Filed To Story: In the Shadow of the Past Luna (Lily & James)
The female looks down again. She does not say anything.
I am getting more and more annoyed. “ANSWER. ME.”
“I am sorry… it is just that I am still trying to understand it myself. We all are. It was sort-of hard to follow. everything that happened. All that I know is that her sister’s memorial service started really late. It never starts late. Alpha Randall is the type that would literally banish someone for showing up five minutes late to a pack meeting.”
That part of the story has a ring of truth to it. I have known Alpha Randall for a long time. When I had meetings with him, I would sometimes be on time for a meeting but purposely wait outside the door for a few minutes to ensure that I was late. I found it entertaining to watch how angry I could make him without ever saying a word.
“It was really weird, and no one knew what was going on. Then Beta Robert and his son Nick carried Lily into the memorial. They had to swap out her chair because she kept flopping out of the folding one. She was covered in a black blanket or sheet or something.
Then the memorial got started and everything seemed fine. But then they announced that Alpha
Randall’s son would be taking a chosen mate. And Lily suddenly stood up and started yelling at him.
When she stood up, everyone could see that she was
When she stood up, everyone could see that she was really badly injured. We were not sure how she was able to stand; it looked like one of her legs was broken.”
“And then?”
“And then Lily rejected him and begged him to accept her rejection, which he eventually did.”
“Wait, Lily rejected who?”
“Her mate.”
“No, I mean who was Lily’s mate?”
“Alpha Randall’s son, James.”
Oh, Goddess. I took a deep breath, sat down on the comer of the bed, and dragged my hands down my face. This situation is far more complicated than I was anticipating. I thought I was about to hear how
Lily was bullied and beaten. That alone would have been enough to upset me, but hearing that the Moon.
Goddess mated Lily to James?
I am speechless.
I
Alpha Randall and I were good friends for years, and I was around when Lily’s sister, Stephanie, died. In fact, I attended Stephanie’s first memorial service. I had been planning to be at the West Mountain Pack
I anyway to celebrate Lily’s 14th birthday.
As a doctor, death is not a foreign concept for me. The reality of my job is that I regularly encounter dying or deceased werewolves, and I work with a lot of grieving families. It is not uncommon in either the human or werewolf worlds to paint the dead with rose-colored glasses. For example, I have regularly seen drunken, abusive a&&holes eulogized as caring, dedicated fathers.
However, I knew almost from the start that something was odd about the way that West Mountain Pack reacted to Stephanie’s death. It was almost like they transformed the grieving process into an Olympic sport. I assume there are a lot of factors that contributed to why the pack reacted the way that it did, and some of those are probably quite legitimate, but after a year or two, the pack’s obsession with the dead.
she-wolf started to make me a bit uncomfortable. Frankly, it started to make a lot of packs in the surrounding areas uncomfortable.
Ultimately, though, I decided that it was none of my business. I maintained my friendship ship with Alpha
Randall -still occasionally arriving late to our meet-ups just to drive him crazy for old-times sake- and just tried my best to avoid being around West Mountain Pack around these weird Stephanie-themed holidays they created.
The turning point for me was when Lily applied to the accelerated medical program that I run in Red Rock. I received three phone calls shortly after she applied.
The first one was from Lily’s mother, Margie. She told me that she was aware that Lily had applied to the program, and she asked me to accept Lily as a “personal favor to her. When I asked why she thought that Lily would be a good fit for my program, Margie could not come with a single nice thing to say about her daughter. After I got annoyed and continued to press her, she finally admitted that she needed a break from Lily and she could “not stand to look at her anymore”
after what had happened to Stephanie.
The second call was from James Anderson. James wanted to “wam”
me that Lily had caused Stephanie’s death. Unlike Margie, he urged me to reject Lily’s application because, in his view, Lily did not deserve to be a doctor. He said he believed that Lily needed to remain in West Mountain Pack and accept her continuing punishment.
The third phone call was from Alpha Randall himself. He told me that he was aware that both Margie and James had called me. He apologized for them doing so, and he told me that he would support any decision I wanted to make as to Lily’s acceptance into the program. However, he wanted to have an “
alpha-to-alpha”
conversation about it so that he could make sure that I had all the relevant information. He told me that Lily was a bit of a complicated case. He explained that the Moon Goddess had taken away Lily’s wolf after she caused the death of her sister, and that Lily had struggled to get along with pack members and pack leadership ever since.
I was completely aghast after receiving the three phone calls. I had already planned to accept Lily into the program, because her academic credentials and application materials were top-notch. That decision would not change no matter who called me. But what got me was how misguided and oblivious my old friend and the West Mountain Pack had become.
I had never seen any evidence that Lily had caused Stephanie’s death, despite offering to help with the that Lily’s “inability to get along with pack members”
was code for “we have been bullying her for years. without justification.”
How Alpha Randall could not see the reality in front of him was beyond me. As soon as I hung up the phone, I decided to not only accept Lily, but also take her under my wing. I also cut off further contact with Alpha Randall.
I have never regretted my decision. Since Lily enrolled in the program, she has been one of my best students, and she has been a joy to be around. In fact, I had just seen her a week ago and she was laughing and smiling with some of her friends in the school.
To see Lily now, in this state… that is enough to thaw even my frozen, a&&hole heart. Now I must determine if there is anything I can do medically to help her.
Goddess be with me, and be with Lily.
(Luna Jane POV)
I am sitting beside my son’s hospital bed when my mate, Alpha Randall, walks into the room.
“Any improvement?”
he asks somberly.
“Not as far as I can tell,”
I respond sadly.
Randall sits down in the chair next to me and places his hand on my leg. “Are you ready to talk about what happened?”
“No.”
“Jane, darling, it has been 48 hours. We should talk about what happened,”
he urges.
“We can talk after James wakes up.”
“Robert and Margie think that you are avoiding them. They have been waiting outside this room, hoping you will give them permission to come in, or that you will go out there and talk to them.”
1
I lean my head against his shoulder. “I can’t face them right now, Randall. I just can’t.”
“Darling, they are our best friends. Please just go out there and reassure them that you are not mad at them, and that you do not blame them for what Lily did.”
I lift my head back up and look at Randall with annoyance and confusion. “Is that really what they are worried about? That I blame them for what Lily did?”
Randall furrows his brows. “What else would you be upset about? And why else would you be blocking them out? They have been our best friends for over twenty years, Jane. This is the first time that your have ever refused to talk to them.”
I stand up and walk to the window. I stare at the forest outside. “I think there are plenty of more important things for me to be upset about right now than what Lily did,”
I respond.
“Like what?”
I say nothing. I just continue to stare out the window.
“Darling, please talk to me. I cannot help you if I do not know what is wrong.”
“Randall, I love you, but I am begging you. I do not want to have this fight right now. Our son has spent the past 48 hours unconscious in a hospital bed, and I have barely slept. I need some space to process
“Who is fighting. Jane? I am just asking you to share with me what is going on in your head. You cannot expect me to support you blocking out our friends and acting like a recluse if you do not tell me what is going on.”
1
“Please let it go, Randall.”
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?