He exposed every member of this household to the wrath of the entire Synchrony."

"He exposed us to hope." Doctor Parrish rose from her stool with the careful dignity of someone who had lived long enough to stop fearing political consequences. "The Constant Era is failing, Darian. You have seen the signs as clearly as I have. Chronoclasts are collapsing faster. The Correction is missing more deviations each year. The packs grow more desperate, more brutal, more willing to sacrifice anything to maintain their power. Alaric Finch built a fail safe into the Pendulum because he foresaw this decay. He knew that a system built on suppression could not last forever. Iskra Volkov is that fail safe. She is the key he hid inside the lock."

"And what happens when the other packs learn she exists?"

"They already suspect. Why do you think Caspian paid five thousand chrono-marks at a public auction? He was not merely purchasing her. He was announcing to every rival Alpha in Neovictoria that the Finch Pack has found something worth protecting. He is daring them to challenge him."

The pup in my arms began to shudder. His small body tensed. His pale eyes squeezed shut. I felt the shift building before I saw it, a pressure change in the air around him, a vibration that traveled up my arms and into my chest.

"He is changing back," I said.

Doctor Parrish grabbed her instruments. Darian stepped forward, her hand moving toward her sword again. The pup's form blurred, silver light bleeding from his fur, bones cracking and reforming beneath my palms. I held on because letting go felt like abandonment, and something in my gut told me abandonment would break whatever fragile bridge my song had built between us.

Caspian Finch materialized on the examination table, human again, his head resting against my shoulder, his silver hair damp with sweat. He was not wearing the training clothes he had shifted out of. Those had been shredded. He was wrapped in a sheet Doctor Parrish had clearly kept ready for this possibility. His pale eyes opened and found mine from inches away.

"You know," he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by the transformation.

"I know what you purchased. I know what I am. I know your ancestor composed the song I have been hearing since childhood."

"And?"

"And I have not decided what to do with that knowledge."

He pushed himself upright, clutching the sheet around his waist. His hands were still trembling, but the tremor was less violent than before. His gaze shifted to Doctor Parrish. "Report."

"Your vitals are the strongest I have recorded in six years. Her frequency temporarily stabilized your condition. The pup form you manifested was healthy, aware, and free of deterioration markers. I cannot explain the mechanism yet, but the effect is undeniable."

"How long did it last?"

"Approximately forty minutes. Long enough to transport you here and complete initial scans."

Caspian swung his legs off the examination table and stood. The sheet barely preserved his modesty. Darian averted her eyes. I did not. He had purchased the right to command me. That did not mean I owed him the courtesy of looking away.

"Forty minutes of stability," he said. "Forty minutes without pain. I have not experienced forty minutes without pain since I was fourteen years old and this curse first manifested." His pale eyes locked onto mine. "You will sing for me again."

It was not a request.

"You will answer my questions first." My voice emerged steadier than I felt. "All of them. About Alaric. About the m******e. About what you intend to do when the other packs discover what I am. You have purchased my body and my frequency. You have not purchased my cooperation. That must be earned."

Darian made a strangled sound. "No one speaks to the Alpha like that."

"I am not no one. I am a Song-Wolf. According to your own physician, I am the fail safe hidden inside the machine that built this world. If Caspian Finch wants my song, he will give me the truth first."

Silence stretched across the examination room. Doctor Parrish busied herself with her instruments, clearly choosing not to intervene. Darian's hand remained frozen on her sword hilt, awaiting an order that did not come. Caspian Finch stared at me with those winter-pale eyes, and something shifted in his expression. Not warmth. Not affection. But perhaps the first faint stirring of respect.

"Tomorrow," he said. "You will have your answers tomorrow. Tonight I need to speak with my Beta and my physician about what happened in the training hall. Lena will escort you back to your room."

"And my sister?"

"Mila Volkov remains under my protection. Her bills are paid. Her specialist arrived this morning. She is receiving better care than any patient in Saint Verena's history. I keep my promises, Iskra Volkov. Even the ones I make to tools."

He said the last word with a faint emphasis that suggested he was testing me. I refused to react.

"Tomorrow," I repeated. "If you break that promise, I will not sing for you again. I will swallow my frequency until it chokes me before I let you use it without honesty."

I gathered my charcoal dress around me and walked toward the door where Lena had appeared, summoned by some silent signal I had not detected. Behind me, I heard Caspian exhale slowly.

"You have no idea what you are," he murmured.

I paused at the threshold. "Neither do you. That is what frightens you."

Lena closed the door on his silence.