Read Online Tristan's Lyceum Wolves by Kym Grosso - Free Book Online Page B

suffered nightmares, always with the animal scratching to come out and have its due. She’d remembered the tales the other pack girls had told, describing the symptoms of their first time. That was how she looked at it; an illness to be cured. Kalli knew it would come on the full moon, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
    Scared and alone, she’d managed to get out of the city and into the mountains in preparation. She’d rented an isolated cabin in the Catskills, and waited. The excruciating pain of the shift took her by surprise even though she’d known it was coming. After running and killing throughout the night, she’d woken up naked, curled into a hole of a rotted-out tree. Covered in blood and dirt, she’d cried hysterically, believing she was cursed for life. For years she’d repeated the ghastly process, month after month, until she became a doctor and discovered ‘the cure’.
    After graduation, she’d earned an assistantship, which paid for her grad school. The residency opportunity in Philadelphia had led to a permanent position at UVH. She was able to practice, utilizing state of the art medicine, while continuing to blend into society. And it was there she’d found salvation from the beast.
    In reality, her drug didn’t cure her of her wolf. But it kept her at bay, caged and unable to shift. Relentlessly, Kalli had worked; she’d rarely eaten or slept, determined to develop a drug to stop the transformation. On the twenty-second trial, it had worked; Canis Lupis Inhibitor (CLI) kept her from shifting, even on a full moon. Side effects, aside from preventing shifting, included chills and aches, but they only occurred if she missed a daily dose. Enhanced hearing and smell were slightly suppressed but not entirely gone. The discovery allowed Kalli to go months without shifting, and she reveled in finally being human. Best of all, no wolf or vampire could detect her wolf, as far as she could tell, anyway. Of course a simple blood test would reveal her true nature, but other than that, she appeared wholly human.
    After she began taking CLI, she kept refining the drug, seeking other useful purposes for it. She experimented, theorizing the drug could help aggressive animals in the canis genus to reduce anxiety. Since they were not supernatural, she envisioned a one dose treatment that would positively affect their emotions. She hadn’t come too far with that side of her research, but initial projections looked promising. Still, she kept all of her work under lock and key in an effort to hide her identity.
    Truth be told, Kalli avoided purposeful contact with supernaturals. She’d only done one full-fledged test of the formula to see if she could or could not be detected as wolf. By all accounts, the exercise had been a success, yet that one experiment had proved to be her most critical mistake. Last month, she and a co-worker had gone to Eden. Well aware that it was run by a wolf and frequented by vampires, her curiosity had got the better of her.
    Kalli had danced all night, hoping her pheromones would attract a vampire or wolf. Yet every man who approached was human. She’d even approached female wolves and vampires, engaging them in casual conversation, and not one had identified her as wolf. Rather, she was called out as a human by more than one supernatural. She’d left the club in triumph, celebrating the success of her drug.
    But in her efforts to do research, she’d also noticed the fifteen foot yellow boa slithering around behind the bar. A spectacular and healthy specimen; it was like having a private viewing at a reptile exhibit at the zoo. While she didn’t specialize in reptiles, she held an appreciation for a species that had survived through the ages.
    The vivarium, extraordinarily large, with its heated rocks, trees and flowing water, was an excellent example of how a large snake could be kept safely in captivity. Personally, she did not advocate anyone owning or raising a