I frowned. “And you think I’m one of these Greywolves?”
“Iknowyou are.” He turned to me. “The power you just displayed is a Greywolf power.”
Fear tightened in my gut. “So I’m Lena?” My heart hammered in my chest. I was having an out-of-body experience where I didn’t feel like myself and it was terrifying.
He rapped the steering wheel with his thumbs, looking sideways at me. “I want you to be, but Lena’s connection to her powers were severed by the Fae Lords along with mine.”
I felt like I was on a rollercoaster. Greywolf—Lena—not Lena. What the hell was he getting at?
“How many Greywolves are there in the world?” I asked frustrated.
“Hundreds,” he said, and my confusion deepened. “The others went into hiding when we were driven from our land. But all Greywolves are born wolves, not bitten... unless of course they are reincarnated, which is something only possible for Lena.”
He raised one eyebrow at me.
I squirmed in a mixture of anxiety and excitement. “So thatdoesmake me Lena?”
This man needed to figure out who I was or someone was getting a throat punch.
Brayden sighed. “I think you could also be one of Lena’s sisters, Wren. She came to me forty years ago, the day before Lena’s twentieth birthday in that incarnation. She was injured but said she’d figured something out. Something to change thecycle.”
Could you get chills twenty times in the same night? “What was it? What did she figure out?” I was fully invested in this story now.
Brayden shrugged. “By the morning, Wren and Lena were dead, and I haven’t seen either of them since.”
A profound sadness settled over me and a frown pulled at my lips; I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still holding out hope that IwasLena. This reincarnation curse stuff sounded crazy, but if I was going to be one of the Greywolves I wanted to be her. Brayden wasn’t bad to look at, and he came with the package, so why not.
“Were Wren’s powers severed?” I asked.
He looked at me and fear flickered over his face, like this answer would explain something he didn’t want to be true. “No. She had full power. When the Fae Lords took over my kingdom, they severed Lena and my connection to our powers, and… enslaved my brothers and her sisters.”
“They severed it?” I shivered, thinking of it as sort of a magical castration.
“All Greywolves are born with a connection to the Source. How big our connection is determines our ranking and capacity to channel that power. Not only can we shift into wolf form, but as king and queen, Lena and I had the biggest connection. The biggest opening to channel that Source magic.”
A muffled sob came from my throat. This story was incredibly sad and it was affecting me more than I thought it would. I was probably going to get my period soon or something because I felt super emotional.
He blew air out through his lips. “The Fae Lords keep my siblings at full power to… feed from them and use their power. But forty years ago Wren somehow broke free.”
Anger welled up inside of me at that. “Imprisoned for hundreds of years? Why do the Fae Lords allow you to walk free?”
He glanced over at me and I almost regretted the question. He looked so tired, fatigue pulling lines of worry across his face, but there was also another emotion there.Agony. Pure agony danced across his eyes and I wanted to take my question back.
“I was the king of Moon Valley and all of the wolves in it,” he said, and I couldn’t help but think that Moon Valley sounded like a perfect name for a werewolf society. Ronan had mentioned the Ether Realm earlier but I’d been on information overload so I hadn’t asked what it was.
“Therefore, as the Greywolf leader, their magic came from me,” Brayden went on. “If I were to be killed without willingly passing on my power to a successor, all of the Greywolf magic would die too and weaken the entire Greywolf lines of Moon Valley throughout the Ether. Even though they severed my connection to my power, I am still the commander of Greywolf power by birthright.”
Whoa, the way he said that, with such an authoritative tone, it made my spine tingle.
“So the Fae Lords couldn’t kill you or they wouldn’t be able to steal the power from your siblings?” I asked.
He nodded. “And they cursed Lena to die on her twentieth birthday and then come back again in an endless loop of pure hell just to torture me.”
I swallowed hard. Would I rather be a slave to the Fae Lords, pumping them full of power daily, or stripped of power and have the guilt of being free while my siblings were tormented? Both options sounded awful.
“We should break in and free them! Kill those bastard Fae Lords—”
His hand came around my mouth so quickly I yelped in surprise. Eyes wide, he looked into the woods beyond me. “Don’tsay that. Treason is punishable by death.” Leaning forward, he peeled his fingers from my lips one by one and then ran his nose along the base of my neck until he reached my ear. A trail of fire ignited at this simple touch and I had to suppress a whimper.
