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He walked around his desk and stuck out his arm to shake my hand. “Godspeed, son. And make sure you tell your mother, and Mikaela, you’re leaving. They’ll kill me if they find out you left without saying goodbye.”
I nodded as I shook my dad’s hand.
Kyle and I split up after that, and I went straight to my sister’s three-bedroom cabin, where the place was filled to the seams with rambunctious boys.
“How you doin’, guys?” I called out.
Five of my six nephews barreled toward me, shouting, and leapt onto me. I laughed as I juggled them, wrestling the oldest two, until their father shooed them outside.
“Nice to see you, Xander,” James said with a welcoming smile to his face. “You want a drink?”
I shook my head, my mind buzzing with plans. “No, but thanks. I just came to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” Mom said, walking out of the main bedroom where she was visiting with Mikaela. “Where are you going?”
I smiled at my mom and stepped into my sister’s room.
My smiled faded when I saw her. She looked dreadful. Not far from death, in fact, her skin pale and her arms too thin. The light in her usually bright blue eyes had dulled.
“Hey, sis.” I sat on her bed and put my arm around her. “So glad to see you’re okay.”
The baby was lying in his cot next to the bed, fast asleep.
“Xander, I know everyone thinks I can’t do it. But I swear, I...”
I squeezed her tight in my arms. “We love you, sis. You’ve given the pack six strong boys. Now I’ve gotta make sure they have women to mate with.”
My sister pulled back, her eyebrows drawn down. “What do you mean?”
Mom came closer to listen and I smiled at them both. “I mean, Kyle and I are leaving for a little while.”
“Where are you going?” Mikaela asked.
“We’re going north,” I said. “I’ve only just discovered that our pack was cursed by a witch, and I’m going to fix it for us all. Kyle, too. We’re going to hunt down the witch who cursed us and force her to set us free.”
I didn’t care if we had to beg, lie, or kill. We’d find a way to lift the curse.
With a soft gasp, Mom covered her mouth with her hand. “No...”
“Why not, Mom?”
My sister hit me in the thigh. “What curse? What are you talking about?”
I gave her a quick rundown of everything I’d learnt, and by the end of the conversation, tears filled her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“All these years,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I thought something was wrong withme. I was the last of the girls born, and now I can’t have any of my own. I thought I’d broken the pack. I blamedmyself. All this time.”
Mom rushed over and I stood up, moving to the door as my sister cried and sobbed like I’ve never seen her do before.
This was the problem. Our pack, our elders, had hidden a major secret from a whole generation of us. How could they not have realized the effect of such a profound thing on our lives? It wasn’t something that just affected them. It was all of us.
Wewere the ones without fated mates, without children. Without a future.
We were slowly dying, and I would not let that happen.
“Mikaela,” I said from the doorway. “I swear to you, I’ll do everything in my power to find the witch responsible and make her reverse the curse. And then, I’ll make her pay for what she’s done to us.”
