Chapter Nine
Amelia
Nathan kept saying he didn’t care what anyone thought of him, but I could sense his apprehension on the way to school the next morning. We were late, and barely made it in before the bell rang, again accompanied by that spine-crawling awkwardness from the students in the hallways because of our presence. The atmosphere remained tense and full of expectation, as though everyone waited for another fight. Not that Aaron had a chance. If he had any sense at all, then he would keep the hell away from my brother. My own rage rushed to the surface suddenly, and I clung to my bag to stop my anger from releasing. Nathan frowned, and I knew he could feel what I felt. I waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. Without a word he took a different route to his first class, leaving me alone again.
I skulked into my own class, finding a seat at an unoccupied table. Ger smiled at me, but I could only nod in return. I thought it ridiculous to be stuck in school trying to make small talk with completely normal people who didn’t have a pack of werewolves after them. Byron kept insisting we squeeze in the normal stuff, like school, with all of the danger and tension. His plan wasn’t working very well.
I wasn’t altogether sure if there really was a pack of werewolves after me. Nobody seemed to know what the werewolves wanted, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t tell me anyway.
A cold sweat covered my brow, and I told myself I was putting myself under too much stress. I kept twisting everything up in my head and making it bigger than it had to be. So what if Nathan had a fight? One fight in extreme circumstances didn’t mean he was going to accidentally kill anyone. And so what if my grandfather was acting weird? He’d lost his mate and that was huge. He’d lost the person who’d centered him, so of course, he would take a while to find his balance again.
I rationalized everything in my head all day, completely ignoring everything else that was going on. I was so going to fail my summer exams.
At least it was almost time for our summer holidays. We spent most summers in Germany or France, visiting places my grandparents knew well. This year might be different. Nobody had spoken about it, so I guessed travelling was off the table.
I spent at least three classes trying to remember every detail of my dreams in case they were part of the key to ending the curse. Okay, that scenario wasn’t likely. Not at all. But if my family members’ dreams led to soul mates, then why not curses? But I could find nothing. Nothing useful about curses, anyway. All I remembered was Kali’s distraction, and the focus she had on escaping her life.
Sometimes I woke up wanting to slap her. Her thought processes and the decisions she made confused me. She was so dramatic. She barely knew Andriy, and she had convinced herself she was hopelessly in love. She didn’t see that she was so desperate for escape that she would have clung on to any option that presented itself.
One minute she was noble and moral, and the next she was running after somebody else’s husband. And she was barely older than me. Yeah, she lived in another time, but her actions still grossed me out, though not during my dreams. Everything seemed normal and right while I dreamt.
The dreams had to mean something to me or be relevant to my life somehow. I had been thinking hard, and some of the hints she dropped added up. Kali would have werewolf children. Did that mean she was a soul mate? Was Andriy one of us? His surname was familiar. Ivaneska-Evans. Not a huge stretch. I felt a little ill at the idea of being attracted to a possible ancestor, but really, I was feeling the aftershocks of Kali’s emotions. She loved the man, but there was no possibility of a happy ending for her.