Page 7 of The Healer and the Wolf: Part Two

I hated how weak I was, but whatever they were pumping into me severely limited my natural abilities. If I had to guess, I would think I had worse senses than a human now. I felt about as weak as a toddler. It was humbling, that was for certain.

But I still tried to fight. Granted, the keyword wastried. I wasn’t exactly successful, considering my heavily-damaged state. However, when they came to my holding cage to pull me out yet again, I made another attempt.

“You think he’d get the point by now,” one of the larger handlers said. Although I was often out of my mind from the drugs, I had been lucid enough to figure out that there was three classes within the staff of the medical facility.

First were what I called the scientists. I didn’t know if that was their actual classification, but that’s how they seemed to me with all of their poking, prodding, and writing down the results on their notepads, or typing them furiously into a tablet. They were clearly the head honchos of the day-to-day stuff, and my torturers.

Next were the handlers. The muscle. It definitely seemed like if you were mindless enough, they bewitched you somehow. Perhaps by a mindwalker or the remaining brothers. Considering the broad expanse of mindwalker abilities—humans knew them as psychics—I couldn’t really say one way or the other. But the handlers were the ones who got us in and out of cages and fought whenever anyone mustered up the strength to resist.

And lastly, the janitorial staff. There were only a few of them, and never more than two on one shift, but I got the feeling that all of them were there against their will. Maybe it was the soulless look in their eyes, or the way they were always working, monotonously trudging to their next task. It wasn’t like I could ask any of them—the muzzle around my mouth prevented speech. They didn’t want me to bite either them or myself. I couldn’t help but wonder how many they’d lost from that particular trick before figuring out a way to stop it. Normally, even chomping through one of the thick veins toward the broadest part of the tongue would heal before it could do much damage, but our situation was far from normal. I was pretty sure someone could stab me, and my wound would heal even slower than a human’s.

“Yes,” the other handler said so flatly, it pretty much confirmed my suspicion that not all of them were in full control of their faculties. That made me burn with even more rage for the brothers. They really had a knack for absolutely ruining people’s lives in the worst way possible.

Even though it was clear the more lucid one was mocking me, I still tried to fight as best I could, and just like every other time, it didn’t stop anything from happening. I still ended up strapped to that damn medical table in those impossible silver bonds.

I wanted to sneer at the scientists who only came in once I was fully secured. Wanted to taunt them about their cowardice and show them I wasn’t scared of their disgusting methods. But with the flat metal holding my tongue down, I could only glare. God, I hated them. One day, I would tear out all their throats.

Surely Ven would understand.

I tried to stay alert as one of the assistants disappeared into that first room with all the vials and returned with an IV bag that was a completely different color than any other they’d used before on me.

That was probably not a good thing.

God, after I’d been trapped in my wolf body for so long, I never would have thought I’d yearn to have it again. But being trapped in my human form wasn’t much better, and although I liked being sentient, I despised feeling vulnerable.

I could only glare at them as they hooked the IV and inserted the line into my arm. The first couple of times I’d woken up cold and exhausted in my holding cage, I’d ripped the IV out just to make their life a little more complicated. But every time they simply put a new one in, and in more inconvenient places than the last, so I’d given up on that particular method of resistance.

Sometimes it took a couple of minutes for me to feel the effects of whatever concoction they were giving me, but not this one. After being deprived of both halves of myself for quite a while, I could feel the call of my wolf almost instantly.

Joy rushed through me, a strange feeling in the hellscape I was in, but it was quickly snuffed out when I realized what was actually happening. I wasn’t shifting because I had suddenlygained the ability. I was shifting because the liquid pumping into my veins wasforcingme.

Ah, so it seemed that we were doubling down on that whole not-a-good thing.

Although I had no idea why they would possibly want to try to force me into my wolf form, it wasn’t something I wanted to hand over to them. I tried to fight it. I tried to resist, but it was like trying to subvert gravity. My wolf was an inevitable, primordial force rushing toward me, trying to swallow up everything I was.

Once more, I was struck by how much they could pervert everything about being a shifter. My wolf and I were supposed to be two halves of the same coin, working in conjunction with each other. We were the same yet different. One mind, one soul, spread across two forms.

But the drugs were subverting that, turning my wolf into a mindless beast ripping my thoughts in two as it tried to claw its way to the surface. It wasn’t me at all. It was something else.

I couldn’t shift. Icouldn’t. I needed to fight it as long as I could, even if it felt like I was trying to fight the urge to breathe. As inevitable as it seemed, I had totry.

Fur began to ripple down my body, and at that exact moment, the entire world seemed to shake. It was subtle at first, the warning before a storm, but then a true furor broke out.

Was it an earthquake?

No, that didn’t make sense. I was pretty sure we weren’t in a part of America where that was an issue. Whateverwashappening shook me so hard that my teeth—an uncomfortable combination of wolf canines and human bicuspids—rattled.

Everything was a haze of chaos as the lights around me flashed red and the staff straight up fled from the room. I tried to lift my body to see what was going on, but the restraints kept me in place. My fingers were beginning to crack and bend, unsurewhich form they were supposed to be, and I got the impression it was supposed to be painful, but I was so hopped up on whatever they’d given me, I couldn’t really feel it.

I hated how much they messed with my mind. I didn’t know if it was resisting the shift or the chemical cocktail that was causing my thoughts to begin to melt into each other and turn unintelligible. I only knew it was growing harder and harder to think by the second.

Thoughts were sliding into each other, as were the few colors I could make out through the haze of red lighting. My tongue was still sloppily trying to form words, fighting against the flat metal attached to my muzzle that was keeping it in place. Everything was a cacophony, a sheer torrent of sensation and information that my brain simply wasn’t capable of understanding.

But then, like an angel parting through all the fire and brimstone surrounding me, Ven’s face came into view.

She was so beautiful.

I’d always known that, but it struck me in the moment. Everything else was a blurry, confusing mess, but her face stood out in perfect clarity.

---