Falling into the White (The Ancients Series) (33 page)

The funeral had been two days ago, and I was still thinking about it non-stop. Tonight, was the summer solstice celebration, and I wished Jack could be here for it. He would tease me to no end about my ‘fake’ bonding ceremony, since everyone already knew by now that I was bound to Mikael. He would have been so proud of me though. I could imagine one of his great big bear hugs before we went out there, in front the pack, and vowed to be one forever. I could imagine him giving me a thumbs up from the sidelines as I explained to the pack that I was, indeed, the white wolf of legends. Part of the ceremony would involve me shifting to prove what I was. While some of the pack had already seen my wolf form, others had not, and it was an important part of the ceremony, sort of a coming out for legendary wolf leaders.

With Malachai having run off somewhere, there was no one else to challenge me as the leader of our people. Mikael stood by my side, to be my partner in that endeavor, and Evan didn’t make a claim. Instead, he was planning to stand beside us.

Of course, all of this hinged on me actually showing up on time for my own damn party. I was still blow drying my hair when Mikael poked his head in the bathroom. “We’re going to be late, Jess.”

“I know, I’m coming,” I called back to him. He grinned as he slid back out of the room to finish getting ready himself. I put the hair drier down, stopped procrastinating, and slipped the sundress on that I had out for the occasion. It was a light, pale green dress that came just above my knees, and had tiny little straps to hold it in place on my shoulders. It was a simple thing, but beautiful in its simplicity. Besides, it came off easily, which was a bonus when you had to shift in front of a crowd.

My nerves were pulling at me the whole ride to the pack lands. “What if they all hate me, and no one wants a white wolf ruler anymore?”

“Jess, no one hates you.”

“That’s not true. How many attempts on my life have there been now?” I meant it as sort of a joke, but I noticed how Mikael flinched. “Sorry, too soon to joke about everything, huh?”

“Yeah, Jess. I think jokes about people trying to kill you will always be off limits.” We both got quiet again after that, and after a while, Mikael reached over and took my hand in his. “You’ll be fine. People will love you, they already do. Besides, my father was the last leader of the wolves. I’m pretty sure you can’t possibly do anything to look bad after that.”

“Great, so I’m an acceptable leader by default, because we can’t do any worse?” I was laughing at him then. “Yeah, that was a confidence booster!”

“All right, smart ass! If anyone goes against you, they’ll have me to deal with, and they don’t want that. Now, you can add threats of violence to the list of shitty reasons why you’re perfect for the job. We could think of a few more too, I bet.”

“Shut up or I won’t bond with you tonight!”

“Oh, you’ll bond with me, all right! I have it on good authority that you can’t resist all this,” he gestured wildly to himself, and then let out a satisfied sounding growl.

I rolled my eyes at him right as we pulled up in front of my parents’ house. “Well, I guess we are running late, everyone looks antsy out there.” My parents, Ashley, Asi, and Evan were standing there, looking rather impatient as we got out of the Jeep.

“Glad you two could join us,” Ashley called out.

“It’s my party, and I can be late if I want to.” I stuck my tongue out at her, which earned me a laugh. I cherished it, because Ashley hadn’t laughed a lot since her brother was killed. Not that I blamed her. I had been thinking of Jack earlier, myself.

“Shall we?” Mikael offered his arm to me. I accepted the gesture and walked arm in arm with him towards the lake. We decided to have the ceremonies there instead of the usual pack meeting place. It was my way of having Jack with us, because he was right, it was much nicer there anyway.

When we got to the lake, the entire pack was there, along with some delegates from a few other packs that lived within easy travel distance. They were in the same sort of semi-circle formation that the pack had made around us when we sent Jack off into the next world. I nodded my head at those who parted for us to enter the circle formed by the lake and our people. My mom, Ashley, Asi, and Evan stayed behind, joining the circle as my father walked Mikael and I to the center.

“Thank you all for coming out tonight. This, the longest day of the year, the day that holds so much sunshine and promise... The night that leads into another year of transition for our people… This the summer solstice celebration. This is our welcome to our new pack mates, to those friends who come from afar, to family, and to new beginnings, and tragic endings. We celebrate those who have gone, those who have come, and those who are joining together tonight.

My daughter, Jessica Marie St. Marks has been joined and bound to a Prince of our kind, Mikael De’ Lune. They have known the exquisite act of sharing one soul within two bodies. Two have become one, and shall this night be recognized by our people.”

Howls erupted from everyone in attendance, even though they were all still in human form. It was a tradition of ours, and one that put a smile on my face. As Mikael and I turned to face each other, and joined our hands so that our palms touched with fingers outstretched. We both thought of our bond then, and what it was like to create it in the first place, and I swore I could feel the same warmth from the light that had flowed through us that day, flowing back and for the between the two of us then. Judging from my father’s face, I wasn’t far off. There was a glow in Mikael’s eyes as I looked upon his face that hadn’t been there a moment ago. He was mine, and I was completely his. We both spoke the one word required of us for this part of the ceremony. “Always.”

Cheers, hoots, and howls broke out among the crowd, as our bonding ceremony was now complete. That wasn’t the part I had been dreading though. As I turned my back on the crowd to look at my father, I heard a chorus of noises, like the intake of a breath, that tiny awestruck noise one would make when shocked suddenly, only the shock rolled through the entire group at my back. My father was bowing to us, and that was my cue as he raised only his head up to look at the crowd from his kneeled position. “I present to you this night, our white wolf ruler, come to bring peace and prosperity to our kind.”

I quickly bowed my head to my father, turned to face the crowd, smiled, and shifted into my wolf. Since only a few of them had ever seen me, the vast majority were shocked again. There was a difference in hearing rumors, and seeing the reality. One by one, the people in front of me began to drop to their knees, heads bowed. One of the first had been Evan. My mom, Ashley, and Asi fell to their knees too, as did Avery Daniels and the wolves that he had brought with him. Before I knew it, they were all on their knees bowing.

I howled up into the sky and the sound rippled on the breeze as waves of magic overtook everyone present, bringing the shift out of each one. A united howl went up into the night, before we all took off to run together. It was the first time I had ever run with a pack, and my heart hammered away in my chest. My breath hitched, and emotion swelled in me so deep that I wasn’t sure I would ever forget or even top this moment. These were my people, my kindred. I would do everything in my power to protect them and see them safely into better times.

Once the run was over, Mikael and I returned to his house out in the country, where we could be alone. “You were magnificent tonight.” Mikael’s fingers were tracing across my bare back as I lounged there beside him on the bed. “I could feel the joy coming from you in waves as we ran. It was intoxicating.”

“That was my first run with a full pack.” I was still grinning like an idiot when I thought about it. “It was amazing. I could feel all the energy from each of them.” He was smiling down at me, like my own personal angel sent from heaven. “You are gorgeous, you know?”

“Mmm, but your beauty knows no rival.”

I chuckled at that. “Flattery gets you everywhere in my world.”

“It’s not just flattery though, you are my world.”

“Mm mm” I was stretching my body out, relaxing under the constant grazing of his fingertips across my flesh. Goosebumps were dotting my skin as he hit just the right spots. I thought about everything we’d been through to get to this point. “I don’t know what I would have done if we hadn’t gotten to you in time.”

“Let’s not think about it then, because I’m here, and we have a lifetime to make memories together, and forget the ugliness in our past.”

“We can’t forget, if for no other reason because we need to make sure it never happens again.”

“Fine let’s remember and move forward with better times.”

“Do you think we get that?” I asked him, turning to see his face as he answered.

“Get what, Jess?”

“Do you think we get to be happy now?”

“Yes, Jess, we get to be happy now. I think we’ve all earned it.”

EPILOGUE

~*~ Zach ~*~

“We have our orders, and I don’t know about you, but I am going to follow through with them.” I looked at the raven-haired witch in front of me as she clutched her broken wrist in her hand. “Well?”

“Well, what, dog?” She snapped. “Our orders, as you call them, came from a man who has had his throat ripped out. I am pretty sure it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does matter, because she’s supposed to be mine! Jessica was promised to me.”

The witch laughed at me then, a cackling villainous laugh. “You will never have Jessica St. Marks De’ Lune. She was lost to you the moment she met Mikael. From what I hear, she was lost to you long before that too, but he is her true mate, they have an unbreakable bond. They’ve exchanged souls boys. Do you understand how rare that kind of bond has been all these years?”

“I don’t care! She was promised to me, and if I can’t have her, I will see her destroyed. I will see her suffer as I kill off each and every person she ever loved or cared about, and I will save her precious Mikael for last. I will make her watch as he takes his last breath, and I will have you there, to keep her alive as her bond mate dies. Then, she will be ready to be mine.”

The witch stared at me with abject horror written clearly on her face. “You are a sick son of a bitch, you know that?”

“I may well be, but I will get what I want. She embarrassed me once before, and had me thrown out of the pack. I will prove to her I am no weakling. When she sees that I am the last one standing, she will have no choice, but to love me. I will be the ultimate alpha of our kind.

Sophia bit back a snickering laugh as she turned her back on me. “You are nothing. You are a pest, and the only reason you’ve made it this far was because someone greater than you had an agenda. My agenda ended when the love of my young life was killed.”

“The love of your…” I was puzzled momentarily. “No! Not you and Antoine?” When she didn’t move or deny it, I was the one to laugh. “Is that how he convinced you to break his first bond? He convinced you that he loved you.” It was my turn to laugh now. “You fell for that, and you’ve been clinging to the hope that the two of you would be together, all this time?” I moved closer, getting a sense of her mood that was quickly deteriorating. “How did it make you feel when he bound himself to Eleanna then? I bet that was a shocker!” I watched as Sophia flinched at my words as if I had physically slapped her. “That’s what you were hanging on for wasn’t it? Unrequited love with a werewolf… You’re a witch! You are not of our kind, what made you think you could love a wolf?” I was disgusted that she would think one of our kind would lower themselves to be with a witch. We could use them up all day long, feel them writhe beneath us, and send them on their way, but they were not to be loved. This witch thought I was mad, and she had lost her mind long ago.

She never answered me, and I decided to move on with the next part of my own personal agenda. Sophia was right, we no longer had a puppet master pulling our strings, and I had often wondered what the witch would do when she didn’t have someone to give her orders. Thankfully, I planned ahead. I walked over to the far wall in the cabin Antoine sent us to, and I threw the switch there. It triggered the lowering of a special cage, like the one I had rigged up in the pet rescue that Mikael had been building. The cage fell over top of the witch, standing a few inches taller than she was. At least I had been thoughtful enough to make sure she had plenty of room so that she could get comfortable.

“What is this?” She screamed at me from inside the cage.

“This,” I gestured at the cage, “is your new home.” I tossed a pillow through the bars. “Make yourself comfortable, you’re going to be here a while. I’ll have some spell work for you to do.”

“What makes you think I’ll run spells for you, little wolf?”

I didn’t like the way she spat out the words, ‘little wolf.’ She was insulting me. I was no omega wolf. I was an alpha and I was going to have to teach her what that meant. I would break her in every way, and then bend her to my will. “Well, you’re going to want to get out of that cage one day, and the only way that’s going to happen is for you to follow through with my plans.”

“You will regret this decision, boy.” She seethed in my general direction, as I laughed her threats off. “There may well be a way to break the soul share that Jessica has with Mikael.”

“And how is that?”

“Well, we’re going to have to be patient, wolf, but I can promise you this, if you keep me locked up in here, I will work against you, not for you. Do you understand?”

“I understand that if I don’t get the results I want, you won’t be alive to worry about it anymore.”

Sophia threw her head back and laughed then. It was a disturbing thing to hear, because it pierced the ears, and shattered all the glass that was in the small room of the cabin. When she was spent, she sat down on the wooden floor, folding her legs up underneath of her as a black mist rose out from around her, and then as the black mist began to sink down through the wood of the floor, Sophia was pulled along with it. One minute she was there, and the next she was just gone.