40. Ambrose
Chapter 40
Ambrose
“ H as she shifted yet?” Isolde asks from where she sits across the desk in my office.
Emeric is sitting next to her, his face dropping into a snarl at her question.
“What?” She shrugs. “I have to ask. That was why you wanted her initiated into the Moonlight wolves, after all.”
“It’s only been a few hours. Give her some time,” Emeric says.
Isolde ignores him, raising her fair-colored eyebrow as she looks at me, waiting for my answer.
“No, she hasn’t,” I answer.
She purses her lips as she leans back in her chair and folds her hands together in her lap. “I see.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? She still has a week; that’s plenty of time,” Emeric comes to Lumi’s defense.
But I study Isolde. There’s something she’s not telling me.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She looks up at me. “You know I’ve put all of my coven’s hopes on you breaking the curse.”
“I’m aware,” I say in a low voice, unsure of where she’s going with this. But I don’t like to be threatened.
“Then you should know what will happen if you fail—”
“I won’t fail. Lumi is the one—the one the prophecy states will break the curse. She’s my mate—”
“And she can’t shift,” Isolde says with tired eyes.
“It doesn’t matter if she can shift. She’s strong.”
“Not strong enough to survive if she can’t shift.”
Isolde’s words stop my heart.
“How do you know? How do you know she won’t survive if she can’t shift?”
“Our coven’s seer has seen it. If she doesn’t learn to shift, she’ll die. And our hope of the curse breaking this month will die with it.”
My throat closes up, and there is heaviness pressing down on my chest. “How do I help her?”
“Well, I don’t think spending what little time you have left fucking her is going to help,” she snarls.
I grind my teeth together and growl, making it clear what I will do if she continues to speak about my relationship with Lumi.
But Isolde has known me for too long a time to back down. “I could use my magic to free her wolf. But then, I’d always have control of when and how she shifts. She’d lose that power forever.”
“No.”
Isolde and I stare at each other, neither of us backing down. Emeric glares at Isolde, ready to attack her if I give him the signal.
“Then you know what you have to do…”
I do, but it’s not something I want to think about. I still think she can do this. She can shift, she has to. One week—that’s all we have left. Less than that really because she needs practice to be able to do it on command.
“Vampires, Serenity, Rowena…help,” Lumi’s voice floats into my head so softly I’m not sure it was real or if I imagined it.
“Lumi, what’s happened?” I send back, concentrating hard so that she can hear me clearly.
But our connection I’m used to feeling is empty, like I’m shouting my words into a deep void.
“Lumi? Talk to me, Lumi.”
My stomach hollows out, and I know. I know deep down that she’s not going to respond to me. She can’t respond to me.
“Where are you?”
I jump from behind my desk, not bothering to tell Isolde or Emeric what’s happening. I know Emeric can feel the shift in me and that he will be hot on my heels.
I’m careful not to think too hard about what it means that the vampires most likely have her. I take deep, calming breaths as I step out of my office, listening carefully to see if Lumi or anyone else is in my house. The house is empty except for Emeric and Isolde.
Lumi mentioned Rowena.
“Rowena?”
I open the door and start running, unsure of what I’m going to find as I shift into my wolf form.
But I realize immediately that it was a mistake. It’s harder to control my feelings in this form. Harder to remember that my feelings for Lumi have to be dampened. I can’t care about her too much. I can’t dare to cross close to the line from like to love.
Mate, mate, mate. You have to protect her. Save her. She’s your mate.
The feelings begin to flood me in an uncontrollable way. I have to find a way to stop this, or I’m going to kill her even if the vampires don’t.
Blood, I smell blood. But it isn’t Lumi’s blood.
Still, I run toward the scent, my only clue as to where she might have been taken.
Rowena.
Her body is lying on the dirt road. She’s not breathing, and a pool of blood is surrounding her.
A hollow ache hits me hard in the gut as a primal fear takes hold of me. I hold onto that feeling, only letting myself think of Rowena and not Lumi. As long as my feelings stay with Rowena, I can’t think too much about Lumi. My feelings for her won’t have room to grow.
I collapse next to Rowena’s body, not sure if I can save her or not.
“Go,” Emeric says suddenly next to me. “I’ll make sure Rowena is okay. Go!”
Where?
But then I get a whiff of their scent on Rowena, and I know exactly where they’ve taken her—to Draven’s house.
I look back at Rowena one more time, and I see one of her fingers twitch. She’s going to be okay. Emeric will take care of her.
I run up the steps of Draven’s house near the edge of San Fransisco. It should have taken me days to get here, but it only took me hours as I ran faster than I ever have in my wolf form. Halfway here I got word from Emeric that Rowena is awake and they are traveling fast behind me. They will be here soon. But I don’t have time to wait for them.
I don’t take in any of the details of the house. I barely take in the concrete steps I’m climbing in my human form or the solid black door until I’m upon it. The only reason I even know this house is Draven’s is because when my father was alpha, he brought me here with him. My father thought he could find a way to break the curse if he talked to all supernatural creatures. He thought that we all had missing pieces of the puzzle and that together, we would be able to break the curse.
Draven thought my father was insane for trying to bring us all together. But deep down, I know he respected him. It was the only reason he allowed us to leave without attacking us.
Now everything has changed.
I expect to be greeted by one of them as I approach the house, possibly attacked before I can even get a word out. But as I turn the door handle and push inside the house, I realize their focus isn’t on intruders.
I’ve never run so fast in my life as I climb the stairs and throw open the bedroom door. I try to clear my mind and keep my feelings neutral as my eyes adjust to the scene in front of me.
My heart thunders in my chest, and a guttural growl builds deep in my chest until it rumbles out of me. Their fangs are plunged deep into Lumi’s neck and wrists. Her blood spills from their mouths in puddles on the floor. They aren’t feeding off of her; their only intention is to kill her.
“Enough,” I say.