by Eden Beck
Something is wrong.
That emptiness, that lack of something …
“It’s our bond, isn’t it?” I say, finally struggling up into a sitting position. I’m almost at the point of screaming, now. “I can feel it. It’s different. What’s wrong?” I ask again, turning to Rory, who’s sitting the closest to me, in hopes that he’ll give me an answer.
“Calm down,” he says as he wraps both his hands around mine in a way that isn’t comforting at all. “The bond is still there, it’s just … changed.”
I search for the bond, and though it’s there … it’s hard to grasp around my spinning mind.
“Changed, how?” I ask, even more panicked. “You can feel it too, can’t you?”
“Of course, we can feel it,” Marlowe says gently. “But it’s been altered.” He shares another one of those looks with his brothers. “All three of us can tell that the bond feels differently, smells differently.”
It isn’t until he glances away again that I notice something behind him, out the window. The light has changed. It’s dark … but not as if sunset is approaching. It’s as if it’s already come and gone.
It’ll soon be morning again.
The day after I was supposed to shift for the first time. The morning after my first full moon.
The shift. It was supposed to be the night of my first shift.
“How?” I choke out, tears starting to stream down my face as all the pent-up emotion in me spills over. I don’t know how to ask them about the bond. I don’t know what to. Ask. So, instead, I ask the first other thing that comes to mind. “Did I shift last night?”
Everyone glances at each other again, and I fear for the worst.
Kaleb turns back around to look at me and I notice that he has tears in his eyes too. I’ve never seen Kaleb cry before, and it scares me.
“Sabrina,” Lydia says at my side. “You were much too ill to shift last week.”
My stomach sinks like lead.
“Last week? How long have I been asleep for?”
Her response, given after a slight pause, does nothing to soothe my racing pulse.
“Eight days.”
I know I’ve been ill before. I’ve missed nights. Multiple days. But never a week.
And never like this. Even Romulus looks indescribably pained. It’s not a look I’ve seen on him before.
“Honestly,” Romulus says, reaching for Lydia’s hand beside him. “We weren’t sure if you were going to survive at all.”
I look to Lydia. I know that she’ll tell me the truth.
“Lydia, please tell me what’s going on,” I plead, keeping my eyes glued to hers. “What is it that no one wants to tell me?”
She’s quiet for a moment and then asks everyone kindly to leave. It’s in this moment that I know the dread inside me isn’t made up. It isn’t fueled by my own fears. Whatever it is … it’s real.
The boys hesitate, especially Rory, but in the end, they seem to know that she needs to talk to me alone as so they do as she asks.
I don’t want to let go of Rory’s hand, but he assures me that they aren’t going far. His eyes plead with me, begging me for something I don’t understand. And then he’s gone.
I feel the void left in his wake.
Lydia comes to sit down on the edge of the bed beside me. Even when she is very obviously about to deliver bad news, the kindness and warmth on her face remains.
“Sabrina, the poison that Remus gave you was a powerful one,” she says.
Poison.
I’d known it for a moment, before the blackness took me. Now, nearly a week later, I’d almost forgotten. But at the mention of it again I feel my head spin again as it did the moment the poison first hit me.
“So you know? Oh, thank god, I was trying to stay awake to let you know but then I passed out.”
I find myself rocking back and forth a bit where I lay, as if I’m wrestling with everything happening right now, unable to settle on how to act or how to feel.
“Yes, we know. We realized what happened right away.”
Here, she glances once over her shoulder—and for a sickening moment I’m reminded of when Remus did the same. They were each looking for the same person, but each for different reasons.
“Romulus …” she begins, her voice catching. “I can’t tell you the depths of the shame he feels for trusting his brother, even for a second.”
She takes a second to compose herself before continuing.
“Remus is proud of what he has done to you and to our pack. He wasted no time in taunting Romulus with the knowledge of it. The boys, of course, rushed in to help you and carried you up here to bed where we have all been watching over you. Like Romulus said, you’re lucky to be alive.”
“Then his plan failed,” I say, hoping that things aren’t as dreadful as I can feel they are.
“No,” Lydia says as she sadly shakes her head. “His plan succeeded.”
The way she looks at me …
“I don’t understand,” I say, stubbornly. “I’m alive. Wasn’t that Remus’ intention? To … to kill me and prevent me from shifting?”
“Remus’ intention was to inflict as much damage to Romulus and his pack as he possibly could. Simply killing you wouldn’t have been enough. So, he did something else.”
Lydia’s already forced smile fades from her face.
“Sabrina, the reason that your bond feels different is because of the poison. The change in your bond … it’s what a wolf feels about her mates once her breeding age has passed. The desire that you had to mate, to breed and produce offspring … that part of your bond is gone.”
I blink up at her, not understanding.
“Sabrina, that feeling has passed because you can no longer carry pups. I’m so sorry, Sabrina, but you can no longer have children. The poison …”
And then it finally dawns on me.
I finish her sentiment in a hollow, empty voice. “It’s made me infertile.”
I feel a heavy emptiness that pushes me down against the bed. My bond with Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb is forever changed. That wonderful moment that we had in the forest enclave is erased and changed into a pained memory because it will never happen again.
Not like that.
Never in the same, feral way.
We will never have that part of our connection and I will never be able to carry their children.
I’d never really considered it before. I’d always just assumed, when the time was right …
The transformation from human to wolf shifter is no longer the happy occasion that it was supposed to be. Now it’s a time marred with devastation and sorrow.
I don’t even want to be strong now. I don’t want to hold back the flood of tears that follows my dawning understanding. I’ve lost something primal, something that can never be returned to me. Something so basic that I didn’t even know it was a part of me until it was taken from me.
As it just has been.
Lydia holds me as I start to cry. She is the light in the dark and the comfort in my sorrow. She is everything that I had always wished my own mother to be. And unlike my blood mother, my bonded mother knows the right thing to say always.
Even in my pit, my blackness, her voice somehow finds its way through just as her hands cradle my bowed head.
“The boys still love you, Sabrina. They will always love you and be devoted only to you no matter what, even if you can’t carry their pups.”
Even still, it’s not nearly enough.
I am broken now.
The look of pain on Kaleb’s face and the sound of hurt in Marlowe’s voice … even the shaking hands that Rory wrapped around my own, show me that they are broken now too.
Everything wonderful that we had is broken.
Yes, we will all still be together. And yes, I will still shift as soon as I am well enough to do so … or so Lydia tells me as she continues trying to explain where we go from here. I’m hardly able to pay attention. What Rem
us has stolen from us is more painful than anything I imagined before.
That is why Romulus looked as devastated as he did too. I am mated to his sons and now I am barren. Romulus’ bloodline will die out, and that is exactly what Remus wanted. Remus has done what he has wanted to do since the beginning.
He has had his bloodshed.
He’s more than murdered his brother’s son. He’s killed out his entire lineage.
When Lydia lets me go, I don’t know how to feel anymore. My bond with the boys had been my compass, but now, with the change, I feel like I’m spinning out of control.
“I’ll send the boys back in,” she says as she gets up. “But you need to get rest. Regardless of the damage Remus has done, he did not manage to take you from us. The boys need you as much as you need them. You need to rest and get better.”
I nod my head at her as she leaves.
The boys return to the room moments after Lydia is gone. They climb onto the bed with me and curl up all around me. Kaleb presses his cheek against mine and all three of them hold on to me as I close my eyes to sleep some more, not because I want to get rest but because I want to wake up again and find out that this was all just a bad dream.
Another dream.
Oh, what I would give for it to just be that—a nightmare.
14
Sabrina
But it’s not just a nightmare.
No matter how often I drift off into fitful sleep, it’s always the same when I once again awake. After two weeks of this drifting, I’m finally starting to feel well enough to get out of bed.
It’s a small solace, especially when sometimes I wish I wouldn’t wake up at all … let alone resume any semblance of a normal life. Normal. As if my life was ever normal.
The boys have stayed with me most of the time, with Lydia there by their side. Even Romulus would come to visit me on occasion, although he didn’t really have much to say when he did.
When I finally get out of bed and start to walk around the house a bit, I hear talking coming from one of the libraries and go to see who’s there. It sounds like it’s all three boys there with Romulus, their voices hushed as if they don’t want to be overhead.
Remus is long gone, so there’s only one person they’d be trying to keep this from. And that person is me.
So, naturally, I stand in the corner of the hallway to listen.
“It can’t be ignored,” Rory says, from inside. “After what he did, something has to be done with him for his betrayal.”
“I agree with Rory,” Kaleb says. “It was a declaration of war and nothing less.”
They suddenly quiet, their voices trailing off into silence as I remember that even though a part of our bond was damaged, the rest of it is still very much intact. The boys must still be able to sense that I am near, just as I could. Just as the bond led me here.
Fortunately, they don’t manage to stop talking before I’ve realized what they were discussing. They’ve been discussing what to do about Remus, of course.
I didn’t need to overhear it to know it.
It’s all there is on any one of our thoughts. He’s all there is in any of my dreams. His face. His evils.
“Hey,” Marlowe says as he walks out the door of the library and sees me in the hallway. “What are you doing out of bed?”
His forehead creases with concern.
“I’m tired of being in bed,” I say as I walk slowly toward him. My legs feel a bit like gelatin, if gelatin were weak and painful.
Marlowe helps me sit down in a chair inside the library as Rory and Kaleb come to sit around me too.
“Part of the reason you’re still so weak now,” Romulus says, watching me from across the table, “is because you are at the lowest point in the moon cycle now and your body is probably reacting to the fact that you never shifted the first time.”
“Can’t I just do it now then?” I ask. “Maybe if I just shifted it would start to make things better. At least a little.”
I know nothing I do will make everything better. There’s still a part of me that is lost forever. Stolen.
“No, the first shift is already so hard on the body. You’d better wait until the next full moon. You’re just not strong enough to endure it yet,” he says. He shakes his head, his eyes sliding away from me as if just looking at me is too unpleasant to bear.
Rory sees the frustration on my face. “I promise that after your first shift you’ll start to feel more like your old self,” he says, quickly. “Actually, you’ll start to feel like your new self. Just wait for a little longer.”
His hand reaches out to rest on my shoulder. Though it’s meant to be reassuring, it just feels pitying.
“I’m tired of waiting,” I say with a huff.
I know that they’re right though. I can barely walk from one room to the other without feeling like I need to sit down and rest again. I can barely keep my head held straight on my neck without leaning it back against the chair. There’s no way my body could handle a shift right now.
The boys help me back to the bedroom and I lay down again, even though I don’t want to. Even though they say they’re doing it out of concern for me, part of me knows they want to go back to their discussions.
They’re up to something, but they won’t share it with me while I’m like this.
So, even though it pains me, all I can do is focus on getting better until I can demand my place at their table again. As it is, I can barely demand a glass of water.
Every day I try to get up and walk to a different room in the house and every day I end up needing to sit down in a chair or on the floor of wherever I have made it to and wait for the boys to help me back to the bed. The frustration alone is the most exhausting part. But each day I get a little further and after several days I do actually begin to feel a marked improvement.
A tiny mark, but a mark still.
I haven’t run into anymore discussions about the other packs again, but I can sense the tension in the boys, and I know that they’re still talking about it. I want to know what they’re planning. But I’m too tired, and too focused on getting better, to do anything about that right now.
The stronger I get and the better that I start to feel, the more optimistic I become that I will be able to shift during the upcoming moon and that maybe things will start to make sense. That single thought grows until it consumes me.
I think of nothing else. I can’t think of anything else … because everything else makes me feel as if I’m crumbling, as if I’m falling apart.
“You’re looking better today,” Lydia says when I walk into the living room one afternoon to find her sitting and reading her book with a cup of tea.
“Thanks,” I say, with a small smile that feels like the first I’ve been able to muster in weeks. “I think that’s the first time anyone has said that since this all happened.”
“That’s probably because it’s the first time that you’ve actually looked better,” she teases. “Would you like some tea?”
She starts to set her book aside and get up, but I quickly wave her back down.
“No thanks,” I say as I go to sit down next to her. “What book are you reading?”
“Oh, it’s actually really good,” she says as she holds it up and shows me the etched leather cover. “It’s about a pair of badass heroines who end up saving their lovers from a huge mess that the men have gotten themselves into.”
Something about hearing Lydia say “badass” makes me giggle.
“Oh, is it an autobiography?” I say, rolling my eyes. “Speaking of a similar topic … I’ve heard the boys talking to Romulus about Remus. I couldn’t hear what they’re planning to do though. Do you know?”
Lydia shakes her head. “No, I don’t think they know yet.”
“I just hope it’s not something foolish,” I say.
“So do I.”
But, of course, we both know better.
15
Sabrina
When
the next full moon comes, I am finally ready. More than ready.
I feel better—not wholly so—but well enough to shift, and I am more than ready to finally experience my first transformation. I’m really hoping that shifting will help repair at least some of the damage that’s been done to the bond between myself and the boys.
I’m looking forward to running through the forest with them tonight on four paws, and with renewed strength and energy. I know that the first shift can be tough, but Romulus said that once it’s done, the rest is pure energy and excitement. Considering that I’ve spent more days in bed than anything else lately; I could really go for some energy and excitement.
It seems I’m not the only one.
The forest itself seems alive tonight all around us.
Even though I’m determined to be well enough to shift, we didn’t want to waste my energy by going far. We’ve traveled just outside the grounds around the house. I know they often move further up into the forest, into the glades and thickets that provide shelter. This here, close to the house, will have to do tonight.
For me.
For my sake.
“Are you ready?” Marlowe asks as he grins at me.
All three boys are with me and even Romulus and Lydia are coming too. This will be my first shifted night with my new family.
“I am so ready,” I say, trying not to hide the slight shake in my voice.
We’re all just waiting on Romulus to join us, which shouldn’t be much longer.
The air outside is crisp and cool, nothing like the stifling air indoors. I take a big inhale of the woodsy-laced air into my lungs, expecting to feel it rush down inside me with invigorating tendrils just as it once did.
But just as fast as I inhale, I am immediately sick.
I double over and start to vomit on the ground as the boys look on in horror. Lydia kneels down beside me and holds my hair back until I am done being violently ill.
Overhead, the moon will soon reach its peak. But I won’t be here in the forest beneath it.
