“What is it about me that you hated so much?” She searches her mother’s beautiful, doll-like face for some kind of an answer. “I tried to be everything that I thought you wanted me to. I tried to make you happy, to make you proud. But it was never enough, nothing that I did was ever good enough for you. You would always stare at me, with that look in your eye, the same one that you have now and I never knew what you were waiting for me to do.”
A single tear falls down Sofie’s cheek and she wipes it away hurriedly, reminding herself that she’s cried far too many tears over her parents, more than they deserved. Her mother moves, but rather than heading towards the basket, to pick up the baby, she takes a step backward, getting further away from it. There’s a look of something in her eyes that Sofie can’t quite put her finger on, but suddenly the realization hits her like a bolt of lightning. It was fear. Her mother had been afraid of her.
“But why? What are you frightened of?” Sofie doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. It doesn’t make any sense. Her mother doesn’t respond, turning on her heel and marching briskly towards the door. Sofie’s mouth drops open, wondering if her mother is really going to leave this poor defenceless, crying baby on her own. Sofie races after her. “What are you doing? Where are you going? You can’t just leave her there! You can’t just leave me there!”
She follows her mother through the front door of the house that she had grown up in. It was the same house that had been taken away from them to pay off dear old dad’s debts. She didn’t feel any kind of sentimentality in seeing it again. As far as she was concerned, that house belonged to another life, a life that wasn’t really hers. This was never my home, she thinks to herself and as she walks through the door she feels that falling sensation, like Alice on the other side of the mirror.
When her surroundings stop spinning, she tries to focus on where she is. It’s dark and hard to make out what it is she’s looking at, but slowly, as her eyes adjust she sees her mother. She marches over to her, determined to find some way to force her to answer her questions, and it’s only when she’s a few feet away that she realizes it’s not her mother at all. But they look so alike, they could have been twins.
The woman standing in front of her is young, probably younger even than Sofie. And she’s not dressed in any kinds of clothes that Sofie has seen in the flesh before, only in paintings. From the pictures that Sofie remembers seeing in her mother’s bedroom, the woman in front of her is dressed in traditional Romany gypsy garb. Her mother had never spoken about her homeland apart to say that everything was better in America. Even so, she had kept a few mementoes of the old country, hidden away where she probably never thought to look at them again. But Sofie had found them. When you were a little kid left to your own devices for most of the time, you came up with a lot of ways to amuse yourself, snooping had only been one of many.
Sofie steps closer, taking in the woman’s features. They have the same almond-shaped eyes, the same full mouth. This woman was part of her family, the resemblance between them was too strong for there to be any other explanation.
“Who are you?” She asks the question despite knowing that there’s no way the woman can hear her.
The only light comes from a small fire that the mystery woman has built in front of her and the light of the moon. Sofie looks up to the sky, not just any moon, a full moon. The night is so beautiful and peaceful, the silence is almost hypnotic. A noise, like a dry twig snapping in half, brings Sofie back into the moment. It feels like time has passed, as if she’s been looking up at the sky for hours rather than seconds.
She looks over at the fire, to where the gypsy woman had been sitting, but she is no longer there. Instead, in her place is beautiful black wolf, elegant and strong. But she’s bigger than a wolf, more like the size of werewolf.
“Holy crap,” Sofie breathes out in awe, trying to process what this means. This woman, that looks like someone she might have called grandmother is a werewolf, a Lycan. The wolf looks straight at Sofie, not through her but at her and Sofie gets the impression that she really sees her. She holds her breath, not knowing what to do next, wondering if this dream is going to end like the ones she’d had of Ashton, with the wolf closing its teeth over her arm and ripping flesh from bone. But there’s no sign of malice or anger or distrust in the ebony wolf’s face. If anything, as she looks at Sofie, her expression softens, like she recognizes something in her, something that seems familiar.
Sofie opens her mouth to ask one of the million questions popping up in her brain, but it’s too late. She’s being pulled out of the blackness that’s thick as tar and she’s floating further and further away from the wolf woman on the ground. She tries to fight it, but there’s no use, it’s like trying to stop grains of sand from slipping through her hands.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, double-shit!” Sofie wakes up to Lindsey’s expressive cursing. Her eyes fly open and Lindsey looks like she’s just seen a ghost. “Holy, mother of God, you’re alright, you’re awake! I thought you were having a fit. What happened? You scared me half to death!” Lindsey elbows her in the ribs as Sofie sits up.
“Ouch! Thanks for showing me how concerned you were by giving me a nice, shiny bruise!” Sofie rubs the spot on her torso as she grumbles.
“Well if you think that’s bad, then just as well you can’t see the bump on your head! You really hit the ground! Didn’t anyone ever teach you how not to fall on your face?” Lindsey shakes her head at Sofie’s lack of grace, but she can see the relief that she’s not hurt flooding over her friend.
“Remind me never to be around you when I’m sick, you would make a terrible nurse!” Sofie tries to stand, but her legs aren’t quite strong enough for that yet. As soon as she tries the strenuous movement everything gets a little hazy.
“What the hell happened? One minute you were fine, the next you were falling on the dirt like a sack of potatoes, the next you were shaking and screaming. I thought all those knocks on the head had broken your brain!” Lindsey looks mad enough at her to give her another blow to the head.
“I’m touched by your concern, Linds,” Sofie smiles ruefully before she discovers that it hurts her head to do that. “Damn, I really did take a spill, huh?” She presses the side of her head gingerly, feeling the tender bump where she’d landed. “What was I screaming about?”
Lindsey shrugs, as if that were hardly the most important part of what just went down. “I could only make out a few words. You said ‘Mother’ a bunch of times so that was clear enough and then it was just a lot of garbage, like you were speaking backwards or something. The only other thing I understand was when you asked ‘Who are you?’.” Lindsey looks at her, concerned. “Where did you go?” The way she phrases the question tells Sofie that her friend knows more about what just happened than she’s letting on. She doesn’t ask what she was dreaming about, she asks her where she went.
“Honestly? I’m not really sure. It was like I was looking into the past, seeing something that had happened before, but things I had no memory of. How is that even possible?” Sofie looks to Lindsey for answers but she doesn’t get any, her friend just motions for her to continue so she takes a deep breath and tells Lindsey exactly what she saw.
“And you’re sure?” Lindsey looks at her with that expression of trepidation that is starting to become a permanent fixture on her face. “You’re sure that the werewolf who transformed looked like you? If it was dark, then how could you really see?”
Sofie waves the questions away impatiently. “I know what I saw, I didn’t just imagine the clothes she was wearing, the way her eyes were the exact shape of mine. But it doesn’t make sense. How does that fit in with my mother being afraid of me? She didn’t even want to pick me up when I was a baby!” The sad truth of that is a whole lot more depressing when it’s said out loud, so Sofie decides never to say it again. The headache that never goes away is notching up power, making it hard for her to think straight. “Well, that knock on the head hasn’t
done anything for these stupid migraines! I never even had migraines before I came here!”
“Of course.” Lindsey covers her mouth with her hand, her finger tapping against her top lip in the way that it does when she’s thinking. “It all makes sense now.”
“Does it?” Sofie looks at her friend, even more confused than before. “What makes sense?”
“It’s all falling in to place. How could I have been so stupid? How didn’t I see this before? I’m supposed to be the strongest Seer this pack has had in centuries and I can’t even see as far as the nose on my face!” Lindsey throws her hands up in the air and starts pacing and muttering to herself.
“Umm, Linds, you’re kind of scaring me now.” Sofie tries to stand up again and fails miserably, just crumpling to the floor in a pathetic heap again. “Well this is fun,” she mutters to herself.
“Stay still, if you get up too soon you’re just going to get vertigo.” Lindsey stops pacing and takes a seat beside her, but she leg bops up and down, like she can’t contain all the energy in her body. What Sofie wouldn’t give for some of that strength now.
“Thanks Linds, I hadn’t noticed that.” Sofie sighs deeply, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose to try to stem the tide of the pain in her head. “So are you going to tell me what it is that’s so obvious from my dream that any idiot should have been able to see it? Or am I going to have to play guess the big bad werewolf secret?”
“I think I liked you better when you were unconscious, you asked fewer questions.” Lindsey nudges her friend gently, smiling but her smile turns serious as she prepares to tell Sofie what her dream has brought to the fore. “First of all, it wasn’t a dream, you had a vision.” Lindsey looks at Sofie to make sure that she’s followed her so far and she motions her on. “Right so, the sacred stones around us, the one around your neck, they can do a few different things. The one around your neck is a protector; it shelters the wearer from any kind of harm. But each stone is as individual as a person, they have different properties, different...talents.”
“Talents? You talk about them as if they’re alive.” Sofie manages to get the question out despite her head feeling like it’s going to split open at any point.
“They are alive.” Lindsey doesn’t even blink. “You humans, you’re all so black or white. Just because something doesn’t have a heartbeat doesn’t mean that it isn’t alive. This whole mountain is alive, it just lives in a different way to us.” Her voice has taken on the tone of a teacher instructing her pupil on the ways of the world. Every time Sofie thinks that she has Lindsey all figured out, she shows another facet of her character that just throws everything for a loop.
“So the stones…?” Sofie prompts, trying to move things forward a little faster before she passes out from the pain in her head.
“Right, the stones can do different things. The ones that are standing upright, like the one you decided to take a little rest against, they’re vision stones. I use them sometimes when I want to see something more clearly or pregnant women in the pack might use them to see that their baby is going to be alright. You don’t have to be a Seer to use them, but you do have to be a woman...and a Lycan.” Lindsey studies Sofie’s face as she comes out with her final bit of news.
“Well that doesn’t make any sense. Yes, I have two X chromosomes, but I’m not a werewolf, that was the whole point of me coming here to be turned. Did you do some drugs that affected your short term memory while I was out?” Sofie furrows her brow at her friend until she remembers that it hurts too much to do it.
“Stop being such a smartass and just listen to me for five minutes. Can you do that Little Miss Scientist?” Lindsey rolls her eyes at her and Sofie has to grind her teeth from responding in any way but a nod. “Good. So, where was I? Right, so the stones can only be used by Lycans, just like the stone around your neck should only work on supernaturals.” At the mention of it, Sofie clutches the necklace and her headache subsides, ever so slightly. “I told you that you were important, that I could feel it, that you’re the key to all of this, somehow. Now I have a better idea of what makes you different from every other human out there.” Lindsey pauses for dramatic effect and Sofie wants to shake her to get the punch line out of her faster. “It’s because you’re not human.”
“Alright, Linds, stop right there. I know coming here and finding the stream contaminated has really upset you and with everything that’s going on, I’m not surprised that you’re a little traumatized.” Sofie ignores the hostile look that the petite woman is giving her. “My parents were humans, I never even knew that werewolves existed until I met you guys!”
“Remember how we talked about you not talking?” Lindsey crosses her arms and taps her foot, looking anything but amused. Sofie shuts her mouth, figuring that the best way to get over whatever Lindsey’s fixation on this is all about is to just let her get on with it. “The woman that you saw, she was a relative of yours, I don’t know how far back or how long ago that vision was from. You said that her clothes looked traditional, like, old, right?” Sofie nods, not sure if she was allowed to talk yet or not. “Well, whether she was your grandmother or your great-grandmother or your great, great, grandmother or...well, you get the picture. However distantly related she is to you, she is still part of your family and she also happens to be a werewolf.” That point isn’t up for discussion, Sofie couldn’t deny that part of Lindsey’s interpretation. “Your mother was afraid of you, she avoided you, she was scared of you. Why? Because she knew that you carried the gene, she knew that you could have changed at any moment.”
“Wait a minute, what gene?” Sofie breaks her silence, unable to keep her questions to herself any longer.
“The Lycan gene! What, are you sleeping over there?” Lindsey shakes her head.
“But if that were true then how come my mother wasn’t a werewolf, how come I’m not?” Sofie rubs her temples, imagining that she’s massaging the pain away.
“Just having the gene on one side isn’t enough. Every werewolf that I have ever met has come from Lycan parents. But even then it doesn’t necessarily hit on every generation, that’s why there are so few of us. You have the gene, and that’s why you’re getting the headaches.” Lindsey drops the schoolteacher routine and stands beside Sofie, stroking her hair lightly.
Sofie doesn’t have the heart to say to Lindsey that every time she touches her it feels like needles are being driven into her scalp. “What do the headaches have to do with anything?”
“You say you’ve never had them before, nothing like this.” Lindsey looks at Sofie for confirmation and she quickly nods, wishing that she hadn’t. “Well, coming here to the canyon, with all the Lycan power and actual werewolves around you, it’s somehow triggering the change in you. The headaches are just the start of it. Your body isn’t prepared for what is going to happen to it. It’s like the human part of you is doing everything it can to fight the Lycan gene.”
Sofie sits in silence for a few minutes, trying to get to grips with everything that Lindsey has just told her. It all seems to fantastical, too impossible to be true. But then how do you explain the vision? Sofie really wishes there was a way to turn part of your brain off. Eventually, she asks the only question that really seems to matter. “So, say that you’re right about all of this...what’s going to happen to me?”
Lindsey stops stroking her hair and crouches down beside her, putting an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t know, Sofie,” she answers truthfully. “I’ve never seen anything like this happen. All I know is that I’ve connected the dots and they’ve led us here. We have to go back to the pack. Ashton needs to know what’s going on, he might have a better idea of what we’re up against.” She stands up slowly, holding out her hand. “Can you make it or do you need me to carry you?”
But Sofie’s response is interrupted by a buzzing in her pocket. She picks up her cell phone, and reads the message from Finn.
“We can’t go back to the pack. I need to go i
nto Beaumont. Now.” Sofie pushes herself up from the ground, not caring how much it makes her brain scream out in pain.
“To Beaumont? Are you crazy? Did you hit yourself harder on the head than I thought?” Lindsey looks at her as if she’s just announced she were going to the moon.
“My friends are in trouble, I’m not just going to leave them.” Sofie punches buttons on her cell furiously, trying to call Finn, but it keeps saying that the number has been disconnected. “Oh Jesus, Finn, what have you done now?”
“Sofie, listen to me, you can’t go down there. Your face has been on every news network in the country, on a loop, people are going to recognize you. And after what Rudy and Teresa told us is going on in Beaumont, I don’t think they’re necessarily going to welcome you with open arms!” Lindsey grabs hold of Sofie’s hand, using her brute strength to stop Sofie in her tracks.
“I don’t care, Linds. They are my friends and I’m going to help them. What would you do if it were someone in the pack that needed you?” Sofie watches as the expression on Lindsey’s face softens. “Exactly, now let me go.”
Lindsey drops her friend’s hand. “It’s crazy to go down there, Sofie. There’s no way we’re doing that. There has to be another way.”
“You’re right, Linds. We’re not going, I am. You’re heading back to the pack, Ashton needs you more than he even realizes and I’m going to help my friends.” At the look of concern etched on Lindsey’s face, Sofie’s voice softens. “I’ll be alright, Linds.” But she doesn’t waste any more time, turning around and heading back down the mountain, running as fast as she can, Finn’s message replaying in her mind. IN BIG TROUBLE. NEED YOU TO COME NOW.
Lindsey shouts after her. “If you want to get yourself killed, my friend, then that is your problem, not mine!” The only sound she hears in response is Sofie’s feet hitting the dusty ground as she virtually skids down the mountain. “What the hell are you doing now, Lindsey Barker?” She shakes her head at her own stupidity as she runs off into the night, but she already knows exactly what she’s doing, she’s helping her friend.
Torrent (Alpha Love - a Paranormal Werewolf Shifter Romance Book 4) Page 10
