Chapter 94 Vane's Breeding Stock
The heavy oak doors of the study clicked shut, sealing out the sounds of the house—the distant clatter of pots, the shrieks of the twins, the warmth of the family. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of old leather, unlit tobacco, and a tension that had been aging for centuries.
Damon moved to the crystal decanter on the sidebar, pouring four fingers of amber scotch into five heavy glasses. He handed one to Jax, one to Fennigan, and then walked over to the two Elders sitting in the high-backed wing chairs near the unlit hearth.
Elder Thorpe took the glass, his hand trembling slightly—not from age, but from the weight of the words he was about to speak. He looked into the amber liquid, swirling it, watching the light catch the facets.
"You think we came here just to save face," Thorpe said quietly, his voice lacking its usual political polish. "You think we are just old wolves afraid of losing our seats to Vane’s new regime."
"Aren't you?" Fennigan asked, leaning against the heavy desk, his arms crossed. "You’ve been fighting him for control for years."
"It isn't about control, Fennigan," Elder Horne rasped, staring into the dark fireplace. "It is about... remembrance."
Thorpe took a long, burning swallow of the scotch and looked up. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, looked ancient and haunted.
"There is a secret," Thorpe began, his voice dropping to a whisper that seemed to suck the air out of the room. "A secret kept since long before your mother’s grandmother walked this mountain. A secret about us."
He gestured between himself and Horne.
"The Elder Council was not always a bureaucracy of paper and laws," Thorpe revealed. "In the beginning... before the treaties... we were not just administrators. We were The Four."
Damon frowned, his glass pausing halfway to his mouth. "The Four?"
"Earth. Water. Air. Fire," Horne recited the words like a penance. "We were the original Elementals. One Elder for each pillar of nature."
The silence in the room was absolute. Jax straightened up from the wall he was leaning on.
"You?" Jax asked, skepticism coloring his tone. "You were Elementals?"
"We were powerful," Thorpe whispered, his eyes distant, looking back at a time that felt like a different life, a different skin. "We could move mountains. We could summon storms. We could breathe life into the soil or burn a forest to ash with a thought."
He let out a bitter, hollow laugh.
"But power... absolute power... it corrupts. We became greedy. We stopped serving the balance and started serving ourselves. We wanted to rule the packs, not guide them. We wanted to be gods."
"And the Moon Goddess stopped you," Fennigan realized, the pieces clicking together.
"She stripped us," Horne said, his voice shaking. "She didn't just take the magic; she tore it out of us. She left us as nothing but wolves—hollow,but immortal, so we would live with what we had done. It was a punishment so severe that we buried the history. We created the laws and the red tape to ensure no one would ever have that kind of power again. It was so long ago... sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else. Like a dream we woke up from."
Thorpe looked directly at Fennigan.
"But then Leela came along."
He set his glass down with a heavy clack.
"She is not like us, Fennigan. We were four separate vessels, each holding one fraction of the power. Leela... she holds the Elemental Stone. She is fused with it. She holds all four elements within a single body. She is the convergence we were never strong enough to be."
"And that is why Vane is terrified," Fennigan said, his voice low and dangerous.
"He is terrified of her power, yes," Thorpe agreed. "But his fear has twisted him. Vane looks at Leela and he doesn't just see a threat to his authority. He sees a biological goldmine."
Damon’s eyes narrowed. "What are you saying?"
"Vane is a scientist at heart, an industrialist," Thorpe warned. "He doesn't just want to contain her. He wants to replicate her."
Jax let out a low growl, the sound vibrating in his chest.
"He doesn't want to kill the twins because they are abominations," Thorpe said, delivering the final, sickly truth. "He wants to capture them because they are the first successful prototypes. He wants to breed a superior line, Fennigan. He wants to create a caste of wolves that he can command—soldiers with the power of the elements, born in a lab, raised in cages, and loyal only to the High Council."
Fennigan’s hands gripped the edge of the desk so hard the wood groaned under the pressure. The image of Vane trying to turn his children—and his unborn child—into breeding stock for a super-soldier program made his wolf claw at the surface of his skin.
"He wants to farm them," Fennigan spat, the words tasting like bile.
"He wants to be a god," Horne corrected. "The same mistake we made. But unlike us... Vane doesn't have a Goddess to strip him. He has technology. And if he gets his hands on Leela or those children... he will unlock the code to the Stone. And he will burn the world down just to rule the ashes.