Page 77 of The Witch’s Daughter

“Your Gram.” Frances’s voice was miles away. “She says to run.”

That’s it!

You can’t come out. I jumped to my feet as my wolf tried to take control, fearing what would happen if she inhaled these toxic fumes, and my vision tunneled.

The ground fell from under me.

I screamed, scaring my beast back into hiding as I clawed at the earthen hole that swallowed me into its depths. Over and over. Deeper and deeper. I screamed as I fell.

The crow cawed. Mom sang one of her weird human lullabies that the other pups had never heard of. Dad howled as he taught us how to hunt. To clean our kill. My sisters giggled as we played.

Ring around the rosie. A pocket full of posies.

The noise of my life came rushing past me as I continued to fall. I tried to grab onto something, and it was Jaxon’s face that filled my mind. The day I’d found him in the tree once he realized how different he was from the rest of us. The sadness in his eyes. A promise I’d made to myself long before Gram died.

That I’d always protect him.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Never when I’m with you,” I’d said, trying to ease his worries.

I landed on my back hard in the dirt. Groaning, I rolled to my side and slowly pushed myself up.

“Tisiphone, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Gram?” Tears blurred my vision as I climbed to my feet. There she was. Just how I always remembered her. Moon-streaked silver hair decorated with beads and glacier blue eyes that saw everything.

“You shouldn’t be here either,” I said.

Warmth filled her smile. “No, my brave girl, I shouldn’t be. But you had a question for me.”

I swallowed down the hundreds of questions I’d wanted to ask over the years and settled on the one burning most in my heart. “Did you know about Jaxon?”

“That you two were fated mates?” She nodded.

“Why then?” I whispered. “Why would you make him swear to protect me? If he was my mate, he would’ve done it anyway.”

Gram frowned, and I had to wonder if ghosts could feel haunted. “Jaxon had some hard decisions to make with a power as great as his. If he always put you first, I knew it would balance out the scales.”

I clasped my hands over my mouth, choking on all these wasted years. “I didn’t know.”

“I think you did.” Gram shrugged. “I think a part of you always knew, so you did what you decided to do to protect your sisters.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I sighed, realizing I was arguing with a hallucination of my own making. This wasn’t Gram.

She leveled me with a glare.

Okay, maybe it was.

I gave her a watery smile. “I messed up.”

“I told you to protect them. Not hide your magic so they’d grow stronger while you faded,” Gram said.

Damn if those words didn’t cut straight to my core, because that would protect them. If I’d have had full range of my powers throughout our entire lives, my sisters would’ve been pushed to the background. A sigma and an alpha wolf, bettered by a beta? They didn’t deserve that.

It wasn’t intentional, though. It wasn’t like I’d purposefully hidden myself or denied what I wanted so that they wouldn’t suffer. So that they’d become the powerful wolves they were always meant to be…

Oh gods, she’s right.