Branches of the Willow 3

by Christine M. Butler

  I cut Avery off when his eyes turned sad. “How about we just let them decide what they want to do?” Avery agreed. “Oh, before we go back in. I have two Ancients that came in last week. I think they’d best go to your pack. One of them is a bit cheeky, so he bears watching, which is why I wanted him with you, but if it’s too much, considering…”

  “No, it’s fine. It’ll give me someone to yell at.” That seemed to cheer Avery up a bit, and we made our way back into the hall to sit with everyone else while we awaited on our dinner to arrive.

  My father did a good job of guiding the others through who could have possibly been working with John Freedman’s pack. As it turns out, one of Freedman’s sisters was traded off to Mac’s pack a few years back, and she had overheard her mate talking about the leader heading here for a special meeting. Mac promised to get the issue straightened out as soon as he got back.

  A knock at the door interrupted the lighter conversation that followed. We all thought it was just the food, so my father bellowed, “come on in.”

  To his surprise, and everyone else’s, Serena stood in place of what we thought was going to be our food order. Jaws dropped as the stunning woman’s piercing glacial eyes travelled the crowd until they found mine. “Jessica, we need to talk.”

  Every wolf in the room jumped to get in front of me, some snarling and snapping. They could sense that she was a witch, though they weren’t certain if she was friend or foe yet. Many were not aware what Sophia looked like, or whether witches could change their appearance on a whim. Mikael, even knowing who Serena was, still didn’t trust her. He pushed me behind him, and snarled at Serena right along with the rest of the wolves.

  “Please, if you would allow me to explain, I promise it would ease your worry.”

  “If you allow us to lock you up while you explain, then you can stay, but I’ll be damned if I am going to have another witch involved with anything near Jessica without taking precautions.”

  “I think that’s a fair proposal.” I called out from behind Mikael’s shoulder, suddenly pissed about feeling like a school girl who couldn’t see over the rest of the class. “Once you’ve said your peace you will be free to go. You have my word.”

  “Very well, if that’s the way it must be. I suppose you have a secure location to put me?”

  “As a matter of fact, we’ve been preparing.” My father announced stiffly. I hadn’t known anything about cells being prepared for witch containment, but then again, this was my father’s pack lands, not mine. He was free to do as he saw fit. “Once you are secured, Jess will follow.”

  Serena nodded, and allowed herself to be escorted out by my father, Mikael, and Mac. Avery and two others stayed behind with me. The men were only gone with Serena for two minutes before my mom came bursting through the door to the meeting hall. “Jess, you need to come with me.”

  “Mom, we have a little crisis going on right now, I can’t.”

  “Well, it’s about the whole reason you’re all gathered here.” That piqued everyone’s interest.

  “What is it?”

  “Annabelle, she sent word with one of the guards that she heard from Malachai. She said she will only talk to you about the details though, because you’re the only one who can make a deal with her for her freedom in exchange.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake. Is everyone going to pop up out of the woodwork today wanting to make deals and tell me special stories. Fine.” I turned to look at Avery. “I’m going with my mom real quick to see what this is all about. Let them know, I will be back to see Serena as soon as this is taken care of.” Sierra popped her head in just then, and the minute she opened the door the smell of oriental food sent my taste buds into overdrive, salivating over the food I no longer had time to eat. I looked longingly at the food as it was brought in. “Enjoy dinner.”

  “I’m sure it will still be warm when you get back, Jess.” My mother offered sympathetically.

  “Seriously, Sierra just served up fresh, hot food to a room full of hungry werewolves, and you think there will be any left when I get back?”

  “I can always make you something, if you like.”

  “Are Annabelle and Leanne still being held over at Betsy’s house?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s the most secure location outside of the cells. We were hoping if they were in a homier environment, they’d be more inclined to talk.”

  “Well, looks like your plan may have worked then.” I offered. “I’ll swing by the house for something to eat as soon as I’m done. There’s no need for you to come with me.”

  “Okay, Jess. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Once I was at Betsy’s place, my hackles went up, and I tensed, on alert. Something wasn’t right. The guards that should have been stationed around the house were nowhere in sight. I thought, maybe since my mother had come to get me, that she had them wait inside with the women. So, I went to knock on the door anyway. I waited for an answer, and Annabelle opened it with a sweet smile on her face. “Thank God, you came. I thought for sure you were just going to ignore my pleas.”

  “I’m here. Now, tell me what’s going on, because I have some important things to get back to.”

  “Oh, okay, well come in.” She slid out of the way, so I could pass by her to get inside the house.

  No sooner did I walk into the house than Leanna came out of the shadows to the right, and blew some kind of powder into my face from a ring she had on her finger. When I turned in her direction I noticed two guards face down on the floor in the shadows, apparently victims of the same little trick. There was someone else in the shadows, but she wasn’t a victim. “You…” I didn’t get anything else out, because my world spun on its heels and tipped sideways all of a sudden. My body was suddenly an immobile brick, as I fell over, and wasn’t even able to catch myself. No one else in the room bothered to catch me either. I knew I would be aching if I could feel anything, but the lights were dimming, and everything sounded like it was suddenly coming from the end of a very deep, dark tunnel somewhere. As things grew quieter and darker I wondered if I would be lucky enough to be rescued this time. Surely, this time, my captors would just kill me and get it over with. Mikael’s face came to mind. His eyes lit up behind that gorgeous grin of his. His smile made me want to mimic it, but he wasn’t really there. His face faded, and I saw Ashley’s, and my parents, the Reynolds family, even Jack’s wonderful visage graced my presence. It wasn’t so much my life flashing before my eyes as my love. Everyone I ever cared about streamed in and out of my conscious thoughts before it all dimmed completely and I was swallowed whole by a numbing, black, nothingness.

  BLOOD AND BONDS

  I wondered if Mikael had kicked me out of the bed, or if I simply rolled out on my own. It had been years since I managed to find myself on the floor after a hard night’s sleep, but the discomfort I felt was definitely directly related to the cold hard floor beneath my body. I tried to move, and couldn’t. Every muscle in my body ached, and the more I tried to move the more the pins and needles sensation from my feet crept upward along my entire body, as if every fiber of my being was just now coming out of a deep sleep. Now that I thought about it, even my tongue felt thick in my mouth. Thick and dry. I tried opening my eyes, but my lids ripped at my eyeballs as if they had been lined with sandpaper. Needless to say, it hurt. Everything hurt.

  I waited another moment or two, trying to let the sensation of bugs crawling through my skin come and go again. At least, I hoped it would go again. Finally, painstakingly, I was able to crack one eye open. I was definitely on the floor, just not the wood planks of my bedroom. I was on some sort of rocky surface. I moved my eye a little further, to open up my peripheral vision a little more. There were bars in front of me.

  I think I swallowed my heart in that moment. I’m pretty sure that it hammered up into my throat, and I swallowed it back down as a hard lump of fear. There were bars in front of me, and I was on a rock floor. My eyes burned as they tried to fill with
panic-laden tears, only the tears wouldn’t come at all. My body was too dried out for that. I closed my eye instead, ignoring the burning pain the movement caused. I needed to think. I needed to calm myself and come up with a plan, but in order to form a plan, I had to wake the hell up. I needed to see where I was, the whole picture, not just bits and pieces of it. I reached down inside me for all my reserves of strength, and managed to open both eyes this time. I was in a large room, obviously closer to the back of the room than the middle. There was one, small window that looked to be about seven feet off the floor. In front of me was a white rug, and off to the left a long wooden table with all sorts of test tubes, herbs, and books on top. It looked like something straight out of an old apothecary, or a witches cottage. “Crap,” I muttered to myself. “Not again.” I was in a cage, and there was a witch somewhere nearby.

  My memories started coming back a little at a time, and I remembered Leanna blowing something in my face, and then… Sophia was there, in the shadows. “Damn it.” I yelped inadvertently, and a lot louder than I intended to. I had jerked backwards when I realized it was Sophia I had seen before I passed out. Now, my head was positioned staring straight up at the ceiling, and it hurt like hell where it pressed to the stone. Apparently, I had some sort of contusion back there that hadn’t healed yet. That was a good sign. It meant I had been out for less than 24 hours. Any more than that and a bump to the head would be gone.

  “Finally, Love!” Zach cooed excitedly from across the room. “I wondered when you were going to wake up.”

  “I am not…” I tried to get out, but ended up coughing as my dry throat refused to cooperate.

  “Best not to talk yet. That’s some nasty stuff they used to knock you out. Dries you out like crazy.”

  “I have.” I had to couch again. “Never.” I sucked in another dry breath, and tried to finish. “Been. Your. Love.”

  “You always have, Jess, just as I’ve always been yours.”

  “Fucking psycho.” Cough. “Delusional.” Cough, rasp, cough. “Bastard.” My voice was all but gone by the time I got to the end, but I said my peace. My throat burned, and begged for water, but my pride kept me from asking for any.

  “Ouch!” Zach mocked. “That hurts, Jess! Sounds like it hurt worse for you to say it. You’ll see though.” He was in front of the cage then, watching me. He saw the way my eyes rolled back. “You’ll see that you’re wrong, love.”

  A loud, low rumble issued forth from somewhere in my chest. It would have come out a defiant growl had it not hurt so much. What started out as a growl turned into a fizzled attempt that ended on a whimper. My throat was done for.

  “Quit tormenting the girl, all ready. She’s about to go through enough pain and suffering without you adding to it.” Sophia told him.

  “But she will live!” Zach stated, not so much a question as it was a demand.

  “Yes, yes!” Sophia responded. “She will be a fractured shell, something even you can manipulate.” The snide remark did not go unnoticed. It did however go unpunished, which meant that no matter how much he wanted to be, Zach was not in charge here.

  “What are you waiting for then? Let’s get the show on the road.” Zach sing-songed.

  “I need the moon, like I’ve told you all ready. We have a few more days to wait”

  “Don’t make me throw you in a cage with her, Sophia.” Zach threatened.

  “Because that worked out so well for you last time you threw me in a cage?” Sophia laughed at him. “I will get my revenge and you will get whatever is left over in the end.”

  “Revenge?” I choked out breathlessly. “What the hell did I ever do to you?” It took me a while to get all the words passed my dried out throat and wrecked vocal chords, but the witch was patient and waited to tell me her tale.

  LEGENDS

  “Did you know, true witches are only born once every 200 years. Special things have to happen to make us, because we are eternal. Not many people know this. Only another of our kind can kill us once we are fully matured, and we regard our own kind with too much love and respect to attempt it, except in special situations.” Sophia completely ignored the question I asked. I wasn’t sure what Witch History 101 was going to tell me about why she wanted revenge on me, but I was a captive audience, literally, so all I could do was sit and listen.

  “My mother feared for us, as we were vulnerable to attack by other creatures until we reached the age of maturity. That takes several hundred years. We are a slow, patient people, you see. I was the oldest of seven sisters. Serena, who you know, came 201 years after me, and I was fast approaching maturity when Layla came along 200 years after that. Mother heard whispers that the dark ones wanted to end our line, and she feared losing us. She be-spelled an entire town and all of their inhabitants. They would be our family’s watch dogs. Werewolves were the original animal guardians of witches.”

  I stared at her, open-mouthed, in disbelief for quite a while before I managed to shut my own dried, cracked lips again. If what she was saying was true, it had been lost to our own histories, because werewolves had always thought of witches as beneath them. They were always thought of as humans who did a few parlor tricks for entertainment, and not much else. Well, except for the rare witch who possessed enough talents to do things for wolves, like say, un-bind them from a mate they no longer wanted. I waited while Sophia was lost in her thoughts. I wasn’t sure if she was planning to tell me anymore or not. Just as I thought that she looked back over at me with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Two sisters and 400 years after Layla was born, Serena reached her full maturity. She was a romantic, that one. She always had stars in her eyes, mooning over the most absurd things. My mother thought she was a darling. I begged to differ. Being the oldest, my mother was on my case to settle down and find a male with worthy seed to beget me my own child. I wasn’t ready, and I let her know in no uncertain terms was I about to have a child. My life was full enough without them. After all, I had enough sisters to keep me tied up with their expectations for years. I was ready to have no one to answer to.

  As a result, my mother turned to Serena to beg a grandchild from her. Surely, she wouldn’t let my mother down, being the starry-eyed darling that she was. Our kind only mate with human males. We enchant them, the ones who have a special charisma, wonderful gifts, beyond what other mere mortals have. They are the ones our kind chooses to mate with. We do not keep them. I fear the original “man-eater” myths were witch born, as many females do end up killing the sperm donor after they’re sure they have gotten with child.”

  I screwed up my face in disgust, but that only provoked laughter from Sophia. “Don’t worry, your dear savior, Serena felt the same as you do. And it didn’t matter anyway, because she went and fell in love with one of our family’s dogs.”

  She couldn’t possibly mean what I thought she meant. Serena fell in love with a werewolf. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of an uproar that would cause, because it was something that would be frowned upon even now. Humans were fair game because they could be turned, but witches could not become werewolves, and vice-verse. Therefore, they never mated.

  “Mother had already created the hunters by then, to try to go on the offensive with the dark ones. Her wolves were only a defensive gesture, you see. They wouldn’t leave the damn nest, and go hunt. They only stayed, and protected. Stupid mutts.” Sophia complained, and then cracked open a bottle of water, guzzling its contents as if it were the most delicious thing on earth. I’m sure it would have felt like it considering how dry my throat still was. She looked at me then, out of the corner of her eye, while she still had the bottle tipped up, glug-glug-glugging away. Suddenly, she pulled the bottle away from her face, letting some of the precious water trickle out to the floor as she did. “Oh, how rude of me. I bet you’re thirsty, aren’t you?” She held her bottle out to me. I didn’t bother moving for it. There was only a few tiny drops left, and I’d be damned if I’d drink from the same bottle her lips
just touched. She simply shrugged her shoulders. “Suit yourself.”

  “Where was I? Oh yes, the hunters. We didn’t really need protection from the pack anymore. Serena and I had already reached maturity, Layla was well on her way, and the hunters had done an exceptional job of killing off enough of the dark ones that the few remaining had gone deep into hiding. By then, the townsfolk had branched off, creating new werewolf packs. Many times, this meant turning humans to use as their workforce. Some of them had watered down abilities, and they became known as ‘lesser’ later on. The pure bloods, from the original family lines that were created by my mother, were later known as ‘ancients.’ I’m sure you know that part already though.” Sophia looked at me smugly.

  “Despite my mother’s warnings not to do so, Serena was determined to lie with dogs. She waxed poetic about how he’d be able to live a few hundred happy years with her, at least. As opposed to the human males who withered and died so quickly. Serena and her dog had a baby together. She was no witch child, and never acknowledged by our family, outside of Serena. She was different from all the other wolves though. Aislynn was pure white in her wolf form. She had no markings. She also held power unlike any of her kind. As she grew into her power, she used it to fix the violent, male dominated, rule of the wolves.” Aislynn’s name wobbled around in my head for a few moments, before it dawned on me why it sounded so familiar. She was the first white wolf, the one Mikael and I had talked to in my dream only a few nights ago.

  “Mother was furious with Serena for mucking up her creations. She punished Serena by killing her mate. Oh, yes, a wolf and a witch can be true mates, and being partnered with a witch extended the wolf’s life expectancy. Well, it would have if mother hadn’t found him. It was only later that we realized her family line would beget another potential white wolf ruler every 200 years. If the other hadn’t died yet, the child would be normal. If there were no current white wolf, then she would grow into her powers as the very first had.”