Page 120 of The Stone Initiation
“I didn’tdoanything. Do you think Iwantedto go into the damn forest and get fucked?”
“I don’t know you well enough to guess your motives, Miss Walker.”
Fine. “Look, I felt shitty, so I went to lie down. I fell asleep, dreamt about the moon and…” I shook my head. “It’s fuzzy after that, but I woke up in the forest.”
“You felt ill before. What symptoms?” he asked.
“Achy, feverish. Just ick. Look, I don’t get sick. I’veneverbeen ill, so I just thought it was from training too hard.”
Willowman rubbed his jaw then relit his smoke and took a drag. “Strange. You were tested at the intake building. Blood tests show you to be a halfblood with alpha tendencies. Nothing abnormal there.”
“But she got through the wards,” Selas said. “Has a halfblood ever done that?”
“None has ever tried,” Willowman said. “Maybe the wards mistook you for an omega.” He didn’t sound convinced though.
“Did the gargoyles inside the damn forest mistake me too?” I glared at him. “They chased me.”
“Omega run puts the males in a primal rut state,” Willowman said.
“I know, but they said they could smell me. Since when do alpha females produce a scent to attract random males?”
“You’re not an alpha, you’re a halfblood with alphatendencies.”
I threw up my hands. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you might have been an alpha if you’d been a pure blood,” Selas explained.
“The fact that you’re Serath’s mate means that you most certainly will be able to produce a mating pheromone.” Willowman added.
“But it should be specific to him, right?” Selas asked.
“Right,” Willowman looked intrigued. “I can take some samples. Blood, hair, saliva, and see what I can find, but halfbloods are…varied. There could be a host of reasons the males reacted to you in this way. The moon, the primal rut, and the air being saturated with pheromones could have confused them.”
But he was wrong. “It happened earlier too. Before I went to sleep. Touron said he could smell me. That I smelled good. His pupils dilated.”
“Touron?” Selas asked sharply. “What did he do?”
“He didn’tdoanything. He backed off and went to his room.”
She looked away and nodded. “Okay, so the scent was there before you went into the forest.”
Something clattered at the back of the cottage, and Sela’s head whipped toward the inner door. “You got company?” she asked him.
He crushed out his cigarette in the small ceramic ashtray on the table. “It’s just Varsa. I let him have the spare room.”
“He’s staying here?” Selas didn’t look happy about it. “I thought the administration gave him rooms in the main building.”
“He doesn’t like the main building. He likes it here,” Willowman said tightly.
She sighed. “But you can’t be on hand all the time, and he needs help.”
“There is no help,” Willowman bit out. “And sending him to be around people he doesn’t know would be severing the only connection he has to the reality he recalls.” His jaw ticked. “Not happening. He stays here with me, and we’re done discussing it.” He looked across at me pointedly.
“We should collect these samples,” Selas said.
“I’ll grab my supplies.” Willowman pushed back his chair and headed into a back room.
I waited until he was gone. “What happened to Varsa?”
