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TEN

Fiona

R eed ferried me back to the room I’d woken up in—apparently Brielle and High Alpha Kane’s room—pressing a swift kiss to my cheek in the doorway before jogging off toward the front gate. Galyna followed me in, and I was introduced to Leigh, the pregnant female Reed had mentioned earlier. She was yawning in a chair, both legs thrown over one arm swinging idly.

“Fiona!” Olivia greeted me with a warm smile, surprising me when she rose from her spot by the bed to hug me.

“Wolves really are a touchy-feely bunch,” I said with a chuckle as I returned her hug.

“Sorry, too much?” Olivia pulled back immediately and blushed, her fair complexion showing the flush all the way from her neck to her cheeks.

“No, not at all. Just… trying to keep up. This is a lot to take in.”

It wasn’t something I was used to—I was definitely not a hugger in general—but it was so naturally part of them that it didn’t bother me. I actually kind of liked it. It made me feel like part of the group, the family .

Leigh snorted sarcastically. “I just bet. Bri and Shay filled me in. So, you thought you were human until yesterday? That’s wild.”

“Yeah… Wild is a good word for it.” I followed Olivia to the edge of the bed and sat, idly running a hand over my hair.

“We were actually just talking about what your ancestor might have been. Do you want to tell us about your powers, maybe give us a hint to work with?” Brielle asked.

“And don’t worry, you’re not the only weirdo around here. We’re pretty much all strange, so you’ll fit right in,” Leigh interrupted, pointing to herself. “I’m half human, Shay’s part fae, so she’s got way more juice than the average wolf. Oli’s basically a plant genius who sleepwalks, and Bri’s an omega. That’s its own ball of wax.”

Blinking in surprise, I followed her finger around the room as she aired everyone’s dirty laundry like it was nothing. Could they really just accept my differences as simply as that? People didn’t just do that. Though, they were wolves, not people, really.

Elodie laughed from her position by the window. “Damn, I’ve never felt like a normal chick being part of the enclave, but you five do make me feel boring. I knew I liked you guys.”

“Says the woman with a sword as tall as I am,” Brielle teased.

Elodie fingered her sword’s sharp tip like it was a puppy, not a deadly weapon. “But it’s so pretty!”

Everyone laughed at that, and even when all their eyes turned back to me, waiting, I somehow felt at ease. “I don’t really know much to tell you, I’m afraid. There’s the family rumors about Great-Grandma Nell and the blue man , but besides that, everybody else in my family is pretty normal. I mean, my mom has migraines, and I have a seizure disorder. But those are pretty garden-variety human ailments.” I smiled, trying to sweep the illnesses under the rug. I didn’t like to talk about my seizures; I liked to pretend they didn’t exist.

“So your grandma—the child of the blue mystery man—didn’t have any strange physical features or any odd habits?” Shay asked.

I shook my head. “Not that I’ve ever noticed. She didn’t suffer from schizophrenia, like her mom. And her only odd habit was crocheting tea cozies for a family full of people who didn’t drink tea.”

“Huh. It’s just not a lot to go on, and my wolf doesn’t scent pixie on you.”

“Wolves can smell specific species?” I asked. I wished there was like an encyclopedia of what all the supernatural species could do. That would be a handy desk reference.

“We can smell almost anything. Our noses are scary good. But we don’t automatically know what something is if we haven’t encountered it before,” Shay answered.

“That makes sense. So I don’t smell like anything you know?”

“You do smell like something we know. Humans.” Galyna’s tone was gruff, as if she was put out that I had eluded her nose.

“So what else can you do? You can see the shield, it looks like a bubble. Anything else?” Leigh pressed, a dog with a bone.

“I—” I hesitated, not sure if I should admit the strange seizure hallucinations I always had. I saw some crazy shit.

“It’s okay, whatever it is, we won’t judge.” Olivia squeezed my hand.

“I hallucinate whenever I have a seizure. It’s not super uncommon for the type of disease I have, but… mine are really vivid and realistic.”

Leigh perked up at that. “Ooh, interesting. What have you seen? Maybe it’s related to your powers.”

“I mean, the last one I thought was a seizure was the glowing wolf eyes in the woods, and the glowing palm, but that turned out not to be a vision. The last one before that was a few months ago. I was in a man’s sitting room—or maybe a bedroom? It had a pair of fancy chairs, and a crystal decanter of alcohol, so I guessed study. But anyway, he was sitting there drinking it, on the phone, and then he grabbed his chest and fell out of the chair dead out of nowhere. Super creepy. There was something off about his hand?” I shuddered at the memory.

“Did you know the man?” Brielle asked.

“Nope. Never seen him before in my life. He didn’t even speak. I just watched him die.” Shame burned in my cheeks, even though they’d asked. Surely death visions were a bad thing, even in the supernatural world?

Brielle’s face did look troubled. But instead of saying anything about it, she walked around the bed to the far nightstand, picking up a slim black cell phone. She tapped it a few times, then walked over and showed me a picture. “Was this by any chance the man?”

I tilted the phone to get the glare off the screen, and then my jaw dropped. “Holy shit. How did you know?”

“Just a hunch,” she whispered, expression clearly distressed as she flashed the picture to the other women in the room.

“She saw the high alpha’s death? In a seizure hallucination?” Galyna blurted, turning wary eyes on me.

“That man was the high alpha? I thought Kane said he was high alpha in the priestess’s office earlier?” I was struggling to keep up with the pack structure. Humans were simple. The president was easy to spot; he was the dude in a suit with a horde of testy-looking Secret Service guys following him. Kane just walked around in regular clothes like everybody else.

“This is the late High Alpha Kosta, Kane’s father.” Brielle met my eyes gravely as she answered, clicking the phone off and sticking it in her pocket. “He died a few months ago, before we bonded. Sitting alone in a bedroom, in a chair, while drinking bourbon. Your description was almost identical to the crime scene.”

I gaped, unsure what to do with this information. Everything I thought I knew about myself had just shifted on its axis again . How many life-altering things could I discover in a two-day period? Seriously, one was enough.

“Okay, so she has real visions, she doesn’t have any scent, and her people are blue. That’s something to go off.”

“Pixies aren’t known for visions,” Shay agreed, steepling her fingers together. “And we’d be able to smell that. I think we can rule out pixie as a possible ancestor.”

“Priestess Marciana gave you guys full access to the library earlier, after I asked for Reed. If you guys want, we can move this party to the library? See if we can track down some more blue species?” Elodie suggested.

“I call dragon!” Leigh shouted as she leapt to her feet.

Shay groaned. “Leigh, for the love of the Goddess, what is your obsession with dragons? We’d be able to smell if she was a shifter.”

“Hey, you don’t know, okay? Dragons are supposed to be the most powerful shifters. Maybe they can mask their scent. And historically, they come in all sorts of colors, so blue totally works.”

“Are they always like this?” I whispered the question to Olivia as we trailed the others out of the room.

“Yep, always. But it grows on you.”

* * *

The library at the Maiden’s Enclave was the most beautiful I’d ever seen, except maybe at Trinity College in Dublin. This one was smaller, cozier, but somehow more . Maybe it was magic. At this point, I couldn’t argue that it wasn’t as real as the stone walls that made up the place.

But the rich, burnished wood shelving and large, wingback chairs arranged around an enormous fireplace on one wall gave it a kind of hygge perfection I’d rarely experienced in my travels. It was quiet, the kind of quiet that seeped into its essence over the centuries, making it hallowed ground.

We entered, and the playful bickering immediately stopped as all of us stared around at the ancient-looking tomes and the beautifully carved corbels at the end of each shelf, supporting the second level of the library with alternating faces of wolves and women. The wolves were in various expressions as if they were snarling, but the women? They were caught mid-sigh, as if forever trapped in a moment of pleasure.

I shuddered, tingles running along my skin as I stepped deeper into the room.

“The section on magical species is over here.” Elodie spoke with hushed reverence, gesturing to the two middle shelves on the left side of the ground floor. “There are tables at the back where we can spread out.”

She pointed out an area behind the fireplace, which I hadn’t noticed at first, where two heavy-legged oak tables filled the entire back of the room, one of them long enough to hold all of us with empty chairs leftover.

Stepping into the stacks was like stepping through time, and I couldn’t contain my wonder as I ran my fingertips over the first spine and then the next. The glorious scent of old paper made me far too happy.

Many of the titles were in languages I didn’t know, and disappointment tried to creep in as I scanned over so many books that wouldn’t be able to help us. But Olivia was ahead of me, and she’d already pulled three thick volumes from the shelves. This wasn’t hopeless; if any library in the world had information about my magical ancestor, well, this one stood a good shot.

I spotted my first book with an English subtitle and grabbed it. Magical Maladies of the Middle Eastern Deserts. Granted, I didn’t necessarily need to know about illnesses, but maybe it would have a helpful nugget or mention a blue species who had the sniffles. After that, things moved quickly, with the seven of us pulling any titles we could read and stacking them in the middle of the table.

There were dozens of thick volumes, the pile chest-high and several stacks deep. I nibbled the inside of my cheek in trepidation at the sheer volume of work ahead of us.

But as six other hands all reached out and took a book off the top, tears prickled my eyes. Smiles and whispers, rustling pages, and community . I could feel it then, the oneness that these women had, and it was like a visceral presence. A warm blanket, wrapping me up in acceptance. All of them helping me tackle what would be a terrifying question alone—without a hint of disgruntlement or annoyance at the task ahead.

“Fi? Are you okay?” Brielle looked up with a frown, seeing that I was still standing there, misty-eyed and frozen.

“I’m fine. I… Thank you, all of you. You barely know me, but you’re helping me. Fuck, I’m not even a wolf. But you really don’t care, do you?” I wrapped my arms around myself as the tears started to gather more quickly along my lower eyelids, turning the library watery.

Brielle smiled then, the genuine care in her expression impossible to miss. “You’re part of the pack now, Fi. We’ve got your back. I have no doubt we’ll figure it out.”

And just like that, I was accepted into the ranks of Pack Blackwater, mystery genealogy and all.