Page 24 of Broken Souls

I scoff. Hybrids are infertile. “Another fucking lie –”

“It’s not. I realized you were a hybrid in my womb, and I…” She trails off. Stops. Turns to stare out at the lake as she wraps her arms around herself. Her eyes are distant. I want to keep moving.Needto give this burning energy inside me a way out, but I stop too.

“You what?” I demand.

“I changed everything about you.” She swallows. “Your face so you wouldn’t grow up looking like him. The smell of your blood so he wouldn’t be able to identify you as his. I even changed your DNA slightly. Not a lot, just enough so you could conceive. You know it’s the absence of one little gene for hybrids…”

“I don’t fucking believe you.” My entire body is vibrating, and I clench my fists with a need to destroy something, but I bite back that anger, control it. I need to think, to make sure she isn’t just telling me more lies. To hide something even worse. “Shit like that requires dark magic,” I say.

She folds in on herself. Her right arm slips down so her palm presses flat against her stomach. She says something, her lips moving, but I can’t hear it.

“Mother,” I growl, the first show of anger in my voice.

She flinches. “You were a twin,” she says loud enough for me to hear.

“What?” I rasp. I swallow hard, work my tongue around my mouth to try to get the sudden ash-taste out of it.

“I had to make a choice – lose you both or save one of you.”

“So you killed him.”

“Her,” she whispers. “Her name was Uri, and I gave birth to her before you. Your father was so broken when he saw her come out dead. I think he might’ve suspected since then that you two weren’t his. She looked so much likehimeven then, but Caden loved you. He loved you so much, he didn’t care.”

“Then why did he leave?”

She flinches.

“Why?”

“Not because of you,” she says.

“But he couldn’t look at me when he came back.”

“Itwasn’tbecause of you. He just saw you after we had a fight. He left –” She swallows, takes a moment. “He left because we completed a blood bond, and it broke us. After everything we went through, he couldn’t handle…” A bitter note hits her voice.

My blood stills, but I don’t push her. My thoughts fly to Micha. Every blood bond requires a sacrifice; what if we do not survive it either?

The silence stretches between us. Not quite as heavy as it was before we started, but it’s still thick and muggy and crushing on our shoulders. The truth can only lift it so much when the lies have piled on year after year after year.

“What are the limits of my curse?” I finally ask.

“You can’t use magic in any form. You can’t phase. You will never grow fangs. You will age and scar. The only time you can feed on blood is if you’re dying.” She glances at the two rings I have on my hands. The ones that give me the strength of a vampire. “And those are just placebos; you don’t need them to do what you do.”

I glance down at them, feeling the weight of their lies.

“And you can never fall in love.”

My head jerks up. “What?”

“If you do, the curse lifts.”

I stare at her, more shocked about this than anything she’s said so far. “You chose a fuckingfairy taleas the curse breaker. Why? So I would be happy even when my world is falling to shit?”

“Because you’re firstborn,” she says simply. “We don’t get the luxury of knowing what real love is. We are too paranoid, too targeted, too fucked up by our position. It is something that will never happen.”

I stare at her in disbelief. “But you love us.”And I love Micha.

Her heart breaks in her eyes. “I love you as much as I know how. But I’ve lost so many children that I fear giving you all I have.” A dry laugh leaves her lips. “I don’t even know if I have it in me to give. Caden didn’t think so at the end...”