Page 9 of Bound by the Moon (The Ancients #4)

My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing in my pocket as I walked through the caverns that, somewhere up above, linked my father’s lands to Avery’s. Finally, I decided just to answer it, only to hear Mikael’s angry voice on the other end.

“Have you lost your mind, Jess? We’re out here on the trail of the rogue hunter and Clarissa to stop them from helping the others to find you. Now, you’re going to just walk your ass to them?”

“Technically, yes.”

I was definitely going to be in trouble with Mikael if I made it back alive.

“Seriously, you’re going to be a smartass, right now? What about Willow, Jess?”

“She’s taken care of until you get back.”

As much as it pained me, I had to keep my emotions on lock down. If I had taken too much time to think about possibly leaving Willow and Mikael behind, I would have chickened out, and Sierra’s baby would suffer for my cowardice. “Who told you?”

“Does it really matter? You should have told me.”

“I didn’t want you worried while you were out on a retrieval mission. As for Willow, she’s safe, and she’s taken care of. It’s not like I was bringing her along for the ride. They have baby Jack, Mikael. What else was I supposed to do? They thought he was Willow when they took him. If it had been Willow, would you be on the phone with me right now, convincing me not to go?”

“No, I’d be running towards you to help if it were our daughter, and you know that. This is different. I know you care for Sierra and baby Jack, but you’re running off to make yourself a martyr, and you’re leaving our daughter behind to be motherless. How does one more tragedy added to the list help at all?”

“Damn it, Mikael, and where are you right now? Oh, that’s right, you’re tracking down dangerous people. I never asked if you were trying to leave our daughter fatherless, because I knew it was something you had to do. So, stop trying to put that guilt off on me.”

I sighed heavily into the phone as I collected myself. “Besides, I do not plan on dying today, but if I did, I know you would take care of our daughter and remind her that I did what had to be done. I am not the type of person to leave innocent people, especially a baby, to die in my place.”

“Jess,”

he whispered into the phone, “please, don’t do this right now. Wait until I can get back.”

“We can’t wait, Mikael. If we wait, the baby dies. You’ve held him in your arms too. Hell, he was the baby we both coddled while we waited for our own to be born. He’s the one thing that saved Sierra after Jack’s death. Could you really wait if our roles were reversed right now?”

“No.”

That one word came on the heels of so much misery that it made my chest ache. “I know where you’re coming from Jess, and it makes me love you all the more. We just haven’t had enough time together yet. Maybe that makes me selfish, but I think we deserve at least one human lifetime together if we can’t have the rest of our unnaturally long were-lives.”

“Mikael, some humans don’t get a lifetime together either. I love you, and I will do my best to come back for you and Willow, I promise.”

I hesitated when I heard a sob coming from the other end of the line. “Mikael, if I don’t…”

I swallowed hard thinking about the possibilities. “I left something for you and Willow with Serena. She will see that you get it. I have to go, I’m at the cave entrance now, if I keep talking they’ll know more than I want them to.”

“Jess…”

Mikael’s voice cracked in anguish. I don’t know what he would have said in that moment, because I hung my phone up and turned it off. If I had to hear the despair in his voice, or another sob come from the man I’d always known to be so strong, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go through with this plan myself. Actually, I didn’t have an option any longer. The dark ones that were interspersed throughout the tunnel system were now at my back, pushing me forward into the unknown abyss on the other side.

“Ah, so good of you to finally show your face. I had been worried that you would sacrifice your child, rather than come to me on your own.”

He looked at the baby who was sitting quietly beside him. “I had heard rumors that the white wolf had given birth, that she was still with child, that she never was. It’s a daunting thing to try to see a strange world from the outside in, especially one as closed off and secretive as the wolves.”

“Do you have a point?”

I rolled my eyes. It was just my luck to be stuck with the chatty leader of the dark ones.

“My apologies, it appears as though I bore you with my seemingly futile attempt to find the one who could open this portal.”

As he stepped out of the way I got my first glimpse of the dais I had seen so many times in my dreams. I took a moment to look around me. This was most assuredly the same cave I always met with the White Wolf Souls in. There, just in front of the dais was the willow tree that I had seen growing in my dreams as well.

The man, the monster, before me glanced at the tree too, before turning back to baby Jack who was still wearing Willow’s t-shirt. It was a baby blue color, which accounted for why Sierra would have chosen that one, but up in the left hand corner, just above the baby’s heart was the embroidered name, Willow. “The tree makes sense now.”

He turned his attention back on me then. “Since you’re bored, I don’t see the point in wasting any more time with getting to know each other, you won’t be around long enough for it to matter. I do thank you for your sacrifice though.”

I couldn’t help myself, I started to laugh. Once the delightfully nervous sound of it bubbled up from my body and spilled out to be echoed through the cavern, I couldn’t stop myself. It just kept coming, and it seemed to stop Louis in his tracks. He stared at me, stunned, as if he looked upon a mad woman. Perhaps, he did. “This is not the typical reaction one expects when they tell the victim that they are about to be sacrificed.”

His voice gave nothing away, but his eyes, they expressed a multitude of things. Shock at my odd behavior, to be sure, but just under there I saw the seed of doubt start to take hold and grow.

“This is not my first rodeo,”

I blurted out in between bouts of hysterical laughter. “You aren’t even my scariest captor yet, but you do have one thing in common with all of them.”

“Do tell…”

“They were just as clueless as you are.”

The laughter in my belly dried up then, and as I stood taller, more confident in what I was about to do, the rest of my plan began to unravel. “You’ve been draining the girls you thought were me, and judging from the stains on the dais, that’s where you’ve been hopefully waiting for the right results.”

“All of this is very obvious, get to the point, before I put the point in you…”

His fangs flashed out as his smile widened. I was a werewolf. Fangs were never a worry for me, and they didn’t put an ounce of extra fear in me now.

“Had I actually been one of those girls you so thoughtlessly slaughtered, you would have killed all of your chances of ever getting that damned portal opened.”

“Really?”

Sarcasm dripped form that word. It was clear he didn’t believe me, yet.

“Truly. I know the spell that binds me to this place. I suppose I should say, that binds this place to me. It’s not what you imagined it to be.”

“I imagine nothing. I have a knowledgeable source on the matter. I know exactly how a blood bond works.”

“Do you? This isn’t a typical blood bond. It’s a bloodline spell. Did you know that?”

I could tell by the look on his face that he did not. And of course, that would be because it wasn’t. “The witch who sealed this place…”

I started.

“Layla,”

he interrupted.

“Layla, apparently wanted to make sure it stayed sealed. She bound the white wolf blood line to this place. The only way to gain entry is for me to willingly give up mine and my baby’s life.”

I had been inching closer to baby Jack all the while as I spoke, and now, I reached down and picked him up. “I have to step on the dais, with my baby, and willing drop blood from both of us on there. It actually doesn’t take a lot, just a lot of determination to make it happen on my part.”

“So, you’re telling me that you can open the portal and still live. I assume you want me to free you and your baby once you’ve done so for me?”

He was the one nearly laughing now.

“No. I’m not stupid. You’re going to kill us one way or the other. You are the monster, after all.”

“Then what do you gain by telling me how to break the barrier?”

“I gain this… I take the baby to the other side with me, peacefully, and hope that you will keep your word to leave my pack out of this. I don’t care about anyone else’s people, pack, or whatever you intend to harm. My pack stays safe, or you can kill me now, and give up on this portal ever opening. Remember, I will be opening a gateway to the dead that won’t be able to close again. I can come back through to make sure you kept your end of the bargain.”

“I see.”

Louis paced back and forth for a few minutes, while thinking. Meanwhile, I prepared by tucking aby Jack in close to me. I had fastened a sling around me before I left the house earlier, in anticipation of having to carry the baby back, or take him with me to the other side. According to Layla I would need for parts of the baby’s skin to be touching my own when I crossed over, otherwise he might be lost anyway. I made sure that Willows shirt was pulled up off the baby’s stomach and then I pulled mine out of the way too. One of his arms, and his belly were flush against my own skin then. Now, I just had to hope that this worked, for his sake.

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