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“When I found you, it was in the depths of the mines along the outermost part of the pack territory.” She sniffed. “He’d been watching. Waiting. Several years later, it occurred to me that it was why he had sent your father to me. He knew we were fated to be mates. Or at the very least, he suspected. Your father tried to save you, I suspect, when he realized what was going to happen. He was dead by the time I arrived, and so, my dear, were you.”
“He would slit a newborn’s throat to gain immortality?” My stomach churned at the thought, my hand flying to my neck as bile threatened to spill.
“No, Freya. The ritual you were part of is a perverted version of what my brother created,” she assured me. That didn’t ease my mind in the least. “He gave you a poison. Monkshood. In large quantities, it’s lethal to our kind.”
“If he killed her, how is she still here?” Wolf eyed her suspiciously. “You would have had to resurrect her. A life for a life.”
There it was again—shame and guilt.
“Please tell me you didn't,” Hunter begged. “Please tell me you didn’t perform one of the darkest and most forbidden rituals in the world.”
Her silence was all the answer they needed.
“I don’t understand.” I looked back and forth between them. “Who did you sacrifice?”
Wolf’s lips curled back in a sneer, and he growled. “Everyone. She sacrificed everyone.”
“I was desperate,” she tried to explain, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I told you that it all came at a cost and that the loss of youth was my brother’s. The moment I saw your still, cold form lying in the cot, I realized that he’d prepared. You were mine. You were my price to pay, and I didn’t want to pay it. You were all I had left, Freya. I never realized just what the cost would be. I was young, and I was heartbroken. I had lost the two most important people in my life at the hands of my own brother. I’d barely gotten to hold you in my arms. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized the depth of what I had done. The first cry brought joy, and your next turned half the pack into wolves. They became feral, without the ability to change back into human form. Their animal had completely taken over.”
“I remember reading about that,” Hunter recalled. “When I was with the Collective, it was in one of the old texts they used to make us read. But it was twisted. It blamed humans for creating the ferality. It said that the shifters’ bodies rejected the human DNA so much that it wouldn’t allow them to shift back.”
Granny pursed her lips at the information but didn’t mention it. Instead, she continued with her story. “I buried my head in the sand, refusing to believe that it had anything to do with thespell I’d cast. Until you cried again. All the pups that had only known their mothers’ wombs were stillborn.”
“I don't understand. I was just a baby. I’ve cried plenty of times since then, and nothing’s ever happened.”
“Newborns hold some of the greatest magic in the world. They’re pure and unblemished, and the spell I cast turned your original purpose on its head. Once a child reaches a certain age, the magic becomes less volatile, and it begins to wane. Did you ever notice when you were growing up that it started to rain when you cried? When you were sad, did you ever notice that the clouds started to shift over the sun?”
Now that she had mentioned it, I remembered plenty of times when rain would fall from a cloudless sky because I’d been pushed on the playground. Thunder would crack when I yelled, and the sun seemed to shine through the dreary days when I was happy. I’d told myself as I got older that it was my imagination. Of course every little girl would imagine that the world revolved around her.
“I found a shaman who was sympathetic to my cause. There had to be a way to undo what I’d done without losing you. He created a sleeping potion. One that would freeze you in time, for the most part. You would age more slowly than even a shifter. It gave me time to look for a way to save you from what I had done. From what my brother had done.”
“You never did find a cure, did you?” My hands grew clammy when I asked the question. We wouldn’t be here now, having this conversation, if she had. Her eyes dropped to her lap, and the sorrow on her face told me everything I needed to know.
I was living on borrowed time.
“I searched to the ends of the earth. I abandoned my pack to find a cure for you, and in that time, a darkness had taken hold of it. When I returned, so much had changed. Everything had gotten so much worse. Not just with the pack but with shiftersnot being able to shift any longer. Not being able to make new wolves from a bite. Even cubs that were born to two full shifters were being born human. Wolves were suffering from infertility because they couldn’t find their mates. Our species was dying out, and I had put that into action. You were supposed to die that day, a fixed point in time that I had altered. I knew I had to fix it; the problem was that the one who could fix it was dead. I’d killed him to save you. A life for a life. The only way to fix what I had done was for you to be sacrificed like you had been before.”
“If you knew I was going to be sacrificed, why were you waiting for me at the café?”
“Because the time wasn’t right, and the goddess was giving me one last glimpse of you before she took you away again.”
“No one’s taking her anywhere. There is no way we’re going to let them sacrifice her,” Wolf growled, getting to his feet, the chair crashing to the floor in his anger. “She’s our mate. You’re telling me that you knew she was going to have to be sacrificed to fix the world, and you still kept it a secret? Let us meet her? Let her grow close to us, just for it to all be taken away?”
“I’m not going to justify my actions, Wolf,” Granny told him. “I’m not going to pretend that what I did was okay, because it wasn’t. The goddess gave me a glimpse of the three of you together. You and Hunter were meant to be in my life as much as I was meant to be in yours.”
“What’s the point? What was the point of bringing us together just to tear us apart?”
“To show you that you deserve love and that you have the capacity to love. Because even though I raised you with all the love I could, you’ve both suffered through a lifetime of neglect and abuse. The three of you showed each other that you could be loved and love someone else in return. That was the point, Wolf.”
“So if I don’t go back there and let Damien slit my throat, then what? That’s the end of the shifter community as a whole? They’ll die out?”
“Your death will change the course of events that I started long ago.” Her voice was pleading, trying to get me to understand why she did what she did. “After I gave you the antidote to the sleeping potion, I gave you to a friend, and I told her exactly what would need to happen. I told her she couldn’t interfere with what life brought you. Told her that she couldn’t protect you, because it needed to happen.”
Any sympathy I might have had for the woman who’d given birth to me suddenly vanished. Fire licked at my veins as I struggled not to shred her to pieces with my claws. I clenched and unclenched my fists, my jaw tightening as I stared her down.
“You’re telling me that you told the woman I thought was my mother, who let me be raped over and over again from the time I was sixteen, who turned a blind eye to the bruises and the scars and the cries, to ignore that? You just gave me up as a lamb to the slaughter, knowing full well what would happen? You told them not to interfere? You said let me go through it on my own? Because of somethingyoudid? Why do I have to pay the penance for your sins? How is that fair? It shouldn’t be me they sacrifice. It should be you. You were the one who started this. You were the one who condemned our race.”
“And I am the one who has to watch you die again. I’m the one who lost everything. My brother, my mate, my pack. They were taken from me like you were. You think I haven’t suffered? I suffered every day, knowing what was going on behind those walls. Knowing what they were doing to you. Knowing what would happen to you. Knowing that I’d see you again and that I’d get to know you and who you became, and I’d have to send you right back to Damien.”
