Graeme sat in a chair next to his bed, running his hands through his hair. It felt too long. He hadn’t cut it or shaved since the Marius episode, which had now been three weeks. He groaned into his hands.

Once again he was running through it all in his mind—what he could have done differently when Marius showed up that day. He should have been right next to her when the bastard walked in the room. He should have positioned himself between them, and things never would have escalated like they did.

Or rather than reacting to Marius touching her, Graeme should have waited until Lucas was taking her away. But August’s apparent gift of sight or touch or whatever it was threw him off. She looked traumatized mere moments after Marius touched her face.

Graeme ran his hands over his own bristly face in frustration. Thinking about it over and over again wouldn’t change anything, but it didn’t make any difference. He was tormented by it. And worse, she would be tormented with those memories, too, in addition to what happened to her in the forest.

He looked up at the unconscious August in his bed. She was hooked up to lines and fluids and monitors that Greta had brought over. After Greta had taken care of August’s arm and they cleaned her up, Graeme immediately took her out of there. He couldn’t bare to have her wake up in that room again. Or even that house.

The elders wouldn’t allow him to take her out of pack territory after what happened with Marius. Although Marius was alive and locked up (unfortunately Graeme didn’t kill him when he had the chance), they still required that August come before them for a hearing if she did wake. When she did wake. Graeme suspected they were hoping he would reconsider taking up his place in the pack with a Luna by his side. It would make them all stronger.

For now, he and Greta were monitoring August’s condition in Graeme’s default home on pack territory. It had started as a treehouse that their parents had built for them when they were kids. At that time, it had been a fun camping and sleepover spot where they could stay with friends—away from their parents but still close enough not to be in danger.

A few years ago, Graeme had decided to renovate the treehouse into a proper home for when he was visiting. He didn’t like imposing on Greta and her mate, Samuel, and he worried that staying with them would cause them trouble if anyone decided to protest his presence in the area. Plus, the treehouse was fairly secluded and private, which was the way he preferred it.

Nobody knew how long August would take to regain consciousness, because her condition and the way she had suddenly gained strength and then abruptly lost it was a mystery. Initially, they expected her to wake fairly quickly, thinking she had just collapsed due to exhaustion. But three weeks had stretched on now, and there were still no answers.

Greta thought August’s coma was self-induced, like some kind of innate defense mechanism that had to do with the catalyst drug she had received from Eliade. Whatever had caused it, Graeme lost track of the days since it started. He wasn’t sleeping much, and when he did sleep, it wasn’t well. Greta would typically arrive in the morning to check on August and find Graeme slumped over in a chair next to the bed.

“You need to start taking care of yourself. You can’t be here for her if you aren’t here for yourself,” she had said.

“Thanks, mom,” he had replied dryly. But he didn’t seem to be listening to her.

Greta, on the other hand, had buried herself in her own research. She was vaguely familiar with the catalyst that Eliade was using in a final step of coaxing out the changes the virus was attempting to make in the humans infected.

Unbeknownst to most, this virus had been expertly designed to alter the human genome in order to create a superior race of individuals that would, if successful, inherit the responsibility of deflecting the earth from its current path of ruin.

The virus was meant to be an attempt at reversing human overpopulation in the form of a new pandemic that would strengthen few while weakening the rest. The plan was insanely grandiose, which is why no one aware of the research took it seriously. Until this year.

August was among a student cohort specifically targeted for what seemed to be initial success of the retrovirus to begin altering their genes on a multicellular level. While others in the global population became seriously ill and many died, those whose bodies were successful in accepting the new genes showed no adverse affects aside from one obvious sign: a peculiar rash that appeared for several days before leaving a scar. August’s had appeared on her left shoulder, and now a translucent scattered pattern like a constellation of stars remained as a reminder of her infection and an unfortunate identifier to researchers of her unique status.

The community of researchers and scientists responsible for the virus drew upon clandestine genetic knowledge of a variety of other creatures that existed in the shadows, having disappeared from public knowledge into stories, myths, and legends—lycans amongst them.

The scientists believed these creatures to now be extinct, as no trace could be found of them on the globe any longer, but—like time capsules—fragments of their DNA still existed in extant humans. The diverse species of creatures had clearly mated with humans successfully for generations before, and their descendants maintained this kind of latent potential for a hybrid. Those scientists privy aimed to bring a purer form of the departed creatures into being to strengthen humans, if only by genetic manipulation.

Lycans—clearly not extinct and rather hiding successfully in the shadows of the ever-decreasing wilds of the world—had been aware of this research for decades, but it wasn’t until recently that any of them imagined how close the virus was to a reality. And now it had been let loose on the world, much to their dismay.

Still, no one who was aware of the true nature of the virus believed it would be successful. More than likely, it would end up as just another mysterious pandemic that came and went, leaving the world scarred in a new way and conspiracy theorists to reimagine what really happened. Nevertheless, a general unease had been born.

From what August had said, Graeme suspected her stepfather had actually received money to send her to Eliade as a guinea pig for what would be the final stage of the experiment. The university was performing tests and producing data without the students even being aware of it, and there were universities distributed around the globe doing the same. But there were still many unknowns with these kinds of experiments.

August had suddenly exhibited superhuman strength, but it seemed to disappear as quickly as it came. She wasn’t healing at an accelerated rate like lycans either, so it clearly wasn’t a simple matter of lycan genes being activated.

What was especially concerning to both Greta and Graeme was how her fever kept returning. It was spiking higher each time. The fever had been associated with excruciating pain the two times August experienced it while conscious—but the cause of fever and pain was a mystery. And August seemed to be getting weaker now after each episode. If these spells kept escalating in intensity without activating some kind of radical change in her condition, it was unlikely she would survive.

“I have a theory,” Greta had said that morning.