70

70
Haylee's POV

“Stay… stay behind me,” I whisper at Kael and Lior, stepping to shield Kael and Lior entirely from the Elder.

The silver light still pulses in their little bodies, moving along with my mood as if they were alive. I feel it reaching out to my own power, pleading with me to let it free, to teach this old thing just what the True Alpha mother of its offspring can do when her pups are threatened.

“Interesting,” the Elder whispers, moving a step closer again. The accumulated gravitas from centuries settles into his voice; every word measured. “The prophecy described children who would save or damn us all. Now I can understand why everybody was so... eager to take them.”

Xavier is frozen in mid lunge, locked as a beast form with Elders magic although black eyes shifting his attention all around the room. Transformed into that berserker nightmare, I can see him listening, plotting, waiting, to hit it again.

“They’re just kids,” I say, struggling to keep my voice from shaking while the panic tears through my breast. “Six year old boys who just want to play with toy cars and argue over bed time stories.”

"Are they?" The Elder cocks his head, and those starry eyes appear to look into my very soul. "True Alpha, can you tell me when they first started to manifest that power? When did you know that you had given birth to the subjects of some ancient prophecy?”

I swallow, remembering the night Kael shifted the first time when he was four—a full two years before any wolfling should. The way that Lior had just seemed to know where to find his brother when he got lost in the forest, on instinct that couldn’t possibly be scent or sound.

“Their strength has been creeping upwards,” I concede, for I have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by lying to this creature. “But they’re learning control. They're good boys."
“Good boys,” the Elder says again, and there’s something almost droll in his ancient voice. "Remember the prophesied children Luna Haylee, what became of that? Those born three centuries ago?”

My blood turns to ice. "What happened to them?"

The Elder’s countenance becomes serious, and for a second, the starlight in his eyes flickers slightly. They were raised by parents who aren’t monsters, and that’s how you’re trying to raise yours. Protected, sheltered, trained to wield their gifts.” He stops to listen and the silence draws taut like a wire. “I shared the cigarettes with them, and by the time they were 10 years old, they had smoked three cartons.” Not out of hate, mind you. Just because their strength had outstripped their control.

“No,” I gasp, but the word is sound, nothing more than a whisper.

“The Council was in a difficult position,” the Elder says, each word dropping into silence like stones on still water. “We just couldn’t let them to keep getting stronger. It was too dangerous for our entire species."

Comprehension crashes down on me like a punch. "You killed them."

“We attempted to remove them from their families first. Took them to the sacred lands for proper training, so they’d not be triggered into power surges by emotion.” The Elder speaks in a calm, clinical voice. "But isolation broke them. Made them unstable. Ultimately, we had no choice.”

I feel the rage rise in my chest, vivid white and all-consuming. “You killed children because you were afraid of what they would become.”

“I took out a threat to every werewolf on this continent,” he corrects, unapologetic. “As I will have to do again,” he added.

“You will not be taking my sons,” I growl, my voice heavy with the Alpha force behind the delivery. I do not give a damn how ancient you are, or what powers you possess. “They have family that loves them, a pack that will protect them and a mother that would watch this whole world burn to cinders if you touch one hair on their heads.

The Elder looks at me for a long second, and I can almost feel him considering possibilities, doing the math on risks. "Your motherliness is commendable, Luna, but it will be the death of us all. But do you really have their power under the full control?” That you know for sure they'll never fuck up and kill innocents?"

The question goes to the heart of my deepest fears, the ones that wake me up in cold sweats at 3 in the morning. The truth is, I don't know. Their power has been growing out of all proportion to natural growth, and sometimes I catch them doing things that they shouldn't be able to do – objects moved without touching them, knowledge of things they couldn't possibly know, cuts that should take days to heal closed over before my very eyes.

But I also know that they are my babies. That Kael still crawls into my bed when it thunders and Lior cries if he unknowingly steps on a bug. They are first and foremost CHILDREN, not prophesied beings.

I can’t reassure you that they won’t ever fall down,” I finally say, the confession shattering something in side of me. “But they will never become monsters, I can promise that. Not so long as they have love, guidance and a family that knows they’re more than their power.

“Pretty words,” the Elder replies, and he seems weary, as if he’s heard promises like this before. But I've been around too long and seen too much to have faith in hope alone. "It is our species that has to be safe first."

He lifts his hand, and power arcs between his fingers—not the black energy Xavier held, but something older and purer and utterly horrible. "I'm sorry, Luna Haylee. Truly. But I cannot keep these children with their family. They're going to come home with me and get way evaluated and be trained."

“Over my dead body,” I snarl, allowing my own True Alpha power to push outward, forming a layer around my sons.

“If need be,” the Elder answers with charring composure, and quite suddenly I believe he will have it so. This centuries-old creature will murder me without remorse if I interfere with what he thinks is the best course of action.

You will not break our family,” the boys intone in unison, and their young voices take on an otherworldly sternness that causes even the venerable Elder to halt in his tracks
.
The white light widens, forming a dome of protection all around us—all around me, Aiden, Marcus, even Elder Patricia. But the Elder is on the outside of it, his starry eyes round out not of something that could be too close to terror.

"Impossible," he whispers. “They’re too young to consciously power this level of this. The prophecy said—"

“The prophecy was many things,” Kael interrupts, his six-year-old voice strangely ancient. “But nowhere did he say I had to be separated from the people I love.”

“Love makes us stronger, not weaker,” Lior says, gentle in that way he has, even as impossible power pours out from his tiny hands. “Mommy and Daddy teach us that.”

The Elder peers at them, and one gets the impression that he is uncertain for the first time since he entered this room. "You're children. You have no idea how hard it is for me to be—"

“We know that family is everything,” Kael insists. “We know that you have hurt the children who came before us, by separating them from their families. We do know that fear makes people do terrible things.

“But we fear you not,” Lior continues, almost under his breath. "We're sad for you. You have been alone so long you have no sense of what it is like to belong.”

The Elder reels as if he’s been punched in the chest, and I stare, stunned, as my six-year-old boys, still babies in so many ways, stand up to one of the most dangerous creatures on earth with just love and a knowledge that shouldn’t be in children their age.

But while pride wells in my chest, I can see the struggle on their faces. It is taking everything that they have to maintain that level of power, and they can’t hold on much longer.

The Elder, it sounds like he realizes this as well, because he straightens, his expression hardening once more. 
"You've done well, kiddies. But power without preparation is yet dangerous. You've only proven my point."

He lifts both hands now and the air around him starts to cook with heat. "Stay down, or I'll—"

The shield wall around us suddenly flares into an outsize bubble, shoving him against the wall. But instead of attacking him, it appears as if the white light is enveloping him. I barely watch my breath as the Elder’s weathered, age-eaten face seems to suddenly lighten, become more rested.

“We’re not here to fight you,” Kael says, his voice trembling yet resolute. “We want to help you never forget.”

“Remember what it felt like to have people who cared about you,” Lior says, and tears are flowing down his pasty cheeks at the strain of keeping this connection alive. “Remember what you forfeited when you sacrificed love for duty.”

The Elder buckles under the pressure, and I catch a glimpse of something raw and devastating across his face. “You don’t get it,” he murmurs. “The things I’ve done, the choices I’ve made, there’s no coming back from that kind of darkness.”

“There’s always a way back,” I keep saying, inching forward even as my own strength is on its last legs. "My mate taught me that. He made dreadful mistakes, injured the people he loved, and lost everything that was meaningful to him. But he made his way back because he never stopped trying to do better.”

The Elder studies me, then my sons, whose strength is now dimming like candles in a gale. “I killed the prophecy children,” he finally says, barely audible. "They weren't monsters. They were just... scared. Alone. And I was too scared to try the other.

“You can give another way a try now,” Kael struggles to speak as he bobs from exhaustion.

“We’ll help,” Lior says, and then the boys both fall over.

The brightness disappears in an instant and we are all under the stark fluorescent of the medical wing. I run to be with my sons, holding both against my chest as they fight to remain awake.

“Mommy,” Kael whispers, his face as white as a sheet of paper. "Did we do good?"

“You did great, baby,” I murmur, planting kisses on both of their foreheads. “You were so brave, so strong.

Xavier. With everything going on with the Elder, I’d almost lost track of him in his berserker form, bound by ancient magic.

“The children,” the Elder says suddenly, in a very different voice, still strong but less commanding, shakier. "They're right. About the previous ones. I could have searched harder for a different way. Should have tried harder."

He meets my eyes and the starlight in his own is dimmer now, more human. "Perhaps... dare to say no” — maybe it’s “time to crack the fear cycle.”

Hope springs in my chest, brittle but true. "Does that mean—"

An explosion like shattered glass fills the air, punctuating my words. KABOOM-cracks run across Xavier’s frozen figure as if he were the Earth himself recovering from every major earthquake ever opened up.

“The magic is dying,” gasps Elder Patricia. "The kids' power surge---it screwed up the binding spell!

Xavier’s black eyes snap around to me and I see awareness there, cruel intelligence returning as the paralysis starts to lift. A gruesome smile stretches across his mouth and those rows of sharpened teeth.

“Did you honestly believe,” he croaks, his voice distorted by the change, “that your tearful family reunion would save YOU? I may go out, but I’m taking you all down with me.”

The fractures on his shape tear apart, and dark energy gushes out as blood from a severed artery. But rather than weakening him, it seems to be feeding something else, and that something has begun unspooling the very fabric of reality that lies at his back.

“No,” the Elder whispers, as his face blanches to a shade of terror. "He's opening a rift. It's the berserker serum mingled with my binding magic—there's opened a rift between world."

Something is moving in the blackness beyond the expanding tear in space. Something immense and ravenous and wholly other than our world.