56. Juniper
JUNIPER
My world was agony. Excruciating pain washed over me.
Try as I might, I couldn’t lift my arms; they lay broken and misshapen at my sides.
Air gurgled in and out of my throat, and there was a grating sensation in my chest, like needles dragging across my lungs.
Every breath was misery, and I could taste blood in my mouth.
“Naphele, I’m home. Sorry I’m late.”
An overwhelming surge of relief pushed the pain away for a moment. Levi was home. He would help me. He would save me. I opened my mouth to cry out for him, but only a hiss emerged, followed by a stream of blood across my lips.
Looking toward the door was like running a marathon. The simple act of moving my eyes in their sockets was like moving the world itself.
The smile on Levi’s face vanished as he took in what must have been a horrifyingly bloody scene. Even in my misery, I experienced a painful ache in my heart at the look of horror and shock on my love’s face.
“Naphele,” Levi screamed, falling to his knees beside me. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
The edges of the room were beginning to blur and go dark.
I forced myself to stay. I didn’t want to go.
I didn’t want to leave him, but I was slipping.
My healing wasn’t strong enough for what had been done to me.
It was almost as if I was being tugged backward, dragged away from the man I loved more than life itself.
Levi reached down, gently scooping up my body to hold me close. Even the agony of that was worth it to have his body pressed against mine. I was no longer so cold, so alone. His heat radiated into me, and along with it, the love he had for me.
Tilting his face up, Levi screamed at the top of his lungs for someone to come, for anyone to try and save me, but it was too late. I knew that.
When he looked at me, I could see the heartbreak in his eyes—his devastation at realizing I was slipping away, and his impotent rage at being unable to do anything about it.
“Don’t leave me,” he sobbed, tears dripping from his nose onto my cheeks. “Please. I can’t live without you.”
Summoning the very last of my strength, urging my inner wolf to give me any energy she might be able to, I coughed, clearing the blood from my throat, and spoke.
“I…will find…you…again, my…love.”
The room grew ever darker, the blackness seeping in until all I could see was Levi’s sobbing face. In the distance, I heard boots thumping up the stairs, men crying out and cursing, and one man’s voice ringing out in horrified shock.
“Jesus, Levi! You’ve killed her. Why?”
With that, my eyes slipped closed for the last time.
I rolled from bed, sleep and wakefulness colliding like a bus and a freight train. I slammed into the hard wooden floor, tangled in the sheets, tears in my eyes. A sharp stinging pain shot through my hip and elbow. I was screaming and didn’t even realize it.
With my free hand, I reached up and clutched at the necklace, my fingers gliding across the cool metal of the infinity symbol, my breath coming in heaving gasps.
“June?”
The lights clicked on, flooding the room with light. Gran rushed over, kneeling next to me. That motion, so similar to what I’d witnessed Levi do in my dream, unleashed a flood of pent-up emotion. I cried out, reaching forward and clutching her, sobbing into her nightgown.
“Oh, my dear girl.” She rubbed my back, rocking me like she had when I was a small child. That only caused me to sob harder than ever.
The dream had been more like a memory than a nightmare. After a few minutes, I finally managed to get myself under control and release Gran from my death grip.
“June, baby, what happened? Are you okay?” she asked, brushing my hair back from my forehead.
I nodded as I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I had a nightmare.” I thought about it for a second, then added, “It actually felt like more than a nightmare.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, rubbing her hand across my forearm.
I groaned. “Let’s get off the floor.”
I helped her up, and we both sat on my bed.
I hugged my knees to my chest while she leaned back against my headboard, waiting for me to start speaking.
I hadn’t told my grandparents everything that had happened in Hidden Grove.
All they knew was that I’d gone into the forest to find Leviathan Cross, so he could teach me to shift.
As far as I knew, they assumed the legend himself had helped me access my inner wolf, and then I’d returned home. How did I tell them more had happened?
“I dreamed about a woman dying,” I said, deciding to be vague instead of delving into my sex life with my grandmother. “She was a real woman, though. A person who lived a long time ago, here in Idlewild. I think I’ve been dreaming of her death. Is that crazy?”
Rather than laughing it off and easing my fears, Gran chewed at her lower lip and looked out the window, deep in thought.
“Uh…it is crazy, right?” I said, hoping to get her to agree with my assessment.
“Hmm,” she said. “I wish your grandfather was here.”
“Huh?” I frowned at her, wondering if I was still asleep. This was surreal, like a continuing dream.
She gave me a sad smile. “He went on an early run. He doesn’t sleep well anymore and likes to go into the woods to run off the excess energy.”
“Gran, what would Grandpa have to say about this? You aren’t making any sense.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Your grandfather might have more insight because his side of the family had a touch of the sight.”
Shifters had many gifts. Of course there was the ability to shift into our animal form, and the bond we had with our inner creatures, but we had enhanced healing as well as the ability to reincarnate in new bodies—though from the stories I’d heard, reincarnations were normally a shadow of the person deep inside a new personality, not a true reincarnation like Levi believed.
Along with those more well-known attributes, there were other gifts that only blessed a small portion of shifters.
One being the sight, a skill that allowed some of us to see things from the past. It was rarer than most of the others, typically passed down from certain bloodlines.
Grandpa’s family had been known for the gift, but over the years, its strength had faded.
His father had been the first to have the gift in nearly a hundred years, and so far, Grandpa had shown no hints of it in all his years.
Though, that never stopped Grandpa from joking and saying he knew when I did something wrong because of the sight.
I’d never even entertained the idea that I might have it.
“Are you saying this might have been more than a dream?” I said, unsure if I was relieved to know I wasn’t imagining things or scared that I might be seeing the past while I was asleep.
“Perhaps.” Gran shrugged. “Discovering your ability to shift this late may have also unlocked some other gifts. Who is the woman, anyway? If it was in the past, I might have heard of her.”
If my dream really was a vision of the past, and not just some fantasy brought on by my relationship with Levi and his obsession with Naphele, then it sounded like Levi had been accused of murdering her.
I could still hear that accusing voice at the end of my dream.
Everyone in town had obviously forgotten about an alpha’s dead mate after a hundred years.
Shifters lived longer than humans, sure, but not that much longer.
There might be, at most, a half dozen of the oldest members of the pack who might have been alive back then, and nearly all of them would have been children at the time.
That didn’t mean I wanted to stir up old crimes, especially not with Levi staying in town for who knew how long.
We’d had a falling out, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to get arrested for a crime he never committed.
“Gran, I need to go see someone,” I said.
“June, you’re worrying me,” Gran said, patting my knee. “It’s not even five in the morning yet. Anyone you need to see is probably asleep. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, yeah,” I said as I got up and tugged on my jeans.
When I bent to slip my shoes on, the infinity necklace dangled down, catching my eye.
“Gran?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Could…uhm, could the sight maybe channel things? Like through personal items? Could that let me see what someone else saw?”
She thought about it, then nodded slowly. “You’d really need to ask your grandfather, but I think I’ve heard that. Items of heavy significance could possibly be used to focus the power and see specific things. Is that what you mean?”
What if there was a trace of that old magic within me? It would be useful in figuring out who killed Naphele. If that’s what it really was, and if I could learn to control it, that is. Why would it start now, though? Why not when I was younger?
Reaching up, I fingered the necklace, running my finger across the delicate chain. “Yeah. I’ll talk to Grandpa when he gets home, but first I need to go see someone.”