Chapter 156: Whisperer
MARGAUX
Restlessness took hold of me, refusing to let me be still.
Aimless movement only sharpened my frustration. I paced the infirmary twice, drifted to the window, then froze—haunted by the memory of Étienne standing there just ten minutes earlier, when everything was still uncertain, not yet a vanishing certainty.
"Can I get you something to drink?" The head healer’s voice came from behind me, careful and professionally neutral. "Water, at least."
"No." I turned to face him. "Thank you."
He nodded but lingered, his presence weighted with unspoken words he had not yet chosen to release.
"What you said earlier," he began.
"Which part?"
"About seeing and speaking to the spirit of Alpha Theodore." He held my gaze with the particular steadiness of someone who had made a decision about how they were going to handle a conversation and intended to follow through with it. "Was that actually true?"
I studied him for a heartbeat, searching his face.
"You probably think it sounds insane," I said.
"No." He shook his head once, simply. "I genuinely do not."
"Why not?"
He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone avoiding the question, but the quiet of someone choosing where to start.
"My sister," he said. "She used to say things like that. When we were young, and even after. She would describe seeing people that were not there, and colors coming off of people like smoke, and connections between people that she could follow like string."
A new weight settled in my chest, shifting something inside me.
"The threads," I said. "You are talking about the threads."
He looked at me sharply. "She used that word exactly."
"I see them too," I said. "Not quite like smoke. More like string, the way you described. Running between people, and different colors."
He took it in without the skepticism or guarded distance I had come to expect from others.
That made me look at his fingers to see which thread we both shared, and, surprisingly, I saw a color I had not seen before.
It looked white. No. It was not pure white. If anything, it had a metallic sheen. Silver. That was what it was.
I then looked back at his face.
"Where is she now?" I asked. "Your sister."
"She left the pack some years ago." He moved to the counter and straightened instruments that did not need straightening, the small busy motion of someone who found certain topics easier to discuss while their hands were occupied.
"Oh..."
"She is not in the alliance against rank or anything of that nature. She simply wanted a different life. A quieter one. She lives in the human world now and seems, from what I can tell, genuinely content."
"Do you still see her?"
"When I can." Something brief and warm moved across his face. "She was always the stranger one between us. I spent years thinking she was a little bit—" he paused, searching for the word, "—untethered from reality. I told myself she had constructed an elaborate internal world because the real one disappointed her." A pause then followed. "I think I was wrong about that."
"I would like to meet her," I said, before I had fully decided to say it. "If that would not be strange."
"It would not be strange to me," he said. "I cannot speak for her, but I am quite sure she will be generally more welcoming of people who see what she sees than people who do not."
I looked down at the encyclopedia still tucked under my arm, the one Alpha Amine’s apparition had led me to in the library, and thought about everything I still did not know and was only beginning to understand.
"Did she ever have a name for it?" I asked. "What she could do. What she is. It is stupid. But I found this book with information, and some part of me thinks I can find something about it there."
He considered the question with genuine care, the expression of someone sorting through old memories for a specific detail.
"I always assumed she simply did not like being categorized as a standard werewolf," he said slowly. "She chafed against a great many pack structures and labels. But she did use one word, consistently, whenever she referred to herself in that context." He paused. "Whisperer."
A sharp breath caught in my throat.
"She called herself a whisperer."
I looked down at the encyclopedia in my hands.
A whisperer. That was a new word. But it seemed like something that would be in a book like this. It helped to learn that I was not the only one who had this going on. So that meant my case could not be novel. The encyclopedia had to include something that discussed it. I was certain about it, and I was about to open it to find the page, when Theodore’s voice surfaced in my memory with the clarity of something I had almost managed to set aside in the rush of the last hour.
The promise I had made him.
Alpha Dorian.
I had promised to deliver what he had told me, and then I had left Céline alive in that study with a broken finger and full knowledge of everything Theodore had revealed.
Céline, who knew exactly what would await her if any of this came to light.
Céline, who had looked me in the eye and said that if she was going to suffer, she would not suffer alone.
My blood turned to ice.
Fear made people beg.
Desperation made them bargain.
But cornered people, people with nothing left to lose, did something far worse.
They burned everything down with them.
I had left her alone.
Behind a closed door.
With enough time to decide that if she was falling, she would drag every last one of us into the abyss beside her.
A worm afraid would turn.
I dropped the encyclopedia onto the nearest cot.
"Alpha Dorian," I said, already moving toward the door.
"Luna Margaux—"
I was in the corridor before he finished the sentence, and the sound of his footsteps following me told me he had decided, sensibly, that staying behind was not an option.