The Tempering (The Mackenzie Duncan Series) (3 page)

“What are you talking about? I called you this morning. I didn’t ask you to go to my other classes.” Mackenzie was truly confused. They only had the one class together on Fridays, why would she think she was asking or expected her to go to her other classes?

“This morning? Try two days ago. You called on Friday, today is Sunday. Sunday afternoon to be exact. What have you been doing? And what the hell is up with your eyes?”

“You’re crazy. No way has it been two days! I was sick, tried to take a shower, puked, and fell asleep.”

“You mean you have been sleeping for more than 48 hours? Seriously, your eyes?”

“I have no clue what’s up with my eyes. It must have something to do with whatever made me sick. I feel fine now, but something is still going on. I wonder if that wolf had some kind of weird disease or something.”

“What wolf?”

 Mackenzie began the tale of her long walk home. She told Jordon everything she could remember and by the end, Jordon was looking at her as if she were insane. There were no wolves in Massachusetts.

“Honey, I think you should see a doctor. Between the hallucinations, the eyes, and sleeping two full days, something has got to be wrong.”

And for once, Mackenzie completely agreed with Jordon. She had to be imagining everything. There had to be a logical explanation.

~*~

Mackenzie opened the heavy glass door and stepped through. She never liked having to see a doctor. Not only did she not like the poking and prodding, but also the fees were insane. For the first time she was glad for the Student Health Fee she paid at the beginning of the year as it covered her appointment.

The room was meant to be inviting. The chairs that sat in lines were colorful and looked to have a fair amount of cushion on them. The walls were painted a soft yellow and framed pictures lined them. However, the one thing they couldn’t mask with some cheery colors was the sterile odor. The scent told everyone that this was a clean environment, but this time it made her nose itch whenever she breathed in. It was stronger than she had remembered from other doctor’s offices. Maybe the college just used extra strong stuff to combat the myriad of germs that the student body managed to carry.

After checking in with the receptionist, Mackenzie took a seat. The magazines on the table next to her provided entertainment for the first fifteen minutes, and then boredom hit and she began to fidget. Finally, a nurse stepped out from behind a thick wooden door.

“Mackenzie Duncan?”

“That’s me.” She stood and followed the nurse back. She set her things down on a table in the room and proceeded to get her height and weight checked.

“Let’s see, 165 pounds and five foot eight.” She began writing in the chart in her hand.

 “I’m 5’6”. I have been since I was 12.”

“No dear, see here?” the nurse gestured to the height portion of the scale, “Five Eight on the nose. Perhaps you grew and just never realized it?”

“I grew, all right.” In her mind, she was adding yet another symptom onto her list of weird and wacky things to ask the doctor.

The nurse left Mackenzie alone in the room to wait for the doctor on duty. She slowly walked around the tiny space, looking at all the pamphlets and posters that advised the students of the dangers of drugs and unprotected sex. It just so happened that when the door opened and the doctor walked in, Mackenzie was holding a pamphlet titled ‘You Got Drunk and Wound up in A Stranger’s Bed. Now What?’

Scrambling to put it back in the pile where she had found it, she ended up knocking the whole stack over. Before she could even chastise herself for her clumsiness, she reached out and caught most of the pamphlets, righting them before picking up the few that fell to the floor. Quick reflexes were not usually in her repertoire.

“Ms. Duncan, nice to meet you. My name is Dr. Mallson.” The older gentleman held his hand out for her to shake. She glanced down at it quickly, before placing her hand in his. She wasn’t sure why she was so wary of him, but there was something that told her not to trust him.

“Hello.”

“So, what seems to be troubling you?”

Mackenzie took the few steps to the bed and hopped up. But when she hopped, she went a few inches higher than she had intended, which made landing on the bed much louder than she expected. The bed let out a groan and slid slightly along the floor, bumping into the wall.

“Sorry about that,” she said with a slight grimace. Embarrassing moment number two in all of twenty seconds. The day just kept getting better and better.

“Don’t worry about it. How about we just talk about what brought you in? Did you see any of those you would like to take with you?” he asked as he nodded toward the pamphlets on the table.

“No, I think I’m good without them, thanks. I came in because I was so sick over the weekend, that I don’t even remember it. Apparently, while I was throwing up I passed out and didn’t wake up for a few days. Oh, and my eyes. I have had blue eyes my whole life, up until this morning, that is. Oh, and I grew two inches over night.”

“Can you remember anything from the night you started to feel ill?” He moved to the wall beside the bed and pulled down a tool that looked like a little thin hammer but with a light shining out of one end. “Look straight ahead.”

As Dr. Mallson started to point the light in Mackenzie’s eyes, she tried to recall all the details of the attack. She also wasn’t sure she should tell him. He wouldn’t believe her anyway.

“I was at the football game, got in an argument with one of the Final Boys and left. When I was walking through the park, I thought I saw something, got scared, and ran. I did fall and bump my head though. You think that has something to do with it?”

“Well, I don’t see anything wrong with your eyes aside from the color change. You can make an appointment with your optometrist, if you would like. As for the sickness and fatigue, we can run some tests. Mackenzie, when was the last time you were sexually active?”

Mackenzie laughed at his question. She could count the number of times she had sex in her entire life on one hand, and none of those times had been even remotely recent.

“Not for a long time. About two years ago.” The doctor made a note on his paper with a little grunt, as if he didn’t believe her. She watched as he scratched down whatever drivel he thought important enough. The sound of the pen on paper as he was writing down what were most likely lies irritated Mackenzie’s ears, much like nails on a chalkboard. She didn’t stop to wonder why she could hear each stroke so clearly; all she thought about was ripping the pen from his hand and throwing it across the room.

“Ms. Duncan, for me to help you, you have to be honest with me. Now, if the sex wasn’t consensual, we can get you any kind of help you need. But you must tell me the truth.”

Not only was he lying about her on paper, he was calling her a liar to her face. Mackenzie’s temper flared and she jumped from the bed and knocked the file and pen right out of the doctor’s hand. The terrified look on his face snapped her back, making her realize what she had just done. Grabbing her coat, she hurried out the exam room door.

“Sorry!” She yelled out just as the doctor made his way into the hallway to watch where the disturbed young girl had gone.

Chapter 3

Three weeks had passed since Mackenzie ran out on the doctor. She still didn’t understand why she got so angry. The more she thought about it, the more she realized he was doing his job. She wanted to return and apologize, but she just couldn’t bring herself to face the embarrassment. She did, however, take Dr. Mallson’s advice and schedule an appointment to have her eyes checked, not that it was any help.

The optometrist told her to see her general practitioner after testing her eyes and finding nothing wrong. Apparently he didn’t listen well either because she told him the doctor sent her to him. In fact, there was not only nothing wrong but her eyesight had improved to better than 20/20. She was now able to see at thirty feet away what people with normal vision had to be at twenty feet to see.

With her eyes still the strange color, Mackenzie decided it was time for some real research. Being at Harvard had its perks besides a degree no one would turn away. The university had a library that held every law book, every medical book, and any other book one could think of. 

Standing at her desk, she tripped on the strap of her purse that had been sitting on the floor. She threw her hand out to catch herself on the shelf, but when her hand grasped the wood, it cracked. Growling in frustration at the broken shelf, she cursed the old piece of furniture. She didn’t have the money, or the time, to deal with anything else.

Losing her job after her two-day Sleeping Beauty act had hurt. No amount of begging received any sympathy from her boss, and no one else in the area was hiring. She knew because she had gone to every store, restaurant and bar hoping to find something but not one job was available. Her funds were dangerously low and while she knew she had enough for rent for the next month, she wasn’t sure if she would have enough to eat and she really didn’t want to have to call her mother for help. She hadn’t called once since she left home and calling to ask for money was not the best way to make contact. She had to fight her mother to convince her that she was responsible enough to attend Harvard. Her mother thought she should go to the community college down the street first to make sure she could cut it, as if getting into Harvard wasn’t an academic accomplishment enough. That was her mother, so very supportive.

If she had been able to take her typical route to the library, the walk would have lasted all of ten minutes. Having to avoid the park all together added another twenty on top of that. She couldn’t bring herself to go back to the place that changed her life. She couldn’t handle the thought that the wolf was still there. She got the feeling it had been after her, that she wasn’t a random chew toy. It wanted to hurt her, to kill her. It might have been silly, as Jordon pointed out to her, but it was how she felt.

By the time Mackenzie reached the library, she was pulling off the layers of clothing she wore. It must have been an extremely nice day, she was never hot after the leaves began to turn, and she was typically freezing once the first snowfall covered the ground. Both of those things had already occurred, yet here she was, walking into the building in a simple tee shirt and jeans that were slightly too short due to her sudden and unexpected growth spurt.

She walked quietly over to a table in the back of the medical section and put down her bag. Looking around at all the stacks of books, hoping that one of them held the answers she desperately wanted, she pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it on the table.

When she went to lift the screen, her thumb broke right through the casing with a resounding crack that echoed through the silence. Blood droplets splattered against the broken computer and when she turned her thumb to see the damage, she let out a shriek as the inch long cut slowly sealed itself right before her eyes. She hadn’t been hallucinating the night the wolf attacked her. She really had watched her arm heal itself just as she watched her thumb return to a perfect state.

The other students surrounding her looked around wildly before seeing no immediate danger. They threw scowls at her with a resounding “SHHH!” Mackenzie ignored them. She was still in utter shock and terrified. Her thumb just crushed through her laptop. Her skin looked like it zipped itself closed, sealing the slice in her finger as if nothing had happened, not even a scar remained. And to top it all off, she didn’t even feel her skin being ripped open.

Even though she wanted to run away and hide in her little apartment and pretend that the last few weeks had never happened, she knew she couldn’t. She had to find an explanation.

Carefully opening the lid of the broken computer and hoping for the best, Mackenzie pressed the power button and waited for the hum that would tell her it wasn’t headed for recycling. More than two minutes passed before she gave up, slamming the lid closed and watching it shatter beneath her hand.

“SHHHH!” A small girl with a stack of books and a million papers in front of her said while glaring at her, “This is a library!”

Mackenzie could feel her blood boiling. How dare that girl speak to her like an idiot? She knew it was a library. What kind of dumb ass wouldn’t know they were in a library?

“Mind your own damn business,” Mackenzie growled out. She was pretty sure it was an actual growl after seeing the girl’s eyes widen in fear and scamper away. Reminding herself that she was not her father and did not need to lose her cool, she took a deep breath. Breathing deeply for a moment allowed her time to collect herself, and to feel bad for snapping at the girl. Sort of.

Stowing her broken laptop away in her bag, Mackenzie headed over to the computers available for student use. Sitting down while eyeing the keyboard warily, she wondered how on earth she was going to use the keyboard without destroying it. As she hoped the surge of strength had passed, she placed her hands ever so lightly on the keyboard and began to type.

~*~

The library’s medical database wasn’t much help. Not one medical text had each of the symptoms she was presenting. Mackenzie was about to give up when a group of girls walked by, giggling and talking about some new movie and how gorgeous the actors were. It would have been a completely irrelevant conversation to overhear, except when she heard the name of the movie, it was as if everything clicked.

“So, are you going to see
Beneath the Moon
with me tonight or what?” The girl whispered to her friend.

“Absolutely, I mean, who wouldn’t want to see half naked men who just happen to turn into wolves?” Then they both giggled and disappeared between the stacks.

Wolves. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She was a mythology major after all! Could the myths actually be true? Could she really have encountered a Werewolf? Frantically, Mackenzie opened up a different search program, one that found books from the schools complete catalog, not just the medical journals she had been searching.