Factors of Change Ch. 07

I laughed. "What did you do, then?"

"I managed it. It was only me and my father; my mother died when I was still a baby. My father was a good cook, but had no knowledge of numbers. I held the books, placed the orders with the suppliers, managed the employees, that sort of thing."

"Like an accountant?"

"Like a manager," he corrected, giving me a warning look. "I have always liked managing business. Playing with numbers, investing money, and watching it grow." He smirked. "And I am good at it."

I laughed at the look on his face. "Only now you do it with a whole pack. I'm glad to see it's in good hands."

He smiled at me before looking back down at his coffee. "I liked my job, and worked a lot. I was outside the rest of the time. Trekking, biking, and climbing. I have been outside my entire life. Joseph was my partner since we were children."

I felt my smile fade. "Is that how you hurt your back?"

"It was so stupid," he said with a shake of his head. "I could go trekking in dangerous mountains, downhill ski in the Alps and climb dangerous cliffs without ever hurting myself." He sighed. "When I was 26, in the winter, Joey and I were simply hiking in the Laurentians when I thought I saw something between the trees." He paused, and sighed again. "I stepped off the official track like a beginner, to try and see what it was, and stepped in a patch of soft, deep snow. I sunk in it all the way down to my thigh, lost my balance and ended up slipping and rolling all the way down the steep hill. I remember breaking through a few bushes, hitting my head, and nothing else." He shut his eyes, and I could tell how upset this was making him through our newly made bond. "When I finally woke up, I was lying on my back in a ditch, I had the mother of all migraines, and Joseph was sitting next to me, trying to get a fire started. And I could not feel or move my legs." The last words were spoken so quietly that I could barely hear them. "Two hours later, two men followed the smoke and found us, and Joey left with one of them to get some help while the other did his best to keep me awake. I was in a helicopter on my way to a hospital by the end of the night, crying the whole way to Montreal, because I was convinced that I could never walk again."

"Did you break your back?" I asked in a soft voice.

He nodded. "Two lumbar vertebrae crushed, very little chance of recovery," he said softly. "I went through surgery to retrieve bits of bones that had lodged themselves in the spinal cord, and they had hopes that it would bring back some sensation, but..." He shook his head. "It did not work."

I watched him closely, while trying to decipher the emotion I could feel from him. He had gone back to his expressionless face, but from now on I knew it would never work with me; he was so upset I could feel it clench my own heart. "But you're walking now," I said gently.

"At a great cost." He straightened himself on his chair with a sigh. "The two men who helped us in the mountains were Weres. In my fall, I landed very close to the river, and only a few kilometers away from the compound limits. Cedric and Mathieu were on sentry duty; they were the ones who helped us."

"Mathieu?" I let out, curious; I had never heard the name before.

Gabriel slowly nodded. "Cedric's older brother."

A wave of grief passed through our bond, and I suddenly felt horrible for asking. "Oh Gab," I said softly. "What happened to him?"

He shook his head, like he wanted to dismiss it. "I went back to some of my work, after the accident. As much as I could do from a wheelchair, at least, which is surprisingly a lot," he continued, blatantly ignoring my question. "My father insisted I continued physical therapy, he got me into discussion groups, and he pushed me to my limits at work." He smiled softly. "He kept me useful, and simply refused to let me feel bad for myself. And there was Joseph, with his new girlfriend Marie. And Cedric and Mat, who were concerned for me, and kept visiting after the accident."

"That's how you became friends?"

He nodded. "Close friends, although they never told me what they really were. Friendship between humans and Weres was not exactly encouraged by the previous Alpha."

I pressed my lips together. It sounded as though things weren't terrible, but... "What changed?"

"My father died," he said quietly. "Of a heart attack, walking home one evening."

"Oh. I'm sorry... Jesus, Gab, when did this happen?"

"About eight years after my accident." He looked down at his cup. Our coffees had probably gone a bit cold by then, but he took a healthy gulp of it anyway before setting the cup back down with a grimace. "I was left on my own with the restaurant. I had no desire to hire a cook, to do it all by myself. So I sold my father's business."

It was starting to dawn on me that he might have had good reasons to want to change his life then. "And were left without a job?"

"Without any use at all," he said, and scoffed softly. "It was a terrible decision, and everyone tried to talk me out of it, but I was stubborn, and did not listen." He narrowed his eyes down at his untouched plate of toast. "I shut myself out from my friends, my family. I tried to, at least. But Joey, Ced and Mat would not let me." His lips curved up slightly. "They did their best to help."

"But?"

"They got worried. I was not getting any better. I had no plans," he explained, glancing up at me. "Nothing interested me. I had lost my business, and I could no longer do the things I loved with my best friend, who by then had gotten married and had started his own family." He narrowed his eyes. "I started feeling sorry for myself, what my father had never let me do. I got depressed. And through it all, I became curious about my two other friends, who had not changed at all in all the eight years I had known them."

"Is that why they told you?" I asked him.

He opened his mouth to continue, before changing his mind and shaking his head. "How much do you know about our healing abilities?" he asked me.

"Not much, only that they're much better than humans'," I replied. "I heard somewhere it was because we could shift. Do you always have to change the subject?"

"That is right," he said, ignoring my comment. "But it is more complicated than just that. Shifting rearranges cells, and some organs completely reform themselves." I nodded; I knew all of that. Veins and arteries being reorganized, bones stretching and shortening, articulations rebuilt; shifting was a messy business for the body, and many parts of the body went through a complete renewal, such as the skin, the liver, neural connections, or the lining of the uterus, which explained things such as our impressive memory, or a Were's inability to shift when pregnant. "One of the organs that renew themselves each time we shift is the thymus. It basically controls the immune system."

"I've never heard of that," I admitted.

He smiled. "In humans, it starts degenerating very quickly after the teenage years. In our case, it is renewed each time we shift."

"So that's why we don't get sick. And heal so quickly."

"And age so slowly," he added with a nod. "Mathieu had the idea that if I was turned into a Were, these newly enhanced healing abilities would help fix my spine, and allow me to walk again." He gave me a wry smile. "Cedric pointed out that if it did not work, I would only have a much, much longer life to live in a wheelchair, but they agreed on presenting the options to me, and giving me a choice."

"Did you believe them?" I asked him. I couldn't imagine what I would have thought as a human, if one of my friends had turned up and offered to change me into a werewolf.

"I did when one of them shifted in front of me," he said with a soft snort. "And I decided that I had nothing to lose, and went with it." He took a deep breath and let it out loudly, running both hands through his hair. "Mathieu was the one who bit me. It took me a few days to shift for the first time; they stayed with me the whole time, and could not hide it from Joseph when he came to visit."

"And it worked?" I asked, fascinated.

"Not after the first time," he said wryly. "I panicked when I shifted back to a human and I still could not walk. But the brothers persisted, told me that some wounds do not heal perfectly on the first try, and after a few weeks, I started regaining sensation in my legs, my leg muscles regained the tonus they had lost." He glanced up at me. "Two months later, at the beginning of summer, I could walk. So yes, it did work. But I was not supposed to exist, and they both could not hide me from the pack forever."

I knew what he meant. It was a bigger offense to unwillingly change a human, but it was still forbidden to tell humans about Weres. And in order to get Gabriel's consent, the two brothers had told him everything. He had chosen to be turned, yes, but if he had not, it might have endangered the pack to have a human know everything about it. "What happened?" I asked, a growing feeling of dread settling in my stomach. Cedric was still in the pack. But I had never heard of him having a brother.

"Mathieu was exiled, kicked out of the pack," he whispered. "We tried, Cedric and I, and other friends of theirs, to reverse the Alpha's decision. But in the end, he had to leave. And he did so in the dead of the night, without saying goodbye to anyone."

"He must have been angry," I whispered. Gabriel scoffed at my obvious comment, but didn't add to it.

"We left, Cedric and I. We left the pack to try and find him, to try to bring him back, and change the Alpha's decision." He pressed his lips together, and nervously drummed his fingers on the table. "We followed him across the country all summer as he travelled west, but we could never find him, only traces he left behind. He was growing increasingly clumsy," he said, with a click of the tongue. "We would hear things, about beasts being attacked and people hearing things in the nighttime. The local packs were very unhappy about it, and we grew worried that he had become unstable, that he might eventually turn rogue and attack humans, unless we found him in time and brought him home."

I stared at him for a few moments. "You didn't find him, did you?" I asked softly.

"We caught up with him in Alberta," he said quietly, "but only because the Calgary pack had already... taken care of him. He attacked and killed humans there. They had to stop him before he did it again."

The words hung in the air, ugly and sad, and rang in my ears for a long moment. My heart broke for Gabriel, but for Cedric as well, who had lost a brother to something as stupid as a law applied by an intolerant Alpha. "What a horrible waste," I whispered, my voice trembling with frustration. "He only wanted to help you!"

He narrowed his eyes down at the table. "Yes. Alpha Robinson was not the most understanding of leaders."

"That sounds like a terrible euphemism! What happened to him?"

"I beat him," he said, with a slight hint of satisfaction. "Three decades later, in the Alpha elections, I won against him and took his place. He moved away afterwards, in Quebec City, with his wife and the rest of his family."

"Good for him," I snorted, and paused for a moment. "Three decades? How old were you?"

"When I was turned? In 84... I was thirty-three," he replied. "Almost thirty-four."

I nodded absently. Something was nagging at my brain, but I couldn't pinpoint what it was about his story that bothered me. Gabriel was 63 now, so he had been a werewolf for exactly thirty years, just like me. What a strange coincidence.

I looked up at him. It seemed to me like he had been a Were for much longer than I had, but then again, he had been mentored and trained and groomed in the ways of a pack from the start, unlike me with my hectic upbringing. But we had been turned at the same time. He here, in Montreal, and me, a few months later, in the mountains of...

"Oh God," I whispered, making him glance up at me. My head spun, my ears started ringing, and all of a sudden I realized I was very close to fainting.

I must have looked truly alarming, because Gabriel quickly rose from his chair to crouch next to me, laying a comforting hand on my arm. "Lili?" he asked, a confused look on his face. "Leah, are you alright?"

"No... No. Gabriel... there aren't coincidences like that."

He frowned. "What?"

"It was your friend," I said weakly. "It was him, it was Mathieu..."

"Leah," Gabriel said in a stern voice. He squeezed my arm, and shook it gently. "What are you talking about?"

"It was in 1984, too, that I was attacked by a rogue," I whispered. "In August. In Banff. Gabriel, I think... I think we were the people they told you he attacked."

His face went completely blank, and he paled considerably. "You..." He pressed his lips tightly for a moment, before he dropped his hand from my arm and pushed himself up to stand again. "You did tell me it had been thirty years," he whispered, a truly confused look on his face. "I hadn't... I had not realized."

"It might not be it," I said weakly, suddenly feeling bad for saying anything. "I might be wrong."

"Non," he said quietly. "How many rogues could there have been in a hundred miles radius of Calgary in one month? Non, Lili, I do not think this is a coincidence." He took a step back and let himself fall back into his chair, rubbing his hands hard against his face. I watched him carefully, wondering what to say. I could feel nothing but a jumble of emotions emanating from him and couldn't isolate one; I really needed to get the hang of that mate bond thing. "Could it be..." he suddenly said, and dropped his hands to look at me. He didn't look as upset as it felt to me, but I knew better than to believe his facial expression.

"What?" I finally said when he didn't continue. "Could what be what?"

"It is maybe a crazy thought, but...As unlikely as it sounds, it seems we were both bitten by the same Were," he said softly, almost sadly. I reached out for him, and he grabbed my hand, squeezing it tightly. "Could it possibly be the reason we are mates?" he finally said, and I almost dropped his hand in surprise. "Why we were able to be with each other?"

I stared at him, at a loss of words for a long moment. It made an awful lot of sense, though. It might explain why we felt so close from the beginning. And since so few Turnings occurred in the Were world, almost no Were would have the occasion of biting two humans, and it might, sadly, explain why no other Turned Were had found their mate before Gabriel and I. My throat suddenly felt tight at the idea; for Joey and Marie, who was maybe right to fear losing her husband. "For the sake of all the other Turned Weres, Gabriel," I said softly, "I really hope you're wrong."