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She frowns at me, and I get a sharp stab of guilt in my gut.
Okay isn’t good enough. It was my standard response whenever she was trying to make me feel better as a teenager, and I didn’t believe her that things would get better.
I might as well be saying I’m going to shift whether she likes it or not.
“I won’t shift tonight,” I sign, wondering if it’s the first promise I’ll have to break.
She stares at me for a long moment, as if she’s trying to decide whether or not to believe me.
The thought of disappointing her is crushing, but I feel in my heart this is something I need to do.
“You will pray with me tonight,” she says. “Before you go to bed to sleep.”
She says that as if it’s not something we often do.
I suppose she’s putting the emphasis on me going right to bed afterwards.
She nods slowly. “We will ask Artemis to keep our pack safe while I think about what I can do to help restore our protections. This is not your responsibility, Lita. You are not the pack’s Alpha, nor are you one of its elders.”
In other words, I’m not the one who’s supposed to keep us safe.
I already know that. It doesn’t matter. If no one else can, I will.
I nod, and Alina leads the way home.
She’s still my guardian.
She’s the reason I’m alive.
I would do anything for Alina, but I can’t ignore the instinct to protect Nightshade’s people.
I never would have guessed the line I would cross that will disappoint my guardian would be this one.
Chapter Nine
Scar
Theruinedforestshimmerswhen darkness falls in Nightshade. It’s the first sign that the portal is ready to open, to allow us access to the lush woods full of small creatures that the pack seem to take for granted. Their Alpha has not made the promised weekly sacrifice of livestock for almost two months now, abandoning the ritual that was put in place by his father’s captive.
The pack’s witch was a very smart woman.
The Alpha’s son, however, is as lazy and entitled as I always suspected he was.
A wiser man would have known to consult his elders, and the pack’s only spell-casting member, before abandoning a ritual that’s been in place for close to a century.
The dark magic that was summoned to make the forest into a prison was kept strong by the ritual.
It built upon its own foundations with each offering.
Fresh blood spilled on the ground sealed the trap.
But the walls of our prison were broken when that blood stopped flowing.
The spell’s strength weakened. The dark magic faded.
The rituals were powerful. They worked.
Now, every last spark of the magic that created them is gone.
