Page 152

Camden nodded his understanding and took over. “Yeah, they make us in all shades, grandpa, get over it. Now, let’s start with how you closed the portals.”

He chuckled to himself. “Well, if you idiots made it over here, I guess we didn’t do a good enough job closin’ those doors.”

Elias gritted his teeth. “And how exactly did you do that the first time?”

Francis took a big sip of his wine, a few drops escaping to dribble a bit down his chin. He smacked his lips and frowned, looking at Elyndra pleadingly. “Won’t you be a dear and add a drop or two?”

She nodded and turned to Cavelli, who gave Francis a patronizing smile before taking his Lunessa’s wrist in his hand. He brought it to his mouth, nicking her skin with one of his sharpened canines, and then she brought it over his cup, letting the blood drip inside. His eyes dilated, and he swirled the cup beneath her. “That’s it, just a little more.”

Once he was satisfied with her offering, Cavelli took her wrist back and sealed the wound with a quick kiss.

Francis took a huge, greedy gulp. “Ahhh…” he sighed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re too good to an old fool like me, Elly.”

She patted him on the hand, and we waited a beat more before Camden clicked his teeth in frustration. “You good now?”

Elyndra kept her hand on top of Francis’s, giving him big doe eyes—which, considering she looked like a cross between a deer and ahuman, wasn’t too difficult. “Won’t you tell these shifters what you know, Francis?”

He looked over to our pack with milky eyes, his lips stained red. His skin was papery thin, and the veins underneath came to life from Elyndra’s offering. “I s’pose I could. Well, let’s see… it was the priestesses that closed the doors, I was just the unlucky son of a bitch who volunteered to say the spell from this side. I didn’t have a servaglio at the time, and all the other males in my battalion had packs and women and little ones waitin’ for them at home, you see.”

I wondered if the priestesses at the temple had any records left from this time. I couldn’t imagine they were a part of some grand conspiracy to hide the true nature of the war, but it seemed odd that they had been so instrumental in its end. These days they held no power whatsoever, aside from determining shifter designation in pups.

“Do you still remember the spell?” I asked.

He ignored me and looked back at Camden. “You remind me of John, alpha. Now, he was a good fighter. Never seen a wolf as big as him, I tell you what. Took down a dozen of those fae bastards all on his own, not a scratch on him. Me, I wasn’t too bad myself, but…”

“Francis,” Elyndra interrupted. “Do you remember the spell that closed the portals?”

“Hm? Oh right, the spell. Nah, it was the priestesses that closed the doors. You see, they needed someone on the other side to say half the thing, and I was the unlucky bastard…”

The pack and I exchanged exasperated looks. I couldn’t say exactly who I was expecting to meet in this realm, but an old, redneck, racist vampyr with dementia wasn’t one of them.

While Francis muttered on, Cavelli turned towards us and added quietly. “I don’t normally condone using the power on other vampyrs, but I have a feeling we’ll be here all night if I don’t.” He got up and walked over to the old male, kneeling beside him to look at him directly. “Francis, do you remember the spell that closed the doors?”

Francis’s eyes dilated as the compulsion took hold. “No, it was too long ago. I threw the spell away.”

I figured as much, but it was still disappointing. We’d need to find another way, then.

“Anything else you’d like to ask? Even with the power, I don’t think he’ll be lucid much longer.”

I gave Cavelli my most pertinent questions, which he repeated to Francis. “Why do the vampyrs and shifters of the other realm believe they were fighting each other and not the fae?”

“Leadership thought it would help protect our people if we forgot this realm existed. It would keep us from seeking out the doors, trying to reopen them. The spell changed our memory. On the other side, that is. I still remember.”

Kian and I looked at each other. I couldn’t believe the amount of power it would have required to alter the collective consciousness of tens of thousands of people. But the reasoning made sense, and had at least protected us from further attacks for this long.

“Why did the vampyrs and shifters lose their powers, and why are there no more omegas?” Cavelli asked, moving on to my next question.

“The magic comes from here. Once the doors were shut, the source was cut. I overheard the priestesses say that the spell would also make omega designations disappear, to make sure the twins couldn’t be born in our world, and that would help keep the fae from wanting to come back.”

They were able to eradicate an entire designation? What kinds of powers did we have before the war?

And how dire must things have been to come to such a decision? Yes, we could live without magic, without shifting, without omegas, but we’d lost so much of our identities and culture as shifters. We were only barely different from humans these days.

Maybe that had been the goal—assimilation to the point of genetic erasure. That was its own sort of protection, I supposed, but I wasn’t sure it was worth the cost.

Then the light began to fade from his eyes, and he shrank into his shoulders. “I think I might need to lie down. I’m… I’m not feeling that well, you see.”

Cavelli looked at us. “I think that’s all Francis can tell us right now, alphas.”