Because gods forbid you just enjoy finding your soul mate?
He sighed. Did everyone else have as contemptuous a relationship with his or her wolf as he did? This is fun for me.
“I’m telling you that if you wanted to, in order to protect your mate, you could fly to the moon using only a swat from your tail.”
“Theo, I don’t know if poetic references from fairytales are what’s called for in this situation.”
Theo only laughed, which made Az want to show him exactly what damage he could do with his tail. The thought stopped Az in his tracks. That was a fairly aggressive response, not something he usually bothered with where his brothers were concerned.
Maybe Theo was right, maybe he was out of synch and more…primal…due to his mate’s appearance and his inability to do anything about it.
He shook his head and looked down at the brown and white fur ball that he held in his arms. Narrowing his eyes, he realized she’d fallen asleep. This time he gave in and laughed aloud. Here he was obsessing over whether or not they were actually mated and what ramifications that meant for him and his future bride, the woman he was bound to for eternity, who he still had yet to lay eyes on, had fallen asleep in his arms.
Theo followed his gaze. “I guess she was tired after the fire. She’s probably not used to the chaos like we are.”
This sobered Az immediately. Was it a bad sign that his brother had twice now had to explain the woman to him? Why couldn’t he be as attuned to her needs as Theo?
“Theo, she dragged me across the lab with her teeth.”
“They’re all very strong, stronger than ‘normal’ wolves, maybe as strong as we are. You haven’t encountered one in battle yet. They really kick ass. Dad knew what he was doing when he created them.” Theo visibly shuddered. “It would be great if you could figure out how to turn them back so we could take away that advantage.”
“Are you under the impression that I’m not trying to get it done? Because I have been doing nothing else for months. All I do all day, every day, is work on the ‘man made’ wolf problem. You guys bring them in, I work on them, they die, and I burn their dead carcasses. Sound like a lot of fun to you? Sound like something you’d spend more than one extra second doing if you had the chance?”
Yeah, tell him to go screw himself.
Theo put his hands out in front of him in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry, Az, I mean clearly you must be doing something right if Dad is attempting to destroy your lab. We all know how hard you’ve been working. Maybe after your mating, your mind will feel clearer.”
“Dad has been trying to kill me since I was born, remember? When I was two days old he tried to drown me in the bathtub and as for the mating, there is a big problem there—mainly that she is currently a wolf without a human body. I have no idea what to do about this very large problem.”
Az started moving forward, Theo followed next to him, his hands in his pockets. A slight drizzle fell from the sky, not unusual for Maine in the early spring, and Az after checking to make sure the blanket was fully covering his lady wolf, raised his head to the sky to let some of the light rain spray his face.
“I remember when Dad did that. It was horrifying…and in retrospect, probably the beginning of his decline into madness.”
“If Mom hadn’t come along when she did, I’d be dead.”
“Actually, I think it was Gabriel who saved you.”
Az stopped dead in his tracks. “What?”
“I know the story always was that Mom came along and stopped Dad but I’m fairly certain it was Gabriel who told Mom what Dad was up to, risking Dad’s wrath. She took all the blame to spare him.”
So now Az officially owed Gabriel twice for saving his life. “I guess I’ve always been a little confused as to why the pack didn’t throw him out of Alpha position for trying to kill his own son.”
“No one outside of the Kane family knew anything about it.”
He nodded. “That’s what I always figured.”
And if I’d been around back then he’d have been a dead man.
A thought occurred to him. “Why did Tristan and Cullen take their families offisland?”
“Ashlee and Summer wanted to get the babies vaccinated.”
“They wanted to what?” Why hadn’t anybody discussed this with him? One of his five degrees was in medicine. Granted, it was fifty years out of date…
“They’re concerned the pups might be susceptible to human diseases like measles or polio.”
“We don’t get sick like that.”
“I know that and you know that but the Morrison girls are still convinced the fact that their children are one quarter pure human might leave them open to those kinds of illnesses.”
“Theo,” Az scratched his head. “We have been marrying humans on and off for hundreds of years. There has never—ever—been a recorded case of anyone even catching a cold. Why on earth would Tristan let her think the pups could get sick?”
Tristan and Ashlee had three children. When Az was actually outside of the lab, he loved being with Braden, Virginia, and the new baby, Elizabeth. Secretly, although he suspected Tristan knew of the jokes, the pack liked to say that Tristan and Ashlee were trying to repopulate the pack all by themselves. Summer, Ashlee’s baby sister, and Cullen, the pack’s enforcer, had just had their first child, a son they’d named Jude.
Already whispers flew around the pack about a future Kane/Murphy mating. Shifters liked to gossip. Matings however, as Az knew, were left to the Fates and not the speculations of the wolf pack. Not to mention they’d be first cousins…
“Tristan and Cullen learned quickly that one does not tell one’s mate anything, one simply goes along to help them not get killed.”
“Alright, but an unnecessary vaccination…”
Az stopped speaking midsentence. Ideas always came to him like a car slamming into a wall on the side of the highway. Impact was rough but if he was lucky he lived to talk about them. Vaccinations, the doctor stuck a small amount of a dead pathogen, or maybe in some cases a live one, into you giving your immune system the opportunity to develop immunity to it instead of having to develop a full blown case. That way if you came into contact with whatever you were being inoculated against—say the measles—
you wouldn’t catch it because your body would think you already had as it had the immunities stored up.
Az’s head whirled. It was so damn simple. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Not all vaccinations lasted. Children—humans at least—had to sometimes be revaccinated for certain diseases. Sticking with the measles theme, he wanted to dance. Human doctors had to give the MMR vaccine at least twice during childhood and sometimes again if they knew a patient was leaving the country and going somewhere where there might be an outbreak.
That was what the drug was. It was acting like a counter-vaccine; it was stopping the bodies of the wolves from using its immune system to fight off the disease that was the wolf body Kendrick had given them. They weren’t supposed to be wolves. It was like a disease. Too much suppression and the body overreacted to the pathogen—thus killing the wolf.
He wasn’t any closer to knowing how the witches were hoisting the wolf on the poor souls to begin with but maybe he could keep them alive a little longer. Maybe he could keep his mate, and it was scary how fast he’d started to think of her that way considering he still didn’t know her name, from dying on him before he learned the cause of the initial transformation.
Theo stared at him. “You look like a kid in a candy store.”
Are you going to try to explain it?