Well, offmostof their faces. Sergio’s face had a strange expression that I just couldn’t decipher, but it wasn’t at all what I saw on his parents’ or grandsire’s faces. As for Alexandria, she was standing to the side, face blank, as if she were trying to dissociate from what was happening.
God, I wished Cherry was right in the room with us. She’d tell me exactly what they were feeling, unnerve them with uncannily accurate deconstructions of their inner selves, then probably sneak in a couple of animal facts while she was at it. But Cherry would never be there because she was dead.
Andtheyhad killed her.
“What the hell is this?!” Chris yelled almost as soon as he came to, spitting mad in a way I hadn’t seen since a business partner tried to embezzle over a million dollars from the scholarship fund my brother set up for orphan shifters. “Vincenzo, Arlene, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Get us out of here before?—”
Mrs. Parracida lifted her hand, and a stone rose from the ground. It crashed into my brother’s mouth. His head jerked to the side, and I was sure I heard a tooth crack. “Your time for giving orders is done now. So please, be quiet and have some dignity as our family frees itself from your oppression!”
“But you’re a shifter, aren’t you? You married into the family,” Penelope said, sounding a little rough around the edges. “How do you have magic?”
While legends spoke of ancient shifters once being able to cast spells and enter into patronships with ancient gods or spirits, somewhere along the way we’d lost that. Magic users were magic users, and shifters were shifters, with never our two bloods to mix.
“I did what any mother would do to protect the future of my children,” she said, shifting slightly. And it must have been an effect of hanging around Cherry too much, because I felt my mind locking onto everything about the movement and picking up micro-cues I never would have noticed before.
She shrugged one shoulder higher than the other. It looks unnatural. Why? An injury?
Unlikely.
Then what?
My gaze went down to her arms, and I noticed a heavy tome was tucked under one of them. It looked quite old, and even from where I was bound, I could tell the pages were slightly different sizes and yellow from age. My mind raced through the magical studies course that had been a prerequisite for my degree in sophomore year, and I realized exactly what had happened.
“That’s a grimoire. You made a pact with another worldly entity.”
While there were all sorts of magic in our world that I was not familiar with, I also knew that witches, warlocks, sorcerers, andthe like all employed the natural magic that existed within our reality. It had its own set of rules and dynamics, but it was just as much a part of nature as the very air we breathed.
But there were entire realms beyond ours that ancient magic users had learned were not meant to be messed with in ours. That was the same reason why necromancy had been forbidden. Once the soul passed, it was beyond the natural cycle of our plane of existence. Wrestling it back caused all sorts of issues to the fabric of reality.
“I did!” she said, raising her chin in defiance. “I gave up my wolf so I could have the power to right the injustice you have forced on my husband and his family for generations!”
My conversation with Cherry rushed back to me. In some ways, the people before me had every right to be infuriated and try to change their position. Our family had been benefiting from their services far beyond the scope of what was right.
But that didn’t mean my father had deserved to be murdered or for Luther to have been… whatever they did to him.
“So, what, you brainwashed our brother to take out our alpha? Was that your big plan?” Jackson spat, not a hint of his usual levity or nonchalance in his words. And honestly, I was filled to the brim with anger too. But I was also learning. I learned a lot from Cherry, but another lesson was that people often revealed far more than they thought they would when you really let them talk.
“You VanMarches have always been so small-minded,” Vincenzo gloated. “We started this plot decades ago. In fact, things went into motion right when you entered the world,Jackie.” The way he said my brother’s name was like poison, and I couldn’t stop the growl that escaped from my throat. Apparently neither could Chris.
“I bet you didn’t know that, did you?” he continued. “I bet you’ve been blaming yourself your whole life for killing yourmother, and everyone around you has assured you that no, it wasn’t your fault. Well, it was, little Jackie. You were the catalyst that ended your poor mother’s life.”
Now I snarled outright while Jackson fell into utter silence. Only Penelope seemed able to speak, although her voice sounded wrecked. “A birth curse? Please, tell me it wasn’t—we had protections!”
“Please, as if I would give up my ability to connect with part of myself for something as simple as a standard birth curse,” Arlene scoffed. “It was something far better than that. It was supposed to attach to each of your fates and feed off all the good luck and fortune you were meant for, corrupting it into the opposite. It was meant to go from youngest to oldest and poison each of you with a deathly anti-luck until you eventually succumbed. Your family was first because your father didn’t have any remaining siblings, so you’re the quickest line to destroy. Not like those McElroys, who can’t seem to stop breeding.”
“Are they bunny shifters or wolves?” the grandfather joked in that grating voice of his like he was at some sort of comedy special.
“What happened then?” I asked, my voice shaking with the intensity of the emotions swirling within me. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Who can say?” Arlene said, waving her hand dismissively, like she was bored with the topic. “Perhaps your mother’s soul instinctively protected her precious Jackie and you all by absorbing it herself; perhaps I just got it wrong. Itwasthe first contract I made with a spirit from beyond the veil.” She smiled as if she wasn’t casually discussing the death of our mother, the kindest, sweetest woman any of us had ever known. “I learned a lot from that, but now I can say that I applied that and wasflawlessly pulled off the perfect combination of spells to get you where you are today.”
I was so caught up in her dramatics that I didn’t expect Jackson to interject with a soft, wounded voice. “So… shediddie because of me?”
“What?” I said, resisting the urge to whirl entirely to him. But I wished I could. Ihatedhearing my brother sound so wounded, and I was having trouble processing what Arlene was saying anyway and the broad ramifications. “Of course not!”
“But no, she did. You, lady?—”
“It’sArlene Parracida!”