Page 25

CHAPTER 25

A shley

Me: You know I don’t like being ignored.

I stare at the message I’d sent over an hour ago to Christophe’s burner phone. This is going on day three that he hasn’t responded to any of my text messages. The day he sent me the pictures of the two butterflies while out on his walk with Mike was the last time I heard from him.

I can’t help but think maybe I did something wrong.

Did I geek out too much over the butterflies?

What if he decided he didn’t like the way I kissed him that night?

Or worse?

“Are you ready to go?” Emery asks, coming up from behind me, closing the front door of her house.

I stuff my phone into the brown leather satchel that Emery bought me on our last outing into town.

“Yeah,” I say.

We’re heading into the mountains to do some exploring on a few of the caves Emery’s told me about. There are drawn images in the caves that detail the Nightwolf pack’s history.

I’ve agreed to go with Emery for the day to explore the caves and sketch out some of the illustrations in my pad for her to reference in the book she’s writing.

“Great.” She smiles before wrapping her arm in mine.

Another pang of guilt hits the pit of my stomach as we step off of the front porch, heading in the direction of the trail that’ll lead us to the caves.

“You know Reese and Alpha Chael will be back this evening,” she says. “I’ve missed them.”

The corners of my lips tip upward at the thought of the leaders of the pack returning with their sweet baby boy.

“Why were they up North so long?” I ask.

“NSA business,” my sister responds. “The Alliance often has meetings, legislation that could affect all shifters, and even hearings that Chael has to attend. But I think they stayed a little longer because of the situation with the, uh …” She trails off.

“You can say it, the torture chamber.” I try to infuse levity into my voice, but Emery doesn’t crack a smile.

Instead, sadness fills her eyes. My gaze falls to the wolf pendant that she continues to wear. She’d offered it back to me soon after we arrived at the commune, but it felt symbolic seeing her wear it.

It felt as if I was with Emery all along.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.

She looks at me in confusion, a pinch between her brows. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I shouldn’t have brought up the … you know.”

I shake my head. “No, not that. Well, I mean, you don’t have to be sorry about that, either. You were answering my question. It’s okay if you mention that place. It doesn’t hurt me,” I confess.

That’s not the full truth.

Yes, being reminded of the months I endured in that hellish place will always bring back pain. But with each passing day it gets a little easier.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you the other day,” I tell her. “About Christophe.”

Her eyebrows pop. “Oh.”

“Yeah, well, I know you were just providing me with the information you had.”

I want to say more but I clamp my lips shut.

“Really, I’m sorry. The last thing I want to do is argue with you,” I tell her.

She smiles at me. “Good, because I don’t want to argue with you, either. Now let me show you these caves.”

I nod, but still don’t feel like the issue is totally resolved. However, I don’t say anything else as I let her pull me in the direction of the trail.

About thirty minutes later, we come to a rocky area that has a few scattered bushes.

“There it is.” She points in the direction of a larger clump of bushes.

“There?” I ask, squinting. From here it looks like nothing more than bushes growing out of the cracks in between the mountain walls.

However, as we inch closer, Emery expertly navigates her way around the bushes.

“In here.”

I follow her, ducking underneath the bushes, and I gasp when a large opening appears the more Emery moves the bushes aside.

“How did you even find this?” I ask, amazed.

“Ms. Elsie showed me. Then she taught me how to spot a cave that most would miss.”

“She taught you all of that?”

Smiling, Emery nods over her shoulder. “She’s pretty incredible, right?”

I nod. “She’s something else.”

Emery’s smile widens.

“What?”

“Mom used to say that.”

“Mom?”

She shakes her head. “Our real mom. You might not remember because you were so young. But that was one of her favorite sayings.” Emery laughs. “I remember she said that when you took your first steps.”

I follow her inside of the cave. “You remember that?”

“Of course.”

“But you were only like, what? Four? Five?”

Emery’s about four and a half years older than me.

“Almost five, I think,” she comments. “But storytellers are also known to have exceptional memories.”

“See.” I nudge her side with my elbow. “I told you there was a reason you were so smart and did so well in school.”

She chuckles a little. “It does make sense now why I didn’t have to study so hard to remember all of my lessons for tests.”

“And your interest in anthology. Fits right in,” I add.

She nods.

“Wonder what my gift is, then?” I mumble.

Emery, who’d started walking toward the back of the cave, pauses. “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

There’s no reason to tell her that a piece of me has always envied how easy she seemed to have it when it came to school.

While I wasn’t an F student, school never came easy for me. It’s not that I’m a dummy or anything. It just didn’t hold much of my interest. I was always daydreaming about worlds that didn’t exist or making up stories about the kids in my class.

“This is the image of mate bonding Chael and Chance’s parents,” Emery says, bringing my attention to the back wall.

My mouth gapes open at the large, beautiful drawing of two people in an embrace as they stare into one another’s eyes. Bright colors that look like starbursts surround the couple. Over their heads is a full moon, the image of what appears to be a face smiling down at them.

“What’s mate bonding?” I ask, my eyes still glued to the image.

“I never explained it to you, have I?”

I don’t look at Emery, but I answer her question with a shake of my head.

“Hm, it’s a little hard to explain. But essentially, it’s like a commitment ceremony of sorts between shifters. Basically, it means that your souls are intertwined for eternity.”

I look over at Emery. There’s that smile on her face again. The one she gets when she’s thinking about Chance.

“For eternity?”

She nods, smiling as she turns to the cave. “It usually happens on the night of the Supermoon, but for some mates it can happen at another time. Like Serafina and her mates.”

I squint and look over at my sister. “Serafina?”

“Yes, she used to be a part of this pack. Well, once a Nightwolf, always a Nightwolf. But she now lives in Colorado with her three mates. I still talk to her every few weeks. She told me Mother Moon didn’t wait for the Supermoon for their mate bonding to happen.”

Emery turns back to me.

“I’m surprised you don’t remember her, she was in …” She trails off.

“Oh,” I say, remembering. “She was imprisoned in that place, too.” How did I forget that?

“Probably because she wasn’t there that long,” Emery replies, making me realize I’d asked my thought out loud.

“It was because of that place, you guys, Alpha Chael, and Chance even found us, right?”

Emery nods.

“When they kidnapped Serafina, she happened to be wearing a tracker her mates had placed on her, even in her wolf form. They were able to track her down, and they had Chael and Chance to help. No one knew what it would turn out to be, though.”

Emery’s eyes fill with sadness.

“Or that you would be locked away in that horrible place.”

“Or Christophe,” I add without thinking.

Emery’s lips presses together before she says, “Yes, or Christophe. Or Serafina’s birth father, for that matter.”

I nod, it all finally coming together again.

Serafina’s birth father was presumed dead for years, along with the rest of his pack. Which, as it turns out, were a unique kind of wolf shifters. A pack that had gone into hiding centuries ago because they had been hunted by their own species.

He survived the horrors of that prison and came to live at the Nightwolf pack’s commune in the old home of his deceased mate.

“I didn’t see him that much,” I say. Serafina’s father, who’s name I found out is Elias, took a trip with Ms. Elsie up to Colorado. And she’d returned alone. He decided to stay in Colorado to be closer to his now-pregnant daughter and her mates.

A small smile tilted the corners of my mouth. Good for him.

To have lived through that awful place for months was almost undoable. I couldn’t imagine being there for years like he was.

“I hope he’s happy up there.”

Emery smiles. “Me too.”

I point toward the images on the wall. “Do you know who drew these?” While the image of the couple is the most alluring, it’s not the only one that draws my attention.

The drawings display a range of community events. There are groups gathered under a bright moon, some in various stages of transitioning from human to wolf.

“It’s a mystery,” Emery says, answering my question. “Even Ms. Elsie doesn’t know.

“That’s during a Supermoon Ceremony,” Emery points out, gesturing toward the image I’m staring at. “It’s when members of the pack have their first shift.”

I nod, knowing what happens during a Supermoon Ceremony. It saddens me to know that I never had my first shift under the watchful eye of a caring alpha and pack.

“I wonder what Christophe’s first shift was like?” The question falls from my lips without me thinking about it.

There’s a beat of silence. Something draws my attention toward my sister.

She gives me a tight smile. “I’m sure it was fine. Look over here …” She points at another image and quickly starts talking about it. “You can start drawing these images here in your pad.”

I nod, knowing she’s intentionally changing the subject, but I don’t bring attention to it. Instead, I get to work drawing the images on the wall for Emery’s records.

All the while, however, I can’t help but think about Christophe’s first shift. He’s never mentioned or talked about it. A heaviness settles over me as I think about how he hasn’t responded to my text messages in almost two days now.

Did I do something wrong?