Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
She must have said Kellen's name, because he left his mother's side to look over her shoulder.
"I don't understand. This is my grandfather, but why is his name at the top of the family tree on the last page?
And look at these dates." She flipped back to the beginning.
"The first page is over a thousand years ago, and there are huge gaps in between, but I don't know who these people are. Why would Josiah have this?"
"Let everyone take a look." Kellen gently removed the book from Samara's hands and brought it to the center of the room.
He lay it on the floor and soon all of them sat in a circle with the book in the middle.
He flipped the pages slowly, allowing everyone time to examine each tree.
The names were written large enough so they could be read easily, but that was because the trees were short, no more than three generations, all of them starting with a man with the first name of Samuel at the top, his wife's name next to his.
Underneath, the names of their children were neatly written, followed by their spouses and their children if there were any.
"From our packs..." Stephen finished for him.
"We need to..." Kellen looked around.
"Here." Leo handed him paper and pen.
By the time he reached the last page, Samara closed her eyes, knowing what she would see there but not wanting to believe it.
"Samara?"
"My name is there, isn't it."
"Okay." She could hear Kellen closing the book. "We can look at this later."
Knowing that her name was in there sparked Samara's inner rebel. "No, open the book again. We're going to figure this out and we're doing it today. I want to know why there's a man named Samuel on all of these pages and why my grandfather is on the last one."
Kellen reached up to touch her shoulder.
The warmth of his hand said more than words.
He knew what she was thinking, and it was okay to be upset about it.
It was the first time he'd touched her since yesterday.
How she wanted to keep his hand where he could offer her comfort, but that would only distract her.
Still, she couldn't help but rub her cheek against his fingers before he opened the book to the last page with his other hand.
There was her grandfather's name printed next to her grandmother, who died of cancer soon after she'd given birth to their only child, her father.
Below them, her father's name appeared as well as her mother's.
Below them was her name, but Josiah had printed her name in all capital letters and with a bold underline.
"My grandfather was a wolf shifter. He must have been.
He changed his surname over the centuries, every time he married.
Just like you three." She looked at Kellen first, then Stephen and Leo.
"You said it was time for you three to move again.
Folks are starting to notice that you're not aging.
My grandfather must have done the same. That's the only explanation I have for this.
" She waved a helpless hand at the book.
"But how can that be? If he had a wolf shadow, wouldn't my father have one also? "
"I've never heard of a pup born without one." Grace kept her voice low.
"But my father never shifted. I'm sure of it.
If he had a wolf shadow, it must have been dormant.
He was always so...regular. He fought fires, hosted neighborhood barbecues, pampered my mother, and attended every one of my school recitals.
If he had a wolf shadow, then I didn't get mine from being bitten by Josiah.
I always had one." She reached out and touched her name on the page. "I don't understand any of this."
No one said anything for a moment, but then Stephen cleared his throat. "Kel, would you turn back to the early 19th century?"
Samara removed her hand and shoved it into Kellen's lap, as if touching the book had burned her. Kellen flipped back to the beginning of the 19th century.
"I recognize some of these names." Stephen leaned in closer. "The females were members who married into my pack. They were turned, not born."
"Same here." Leo motioned Kellen to turn another page. "Yeah, some of the pups grew up in Firebrand. Kel? Grace?"
Grace shrugged her shoulders, but Kellen answered even as he turned the page and then another. "No, none of these are from Riverstone."
They flipped through to the end of the book.
"It looks like none of the names after 1850 are familiar to us. Let's list that as a clue." Stephen started writing. "What else do we know?"
"My grandfather was a wolf shifter," Samara muttered, rubbing her temple that had started to throb, still confused and not sure how she should feel about this family secret.
It did explain why her hands had burned when she was a child.
It had been the silverware she was never supposed to touch that burned them.
Stephen wrote down her words. "Not just a wolf shifter, but a rogue wolf..."
"Judging by the birth and death dates, I would guess all of his female mates were regular humans, unless he changed them later." Kellen stopped turning pages. "Let's keep looking for any connection with Samuel by any other surname and Josiah, who might also have changed his name."
"How far back should we go?" Samara dug back into her box. "I mean, the family tree goes back over a thousand years. Kellen, you said wolf shifters only live an average of five hundred."
"Yeah," he said, looking back into his box. "Which means an outlier could live a thousand, but I don't know of anyone who has."
Stephen interrupted them again. "I don't think we should be looking for Samuel. What we should be looking for is for Josiah. I don't know much except that he wasn't the original alpha of Riverstone. Riverstone was peaceful, like Moonclaw and Firebrand until—"
"—he murdered the Riverstone alpha." Leo said. "That's all I heard, but it was just a rumor."
"Yes, he did," Grace confirmed. "He showed up one day, already a wolf shifter.
He claimed to have been born a wolf, but I don't believe it.
He hung around, talking a lot, but saying nothing useful, bragging about stuff he'd done, but I doubt he had. Yet, some of the betas and omegas started to listen. He had that kind of charisma and told them that the alpha was weak and dragged down the pack because we refused to expand beyond Riverstone.”
She made a rude, scoffing noise. “After hunts, he would tell the omegas how stupid they were for following such a weak alpha who only took from the forest what was needed to survive.
He would actually make fun of the alpha behind his back, twisting the alpha's words, or making up complete lies about him.”
Grace's voice turned sour, "The alpha should have acted sooner.
When he did, he played by the rules of a fair fight and beat down Josiah so hard that Josiah barely limped away.
Unfortunately, the damage was already done.
For reasons I'll never understand, most of the betas and omegas listened to Josiah instead of the alpha.
They got off on his hate and his fake power or felt sorry for him because of how badly he'd been beaten. Whatever the reason, they left the pack to follow him to whatever rock he crawled under.”
Samara could feel her stomach tighten, knowing what was coming, because there was no other way for Grace’s story to end. It made her sick, but she could only imagine what it did to Kellen and Grace.
"Building a strong pack takes time and patience,” Grace continued, her voice quieter now, “so Riverstone still didn't have enough omegas to fight when Josiah and his followers came back two years later, this time with silver bullets and knives.
It was an ambush, crafted to rip Riverstone to pieces.
Even so, Josiah lost many of his followers to the alpha's fury, but not enough.
All the male betas and omegas who survived were tortured with silver.
The alpha was forced to watch, before he too was tortured and murdered.
Josiah got drunk and laughed the entire time. "
Everyone stayed quiet. Even Stephen had stopped writing.
"Josiah's not even a true alpha," Grace continued, after a deep breath. "He just kept saying he was until everyone believed him.”
Kellen closed the book and Samara reached out to grab his hand. He needed this connection, regardless of where their relationship ended up. She needed him to know that she cared about him. He squeezed her hand and gave her a grateful smile.
"I don't remember any of this," he said. "Why don't I remember this other alpha?"
"I'm glad you don't remember," Grace said.
"You were only five and it's not something I would have wanted you to remember.
Soon after, Josiah decided to start training you to fight with the omegas, and later as an assassin.
It was the safest place for you. Josiah loved to force me to watch as he molded and twisted you into something that he knew I would hate.
It was the only reason why he let you live, so he could keep hurting me.
" She took a long, deep breath. "So now that you know, let's move on. "
Move on to where? Grace was hiding something.
Kellen couldn't see it or didn't want to see it, but Samara did.
The way she kept her eyes down, looking at the receipts she held in her lap as she talked.
Kellen couldn't remember what happened because watching Josiah execute someone in cold blood, never mind his pack's alpha, had to have traumatized him to the point where his wolf shadow erased the memory—if wolf shadows were even capable of that.
She also assumed that the omegas who held him hostage had to have abused him in some horrible way, increasing his pain before Josiah ordered them to train him.
A vague thought crossed her already exhausted mind. If wolf shadows could erase memories, had her wolf shadow erased hers? Was that why she couldn't remember as much as she should about her captivity? Had the wolf shadow prevented her from having nightmares?
"There's more stuff in my box that I need to look at.
" Samara reluctantly let go of Kellen's hand and returned to her side of the sleeper sofa and the box.
Everyone else did the same. An hour later, toward the bottom of her box, she found a photograph in a hinged frame, either a daguerreotype or tintype.
She wasn't enough of an expert to know the difference.
With care, she opened the hinged frame and immediately slammed it shut again.
The snap of the hinges closing caught everyone's attention again.
"Josiah and my grandfather knew each other." She passed the frame to Kellen who looked inside. “The one on the left is definitely my grandfather, but long before he became grandfather. And Josiah is standing right next to him.”
Samara closed the box, done with digging for clues.
Josiah knew her grandfather at some point and now he wanted her.
Did he have something to do with her grandfather's death?
Did he want her because her grandfather owed him something?
Money? Interest on a loan from a century and a half ago would have turned into quite a tidy sum.
Had her grandfather run away from his responsibilities and lived his life in secret to not have to fight his friend?
Her grandfather hadn't made friends easily. In all the time she stayed with him while her parents worked, she'd only met two or three people who she might have considered his friends. They were folks he would sit with on a deck chair in the mouth of his garage, drinking beer on clear-weather days.
Kellen passed along the picture to Leo. "My box has spells."
"Like magic spells?" Samara asked. "Magic really exists? I mean you can read an incantation and make things appear or disappear?"
"If you believe in wolf shifters, why would magic be so unbelievable?
" Kellen started to separate papers onto his lap and the coffee table in front of him.
"Each clip has the original document laminated and a translation from various ancient dialects.
Some are Anglo-Saxon, I think, but others I'm less sure about. The translations are clearly spells."
“You understand Anglo-Saxon?” By this point she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Kellen shrugged. “Libraries started popping up all over the place after World War II. By that point we could read and write just like most folks.”
"May I see them?" Grace asked, holding her hand. It took Samara a second to move past her shock that the brothers hadn’t learned to read and write before they became assassins.
Then she craned her neck to better see the spell, just as Stephen and Leo did the same from the opposite side.
"That's my grandfather's handwriting. Either he gave Josiah these papers or Josiah stole them. "
"What sort of spells are they?" Leo asked, too far away to see anything.
Grace turned the papers around so she could read them, but didn’t try to pick them up off the table.
"It looks like they're spells about different types of shifters from different cultures, but if Josiah was already a shifter and wolf shifters are either born with wolf shadows or they are created when bitten, I don't know why he would need any of. ... Oh, wait."
"What is it?" Kellen asked.
Looking grim, Grace touched one of the spells. "There's one here about how to prevent a person from shifting, effectively locking them into their human form and trapping them there. That would explain why Samara’s father never shifted."
"But what about me?" she asked instead of spitting nails. "If my grandfather effectively locked me in my human form, how was I able to shift when I was in the cage?"
"You said that you woke up at one point with bites all over your body.
" Kellen was looking at her again, but she still couldn't bring herself to face him, especially when they were speaking about her captivity.
"I could see Josiah trying the brute force method to break the spell.
If he bit you enough times, or if he had all of the other Riverstone wolves bite you, that might have been enough to break the spell and awaken your wolf shadow. "
Kellen had said that if Josiah wanted to rape her, he would have kept her awake so she would be forced to experience it.
This was just as bad. The bagel in her stomach churned and Samara ran to the bathroom before she embarrassed herself.
Her last thought before slamming closed the bathroom door was how could Kellen possibly love her after this?