26. Ava
Ava
Bridge blinked owlishly at me. “Come again?”
“I…uh…” I cleared my throat and ran my hands through my hair. “I’ve been having these wild nightmares. Since my transition. I thought it was stress or my new shifter side sorting itself out.”
“But?” Bridge asked.
“But when you said this might have happened before, something clicked into place.” I pressed my palms against my thighs to hide the shaking. “In the dream, there’s a witch. She tells me no magic comes for free, but the cost will be devastating. I do it anyway.”
Poe took my hand and gripped it tight, trying to send comfort down our bond. Little good it did. This had been weighing on me for weeks, but with Lycan’s agony still writhing inside him, I didn’t want to put him through anything else.
“And then I changed,” I said. “On a new moon, and I didn’t change back.”
The room went quiet. Everyone stared at me. Even Mill stopped typing.
“The new moon?” Bridge asked.
“Are there any shifters that change on the new moon?” Sol asked.
“None that I know of,” Orion answered.
Revelation hit me like a train, bursting my heart and reframing everything I thought I knew about myself. I bordered on something massive, standing at the edge of a chasm that, once named, would destroy every narrative we’d heard about our family.
“I think it was our mother.” Once it was out, the rightness of my conclusion settled in my bones, as if the magic that had presented these visions were suddenly appeased by being spoken aloud.
“What?” Maeve took a step toward me. “Our mother?”
“Could you see yourself?” Bridge asked.
“No, but…I remembered wearing a long white nightgown.” I closed my eyes, trying to recall the details. “There was a scar on my forearm, an old injury that still hurt when it rained. I knew the witch from my childhood. She was a friend.”
“There are a lot of witches in the Sierra Nevada,” Leander said. “Old magic runs rampant there.”
“What makes you think it was our mother?” Sol asked.
“I didn’t until Bridge mentioned something happening to a previous Kennedy…
until I had a new dream last night,” I explained.
“I watched you crash onto Bastard territory. I watched you mate Orion. I stood in the treeline at your wedding and saw Maeve vow herself to Mill.” My sisters blinked at me like I’d suddenly started speaking a new language.
“Whoever this is has been watching us for years. It would have to be a close relative. Otherwise, why would Marx bother with us when he could go terrorize the Sierra Nevada pack? I know it sounds unbelievable, but I just…I know it. I feel it in my gut.”
I did. I couldn’t explain my certainty other than to say some supernatural instinct told me it was true. It was the same way I’d somehow known Poe was my mate the first time I met him. How I’d known Lycan would be a safe place to put my trust and attention.
“Our mother’s dead,” Guin said, jaw hardened, eyes turned to stone, a warrior drawing up her armor for battle. “She’s been dead for twenty years. Forgive me if I can’t reframe my entire childhood around some fucked-up dreams you had.”
“But what if she isn’t?” I said. “We never found a body. Only a bloody patch in the snow.”
“Mill?” Orion cut in. “Where are we?”
“Getting closer,” he answered.
“Our father would have known,” Guin argued. “He would have told me.”
“Our father was a power-hungry narcissist,” Maeve said. “He would have told us the sky was green if it made him more money.”
That much was true. Father never had the time of day for his children, too reliant on our mother and the staff to ensure our survival.
My poor mother. What she must have gone through.
Hiding her shifter side from her family.
Sleeping with a man she potentially didn’t love.
Giving birth to seven children who would one day have to reckon with the consequences of her decisions.
“Is it possible?” I asked Bridge. “Could I be seeing her memories? Could our mother have found a way to plant them inside me until I transitioned?”
Bridge shrugged. “I don’t know. There are theories that blood can hold imprints, be passed down generation to generation.”
“Then why aren’t the rest of us having these dreams?” Guin asked. “Why only Ava?”
“Magic can be genetic,” Leander said. “Maybe she inherited something you didn’t.”
“What did you shift into? In the dream?” Sol asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see myself. Something with little paws and a fluffy white tail.”
“A fox,” Sol murmured. “A fox darted out into the road, and I crashed trying to avoid hitting it.”
“In the dream, I had to protect my family,” I continued, “like I knew something was coming for us, and I made the deal with the witch to save them. The loss broke my heart, and when I saw you all again, happy and mated, it brought me back to myself.”
“How else could Ava have known all this?” Sol argued. “Seen all this?”
“Maybe it’s a trick,” Guin said, putting her hands on the table. “Maybe it’s Evelyn’s witch in her head, making us confused, forcing us to waste time debating two decades of family lore.”
“It would make sense,” Bridge argued. “If Marx was trying to work a suppression curse on your family and your mother intercepted it, that magic would blow back onto him. Onto the anchor. Curse him instead. Marx would go mad trying to fix it. And if Evelyn was involved, she’d now be the only one carrying the weight of it. ”
“Just one small wrinkle,” Guin said. “Our mother already shifted by the time these so-called memories happened. She’d already given birth to us. She’d already lived thirty-six years on this earth.” She crossed her arms. “How would a siphon or suppression curse even work on her?”
“Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” Bridge said. “You said you felt like you had to protect your family? Maybe the curse wasn’t aimed at her. Maybe it was aimed at you. All of you.”
Orion wrapped an arm over Sol and hugged her in close. Poe tightened his grip on my palm, his brows furrowed with concern, our bond vibrating with tenderness and empathy.
“Oh my God,” Sol murmured. “This is horrible.”
I swallowed down the fury and anguish of knowing my mother had done all this to protect us.
It enraged me, made me want to kill Marx all over again, made me want to rip Evelyn’s head off her stupid shoulders.
My heart broke for the woman I’d barely gotten to know and all the moments she didn’t get to see.
That she’d done all of this to protect us, taken one last look at us, told Guin to be strong, and walked out into the night knowing she wouldn’t come back.
“So just to be clear,” Serpent said as he lit a cigarette, “we’re walking into a fucked-up vampire ritual, run by a woman who’s been rotting for twenty years, to undo a curse that blew back on her?”
“You’re not walking anywhere,” Orion said. “You’re going to sit your ass right here until we can get you patched up.”
“If only we had grenades full of gas strong enough to knock them out,” Serpent groaned. “Oh wait. We do. But they’re in Montana because somebody wouldn’t let me try my luck getting them through customs.”
“I’ve got the list of properties,” Mill interrupted before Orion could snarl at him. “There are two west of here.”
“What are they?” Mick asked.
“Something on Runnymede and another in Chess Valley,” he said.
“It’s the second,” Mick said. “There are stories about Grim’s Ditch. Named after an old God. If it’s proper hiding she wants, that’s where she’d go. Big houses tucked down in the folds. You could drive past one all your life and never see it.”
“Sounds good to me,” Orion said.
“What’s the plan?” Aquila asked, turning to Orion.
“We make Evelyn our main target,” Orion said. “We take down anyone in the way, but bring her in alive. I want to know what she’s doing and why. If we kill her, we might never be able to end this.”
“Leander and I can take out whatever wards she has in place,” Bridge said. “I can buy you minutes to get inside.”
“We’ll split up,” Orion continued. “One team handles the nest. The other pushes forward to Lycan, Locust, and Moose. Aquila, Mill, and Ren, you’re with me. Everyone else goes in.”
“I’ll distract her,” I said.
“No,” Poe said at the same time as Sol and Maeve.
“It’s not a debate.” I set my chin and stared up at Poe. “If this is a trap, if we need to lull her into thinking she’s got the upper hand, I have to be the bait.”
“You’re not going in alone,” Maeve said.
“We’ll go with you,” Sol added.
“Absolutely not,” Orion spoke up.
Mill growled and raised an eyebrow at his mate.
“Alright, calm down,” Bridge said with a humorless laugh. “There’s enough alpha male pheromones in here to fuel a city for a century. This is going to be tough. We took out a lot of vampires earlier today, but my guess is she only sent her grunts. There will be more waiting. The powerful ones.”
“You’ll need all the help you can get,” Guin said. “We’re all going in. She wanted the Kennedy bloodline. Let’s give her exactly what she asked for.”
Before anyone else could argue, Poe doubled over onto the ground, clutching his midsection. Anguish screamed across the bond, forcing all the air out of my lungs. It wasn’t the tender ache of the last hour, no. This was something new, something magical and agonizing. Cold, deliberate, and precise.
“Fuck,” Poe shouted. “It’s getting worse. We have to go. Now!”