“Actually, I’m not going to be dating you at all, Evan.” When he sent a scathing look at his brother I continued on. “You’re the one that brought me to this decision. You were my only option in the beginning and you couldn’t accept that. You had to keep throwing insults, and hurting me, and then this latest shit with Clarissa. I don’t even know what to say about that yet.” I was shaking. I needed to get him out of my face before I turned into a damn wolf in Ashley’s apartment. “I need you to leave, because I am seriously about to lose my shit here.” Evan was stunned. “I don’t know, at this point, if we could even salvage a friendship, because you have all but broken me with this crap.” I pointed to the door, “Please, just go, and give me my space right now.” Evan looked like he was going to argue, but at the last moment, he stopped, drooped his head, and turned on his heel to leave. He waited at the door for a minute. I suppose he was waiting to see if I was going to kick Mikael out too, and when that didn’t happen, he left without another word.
I turned to Mikael then, because I think most of what I had to say was about Evan, and he needed to hear where I stood with him too. “You’ve done almost everything right, except that you didn’t give me the choice in the beginning. I understand why, because you did talk to me about it. I just need for you to understand that this is my choice now. Everything I said to Evan was true, and it’s nothing you didn’t know already. I saw your face when I said it though. Yes, I was forced into this. Yes, I avoided it to a point that it caused me untold physical pain. But then things changed. I am not deciding this because I was forced to, or because I want the pain to end. When I started getting to know you, I liked what I saw here.” I tapped his chest above his heart. “It also allowed me to get to know the parts of Evan that he was hiding. I already knew your bad side. My best friend is a testament to that.” He winced. “I just need for you to know that I am choosing this. Evan did what he did, but you were already changing my mind before that.” Mikael reached out and pulled me into his arms so fast I didn’t even have a chance to react.
He whispered into my ear, “I never thought…” his voice was full of emotion, and he choked up a little. “Jess, I…” The strain in his voice was pulling at my heart. I moved my hands up to either side of his face, and turned him to look at me. His beautiful emerald eyes were swimming in all the emotion he couldn’t get out verbally. I didn’t know what else to do, so I kissed him. It was just a sweet brushing of our lips together, and then he was pulling me closer, deepening the kiss. Everything Mikael was feeling went into that kiss then. Every brush of his lips, stroke of his tongue, even the pressure from his fingertips pulling me closer conveyed all the things he was having trouble saying.
I couldn’t help the low, rumbling moan that came from somewhere deep in the back of my throat, but it was met with a growl from Mikael as he eased up on his grip. His mouth left mine, but trailed down to plant kisses along my jaw, then my neck, and up to my ear, where he whispered again, “Jess.” Another low growl came from him, “Mine.” The power in his voice as he said it washed over me, along with the scent he was marking me with.
The act of Mikael marking me, after that powerful kiss, sent my hormones into overdrive, and then it was me pulling him closer, demanding more. I damn near had his shirt off when something crashed down in the kitchen, and startled me.
“Shit! Sorry!” Ashley yelled from the kitchen, and she sounded oddly breathless.
Mikael laughed. “Sounds like we’re ramping up the whole apartment.” He kissed me softly on my cheek then, and leaned in close one more time. “To be continued…”
“Mmhmm.” I was about to pull him closer again, but my stomach decided to launch into a very loud protest, letting me know that I needed to fill it soon, and stop ignoring it.
“Let’s go get you something to eat.”
“I wonder if Asi left me any pizza?” I grabbed Mikael’s hand and walked him into the kitchen then as Ashley was dragging Asi out of it.
“We need to run to the store. We’re out of coke.” Ashley added, but as she pushed Asi out of the kitchen she turned and flashed me a quick thumbs up, and she was beaming.
“I guess that means you made the right choice?” Mikael was grinning at Ashley’s thumbs up as he spoke.
“Of course, I did.”
I was standing there at the mouth of the hot springs cave. The world felt as though it were shrinking in around me. The forest outside of the cave was dark and unwelcoming. A part of me recognized the foggy quality of my vision for what it was, a dream, but I also knew this felt like something more. As I stood there a familiar tingling sensation washed over me. There was someone nearby. They were watching, waiting, just outside of the reach of my normal senses. I couldn’t find anyone as I searched with my eyes, and listened with my ears. Actually, the cave was utterly silent, as if someone had turned the volume off on the world. The water that normally bubbled up from beneath was still and smooth as glass.
I crept forward, keeping the cave wall to my back as I moved along. It didn’t matter that this was, in all likelihood, a dream. I was not going to throw caution to the wind. As the cave began to wrap around me the further in I went, I started to see a flicker of light up ahead. The light source was emanating from deeper down one of the tunnels toward the back of the open cavern. I decided I might as well follow the vision, and headed down the tunnel.
I kept going even when the tunnel narrowed out to a point that it was just a crevice I had to slide my body sideways in order to fit. As soon as I thought of turning back the crevice widened again and spilled out into another open cavern. This one was a bit smaller than the previous room, but not by much.
The scent of Jasmine wrapped around me, clinging to my clothes, and nearly choking me with its perfume. Candles lit the area, sending shadows dancing about on the walls of the cavern. I was still taking it all in when a woman’s voice reverberated through the stone room.
“Have you chosen then?” I finally spotted her, sitting upon a boulder in the center of the room as if it were her own personal dais. It was darker there since all the candles were placed around the outer walls of the space. It was as if their light could barely reach the center. When I first glanced up, the woman appeared to be older, almost elderly. The voice that had already spoken had an older tonal quality to it as well. As I kept watching her though, she shifted into a young woman, and then a wolf. The minute I blinked she was an old lady again, but slightly different. The longer I concentrated the quicker her form shifted from one to another, and so on. It was dizzying to look at, so I concentrated on the floor in front of her instead, only keeping track of her changing form through my peripheral vision.
“Who are you?”
“Who I am, who we are, is nobody. We are just memories, built into your genetic imprint, of women long gone. You are no longer confused, so we see a choice has been made. It’s almost time to flower, child. When you complete the fourth transition there will be no turning back, and your fate will be sealed.”
“There isn’t a fourth transition,” I corrected. Not that I didn’t have questions about every word that had been spoken thus far, but that seemed like the safest place to start.
“But there is! That’s what makes us special. We undergo the fourth when most others don’t.” I looked up again, watching the woman shift, and realized two things. She wasn’t just one woman. Every time she shifted to a womanly form, she appeared as a different person. The second thing I noticed was that when it shifted to a wolf, it was always a white one. The eye color may have changed here and there, but the wolf was always white. “One will destroy you. Have you chosen wisely?”
A slightly different voice from the ever-shifting woman spoke after that, “we’ve had to make this same decision every time. The white wolf is always sought after, fought over, but it is always our choice and once made our fates are sealed.”
“I don’t understand, if it’s so important, why not tell me who to choose?”
“You have already done so, o
ur opinion would not matter.”
“What if I decide that I don’t want either of them, after all?”
“You must pick. We need a counter-balance for all that we channel. Without a partner it’s too much.” There was a brief pause before the voices began again. “You have already made a choice though. We sense it within you.” There were many voices speaking in unison now.
“I cared for them both, but one had the heart that the other only seemed to have in the beginning.” I wasn’t even sure why I was justifying my choice to them, but it felt as though I had to.
“The first lesson in becoming us… sacrifice.”
“Great, we’ll check that one off the list then. What’s next?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to that. My life had gone from odd to downright strange in the blink of an eye, so finding out there would be more craziness in my future wasn’t exactly a welcome thing, even if it did supposedly make me the most powerful being of my kind.
“Know your enemies, Jessica St. Marks.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“There is one who still licks his wounds, and is waiting to strike again.”
“Zach?” He was the only person I knew licking his wounds who would want to harm me. “Zach is nothing. I was able to brush off his power-plays long ago.”
“Know your enemies, and that they also have friends.” With that last comment, the world I was in began to dissolve away, right out from underneath me, tossing me into an empty blackness I wasn’t ready for. I had more questions, and I wasn’t sure that coming back to this place would be an option. The only thing I was certain of was that I wouldn’t find it in the real world. This was a place that only existed on the spirit plane.
The sensation that I was dreaming never left me, as the darkness began to fade into the background. This time, I didn’t appear in the caves though. Instead, I was standing in the woods where Mikael and I had picnicked one afternoon. The waterfall was flowing into the pool of water below, but again it was as if the world had been muted.
I looked up to see a familiar face standing across the stream from me. “Hello, Jessica.” Her voice was soft and soothing, still I was worried. My muscles were tensed and at the ready to shift and run. She must have noticed because she held up her hands in the universal sign of peace, and then plopped down onto the ground, sitting cross-legged by the bank. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. The entire world was still on mute as she spoke. It was as if she was the only thing I was allowed to hear. I realized then that it had been the same way when I was in the cave with the wolf women. “I too sensed that you made a choice, although you have not made it permanent yet.”
“What do you want from me Estella, Sophia, or whatever you’re called.” The woman winced as I spoke the names, as if it hurt her to hear them. I didn’t care if her own name was a burden to her. I was only concerned with what she wanted with me, and how she ended up in my dreams, visions, or whatever. “Were you here this whole time, or did you just break and enter my dreams?”
She smiled up at me as I spoke this time. “You certainly have a way with words, girl. I am not sure what your dreams encompassed before I pulled you to me, but when you showed up here, we met for the first time since the college campus.” She put her hands down flat on top of her knees then. “As for why…” she hesitated, looked up at the waterfall, and then back across the river at me. Her crystalline eyes were finally apparent to me, as was her reddish brown hair. “There are people moving forward, plotting things, readying to make sure you do not come into your full power. Now that you have chosen, it is imperative to keep you safe until you are mated. Even then… you must be wary.”
“Listen, I’m not sure why you’re suddenly acting as my fairy godmother, or whatever, but I’m not rushing into mating with anyone. The last time I attempted to do that, well, it wouldn’t have ended up being a good thing if I had gone through with it.”
“It certainly wouldn’t have. I see the red wolf counseled you well.”
“Actually, she did not. She allowed me the freedom of choice.”
“Either way, you ended up making the correct decision.”
“How do you know that?” I asked her. “I mean, we haven’t even told anyone.”
“I have my ways of knowing things, Jessica. Just as I know you must still be cautious. There are plans in motion that threaten your existence.”
“But you won’t tell me what those plans are?”
“I don’t know everything.” She was smiling again. “I only know that there are forces aligning to move against you.” She looked at me, and moved her head conspiratorially closer like she was going to tell me a secret, even though a large stream separated us. “Between you and me, I only knew that you made a choice because you have been marked again, and this time by a different wolf. I didn’t think that would happen without your consent a second time, since you knew what to expect.” She winked at me, and then looked back off into the waterfall again. “I must be going soon. It takes,” she breathed a deep sigh, and actually looked as though she were shaking a bit. “It takes a great deal of strength to hold this realm open for a conversation.” The witch started fading around the edges. “Be aware of those around you, some are not your friends. Dear child, I am pulling for you to win!”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I yelled out to the woman, but she had faded away into nothing more than a shadowy figure before she was gone altogether. The blackness overtook me once more as the forest around me faded away. I had a moment to briefly wonder if I was going crazy or not, and then I was waking up to an incessant buzzing.
My phone was ringing and the vibration on the bedside table was adding to the buzzing sensation. I sat up, sweating, and looked around to be sure I was alone. The dreams, visions, whatever they were, had spooked me. I reached for my phone, just before it vibrated itself off the table.
“Hello?” I questioned groggily. There was no one on the other end anymore, so I tossed it beside me on my bed, flipped over onto my back, and stared at the ceiling for a minute before my phone began to ring again. “Hello?” At least my voice wasn’t as grainy this time when I answered.
“Jess?”
“Yes,” I answered, unable to place the caller’s voice at first so I pulled the phone away from my head for a minute, and looked at the call listing. It was Mikael.
“I had a really weird dream. Are you okay?”
“Your dream didn’t involve a bunch of women and wolves shifting in and out of each other and a witch did it?”
“Um, no,” he answered, puzzled.
“Okay, well, then I probably win! What made you call me? It’s only 4am.”
“I dreamt that you were gone. That… well, never mind. You’re fine, so it’s okay. I just needed to hear your voice to be sure, because it was so real.”
“I’m fine, but I think I should really talk to you about my own dreams. I’m pretty sure they weren’t your normal run of the mill kind. You want to come over for breakfast later? We can swap dream stories, and eat.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice. Your parents hate me though. Do they know yet? About Evan or what you’ve decided?”
“No, they don’t. They were both out last night when I got in. I haven’t seen anyone to talk to them yet.”
“Oh boy. Would it seem cowardly of me if I said we should go to Starbucks instead, then?” He laughed, so I knew he was joking.
“Mikael De’ Lune!” I huffed his name into the phone. “You can’t possibly be afraid of my dad.”
“No, it’s not him. Your mom, on the other hand, I never want to be on her bad side.”
We both laughed, but he wasn’t lying. He really didn’t want to be on my mom’s bad side. She had a power, that she rarely used, but would bring a full blown Alpha to his knees if she decided it was necessary. “Yeah, you probably should be afraid of her. I promise, no family drama though. Just come on over. I’m pretty sure my mom was already expecting this
after our talk the other day, anyway.”
“Oh really?” His voice was laden with curiosity. “So, you were already telling her how amazing I am, and how you couldn’t keep your hands, or your lips, off of me, huh?”
I shook my head, happy that he couldn’t see me smiling like a goofball right now. “You sure are full of yourself, Mikael.”
“I think you secretly like that about me.”
“Whatever. I’m going to go take a shower, since I’ll never get back to sleep now. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“See, you even need a cold shower, just from hearing my voice. I’m that good.”
He had me laughing with that comment. “Funny, I never said anything about cold water!” I hung up before he could keep going, but I heard him laughing in the background as I did. He was right, his cockiness was part of the attraction. Damn it, but a little bit of bad boy went a long way toward getting my hormones revved up into full gear.
By the time I got showered, dressed, and made my way downstairs, coffee was already brewing and my dad was sitting there with one of his books about the American Wild West. “Good morning,” I called out to him as I passed by to grab a mug out of the cabinet.
“Morning, Jess.” He never looked up from his book as he spoke. I was mid-pour with my coffee cup when he asked, “so, you had a change of heart after all, huh?”
I stopped what I was doing, set the mug down on the counter, put the coffee carafe back in its slot, and turned to face my dad. I nodded my head, “you can smell it still, huh?”
“Strong. It’s like a busted bottle of cologne got dumped all over you. He wasn’t taking any chances that you were going to change your mind, apparently.”
“Dad,” I sat down in the chair across the table from him. “It’s complicated.”
“You think I don’t know that, Jess? Of course it’s complicated. You know what else?” He put his book down, and really looked at me for the first time this morning. “I’m not blind. I’ve been watching, and waiting to see how this little song and dance played out. To be honest, had you stuck by Evan, I would have been disappointed. I am disappointed that he promised to treat you well, and failed so miserably.” My dad took a sip of his coffee, looking over the rim of the cup at me the whole time. “I know we all got off to a rough start with Mikael, but he certainly stepped up, and treated you well. Plus, you know, I overheard you talking to your mom the other day.” He at least looked slightly embarrassed by his admission. “I only care that whoever you choose to be with in life treats you right, Jess. Honestly, it’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”
The Ancients Series Page 35
