***
Before lunch, Abbi approached me. I tried to smile at her, but something about her triggered my suspicions. She wasn’t evil or anything, but I couldn’t forget my first impressions of her.
“Hey, Ams. Where’s your brother hiding?” she said cheerily.
“Here. Somewhere.” I gestured vaguely.
“No, seriously. I haven’t seen him since this morning. He ran out of class after I told him about Perdy.” She frowned.
“What? What happened to Perdy?” My lungs seemed to constrict, and dark spots flew in front of my eyes. What had happened now?
“Those wild dogs again,” she said slowly, but I was already gone, looking for Joey. I sprinted and found him in the first classroom in which I looked. “Where… what happened?” I blurted, flustered beyond belief.
He looked up from his conversation with Tammie and shook his head. “I should have known you’d be next. A wolf tried to attack us at the hospital; another wolf protected us.”
“Another—oh. Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. I’ve talked about this with your brother already, and he ran out of the school as though the hounds of hell were after him.”
“Oh.” I turned to leave, then hesitated. Oh, crap. I glanced back at him. “Did you say wolf?”
A smile twitched on his lips. “I did.”
“Did Perdita… say something to you?”
His expression was blank. “Like what?”
I bit my knuckle to cover my gasp of fear. Could she have told him the truth about us? Would she really betray us? I shook my head and left. “Like nothing,” I said over my shoulder.
I made up my mind. I was going home. Screw staying in school while the rest of my family was busy dealing with… whatever. I was part of the family, too, and I deserved to know what was going on. I snuck from school grounds without telling anyone. I’d only miss a couple of classes, but I didn’t want to deal with any questions. What could I tell them? I needed to deal with werewolf business?
I made it home, still shaking from the worry of another attack and the idea that people might know the truth about us. Nobody was around except for Opa.
“What’s happening?” I asked him.
He refused to look at me. “Nothing.” But his voice was strained, and I knew something had happened.
“Then, where is everyone?” I demanded.
“Jeremy’s following orders. Your uncle left to find your brother.”
“Why? Where’s Nathan? What’s going on?”
He glared at me, unrecognisable emotions filling his eyes. “He decided he wants no part of this pack anymore.”
I stared back, trying to translate. “Wait. He’s… he’s gone to her. Is that it? He got around the order?”
When he didn’t disagree, I laughed. “That’s great! He’ll be okay now.”
He lurched to his feet, but I gazed at him sullenly, determined not to cower before him ever again. “Disobeying an alpha is not great,” he said. “Betraying family is not great.”
“And yet that’s exactly what you did.” I couldn’t stop the words. They popped out before I could even think.
“I did what was needed for our family to survive,” he shouted. I felt his power roll over me, but somewhere inside me, there was something clamoring to get out. I shuddered with the sensation, feeling a familiar twitching at my fingertips. Not possible. I was not like Kali. But the words were coming again, vomiting out of me without control.
“No!” I cried. “Not for us to survive. You’re taking out your grief on everyone, and that isn’t right! Just because you lost your heart doesn’t mean you have a right to take Nathan’s from him. You can’t act like this and expect everyone to sit down and obey.”
“You have no right, Amelia. No right to speak to me this way.”
“And you have no right to put Nathan’s mate in danger. She was attacked again! For what? Because you have some warped idea of what should happen next? You’re being ridiculous, and people are getting hurt. This has to stop!”
He flinched at the word “stop,” and a crack of pain sliced through my temples. I left the room, eyes streaming, and hid in the bathroom, struggling to breathe. He knocked on the bathroom door gently, but I ignored it. I could barely open my eyes from the pain and fear running through my entire body.
I was terrified. Terrified of him and of what was happening to me and to everyone I loved. I couldn’t see a way out or a way to fix any of the hopeless situations. He was doing everything in his power to make it worse for all of us. I couldn’t tell if he had lost his mind or if he had turned into an exaggerated version of Byron, but whatever it was, I couldn’t cope with it. I wanted my Opa back. He was the one who loved me and who loved his family, not this cold man who brought out the worst in me. I had wanted to strike him and to hit back at the stupidity of his orders, but I was just a girl in his eyes. Nothing I did mattered to him.
I didn’t leave the bathroom until I heard Nathan and Byron return, but that was only because I wanted to know what was going on. I swallowed a couple of painkillers as I entered the room where all of my family members had gathered. I listened to the conversation.
“Perdita reckons the other wolf protected her. The male,” Nathan said, almost hesitantly.
Other wolf? Other wolf? No freaking way.
“It wasn’t only her,” he continued defensively. “Her cousin Joey was there, too. He said one wolf was about to attack, but another got in the way and chased her off.”
I stopped listening. That didn’t make sense, but Perdita wouldn’t lie. She had no reason to, so a wolf had protected her, though it certainly wasn’t one from our family. Opa had made it perfectly clear that we weren’t to help her.
All of a sudden, Nathan’s finger was pointing at me. “What about your own granddaughter? Look at her! She hasn’t slept properly in weeks because of those dreams. I had dreams before I turned. What if hers mean something? Why hasn’t anyone done something about that yet?”
“Dreams aren’t our priority right now, boy,” Opa said. “I’ll think about worrying when it gets closer to her birthday.”
I wanted to leave the room. I didn’t need to hear anymore. He didn’t give a crap about me. Why should I care what he said or thought? But suddenly Byron and Nathan seemed to stand together. They pushed Opa against his will, persuading him to reveal whatever was going on in his head.
He panicked, on the edge of giving in. I saw it in the droop of his shoulders and heard it in the passiveness of his protest. “There’s nothing wrong with secrets.”
“There is when people start dying.” All eyes turned to me. That’s right. I didn’t have to be the scared little girl in the corner. I deserved to play a part in family business, too. To my surprise, Opa nodded. Had I gotten through to him after all?
With a reluctant sigh, he revealed that he knew the wolf in charge, the one who was sending his pack after us. All along, he had known exactly what was after us. He expected us to trust him when he still hadn’t shown all of his cards.
“When I was young I was eager to run wild and find my mate,” Opa explained, “but the years went by, and I still hadn’t found her. I would have the dreams. A face would appear for a while, then poof, the dreams would end. Later, they’d start back up, but this time it would be a different face. A different girl.”
“How is that possible?” Jeremy voiced my own concern.
“I couldn’t figure it out at first,” Opa said. “Couldn’t understand what was going on. So I did a lot of research and asked a lot of questions. I eventually found out quite a bit. It took a lot of effort, but to make a long story short, a certain group of wolves were headed by a particular alpha who wanted to fix their pack. They had been unable to breed properly for years. The werewolves were dying out, becoming weaker with each new generation created. All except our family. We kept getting stronger, and they wanted to break the line to make sure we weren’t stronger than them.”
I glanced a
t Nathan who looked as surprised as I felt. This was big news, yet we were only hearing it now.
“The wolves had a special… tracker. She could find the mates, intuitively. I don’t know if it’s anything like what we do. The werewolves planned to use their tracker to find my potential mate and kill her before I found her. Just like that. No guilt. I found the tracker, and… persuaded her to talk to me. She told me where to find Lia and said Lia was my true mate, even though the dreams of her had already stopped. So I found her, and I made her mine.”
He swallowed hard, and I exchanged a horrified glance with Nathan, unable to even begin processing what he was telling us. I still didn’t trust him. From the way he spoke and the agitation in his hands, I was sure he wasn’t giving us the full story.
He cleared his throat, and I wondered if he might be making up a story in his head.
“Eventually, the alpha lost his role. He was overtaken by another wolf named Vin. Vin wanted to breed his own wolves, and he was convinced that the curse was actively selecting women who were capable of breeding with werewolves. He thought we were essentially stealing potential breed mates for his wolves. But he lost his tracker, so he had no way of taking the potentials away from us anymore.”
“That’s sick.” I wanted to vomit. How had he persuaded the tracker? How had this Vin wolf lost his tracker? Because of Opa? Did he kill her? The whole thing was sleazy and gross and overwhelmingly new.
“Their werewolves will die out. I can understand why he would take desperate measures.”
It was official. My grandfather was a complete stranger to me.
“Well, I can’t.” Nathan looked as repulsed as I felt. “And we could have used this info ages ago. This is madness. If our mates die we’re assigned a new one? What a load of crap!”
“No, no.” Opa shook his head fervently. “Only if you haven’t connected yet. Haven’t bonded. The curse has to continue, one way or another. At least until it’s broken.”
Ding-ding. Amelia, get a move on. The curse wasn’t the wonderful thing I had once imagined it to be because it led to misery, broken families and death. It had to go.
“I still don’t get why they’re doing this.” Jeremy’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Why not let us have our mates and keep prolonging the curse if they’re worried about extinction?”
“If they take the mates, they increase their chances of breeding themselves,” Opa said. “Maybe it worked once. Maybe they’re simply desperate. That’s all. We’re strong. They’re struggling to survive. It’s sad, really.”
“But they didn’t try to take Perdita,” Nathan said, looking absolutely sickened.
Opa nodded. “True. I don’t know why. Maybe you met her before they figured it out. Maybe they wanted you to meet her so they could kill her and ruin your chances of reproducing. Perhaps their coming here to attack the girls was a cover-up for something else. Maybe it was some kind of cruel sadism that sent them here. I’ve no way of knowing.”
It was so confusing, all of the possibilities. Why did they hate us so much? Why not ally with us instead of trying to destroy us. What kind of monsters were they?
Byron spoke, and his words were tight with anger, but it filled me with pride rather than fear and made me feel secure in the fact that, ultimately, he would take care of us. I hoped I was right.
“So this is what, revenge? Domination? A reminder that they can cut us down at any time if they wish?”
Opa didn’t know, but Nathan had more questions. The same ones I had. Why now? What had changed?
“I assume it’s something to do with Amelia.”
I didn’t hear any more. Of course, it was my fault. Everything came down to me. I wanted to leave, to cry, to shout and scream, but Nathan’s anger drew me back in. “So you let Perdita be exposed to danger? And Amelia?” He sounded so incredulous, but I wasn’t surprised. I expected to be used. I couldn’t listen to anymore drama. I was on my own, and I had to start standing on my own feet. Nobody was going to swoop in and rescue me. I had to save myself from whatever was coming.