Lone Werewolf Duology (bxb)

23. The Pink Cottage

June 2017, Montana, USA

Next morning Volya sat on his cot in Mnemosyne's lab, fighting a bit of grogginess and trying to hide that he was fighting anything. He'd just endured an excruciatingly long physical, so he didn't want any stupid wooziness to ruin the favorable verdict.

Sangha lifted her head from the computer screen, glanced at him with something reminiscent of admiration. "Well, color me surprised. You've beaten the very best in historic poisons in record time."

A weird sense of pride bubbled up inside Volya—take that, poison!—but a worm of doubt stirred in his soul. "Dr. Sangha, what do you mean, historic?" Like, outdated? Not good enough?

"Pre-modern." That explained absolutely nothing. His reaction must have been written clearly on his features, because Sangha smiled and added," daSilva concluded that the poison was a mix of mineral components that were used for centuries, like arsenic and mercury, and an organic toxin. It's plant based, but he is still running the DNA comparisons to identify which plant or plants it was specifically."

"I see."

"This means you're lucky," Sangha said. "They didn't have access to the modern poisons that have far higher toxicity."

"Or they didn't want to kill me," Volya replied, "only to scare me." Or hurt him. His twin wanted to hurt him... he couldn't decide which intent turned his barely recovered stomach more.

"Or that," Sangha agreed.

He didn't like the intensity of her gaze. They weren't two friends chit-chatting. He was a bug under her microscope, always. Or, like, a wolf, though they couldn't put big mammals under a microscope. They collected samples, then they put them under a microscope. And he felt he'd provided enough samples for now. It was time to radically change the subject.

"So, I can—" Volya tilted his head toward the Mnemosyne.

Sangha chewed her lips, "Hmm. Technically you have a clean bill of health—"

Volya slipped off the cot before she could bring up counseling again. Maybe an attempt on your life called for one, but he didn't need it. He made a silent prayer of thanks that he didn't sway on his feet. "So I can."

Unfortunately, the red goo remained unaffected by the fighting words and steely resolve on that day... or the next... or even the day after that. Such was the price of hubris. The Mnemosyne gave him nothing, save for more howling. Way more howling. As the moon grew rounder in the night sky—waxed—the weird impulse grew stronger and stronger.

The moon had never bothered Volya before. Heck, he barely even noticed it, unless it hung full and bright in front of his nose during some boyish escapade. Now he feared that the Mnemosyne added this annoying bodily function permanently and doomed him to move through a monthly cycle of howling for the rest of his life.

Another uneasy feeling grew—Volya knew better than the scientists. Yes, he was seventeen, with one more year of grade school to go, and they were adults with Ph.D.s, but he knew better what had to be done.

They kept telling him he was a genetic marvel. Maybe, it wasn't even a discovery. Maybe, they'd just confirmed what he had always known, that he was capable of more than your average seventeen year-old orphan from Solobodinsk. Not that he'd ever had being a werewolf in mind, but if he were one, he should know more than all of them taken together about being a werewolf and magic.

If he were a maverick, then it was time to stop waffling about and act like one.

So, in the end, he trusted his crazy instinct and did what his guts told him to do. He went to see the person who was also sidelined by the scientific discourse into a study subject, rather than its participant: Anabelle.