If infiltrating Twilight Grove under the guise of being their captive is how this has to happen, so be it. It means letting the wolves use me, to ensure Alaric gets healed. It means being a victim for Twilight Grove, and walking within their lines, learning everything I can.
No one speaks in response to my tangent, but Ryder’s eyes drill into the back of my head. They’re as pointed as how Mom glares at my face. But with him, it feels like he’s trying to send me another message.
Since no one speaks, I do, continuing to hammer in my points. “In a week, when they show up, I’ll play the captive. Once with the coven, I can learn the truth.”
“I don’t like this,” Mom grates in a wavering tone suggests I’m winning my argument. “Exchanging yourself for a shifter?—”
She isn’t getting it.
“Not only for him,” I interrupt. “For all of us. Hecate protects all on Earth, which includes the shifters. We need to figure out what we’re up against, and none of us will be able to walk up to them, so this makes me the perfect candidate. For the coven, Iwillbe doing this, and you can’t stop me.”
Arguments play across her expression, and like a real battle, there’s waves. The immediate mom rage demands she locks me up before that transforms into calculations, figuring out how to fight me on this, while finally ending with a concession: A sigh and lowered shoulders.
“This is dangerous, Carina. We don’t know what they want with you, so you could die.”
“More reason to go. What makes me so special, since I’m not like Harlow; I’m not one of the four? Besides, I doubt killing me helps them.”
The room is silent. Mom mentally fighting me. Me mentally defending. And the shifters trying to track what’s happening.
Her shoulders slump, and the weight of a million lifetimes grace her downturned expression. “I can’t change your mind, can I?”
“No.”
“Why Carina?” Ryder’s deep rumble nearly has me jumping from my skin. “She said this coven is targeting descendants from the four original bloodlines.”
As he talks, I look at him. It may be crazy, but I swear his eyes flash through his question. It’s quick and subtle, and maybe a trick of the light.
When Mom doesn’t respond, my spine prickles with something. Fear? Worry? She’s staring at me, her expression pinched with a mixture of dismay and horror, like learning a favourite show is off the air. Or that the BeaverTails restaurant ran out of the ingredients for my favourite flavour.
It’s an expression saying she doesn’t want to have this conversation. Her hands are loose at her side, clenching every so often as the final remnants of our argument fall.
“What is it?”
The weight of the conversation drops Mom into the chair behind her. Her head falls into her hands, hair covering her face, and a whisper emerges from between the strands. “Please don’t hate me.”
She waves her hand into the air and conjures an image—a moving one. A mini movie suspended right there on a makeshift projection enchantment.
Behind me, one of this shifters mumbles something about it being “cool,” but being caught up in the scene that’s beginning, I tune the three of them out.
The feed is from the viewer’s point-of-view. A hand stretches into view and twists a doorknob. The familiar dark wood with the small circular window two-thirds of the way up is one I’ve opened and shut countless times over the years.
Which would make the hand in the scene…Mom’s?
She tugs open the door to find a woman slumped on the doorframe, dark hair plastered to her forehead in a combination of blood and rain. She grips a crying newborn baby in her arms, keeping the baby’s face protected in her chest.
The vision lowers to the ground, hands stretching out to reach for the woman.
“Goddess, what has happened to you?” She casts a spell over the drying blood to examine the true extent of the injuries.
That’s Mom’s voice.
The dying witch blocks the spell. “D-don’t. I’m…already dead. Keep her safe. Carina…her name.”
“What’s your name? What happened?”
“Carina. Love her…as your own. Please. Tell her I…”
Her eyes slide shut, and Mom reaches for her. “Tell her what? What is your name?”
