A few days after the disastrous meeting with Rhys’ caravan, Noah sat on the bank of the lake, hugging his knees to his chest and watching the siblings doggy paddle through the frigid water. Frost covered the grasses, and steam rose from the lake, but the wolves didn’t seem to mind the freezing temperatures. His leather trench coat wrapped around him snugly, doing its best to trap his body heat, but still, he shivered with his teeth chattering uncontrollably.
“Master, join us!” Luna called out while backstroking across the water with envious speed, waves trailing in her wake.
“Your Master does not have the strength to brave the icy waters, Luna. Humans are delicate creatures, and we mustn’t bully the weak,” Silas said, sending a teasing glance toward Noah.
Noah straightened his legs and unwrapped his arms from around his chest. With his tremendous willpower, he overcame his biology, ceasing his shivering with a snort. “I conquered the cold long ago, Silas. It has been years since my skin could feel winter’s bite.”
Silas’ jaw fell open at his shamelessness, but Luna gazed at him with stars in her eyes. His apprentice looked at him like he was invulnerable, and he refused to shatter her illusions.
“If you must question my durability, then you might be stunned to learn that I am undergoing intense mental training. My intelligence is so great and my knowledge is so vast that my brain overheats, causing steam to release from my mouth. Enduring such tremendous pressures, my body shakes under the strain of barely controlled power.”
Luna gasped, and he stuck out his chin, basking in the praise of his apprentice. “Unable to bear its own might, my body is at constant risk of ripping itself apart.”
“Master, forgive me for interrupting your training,” Luna said, bowing with her arms as she bobbed in the water.
“There must be a name for the sickness you have,” Silas said with an incredulous look on his face.
Noah turned his nose at the nonbeliever, ignoring his doubting words. Movement caught his eyes, but instead of becoming alert to potential dangers like he once would have, excitement filled him as he eagerly awaited a chance to socialize with a member of his pack.
“Good day, Lady Wren. What has caused you to seek the pleasure of my company?” he asked, tipping his hat in greeting to his favorite scouting wolf.
Wren rolled her eyes, displaying an immunity to his charms that shouldn’t have been possible. The tassels on her jacket dangled and twisted around one another as she patted the frosted ground. After clearing a seat for herself, she sat so to Noah that their knees touched one another. A wool hat hid her auburn hair and covered her ears, leaving the rest of her face to turn rosy in the cold.
“I needed a break from my constant failures. No matter what we do, the scouts can’t find any traces of the Unseelie. The longer we go without discovering their presence, the quicker fear and anticipation turn into boredom,” she said, removing her wool hat and shaking out her bushy hair.
Noah held his breath as the siblings swam to a group of pups around their age. He smiled when laughter carried across the lake as the children began to splash and dunk each other in the water.
After so many weeks of the Unseelie failing to attack, he was beginning to believe that the force who attacked his caravan was merely passing through the area. If a fae portal existed close enough for the pack to face a genuine threat, they would have found it by now.
Shifting his gaze toward Wren, he inspected the dark bags beneath her eyes that darkened her skin until her beautiful freckles were almost invisible to the world. Every wolf felt the strain of anticipation, but the scouts could report nothing but failures, time and time again.
Examining Sylvie’s best friend, he decided that he couldn’t allow certain secrets to remain hidden. If anyone knew Sylvie’s past and was willing to share it with him, it was Wren. Now that all of his thoughts and energy weren’t focused on escaping the territory, he had to know what afflicted his mate.
“Wren, I need to ask you something that might make you feel uncomfortable, but I need to know.”
Hearing the usual teasing absent from his voice, Wren turned her full attention to Noah, inspecting him with exhausted eyes. “Out with it, Noah. I’m too exhausted to wait for you to finish acting coy.”
“Can you tell me about Sylvie’s curse?”
Wren’s eyes widened, and her head swiveled side to side, checking their surroundings to make sure no uninvited ears were listening. “Why not ask Sylvie?”
“Sylvie and I have made great strides in our mating recently, but I fear she will not tell me the entire story. The respect she has for her father banishes truth from her memories.”
Wren held his gaze for a few moments before releasing a loud sigh, fog clouding her face from the warmth of her breath. “Sylvie is blind when it comes to her father. While most wolves remember Ajax’s rule as a time of unprecedented growth in the pack, they often forget how he achieved that growth.”
A haunted look appeared on her face as she filtered through the memories from her childhood. “Ajax’s lust for power knew no bounds. Fearing his wrath, the pack obeyed every one of his deranged commands. Seduced by a fable, a single desire corrupted his mind—unite the shifters and become Alpha to all.”
Wren wheezed out a humorless chuckle. “He dreamed of sitting on a throne of unprecedented power. Of course, he never understood that by the time the world bowed to his might, only an ashen wasteland would await his rule.”
Noah’s heart clenched at such a poisonous influence whispering into Sylvie’s ears. How had she retained her individuality under such an oppressive figure? She bore no resemblance to the tyrant who sought absolute power. Remove the threat of exile, and Sylvie would relinquish her alpha status without a second thought.
“I take it that Ajax’s arrogance led to his downfall?”
Wren nodded her head and pursed her lips. “Funny how you can predict the outcome of such greed, and yet, the powerful continue to be surprised by their endings.”
“Eventually, Ajax’s desire for power reached a point where conquering other wolf packs could no longer satisfy his lust for violence. Why should he stop at Shifters? He was the rightful king of this world, and the freedom of the other races mocked his strength. In his infinite arrogance, he commanded his forces to invade an Unseelie territory.”
Noah’s eyes widened, and his jaw fell open in disbelief. “He dared to challenge a Prince empowered by his portal?”
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Tears flowed down Wren’s cheeks, her tears falling to the ground and melting the frost one drop at a time. “Including my father, his madness led to the deaths of hundreds of wolves. They died in a foreign land for a senseless war. We could not even retrieve our loved one’s claws and fangs to remember them by.”
Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Wren. Instead of dabbing daintily at her tears, Wren blew an inconceivable amount of snot into the once proud cloth.
“Returning someone’s gift is the epitome of rudeness,” he said as Wren tried to hand him back the snot-filled rag.
She shrugged at his refusal, placing the ruined handkerchief in her pocket. “We label Ajax as a mad tyrant, but he possessed the power to justify his lofty goals. He accomplished a task that the world had deemed impossible. The Unseelie fell before his army, and an invincible Prince couldn’t withstand his might. That is, until…” she paused, waiting for Noah to guess the ending.
“The curse?” Noah whispered.
Wren shook her head, releasing a strangled laugh. “Not curse, but curses. In a last-ditch effort to defend his subjects, the Prince cast two curses upon Ajax. The first slowly decayed Ajax’s life force. Imagine a bucket filled with water, and you extract one droplet every day. No matter how large of a bucket Ajax’s power gifted him, eventually, even his bucket would become barren.”
“How long was he able to fight the curse?” Noah asked.
“A few months after he was cursed, our pack of drifters finally placed its roots in this forest,” Wren replied, gesturing to the towering trees that would seem out of place without wolves running between their trunks and traversing their limbs.
“The curse shattered his delusional dreams of power, leaving him too weak to continue his quest for domination. He hid from death’s grasp for sixteen years, but no one can truly escape death. The Fae mock him, and the Vampires taunt him, but he is inevitable for us all. And one day, even the supposed immortals will be held accountable for their transgressions.”
Noah considered Wren’s words, thinking back on how many times death had failed to capture him. One day, his legendary luck would fail him, and he, too, would face the one he had taunted and mocked his entire life.
“If the Prince targeted Ajax with both curses, why did Sylvie get struck instead?” he asked, clearing the melancholic thoughts from his mind.
“As soon as the curses struck him, Ajax’s death became inevitable, but it would take decades for the Prince’s vengeance to come to fruition. Unsatisfied by such a long wait, the Prince sought a more immediate revenge.”
Leaning his head closer to Wren, he could just barely hear her whispers. “The second curse targeted the mate of the Alpha he despised so much, but unknown to the Prince, Sylvie’s mother had already died during childbirth. With nothing to latch onto, the curse searched for an alternative target that carried the mate’s blood in her veins—Sylvie was only eleven years old.”
Wren hugged her arms to her chest, shivering as if to fend off the chill that the wolves couldn’t feel. “I was with her when it happened. We were at this very lake, swimming in the water without a worry in the world. The moment the curse struck her, she slumped face down and nearly drowned before I could get to her.”
Gazing at the lake, Wren’s voice turned monotone. “I pulled her to the bank and tried to wake her, but nothing I did caused her to stir. With a scream that still haunts me, her body went so rigid that all of her joints popped at once. When she opened her eyes, her natural brown color, always warm and tender, was replaced by complete blackness.
I don’t have the words to describe her screams but imagine a person suffering the worst imaginable pain this world has to offer, and you might come close to what Sylvie experienced that day. It was so awful that I feared something had split her soul in two.”
Noah clenched his cane as he pictured his mate in such pain. So occupied with his own agonizing past, his selfishness had blinded him to the suffering of those closest to him. Poor, pitiful Noah. Must the entire world prioritize his torment over their own?
“Even distance couldn’t deny the Prince’s fury. How can we defeat a monster who refuses to be bound by the laws of space? What chance does the pack have against such power?” he asked, hopelessness filling his voice.
Wren lightly placed her fingers on his hand, brushing the lines of his mating mark. “A curse of such magnitude requires the sacrifice of pure life essence. Despite his near-immortal life span, the curse severely weakened the Prince, leaving him at death’s door for at least a decade. Not even a mighty being like the Prince can cast such a powerful curse again.”
Wren bit her lip in hesitation, leaning so close to his ear that her hair tickled his neck. “There are even rumors that a curse of that magnitude requires the castor to use the target’s blood. The only way the Prince could have gotten Ajax’s blood would have been treachery from inside the pack.”
The crushing pressure preventing Noah from breathing naturally eased as hope replaced a small portion of the oppressive fear. An Unseelie Prince wasn’t some all-powerful entity that the pack couldn’t defend against. They had a chance, and he wouldn’t let the opportunity slip by once it presented itself. His mating mark tingled as Wren continued to stroke his hand, causing his lips to dip into a frown. Her tentative fingers danced across his skin, but they lacked the searing heat Sylvie’s touch carried.
He cleared his throat, and Wren gasped, jerking her hand back as if his skin had burned her. “I’m sorry, Noah! It seems I can’t dwell on memories and not make a fool of myself at the same time.”
As he stared at her blushing face, he scooted a few feet away from Wren before rumors could spread and get him killed by maticide.
“Is there no way to break such a curse? If there were, I assume Ajax would have discovered a cure,” he asked, brushing over her embarrassment.
Wren, staring in a daze at the space he had created between their legs, glanced up to meet his eyes. “Didn’t you know? There’s a very simple way to break an Unseelie curse.”
“A simple cure, but nearly impossible; you must kill the Unseelie Prince who cast it. The calls of their homeland have long since driven the Unseelie mad, and like an addict, they can’t bear to leave their portal’s intoxicating presence for long.”
Noah nodded, deep in thought. Killing an Unseelie Prince while they were empowered by their portal was an impossible task for almost any being on the planet. Luckily, they did not need to break Sylvie’s curse. A curse filled with such hate and evil had taken a life, but it had also gifted a life. Without it, he never would have found a home, family, or love. Nature must always keep a balance, it seemed.
A hair-raising howl bellowed in the distance, leaving him scrambling to plug his ears with his fingers. Grimacing in pain, he jumped to his feet with his cane at the ready to defend against enemies threatening his home. The pack mates enjoying the lake shifted instantly, howling their answers to the unseen caller. In a blur that his eyes could barely discern, the wolves bolted into the woods, heading in the direction of the lodge.
Wren stood next to Noah, staring into the distance with a frown but not rushing to shift like the other wolves had. Luna and Silas left the lake, sprinting toward him with wide eyes.
Out of breath, Luna urged, “Master, you must answer her call. Silas and I are not permitted to attend, but you are First Mate.”
“What’s going on?” he asked, peering through the trees for anything suspicious.
“Sylvie has called an emergency pack meeting. Every senior-level wolf must gather at the lodge immediately,” Wren whispered.
Tearing her eyes from the potential dangers in the trees, she glanced at Noah with a coy smile. “Unfortunately, we can’t allow your lack of speed to slow us down. Jump on my back, and I will carry you.”
After a brief shimmer, a massive auburn wolf stood before Noah, pointing toward her back with her paw. Countless scenes from his favorite books flashed across his mind, and he wasted no time leaping onto the wolf’s back. Gripping his pommel, his fingers twisted into the scruff of her neck with one hand, and he raised his cowboy hat into the air with the other.
“Yeehaw!” he whooped out. “Giddy up, girl!” he yelled, kicking his heels and imaginary spurs into Wren’s ribs. A yelp sounded out, and razor-sharp fangs snapped at his leg, ripping his trousers and coming within inches of removing his leg. Staring at his bare calf that had somehow escaped Wren’s bite, he slowly lowered his hat onto his head.
“Has your master finally gone insane, Luna?” Silas whispered to his sister.
“He toes the line between genius and madness like only the true masters can,” Luna whispered back.
Flushing with embarrassment, he smoothed out Wren’s scruff, refusing to look at his apprentices. “You raise a compelling argument, dear Wren. Please proceed at your convenience.”