“A cruel joke of the gods?” I whisper with a chuckle.
“A gift. I walk through the world, and I feel alone. I’m strange, and I don’t fit in anywhere. But when I saw you, I felt like I wasn’t alone. I had someone and that someone had me.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” Jarek says.
“This is all very strange. It’s happening so quickly, and we still don’t know how to get out of Foreen.” I can see my protests are falling on deaf ears. He’s shaking his head, denying it already.
“I know, but going anywhere without you is impossible for me now. Kaida Keres, I don’t know if we were lovers in a past life or a thousand,but, in this life, I will walk by your side until the day my last breath leaves my body.”
I squeeze his hand, barely choking out my response. “And I you.”
From across the room, Cadel’s dark eyes shine at me, and I get a feeling of such intense longing and grief that it steals my air from my lungs. And then it’s gone, and he’s looking away.
My gaze finds Legion, and the grief that drowned us is contained as if it was just a figment of my imagination. If Jarek dies, I will mourn him like Legion mourns his alpha. We just met. How can I be so entwined with these alphas?
“Get some sleep; tomorrow, we’re going to go out and find the Resistance,” Mordecai says as he rolls up the map. “I know where they are.”
Chapter 28
The plan to forget
Cadel
The Alpha God of Winter
Days After the Night of Falling Stars
The chains are heavy. They weigh me down, crushing me so my forehead is pressed to the stone. When I shift to my wolf form, it’s a little easier, but not by much. I barely notice.
As the minutes creep by, the bodies of the gods I can see turn grey and then harden into stone. It’s the silence that bothers me the most. Where there was chatter, the sound of them in the world, in everything, disappears. Now there is emptiness, the murmurs of the gods' will and words are silenced.
A wrongness that scratches at my mind ceaselessly.
The Beta Goddess doesn’t return, but something is happening. Dark grey clouds line the sky. The moon and her stars are hidden, like the whole world is veiled.
The first time I see a human is several cycles of night and day later. The man is crying, carrying a small child in his arms. He stumbles near my prison and drops to his knees.
“Why did you leave us?” he screams.
The child’s head lolls, lifeless.
He leaves the body of his child pressed up against my rock and, after dropping a lingering kiss on his deceased son; he runs. Several more humans run past, covered in streaks of red.
“Hey!” I shout. “Hey! Stop! Leave him alone!”
No one hears me speak, no one acknowledges me in any way; they chase him down. I hear his screams. I watch them rip him apart with their teeth. I can’t look away as they stand up, drawn away by some other noise, leaving the bloody corpse behind. I can still hear his screams.
The chains hold me in place. I couldn’t save him, even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t.
Time blurs, changes, morphing and merging. Day and night, dark and grey.
More and more people come past, gravitating to my rock, building houses around it. It takes a while before I notice they are all betas.
I hate them. I know I shouldn’t, and it’s not their fault, but I hate them.
And then, twenty long years later, a woman walks into the small garden that has become my prison. She climbs the rock and sits down in front of me, crossing her legs.
