Page 17 of Alpha’s One-Night Stand (Shifters of Clarion #3)

“ D o you know anything about the new student? Yarra Wilkins?”

Mother looks up at me from her papers, her glasses sitting on the edge of her nose. She tilts her head for a moment, then turns back to the pile in front of her. “Is that why you’re here so late in the night? To ask me about another student? Curious.”

I don’t mean to show my hand to her, but I’m beginning to feel desperate. The private sessions with Professor Julia were helping a little, but the totem’s power is steadily weakening. I woke up this evening hearing Yarra’s heartbeat and picking up her scent like wildfire. She was going to see her human detective again.

It occurred to me then that maybe if I stepped in and helped her find her mother, then maybe she’d stop stealing away to this strange human every other night.

“She interests me, all right?” I tell her. “I thought it would be prudent to find out some things about her.”

Mother chuckles and lifts her head. “What could I know about a student other than their grades in my class, which, by the way, she’s doing very poorly in. She hasn’t even connected with her lycan in any way.”

I don’t dare tell her about Yarra’s identity crisis. That feels like a deep betrayal, somehow. I throw myself on my sword instead. “Well, I was thinking that she may be a proper candidate to be my Luna.”

She stares at me blankly, and for a moment, I can’t tell if she can see through my ruse. Then her face splits into a smile, and she leans back in her chair. “So, she was the one you ‘talked’ to, then?”

My face starts to get hot. “That’s beside the point, Mother. I just would like to know if she, perhaps, comes from a family of influence.”

“Okay,” she says. “So you want to know if she’s a legacy at Moonhelm?”

“That’s information that you would be able to access, yes?”

“It’s information anyone can access. It’s a matter of looking up the alumni.” She pauses, tapping her fingers on the desk thoughtfully. “But I’m sure you would like it quickly, so that’s why you’ve come here.”

I nod, and she looks me over. “You can feel the wolf more now, can’t you?”

“Yes. Especially in the Labors classes.”

Her eyebrows raise a little. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

I turn to leave, and I hear her say, “If you’re restless tonight, you should find her. Your lycan will thank you for the good night’s sleep.”

I don’t respond. I just leave without another word.

The next morning, I skip classes, deciding to go for a walk instead. We’re a day or two away from the Red Moon Ball, an event that always held very little interest to me but was important just the same. There’s always at least one Scarlet Wolf in the student registry, and just like where there are Alphas, there are Lunas, Scarlets have their own romantic counterparts—neutrals. It was supposed to start off a weekend of events dedicated to the whole Red Moon thing.

That, like just about everything else these days, makes me think of Yarra. I would expect her to be there with her friend. If the Scarlet happens to be the only female and there are a wealth of neutrals in attendance, she’ll have a busy time fending them off.

I’ve never bothered to attend, but knowing that Yarra will be there has made me rethink that. Perhaps I can convince her to connect with me again. Maybe I can convince her of her true nature.

I stroll down the winding pathways, going nowhere in particular. My wolf feels like it’s jogging next to me, hungry and alert, but settled for the moment. I still have some control over him. I don’t know if it’s the totem or the lessons, but it’ll have to do for now.

I don’t understand how Yarra, the wolf who doesn’t know she’s a wolf, could possibly be my Luna. I seem to feel only chaos when I’m around her, even with the totem’s power keeping it bound.

My mate is supposed to be my peace, yet her very scent brings a whirlwind of emotions. I don’t understand it.

A chilly wind sweeps around me, and I pull my jacket closed. It looks a little like rain. I should head back to my room. I turn and nearly run right into my mother, who is walking right behind me.

I jump back in surprise. “Jeez. You scared me.”

She frowns with slight concern. “You didn’t sense me?”

“I was . . . I was in my own head. What are you doing out here?”

She wrings her hands. “Chad, I need you to come with me. We need to talk.”

“Is this about Yarra?”

“Not here,” she says. “Come on.”

The stern look on her face is enough for me to comply without protesting further. We walk in silence, and she leads towards the woods just past the campus borders. We walk along the well-worn path winding through trees so dark they almost block out what little light is coming from the clouded skies above us. We walk along the path for a few minutes before she stops and looks around as though she’s checking to see if there is anyone watching. Then she reaches into her pocket and produces a smooth black stone. She holds it out in front of her and almost immediately the black stone turns gold with ethereal energy.

I watch with rapt attention as the scenery before us melts away revealing a large white church with a graveyard surrounded by an old rod iron fence. A million questions enter my mind as we continue down the path towards the church.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“Once upon a time,” she says, “a human town dwelled in these woods. By the time Moonhelm was being built, the town had long passed into obscurity. As I understand it, most of the structures had been reduced to rubble in some great fire more than a century ago. Nothing survived except this church. So, we decided to keep it and shroud it with magic.”

I want to ask her why they would do something like that, but as we walk up the porch steps to the front door, I believe I’m about to find out.

Mother opens the door with a push on the splintered wood. It creaks open, giving way to darkness and the smell of dust and wood. Inside, we are immediately in an old sanctuary. Pews lined up on either side of us are in various degrees of disrepair – old torn and dirt covered upholstery and splintered, broken wood frames. It’s hard to imagine anyone had ever come to worship here.

“The graveyard wasn’t here when the school was built,” mother says as we move towards the altar. The wood was still oddly intact though a tarnished brass cross still sat on top. “We decided to use it just the same. Every founder is buried here…all the way from the school’s genesis.”

She walks behind the altar and pulls the brass cross towards her. There’s rumble under our feet as a door slides open on the floor next to her, revealing stairs leading down into a stone hallway.

“Finding Yarra’s mother was fairly easy,” she says as we start down the stairs and into the dank smelling stone basement. “Her name is slightly different. Different enough not to alert anyone, but not so different that I know it can’t be a coincidence.”

We come to a dead end. She touches one brick on the wall before us and pushes in. A door appears and slides to one side, revealing a secret hallway.

“Yarra’s family name was shortened from Wilkinson,” she says as I follow her through the passage. We’re now approaching walls are lined with dusty books and artifacts from Moonhelm’s past.

“Do you plan to kill me and hide my body?” I say with a smirk. She throws me an unamused look.

“This is no time for jokes, Chad.”

We come to a small room, the air heavy with the scent of old parchment and the faint, dank basement smell from the stone walls. In the center of the room stands a pedestal, and on it lies a thick leather-bound book. Mother walks to it and opens it.

“This,” she says, “is the history of Moonhelm’s founding pack. Most of them were either descended from or in direct lineage to the Alpha King.”

I blink. “The Alpha King? Leon?”

“Yes,” she says. “Within these pages are records of the royal lineage and all the noble families of Clarion. Important and historical events are recounted here.” She smiles a little as she turns the page. “It is priceless.”

I think back to our own family lineage. Our pack wasn’t royalty, at least not by blood. But many of us were nobles in some of the courts back in the ancient city of Clarion. “Is this place of your making?” I ask and she chuckles.

“No. This was here many, many centuries before me.” She turns the pages, showing me ancestry tables of various wolves. She stops on one that spans both pages and leads over to the next group of pages.

“This is the royal line,” she says, her finger stopping on the name of the former Alpha King, the one of my mother’s and grandmother’s generation. Below him is the current king Leon and his Luna.

“Here are the children of Alpha King Morn, Leon’s grandfather,” she says, turning the page. This isn’t new information. Our family being descended from nobles, we know the royal line well. Many of them went off to form other packs that rule other parts of Clarion.

And then I see it. “There are too many children here,” I say. “Alpha King Morn only had two children, Gemma and Alphonse. He didn’t have a third.”

Mother nods. Her finger lands on the name of the third child, Charon. “This is Yarra’s mother.”

I look at her, my mouth dropping open. “What?”

“Charon of Clarion. Her name, as it was originally known, lives in these pages alone. She was an illegitimate child of Alpha King Morn and a young witch in his household. When her mother was discovered to have birthed a child of King Morn, an Alpha sworn to a Luna . . . well, she was banished to the Outer Lands. Years went by, and the child returned to Clarion as an adult. The family never really acknowledged her as an heir, but they pledged to let her have all the benefits of nobility.”

I’m floored. By all of this. But the pieces are slowly starting to come together. “Yarra’s mother was a hybrid.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Wait. How can you know this? You said her surname was Wilkinson. How could you have made this connection?”

She picks up a block of pages, a sad look in her eye. She turns to another section with photos. Some of them are in black and white, others in color. They show wolves running through the woods, then the same wolves in human form gathered in robes that were colored in light blue with sigils representing their family crests on them.

“These wolves were a part of the Table,” she says. “They were the founding pack of Moonhelm. They are all mostly gone now.” She turns the pages slowly, and we look at all the pictures. Candid shots of them talking to one another, sitting around a large stone table with the Moonhelm sigil carved into them. In one of the photos, I spot a woman with red hair among them.

“A Scarlet?” I ask and Mother shakes her head.

“No. But interestingly enough, she had a Scarlet child, the result of an unfortunate assault one night on campus. She gave the child up for adoption. It was quite the scandal back then.”

I think briefly of the Scarlet in our midst and I wonder . . .

“And here is Yarra’s mother.” She turns to the next page. An old photograph of a wolf with dark fur. In the lighting, it almost looks purple, like Yarra’s hair. Next to her is a human man. They’re both sitting on a log, looking out on a lake. The photo looks like it’s been taken without them knowing.

“Who’s the human?”

Mother pauses, then replies, “Her lover.”

My eyes widen in shock. My mother continues, “Love is such a strange thing. It can make you choose paths that others fear to tread so much, that they would do anything to keep you from it. I don’t know the story of how she came to know this human. What I do know is that she loved him. At least enough to carry on with him in secret until this photo was discovered.”

A wolf-witch hybrid in love with a human. The wheels turn in my mind as Mother goes on.

“Even with her illegitimacy, Charon was expected to continue Morn’s bloodline in the hopes that her children would at least reap the benefits of being accepted into the royal line. I suppose being rejected by your own father leaves a certain taste in your mouth, though, and Charon as an adult was very much her own person in the end.”

“Let me guess,” I say softly. “The Table didn’t approve.”

“Of course not. Can you imagine the scandal if anyone found out that Charon of Clarion preferred to keep company with a human?” She shakes her head sadly. “It was an unfortunate story, one that . . . that I imagine couldn’t be avoided in the end. Charon followed her nature, and the Table followed theirs.” She goes silent for a moment, a deep frown on her face. “You see, my son, when the Table saw a problem, they eliminated it.”

My stomach twists inside me. “Are you saying she’s dead?”

She closes the book. “The Table knew of her affair with the human and, at first, did nothing. They understood Charon’s wild nature and trusted that when the time came, she would discard her lover and move forward with an Alpha. But then, Charon found herself pregnant. She knew that if the Table found out about the child . . .”

She trails off. I’m glad she doesn’t finish the sentence. I don’t think I want to know.

“She changed her name from Charon of Clarion to Karen Wilkinson,” she says, “and stole away to the Outer Lands, using her magic to shield her from detection. And it’s been that way for years.”

I take everything in for a moment, a strange sense of danger coming over me. “The Table doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s no one looking for her now.”

“I never said that,” she said. “I only said most of them are gone.”

“What does that mean? Is Yarra in danger?”

She regards me, her eyebrows turned up with worry. “I wish I could tell you to forget this girl,” she says. “If any of this gets out about her . . . her connection to Charon . . . It’s already not safe for her to be here. You put your own life in danger being around her.”

“I think it may be too late for that, Mother.” The wolf inside me is roused, hairs standing on end. There’s no use hiding any of my feelings now. “She is my Luna, and I must protect her.”

Mother just looks at me, the saddest look on her face. “She is a Threefold,” she says softly. “Human, lycan, and witch. The poor girl probably has no idea what kind of power she may have access to. She is better off never knowing. She is . . . safer that way.”

“Until the right person finds out.” The totem is doing very little to calm my wolf. All I want to do is run out of here and track Yarra down.

“Whatever you do,” Mother says, “please be careful. There may be forces looking for her already.”

I think about the Scarlet that hangs around her, the human in the car that she meets with . . . and those are just the ones I know about. Who else could be out there?

“I will.” I kiss my mother on the forehead. “I promise.”

With that, I turn and leave, on the hunt for Yarra.