I deflate in the chair, suddenly exhausted. The weight of everything—every death, every lifetime, every moment Kieran remembered while I forgot—crashes down on me.
Kieran pushes my hair off my face, his fingers lingering against my cheek. “Are you alright?”
I shake my head. “We’re searching for a needle in a haystack.” My voice cracks with frustration. “How are we supposed to find somebody when we don’t even know what he looks like?”
The hopelessness threatens to swallow me whole. I stand up, needing to move, to pace, to do something other than sit here drowning in the impossibility of it all.
“We don’t even know if this person is in the palace. Or the capital. Or the Wolf Kingdom! We don’t even know if he knows who he is! I didn’t!”
Kieran watches me with that infuriating calm he gets when I’m spiraling. Finally, he says, “Only you have the ability to communicate with wild wolves.”
I stop pacing, confused by his statement.
“The person who cursed us would know this about you. It wasn’t a secret back then, after all. That’s why he went after the wolves.”
The pieces fall together so fast, it makes me dizzy. “The necromancer.” I whirl to face Kieran. “It has to be him.”
“Yes,” he agrees. He is so calm, so collected. “I’ve been suspicious for a while because it was too convenient.”
My heart races. “Convenient? Convenient how?”
Kieran walks over to the window and looks outside, his silhouette framed by the fading light. “Necromancy is a very ancient dark magic practice. It takes an extraordinarily long time to master it.”
He pauses, and I can see the tension in his shoulders. “It would take decades to be able to make puppets out of shifters, but wild animals? Wild wolves have raw instincts. You can’t control instinct. The necromancer we’re dealing with has more than just a couple decades of experience, considering how fully in control he was of the female alpha. If that is who cursed us, then his power would make sense.”
He turns to me, and his eyes are dark with worry. “If this necromancer has been reincarnated along with us, then that means he is very powerful. And we will have to be careful.”
“What about the attack today?” I ask. “What about the ones from before?”
“The arrows were laced with the same poison.” His jaw tightens. “A very specific one that has been used to harm hybrid shifters who can practice magic.”
“But I don’t practice magic.” I spread my hands. “I’m a pure shifter.”
As Kieran studies me, his eyes soften. “No, you’re not.”
I blink at him. “Both my parents are wolf shifters, Kieran.”
He walks over to me, slowly and deliberately. The intensity in his gaze makes me step back instinctively until my legs hit the chair. I sink into it heavily, suddenly needing the support.
Kieran leans over, caging me in with his hands gripping the two armrests. The heat of him surrounds me; it’s overwhelming and inescapable.
“That’s simply not true.” His voice drops lower. “Because when I marked you, I felt the magic within you. It’s faint, but it’s there. It responds to my own magic.”
I stare at him, shaken. My pulse hammers in my throat. “I—I don’t—”
The words won’t come. How do I respond to that? How do I process the fact that everything I know about myself might be wrong?
“I was the first born.” My voice sounds desperate even to my own ears. “My parents would have said something if I was adopted.”
“Not necessarily.” His face is inches from mine now, and I can barely breathe.
The proximity is suddenly unbearable. I need space. I need air. I need him to stop looking at me like he can see straight through to my soul.
“It doesn’t make sense for you to be a full shifter when you’re the reincarnation of a gypsy witch.”
“Reincarnation,” I say, grasping at the distinction like a lifeline. “Not descendant.”
“One thing about reincarnation is that some dominant traits remain.” He pauses before adding, “Also, one can only be reincarnated within the same bloodline.”
