Awakened Alpha

by Chloe Vincent

  “Mm.” Gwen chewed on her lip, taking a long look at the man who lay there, silent and still. “How’d he get this way? Car wreck?”

  “Ah.” Annie looked up from the chart and raised her eyebrows at Gwen. “No one knows.”

  “What do you mean?” Gwen said. She leaned against the back wall, watching Annie check the man’s vitals.

  “I mean he was found in the hills above Griffith Park by a hiker,” Annie said. “Compound fracture of the femur. Broken arm. Multiple superficial wounds… Comatose state. Took a week before the caretaker was found.”

  “What was the brain injury?” Gwen asked, now utterly fascinated by the mystery man.

  “Oh yeah.” Annie smirked at her and said, “I forgot to mention the best part. No brain injury.”

  “What?” Gwen blurted. “I mean, pardon? So what is it? Did he also have a stroke or something?”

  “Nope.”

  “Um...seizures, diabetes…” Gwen racked her brain, hungry for an answer. “Did he drown?”

  “None of the above,” Annie said simply. “No brain tumor, tox screen came back clean. No encephalitis or meningitis. None of it.”

  “Annie!” Gwen said, laughing. “You sold me, okay. I need to know. What the hell caused this coma.”

  Annie smiled wryly but looking down at the man on the bed, her smile collapsed and she sighed sadly. “Nothing. There has been absolutely no cause found for his comatose state.”

  It’s magic, Gwen thought to herself. It could also have been some medical mystery that had not yet been solved. But in that moment, Gwen was absolutely certain that the man on the bed in front of her had been cursed somehow and that was why he was asleep.

  Annie said, “We call him Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Aw.” Gwen stuck out her bottom lip. “Poor guy. Or maybe not poor if he has a butler. But still. How often does the caretaker come in?” She looked around the room and now, as she stood there, she noticed a few personal touches that had been added to the place. There was a calendar on the wall, each month a different Renaissance painting. There was a nice plant on the nightstand to the man’s right and a bonsai tree on his left. A stack of books sat next to the bonsai too. Gwen imagined the butler coming to perhaps read aloud from the patient’s favorite books and it made her feel slightly better. But the guy still needed more support and not just doctors and nurses. It might help his condition after all.

  “Twice a week,” Annie said. “Like clockwork. Tuesday and Friday.”

  “What’s his name anyway?” Gwen asked. “The patient, I mean.”

  “Ah. Sam,” Annie said, sighing. “Sam Foster. Sleeping Sam.”

  At the end of a long day of appointments in the rehab facility, Gwen trudged back to her office, intending to grab her bag and get home in time for take-out and as much mindless reality television as she could stomach before bed.

  She paused outside her office, quietly noting the figure using the phone at the front desk of the Physical Rehab ward. The woman looked slightly out of place, standing there all in black, wearing boots and a leather jacket as she talked into the phone. She glanced up at Gwen who was checking to make sure she had her keys because they always fell to the bottom of her bag. The woman just as quickly looked away again.

  “Yeah, I’m just here visiting somebody,” the woman said. “No, it’s nobody I know. It’s a total stranger… Yeah, but nobody else is visiting them. I mean, one person but it’s not really a friend. I mean someone like that really needs a friend, you know? So I thought I would go stop by. A few minutes isn’t going to kill me. What kind of person sees somebody like that who’s in the hospital all alone and at their most vulnerable and just leaves them without checking up, you know?”

  Gwen bit her lip and she thought of Sam. The thought of him had returned to her, again and again, all day. It wasn’t just that he was a mountain lion shifter and it wasn’t just that he was alone and in a mystery coma that had not yet been solved… But it was all those things together.

  She resolved to go visit Sleeping Beauty and sighed to herself, feeling exhaustion again behind her eyes. “Alright, alright. Guess I got a few minutes to visit Sam,” she said to herself.

  If she had glanced back, she would have seen the woman in black with the boots and the leather jacket look very satisfied with herself indeed.

  Gwen walked all the way to the ICU again which was nowhere near the employee parking for Phys. Rehab where her car was waiting to take her home to crappy reality shows. Sam’s room was as quiet as before. It was Thursday and that meant the butler would be in the next day. Annie sat down in the plastic chair beside Sam’s bed and gave him a long look.

  “Uh hey,” Gwen said. “So...my name is Gwen? I was here before. With Annie. She was one of your nurses. I just thought I’d come and visit. Since you don’t have many visitors. So…hi.”

  She nodded, feeling a little stupid. She had visited plenty of patients before but they were usually conscious, often future patients of hers who she was introducing herself to before they started their PT.

  Gwen bit her lip. She took out her phone and brought up Spotify. “Do you like music? I bet you haven’t heard music in a freaking year. Unless your butler was playing it. How about some music? Hmmm.” She consulted her playlists and brought up some 80s pop. “The eighties is always good for something cheerful, huh? Yeah, let’s get some Madonna in here…”

  “Lucky Star” started playing and Gwen bobbed her head, setting the phone on the nightstand before inspecting the stack of books there. He had a few classics; The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories, The Once and Future King, The Three Musketeers… One book was bound in brown leather and had no title. Gwen picked it out and immediately realizing it was Sam’s personal journal, she quickly put it back.

  “Huh…” She rubbed her mouth, unsure of what to say or do. She was usually an easy talker. “Alright,” she said, clapping her hands. “I came here so you’d have a new friend. Who is also, by the way, a mountain lion shifter. If you were awake to smell me, you’d know that right away. Okay, so… I guess… I guess I’ll just tell you about my day then?”

  Gwen started talking, and it only took a couple of minutes to no longer feel awkward before she found herself easily chatting and inventing potential responses and questions from Sam that she could then answer. Before she knew it, it was nearly ten o’clock and she finally had to leave. But she found herself looking forward to visiting the silently sleeping Sam again the next day.

  2

  Sam

  Sam could remember Basil with the moon behind him, full and bright and seeming to set all of Los Angeles under a spotlight under its glow. Basil had been levitating, rising over the hill as Sam had faced him, focussing all his energies on the dark wizard. In lion form, he’d crouched there, having already interrupted a ritual that would have lent Basil mind control powers. What Basil had wanted to do with them, Sam didn’t know. It didn’t matter. Basil had killed a few mountain lions already as well as a couple of local witches, leaving his calling card of a simple cursive “B” written somewhere on each body. He was a dark wizard, and he had serious ambitions for Los Angeles. That was all Sam, as a mountain lion shifter, needed to know.

  Mountain lion shifters, after all, were charged with protecting the world from dark magics.

  Anyway, they had been traditional. Though Sam knew plenty of lion shifters had not chosen that vocation. Sam, however, had been born into it and always felt called to it. He had even loved it once upon a time. But now…

  Inside Sam’s mind, Basil was floating there now, above the hills, and the moon was impossibly bright. He was reciting something; one of his spells. He was holding a black flower as he spoke. There was a glow of great power around him like a halo. And then, just as Sam pounced to attack, Basil threw the spell and Sam was falling down the hill, falling, falling, falling and then there was only the void, the emptiness and whatever Sam decided to put there that he knew was not real. Only occasionally, some little bi
t of the outside world broke through. He craved those moments.

  Now Sam was in the void as usual. He was bodiless, suspended in the absence of..anything really. The place was only darkness. He knew it meant his body was in some kind of stasis that looked like a coma. He had felt that immediately. He was either trapped inside his own mind, he had figured out a while back. Or else he was trapped in some between place. There was no telling with what the wizard had thrown at him in that fight. It had felt so powerful, he had been sure he was just going to die.

  I want to be...at the park.

  Sam now imagined the park, the Ferndell trail above Los Feliz. He liked to start there and hike up and up into the hills before shifting and having a good run. Now the void changed around him, trees and clouds and sky appearing and he found himself on that hiking trail. None of it was real; he knew that. But it felt about halfway real and that was still much better than the darkness.

  He did not know how long he had been there in the void, only that it was horribly lonely. He had lost them, all of his friends, in another fight years before. He had never quite gotten over it. He could become as strong as the strongest man in the world and be the biggest lion shifter and try his best to be the bravest guardian that had ever been. But every day, he was still alone. He didn’t talk about it. He had peace with it. But here in the void, as time stretched on with no seeming beginning or end, it was all he had to think about. Every once in a while, Arthur would visit and read to him and that was a comfort. He could hear how sad Arthur was when he visited. It made him feel somehow guilty for being stuck here and worrying Arthur. And the rest of the time, he was alone. Alone with only the memories of ghosts, some nurse or doctor coming by to check on him once in a while. But they did not say much of interest.

  A while ago, he didn’t know how long it had been, two women had come to visit him. One, he could tell, was a nurse. He had been in his own house then that he had rebuilt in the void. It never looked quite right. Whole buildings were difficult to reconstruct perfectly from memory. He couldn’t even remember now what color his couch was because Arthur had picked it out for him and he wasn’t usually observant about such things. But he had been lying on his invented couch, feeling engulfed in a well of loneliness, when he heard the two women chatting, clear as day, as if they were chatting right behind him.

  They were mostly pitying him and he didn’t like that at all. He wished he could tell them he was a warrior, that this had happened in battle against a very powerful force and that such a man didn’t need their pity, thank you very much.

  Although he hadn’t hated it when one of them had seemed very taken with him looks-wise. She seemed to think he was very attractive. A couple of other nurses and doctors had commented on that - it was a rare bright spot in this dark, empty place.

  But then the woman said something that caught his attention so that he could think of nothing else afterward.

  He’s a mountain lion. Just like me. I smell it on him.

  A shifter…

  That was very interesting. That was the most interesting thing that had happened since all that activity when Arthur had moved him from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to Griffith Park Memorial. But this was much more interesting than that. A shifter just like him… He stood from his couch and the surprise of this revelation made him lose his concentration so that his house disappeared around him and he was in the void again, surrounded by the dark emptiness.

  “Who are you?” He muttered under his breath. “Stay here. Please…”

  But of course, she left after only a few minutes.

  Now Sam was hiking up the trail in Fern Dell and trying to concentrate on trees and the way the air in L.A. smelled in summer. He hadn’t yet been able to conjure up smells in the void yet. Parts of the trail repeated themselves because though he’d hiked that trail a hundred times, he couldn’t remember exactly how it went. Now he was half lost among the chaparral and following a little cluster of coyotes, thinking about that shifter woman when he heard her voice again. She sounded like she was standing right next to him.

  Uh hey. So...my name is Gwen?

  It was her! The shifter was back. Sam felt himself grinning now. But he managed to keep up his concentration and now he began the hike back down the trail, to find an even and grassy spot to sit, in the hope that Gwen was going to stick around a little longer this time.

  Sam found himself sticking his hands in his pockets, leisurely walking down the trail and listening to Gwen as she talked about her day and played 80s pop from her phone.

  He found himself answering her this time too, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

  I have this one patient, he’s a little kid who has a muscular disorder and he has a lot of pain but oh my gosh, he works so hard.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Sam muttered, as his boots crunched in the dirt. “I tend to find that kids are often braver than adults.”

  No one could see or hear him after all. It hardly mattered if it looked like he was talking to himself. He often answered Arthur too but Arthur never talked half as much as this girl did as she chatted on and on, telling him about her life and three boring dates she had been on and asked him a million questions about his life that he could only answer into the void.

  Finally, the woman had to leave. It was the longest anyone had talked to him in a year, he was sure. His heart clenched in his chest until she promised to come back and he smiled to himself. Arthur would be back soon too. That made two visits.

  He had a new friend, he thought to himself. It was the best thing that had happened to him in far too long.

  3

  Delilah

  “Ugh. Hospitals.”

  Delilah shoved her hands in her pockets and hunched a little, as if afraid of the very idea of touching anything in the hospital corridor as she leaned against a wall in the bustling ICU.

  Her mission to pair up the fated soulmates, Gwen the physical therapist and mountain lion shifter with Sam the rich and lonely and very comatose guardian against dark magics and mountain shifter, had only just begun. It was going about as well as could be expected, she supposed. But that wasn’t saying much. Gwen had visited Sam once of her own volition. Or anyway, she had been persuaded perhaps by overhearing Delilah’s fake phone call discussing the good deed of visiting strangers in hospitals. Delilah inwardly patted herself on the back for that one. The visit had gone well. Maybe? Who knew! The Oracle had nothing to say about Sam’s internal response to that. Wherever Sam’s consciousness was residing, the Oracle didn’t have a window on it. Delilah didn’t even know if that was beyond Oracle’s scope because the dark magics containing Sam were so powerful or if it was because Oracle was on the fritz again. It could go either way really. It was a question for Katz.

  It was a necessary question though because if Sam was going to stay asleep, Delilah was determined to get in his head. If Gwen couldn’t talk to him, Delilah at least was going to find a way. She thought perhaps she could then point Gwen in the direction of waking him up.

  This really wasn’t going to work if Sam never woke up.

  Delilah vowed to ask Katz about that, if he ever did swing by. Or else she would pester the Oracle until it gave her an answer she liked, she supposed.

  Now Delilah glanced around and stepped into a room for doctors only where somebody’s fresh change of mint green scrubs sat on a shelf with a name tag. Very helpful indeed. Delilah changed into the disguise, stuck on a cap and a surgical mask, and went back into the hall, heading down to Sam’s room to do a little recon. Between the dossier on her mission and the Oracle, she knew the basics of Sam’s life. He had grown up the descendant of mountain lion shifters who took their role as guardians for Los Angeles against dark magics very seriously. He had worked and lived with a pride of three other lions who were also guardians and Sam had been their alpha.

  Then one day, they had fought a pack of wolves under the control of a witch who had seemed bent on doing as much damage as possible. Sam a
nd his pride had foiled the witch’s various plans for years but one day, well… From what Delilah could tell, they had simply had a terrible day and lost the fight. There was no especially big reason outside of being outmatched. There had been about a dozen wolves and they had been stronger and more riled up than normal under the witch’s control. From what Delilah could tell from Oracle’s info, there had been a million ways to win that fight and a million ways to lose. Sam and his pride mates had simply lost. All of them had been killed but Sam. He’d never really gotten over it. But what kept him going, from what Delilah could tell, was being a guardian. He didn’t live for much else and now he was barely living at all; spelled asleep by a wizard who had sent him tumbling down that hill.

  Delilah walked into Sam’s hospital room and sighed heavily. There wasn’t much to be seen here. She already knew the hospital chart wasn’t going to reveal anything new. She sat down at Sam’s bedside and tipped her head, regarding him. Sam looked like an action hero even with a tube in his nose and wearing a hospital gown. He looked pale and a little gaunt and if he woke up, he would probably fall right over trying to stand. But that didn’t matter. He still looked like an action hero.

  “Hello,” Delilah said simply, poking through his stack of books. “You don’t know me. I’m just a uh…helpful stranger. Just poking around for a minute. Don’t mind me. Do you know, I forgot to eat today? When I’m down here on ear- I mean you know, when I’m down here in Los Angeles, I actually do get hungry. Back…home though, eating is pretty optional.” She picked up the journal in the book stack and opened it without hesitation.

  It was Sam’s journal. There was a pen in a cup on the nightstand too. Delilah suspected Sam’s butler had put it there, perhaps in the hope that if Sam were to suddenly wake up, he might need to immediately journal. That was sort of sweet. There was also a radio on the chest of drawers in the corner. The house plants were thriving. Sam’s butler was keeping his room nice, alright.