Catch Me, Alpha (God of War Book 2)

by Emilia Rose

  “Whoever said she was going alone?” Medusa responded.

  A deafening silence descended upon us, and I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. This felt bad. And when I said bad, I meant, really, really fucking terrible.

  Both traveling to hell? Were we bound to die soon? Would we not be able to go to heaven with the Moon Goddess and run in the clouds with other fallen wolves? Would I never be able to see Jeremy again? And Ares … would Ares never get to see his mother?

  “You have your hands full, especially because”—she tilted her head toward me—“you have the stone inside of you,” she said without me even having to tell her. It was as if she could sense the power radiating from me or had read my mind.

  I nodded and stared at the sea-foam green veil, which hid her face. How’d she know about me? How’d she know that I was the one with the stone? Was it that powerful? Were these immense waves radiating off me since I had come here some sort of … message to her?

  “But you hold on to something more.” She walked around me, small snake-like wolf heads slithering out from her veil. “You are plagued by fear despite possessing power this strong. Why?”

  My heart pounded in my chest. It definitely wasn’t because a veiled woman was stalking around me as she looked me up and down and told all my secrets to the world. Definitely not.

  She answered for me. “Because you don’t have the complete stone, right? You only have half inside of you. You fear that it’s not strong enough to protect you, your mate, and your pack, your …” She stopped short and let out a harmonious laugh. “You must not even know about that yet.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, stricken with fear right down to the bone.

  While she sounded so young, something about her told me that she had seen men and women like me before, like she had sensed the stone from the moment I walked into her home, and that was why she had come back from the forest. After all, her basket was empty and not filled with the food she would’ve scavenged that forest to find.

  “You have the other half of the stone but haven’t used it yet. You fear that you’ll be weakened while it’s healing inside of you.”

  I balled my hands into fists. How? How was this possible?

  “Come with me,” she said, disappearing into her home.

  Wanting answers, I marched in after her and into her living room. She ambled around the room and trailed her hand against the rock wall. Ancient letters, words, and symbols that hadn’t been there before appeared on the stone in a glowing green.

  “If you had put the stone into you earlier, you would’ve been weak. The hounds would’ve attacked. You would’ve died,” she said with so much certainty, like she had seen it before. “The only way to ensure a quick and painless healing process is if you perform the ritual during a full moon. Your si—your goddess will help you through it.”

  A circle glowed brighter than the rest of the symbols. It looked like ancient Greek or Latin or a language that I thought I couldn’t quite understand, but then … then it all started to make sense somehow.

  Dawn, the moon guides the stone from the dark to the light.

  She walked back around me and pushed some hair behind my shoulders to see the scar and the stone in my back. I sucked in a breath when her fingers glided against my skin.

  When I had my first stone surgery, it wasn’t during a full moon. It was a random night when Elijah needed to save my life. At that time, I couldn’t have waited a few days for a full moon. I’d needed it then and there.

  “During your first stone surgery, it happened on a new moon,” she said, fingers tracing the small scar on my back. “And it hurt, didn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t control when it happened last time,” I whispered. My chest tightened as the sharp pain from that night rushed through my body, making me ache. “I was dying, and my friend wanted to save me.”

  “I know he did, but”—she placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently—“now, you don’t need saving. Now, you need to place the stone in your back as soon as the next full moon.”

  “The Luna Ceremony,” Ares said from behind me. “When we planned to do it.”

  After nodding in agreement, I frowned. “Who are you? How do you know all of this?”

  “I’ve seen it many times before. Thousands of people have tried to wield the stone before you, my dear. Thousands of people have died within a couple of years from stupid, senseless mistakes such as not being able to wield the stone’s power.”

  I shook my head. “But I’ve had it for over a decade.”

  While I couldn’t see her face, I could sense she was smiling behind her veil. “You have because it was meant for you.”

  She tugged me to the side, turned her back toward the rest of the group, and pulled the veil over her head to look me directly in the eyes. The wolves on her head swayed in all sorts of directions, yet their faces stayed turned to me.

  I wanted to look away, to be afraid. Myths warned never to look Medusa in her eyes, yet now that she had pulled her veil back for me and only for me to see … I couldn’t seem to look away.

  Bloodshot eyes with piercing green irises, sharp cheekbones, and a striking smile. I hadn’t expected her to be so beautiful yet look so … so sad, as if she had been weeping for hundreds of years.

  “Won’t I … I die if I continue looking at you?” I asked her.

  “Only men turn to stone when I look at them, my dear,” she said, brushing her fingers through my brown hair. “You’re special, Aurora. Nothing like the men and women behind me. Something more. Something greater.”

  Chapter 27

  Aurora

  Medusa stared at me with both immense fear and great pride. Inside my back, the stone cast power down my spine and through every bone in my body, the sheer force fabricating the idea that I could both destroy and repair our lonely world with just one growl.

  When she stepped closer to me, she smiled. “You have more power than you think you do, Aurora.”

  “It’s the stone,” I whispered. “The stone is giving me power.”

  “It’s not the stone.” She grasped my chin and stroked her thumb against my jaw. “It’s you.”

  Surely, she had to be joking. I had never been strong or wielded any sort of power. If I had been truly powerful, I wouldn’t have been treated so poorly as a child, right? Mom would’ve been ecstatic to make me alpha.

  After she pulled the sea-foam veil over her face, she turned back to the other alphas. “The stone can be put into the back of any human, any creature, and any demon. But no creature knows how to wield it; they are taken by power, by strength, and by gods and goddesses of the darkness and dusk.”

  My stomach tightened, and I shuffled my bare feet against the stone floor. Did that mean that I wasn’t a werewolf? Or maybe I really was an undead hound, one of the first who could control thoughts, feelings, and actions. I shook my head and shivered at the thought.

  “You see”—she stalked around each of the alphas, the wolf-like snakes atop her head baring their small yet vicious canines at everyone, except me—“there are plenty of Malavite Stones in the world, but if wolves found them … the underworld would rise. There would be no peace, just violence.”

  “More stones?” Ares asked, standing straighter. “Where are there more stones?”

  “Did you not just hear her?” I grasped his hand and yanked him to me. “We can’t give the stone to your sister, especially if she doesn’t know how to wield it. If Charolette dies because she doesn’t have the knowledge on how to wield the stone, she will have the same fate as if she didn’t have the stone at all.”

  “She’s my sister,” Ares snapped, eyes shifting from brown to gold. “She’s my sister. I’m going to do everything I can to save her. If the stone can give her a few years, then I’m going to get her another one and fucking hope she’ll reconsider after she sees how it transforms you.”

  Medusa paused for a few moments to let us argue and then drew the white curtains cl
osed. She trailed her fingers across the cloth until a glowing green illustration of an empty field toward the summit of the mountain appeared. “They call this place Stone Valley. It’s promised to have hundreds of Malavite Stones, but no mortal has found them, and no mortal will.”

  Staring at the image, I knotted my brows. With hundreds of Malavite Stones there somewhere, shouldn’t the field be guarded by some hellish fiend or a divinity or some sort of immortal creature? Why was it so empty and bare? If others knew about this place, thousands of people would flock there daily to search and vie for power comparable to the gods.

  “We’re going,” Ares said, pulling me toward the door.

  “What’s there?” I asked Medusa, yanking him back.

  After staying quiet for a few moments, Medusa tapped her finger against the curtains, the image rendering clearer. Stone Valley wasn’t just an empty field; inside it lay a battlefield with hundreds, if not thousands, of warriors who all looked to be fighting invisible monsters.

  Dad’s warning.

  “Blood. Death. And hell.” She pulled her fingers from the curtain, the drawing disappearing. “You must never travel there.”

  “We have to go,” Ares said.

  “Then, I must warn you that some people who travel there don’t come back. They turn to stone, die, and disappear from this world forever. Thousands of men and women just like yourselves. They all came to me and most disappeared into the darkness.”

  My heart thumped loud against my chest. Dad … all his stories …

  If Medusa was telling the truth, those weren’t old fables that Dad used to tell me. All those rumors about people becoming stone and hellish fiends walking this earth were real.

  “What do you mean, they turn to stone?” I asked, brows furrowed. “Those are real people?”

  “Yes, men, women, and immortals,” she started, her voice cracking softly.

  All the ancient myths warned people away from Medusa, as if she were nothing but a fury-ridden monster. But seeing her bloodshot eyes and listening to her speak with such sorrow made her seem so misunderstood and, dare I say, motherly.

  “The entrance of the underworld lies northwest of and above the Stone Valley. As a wolf, it’s a one-hour run.”

  Heart racing, I grasped onto Ares’s hand and hoped that he would reconsider. The entrance to the underworld lay so close to us. Monsters that we weren’t ready to fight probably roamed around these mountains and the dark forest behind us. We should leave.

  “We have to go,” Ares said. “Now.”

  “One last thing before you go,” Medusa said to us. “Killing the true leader of the undead is a feat that no mortal could accomplish alone, but when the leader of the hounds dies, so will the rest of them. That’s the prophecy I spoke to your pack thousands of years ago, Ares and Aurora. Be careful out there.”

  Squeezing Ares’s hand, I let her words sink in. This must’ve been that curse Ares had spoken about a couple days ago. If we killed Fenris, then the hounds would die. We wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore and could live happy, healthy, and vibrant lives.

  But it would be arduous.

  Fenris was stronger and smarter and stealthier than we’d originally thought.

  If we wanted to destroy the hounds for good, we had to throw all our best weapons and warriors at Fenris because I didn’t want to lose any more family or pack members. I would fight to the end of time to make this world a better and safer place, and nobody would stop me.

  Ares, Minerva, and Vulcan walked outside to prepare our warriors.

  But before I could depart, Medusa grasped my wrist, pulled the veil back over her face, and smiled at me. “My dear, we will meet again. But when we do, it’ll be one of the last times I see you for quite some time.” She glanced down my body and then back up. “If you want a family, hold off the hounds for as long as you can, birth a pup, and love her with all that you have.” She brushed her fingers against my cheekbone, as if she was reminiscing on her life, and stared into my eyes. “You never know when you’ll have to give her up to keep her safe or to give her a better life.”

  Her words were filled with so much sorrow that I had to bite back my own whimper. My heart swelled, and I wanted to stay with her and talk, but I had more pressing matters, like a determined-to-die alpha mate who I needed to protect.

  Instead, I hugged her and rested my head on her shoulder, breathing in her woodsy scent. The snake-like wolves on her head curled around my body and pulled me in even tighter, and I enjoyed this moment with a woman I had never met but seemed like I had known for millennia.

  “Ares, I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said through the mind link as we ran up the mountain’s edge toward Stone Valley and passed divine after divine captured in rock. With every statue we saw, Medusa’s warning about traveling here repeated in my mind. People who came here didn’t always come back.

  If we didn’t come back, we wouldn’t be able to hold off the hounds for our people, wouldn’t be able to have a family, and would be forever damned and memorialized in stone. I didn’t ever want that to happen to me. Our lives might be shitty at the moment, but we had so much to live for.

  Either way, Ares and the other alphas seemed set on finding more stones. Even Minerva, who always thought through battles and plans, had urged us to Stone Valley. I guessed the desire for power far outweighed a content life. It was an incredible force that would drive so many people to death someday.

  Despite my pleas to leave, we continued to run up the rocky path that encircled the mountain. I cursed myself for following him, but I couldn’t let anything happen to my mate. Overcome with need to help his sister, Ares wasn’t thinking straight. Neither was anyone, apparently.

  The farther we ran up the mountain, the more my wolf claimed control, pulling me forward and refusing to turn back now. Like some innate radar, we could both feel the immense energy radiating from the stone in my back and the Malavite Stones hidden in Stone Valley.

  When we reached the foggy summit, the alphas halted, their paws grinding into the rocky terrain. While no life had grown anywhere else on the mountain, up here, trees had been uprooted, struck in half, burned almost to the ground, leaving nothing but stumps and ash.

  Unable to stop myself, I led the group and walked through the woods. I paused at the entrance to a mile-long field of stone. “Stone Valley,” I whispered, shifting into my human with ease and walking aimlessly onto the field while the others stayed behind.

  Hundreds of ruthless warriors—both in human and wolf form—had been preserved in stone, mid-fight. Some were doubled over in pain and grasping open wounds in their abdomens. Others were mid-bite with nothing but air between their canines. I stared at them with wide eyes. These people were my ancestors.

  With every step I took, more and more energy surge inside of me. I glanced around at the impeccably undamaged and unharmed statues and wondered how fog, rain, hail, and snow hadn’t worn their bodies away at all. It had been hundreds of years since the War of the Lycans. Their fragile fingers should’ve been broken off by the winter’s harsh winds, their bodies eroded by the rainfall. Not so perfectly preserved.

  Suddenly, the statue of a human warrior with a spear crumbled into hundreds of pieces, the sound of falling rock echoing throughout Stone Valley. My eyes widened at the unexpected fall, and I nervously looked around at the other warriors to see if the same would happen to them. None did.

  But one stone man caught my eye.

  Naked, muscular, and made of white stone. Unlike most other statues, the man stood stoically in the center of the field. He looked even more divine than Ares did during a fight, and Ares reminded me of a god himself. What seemed even more majestic was that a single ray of sunlight shone through the thick fog and illuminated his chiseled face, giving the white stone a goldish tint.

  Despite Ares calling my name, I found myself drawn to and walking toward the man. When I stood before him, what seemed to be thousands of years’ worth of memories rus
hed through my mind. I tried to grasp onto any of them, but I couldn’t quite seem to visualize them fully.

  A thriving vine of small sunflowers wrapped around his leg and up his muscular thighs, the petals and seeds all facing toward the sky. I glanced back up at him, brushed my fingers against his shoulder, and immediately pulled my hand away, feeling power swell in my body. Whoever this man was, the stone had drawn me to him for some reason. I studied him to try to remember if I knew him from somewhere.

  Yet … I was certain that I had never seen him before in my entire life.

  But I could feel this odd connection to him.

  “Don’t ogle him,” Ares growled at me, snatching my hand and pulling me away from the godlike man. Canines bared, he dragged me through the field of stone. “We’re here to find the fucking stones, Aurora, not to stare at naked fucking men.”

  After shifting my gaze to other statues, I pulled my hand away. “I’m not here for the stones, Ares. You heard Medusa. It could kill Charolette, and I’m not willing to take that risk. But by all means, go find it for yourself.”

  He snarled and stormed away. Along with all the warriors, he searched the perimeter for the Malavite Stones. But while we stood in an entire field of stone, nobody could find the ones they searched for.

  The Malavite Stone glowed a bright white color, was about a quarter in diameter, and looked almost gem-like. They would have to search for days just to find it, days that we couldn’t dedicate to something so deadly.

  Rolling my eyes at how foolish the desire for power made wolves, I glanced around at the other statues and locked eyes with … him. Preserved in stone on the other side of the field, Dad stood in his wolf form with his head held high and his nose pointed into the air, as if he was howling to the moon.

  Once I sprinted across the field, I collapsed beside him. “No,” I whispered, shaking my head from side to side. “No … please, Moon Goddess, no. Don’t let it be.”