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“No!” Poppet screamed, breaking free of Tate’s grasp. Shoving him away from her. “You had a choice. You could’ve listened to me. You could’ve—You could’ve trusted me.”
My frustration spiked, and a foreign power tingled beneath my skin as I lifted my hand, placing it on her shoulder. Poppet’s head snapped around to face me and I watched as her eyes rolled back in her head and she dropped to the ground unconscious.
I stared at her for a moment and then Jackson pulled me back by the wrist and spun me around into a bone crushing embrace.
“I thought…I thought I’d lost you,” he grunted, burying his face in my neck. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“It’s okay,” I said, though part of me knew that it wasn’t. “I’m alive. I’m fine.”
His hands brushed over my cheeks, and in the back of my mind, as he dropped a light kiss on my lips, I registered that the familiar tingle of my vision was gone. Missing.
“Um,” Astrid cleared her throat. “Rebekah, are you…feeling okay?”
Jackson loosened his hold, letting me turn to face her and I swallowed around a sudden lump in my throat. “I…I don’t know.”
“What did you do to her?” Tate asked, his eyes glancing over to the other wolves still waiting in the woods. “I’ve never seen magic like that before.”
I bit my lip and looked up at Jackson. “I took her power. I absorbed it.”
“What does that mean?” Tate asked, nervously scratching his chest.
Both he and Jackson stood naked before us, but no one seemed to care, their attention was solely focused on my face, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I didn’t know how to answer his question.
“Let’s get back to the estate,” Jackson said, circling his arm around my back. “We’ll talk it through back there. Myra and Shado are probably going out of their minds right about now.”
I nodded slowly and hugged my arms tight around my chest. “That sounds good. Let’s go home.”
Tate nodded to Poppet, who still lay sleeping on the ground, Astrid crouched at her side. “What about them?”
I looked down and Astrid looked up smiling softly at me. It’d been so long since I’d seen her face, but now that my memories were coming back, she was familiar to me. She was my sister.
I exhaled a long breath. “It’s their home too.”
“We do have a lot to catch up on,” Astrid said, absently brushing the hair back from Poppet’s face.
I nodded, leaning into the warmth of Jackson’s chest. “Now, that is the understatement of the century.”
One by one the group around us started to laugh, and for the briefest moment, a smile reached my lips. All our secrets were out in the open now. There were still choices that needed to be made, and questions to be answered, but we’d survived.
Jackson knew my darkest secrets, but he hadn’t run away. He was still there standing at my side. The wolves had come to my rescue, my sisters were alive, and I remembered them. We were a family, a little bruised and broken, but still family, and for as long as I had breath in my lungs, that would never change. Family to the end.
36
Two weeks later
Staring out the library window, I could see Astrid sitting in the grass behind the house. She had her face turned up into the sun. She looked so relaxed. I couldn’t help but feel jealous.
In the time that had passed since we brought Poppet back to the house, I’d been anything but relaxed. I couldn’t sit still. The Darkling’s power moved inside my veins, melding slowly with my own. It tingled through my bones and whispered in my ear every time I closed my eyes. I’d tried a few minor spells since we’d come back to the house, and everything seemed normal, but something still felt off. I couldn’t figure it out.
“There you are,” Jackson said, as his reflection appeared over my shoulder in the window.
“Here I am,” I sighed, leaning my forehead against the glass.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“Oh?” I asked, turning to look at him.
He wore a pair of grey sweatpants, and a black tee-shirt that pulled across his pecs in a way that made my mouth water.
