Chapter 85 The weight of Blood
Calix POV
Maddie was still waiting for my answer so I took a breath and told her.
"He fell during a training session," I said. "He was seventeen. Strong, fast, one of the best fighters in his age group. There was no reason for him to fall the way he did. The ground gave out under him and he landed on a broken stake that was sticking out of the dirt."
"That sounds like an accident," Maddie said.
"That's what everyone said. The pack ruled it as bad luck and moved on, but I was there. I saw it. The ground didn't just give out.
Something pushed from underneath. Something that shouldn't have been there."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"I told my father," I said. "He went quiet for a long time after I finished talking. Then he said I was imagining things because I was grieving, but his eyes told a different story. He knew."
Maddie pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She was listening carefully and not trying to fill the silence with anything unnecessary.
"There were two others after him," I continued. "Pack members I got close to. The first was a guy named Reid. We trained together every morning for about six months.
He was one of the few people I actually trusted. Then one day he just collapsed during a run. His heart gave out, he was nineteen."
"And the second?"
"A girl named Petra. She used to bring food to my room when I forgot to eat during exam weeks. She died in her sleep three months after we became friends. There was no cause or explanation. She just didn't wake up."
Maddie was quiet for a moment after that and then she said, "Calix, that's three people."
"I know how many it is."
"No, I mean think about it. A training accident. A collapsed heart. Dying in sleep. Those are three completely different causes of death. If a curse was targeting the people you loved wouldn't it work the same way each time?"
I looked at her. "Not necessarily.
Curses don't have to follow a pattern like that."
"But they usually do," she said. "At least from everything I've ever learned about pack magic. Curses leave a signature. They repeat, they have a method."
"Maybe this one is different."
"Or maybe," Maddie said carefully,
"it's not a curse at all."
I felt something tighten in my chest. "Don't."
"I'm not trying to dismiss what you went through," she said. "Those people died and that was real. Your grief is real, but I'm asking you something serious. Who actually confirmed the curse was real? Who told you first?"
I opened my mouth to answer and then stopped.
"My father," I said after a moment.
"And who told him?"
"His father told him. And his father was told by the generation before that."
"So it's been passed down by word of mouth through your family for five generations," Maddie said. "And in all that time nobody went to an elder or a pack witch to verify it?"
"My father consulted someone when I was younger. A pack seer."
"What did the seer say?"
I paused because the honest answer wasn't what I expected her to ask for.
"She said she sensed darkness around our bloodline. That tragedy followed the Hawthorne name."
"That's not confirmation of a curse," Maddie said. "That's vague. Any seer could say that about a family with a history of loss."
"You're oversimplifying it."
"And you're overcomplicating grief," she shot back. "Calix, your mother got sick and died. That happens. Your brother had a training accident. That happens too.
Reid's heart gave out and Petra didn't wake up and both of those things are tragic but they also just happen to people. Wolves aren't immune to loss."
"So you think I've been keeping everyone at a distance for nothing," I said and my voice came out harder than I intended.
"I think your father watched your mother die and couldn't handle it so he built a story around it," she said. "I think he passed that story to you and you believed it because you were a child and he was all you had. I think you've been carrying something that was never yours to carry."
"You didn't see what I saw."
"You're right, I didn't. But I'm asking you to consider the possibility that what you saw was real loss and not a supernatural sentence on your bloodline."
I stood up because I needed to move. The conversation was pressing on something inside me that I wasn't ready to look at directly. "It's not that simple."
"When did you first start believing in the curse?"
I turned to face her. "What?"
"How old were you when your father told you about it?"
I thought back. "Ten. Right after my mother died."
"So you were ten years old, you had just lost your mother, and your father sat you down and told you that everyone you ever loved would be taken from you," Maddie said. "And you've believed it ever since."
I didn't say anything.
"That's not a curse, Calix. That's a ten year old boy who was handed his father's pain and told to carry it as his own."
The words landed somewhere deep and I didn't have a response for them so I just stood there looking at her. My wolf was unusually quiet, like it was listening too.
"I'm not saying your family didn't suffer," Maddie added, her voice softer now. "I'm saying suffering doesn't always have a supernatural cause.
Sometimes people just lose each other and it breaks them and they need something to blame."
I sat back down slowly. "And if you're wrong?"
"Then we figure that out," she said. "But right now you don't even know if you're running from something real."
I didn't argue after that because the worst part was that she had a point and I couldn't find a solid place to stand against it.