The Prophecy (24 page)

He
shook his head. “It was a tragedy that could have been prevented.” He waved his
hand, dislodging my grasp. “Regardless, I knew that Caleb was better off with
his mother and her people.”

“But
don’t you see how he could think that you just didn’t want him?”

My
father nodded. “I do now.”

“For
years I wondered what you might be like,” I said.

He
looked at me then, a terrible sadness in his eyes. “And are you disappointed?”

I
searched his face and at last shook my head. “Not at all.” He looked down and I
saw the muscles of his throat work as he swallowed.

“The
fire,” I said, which made him look up again. “A man named Victor Hunt might
have been the one to set it, but I don’t think he was acting alone.”

“You
suspect Charlene,” he said with a frankness that at once told me he’d considered
the same thing at some point over the years.

I
nodded. “You do, too?”

He took
a deep breath. “I thought, but I didn’t want to believe. It’s just more death
on my hands.”

I
started at that. “On
your
hands? But you’re not responsible for the
fire. You didn’t kill my mother and grandparents.”

“I
might as well have struck the match. Had I not turned Charlene away—”

“It’s
not your fault,” I said, more firmly this time.

Sebastian
cleared his throat impatiently. “Enough about whose fault it is or isn’t. The
prophecy. What are we going to do about that?”

In all
the talk about Charley and her evil-doings, I’d completely forgotten about the
prophecy. “All right. Tell me more about it,” I said. “What does it say?”

“It’s
an old prophecy, told to children from the time they are in their crib,” my
father said.

“Like a
bedtime story,” Sebastian put in.

“I
never thought it was real, and I certainly didn’t think I would have any involvement
in it,” my father said. “The prophecy claimed a child of a wolf would be reborn
with great powers.”

“Not
born, but
reborn
?”

I
thought back to this past summer when I’d been lying on my deathbed with a
raging fever. Shyla had breathed new life into me, and passed on her powers. Sebastian
and my father listened with rapt attention as I related those few awful days
when I thought I was going to die.

“So you
really think that Caleb and I represent the Sun and Moon and that we are the
keys to breaking the curse?”

They
looked at each other and then back at me, answering in unison, “Definitely.”

TWENTY-ONE

“Does
the prophecy say how to break the curse, or exactly what we need to do?” I
stabbed my fork into a plate of steaming scrambled eggs and shoved them in my
mouth, manners completely forgotten for the moment. I hadn’t eaten anything at
all that morning, and I was beyond starving.

“The
prophecy speaks of the marriage between the Sun and the Moon and the birth of a
new tribe,” Sebastian said. He bit the corner off a piece of toast dripping
with melted butter. “That’s all.”

I
stopped chewing and stared at him. “That
can’t
be all. There has to be
more to it than that.” 

He
pointed his toast in my direction and said, “Fine. Consider it the condensed
version. But that’s all I’ve got.”

I took
a tentative bite from a small dish of grits—a food I’d heard of but never
actually tried before—and dug my spoon deeper into the hot ground corn when I
decided it wasn’t so bad. The consistency was a bit like polenta, which Meg
cooked often.

“It’s
better with shredded cheddar on top,” Sebastian said with a nod at this
southern delicacy.

“I’ll
remember that next time,” I said, hoping there might really be a next time. I
barely knew my uncle and father, but I wasn’t ready for this brief encounter to
be a one-time thing.

“We
know the prophecy isn’t referring to an actual marriage,” my father said. “So it
must be referring to the magic with which your Spirit Leader, Katori, has
blessed you both; a magic that Caleb was born with and one that you inherited.
A powerful magic kept safe within the souls of all who were entrusted with it
before you.”

Sebastian
stared at him, his fork poised in the air. “Very insightful, big brother.”

“How do
you know so much about Katori and the Spirit Keepers?” I asked my father.

“We
might come from different tribes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear. That
doesn’t mean we don’t take the time to learn.”

I swallowed
another bite of grits and pushed the dish aside, suddenly not very hungry
anymore. “Do you think that this was, you know, destined to happen?”

“I don’t
pretend to understand why things happen the way they do,” he said. “The way of
things are often beyond our understanding. But I have to believe that your
gifts, and Caleb’s, were not meant to be wasted.”

I spread
my hands. “Okay. So now what?”

“I
would like to talk to Caleb,” he said promptly. “Then maybe we’ll know what to
do next.”

But
somehow I didn’t think figuring out what to do next was going to be as simple
as sitting around and just talking about it. For one, I didn’t have a clue
about how we were supposed to remove the curse. For another, I didn’t think Charley
would be too thrilled to have Lucas anywhere in the vicinity of her son.

I was
just about to open my mouth to say I would talk to Caleb first and ease him
into the whole thing when my father interrupted my thoughts. “You can ride with
me,” he said.

“Ride
with you? Where are we going?”

He rose
from his seat and looked down at me. “To meet my son, of course.”

At
first, the drive home was unbearably awkward. I had tried to weasel my way on
the back of Sebastian’s motorcycle, despite the gray, chilly day. After all, frozen
limbs seemed a lot more preferable than being trapped alone in a car with a man
I’d known for just a few short hours. 

“Give
him this moment,” Sebastian had said to me in an undertone, placing his hands
firmly on my shoulders and steering me in the direction of the car. “He will
not ask it of you, but I will.”

I was
deeply mortified and too shy to say anything for several miles. And whether out
of respect for my feelings or because he felt the same way, my father didn’t
utter a word himself.

But then
I began to relax and notice certain things about my father that further cemented
him in my mind as a mortal man and not some mythological beast; like how he
drove a Subaru, and how he kept the inside of his car impeccable except for a
lone Trident gum wrapper on the floor by my feet. There was a handful of spare
change in the cup holder of the middle console, which jangled with the constant
vibration of the car.

Judging
by his collection of CDs—which included the likes of DeVotchKa and Edward
Sharpe and The Black Keys—he had eclectic tastes. I ran a finger down the spine
of one of the plastic cases, remembering. My mother had always bucked popular
trends. She’d nearly flipped when my birthday wish-list one year included Kelly
Clarkson’s debut album. I laughed at the memory of her feigned shock and heartfelt
claim that I couldn’t be her daughter;
no way
.

My
father glanced at me, smiling hesitantly. “What’s so funny?”

But it
was my memory, and my memory alone, and I wasn’t prepared to share. “Nothing. I
was just thinking about something. It’s not important.”

Instead,
I touched the wolf pendant hanging from his rearview mirror and set it swinging
with a flick of my finger. The sun glinted off the small gray body, catching in
the folds and crevices of its pewter fur.

“A
little ironic, don’t you think?” I asked.

His
eyes flicked to the pendant. “Your mother gave that to me,” he said in his soft
tenor.

“Oh.”

I returned
my hand to my lap, feeling that I had somehow violated one of his memories of
her. What had they been like together, back then?

“You
can have it if you like,” he said, but somewhat reluctantly I thought.

I shook
my head, although I would have liked nothing more than to clasp the thin
leather cord around my neck and feel a physical reminder of my mother’s
presence there, against my heart for always.

“No. It
belongs to you.”

I
resumed staring out the passenger-side window, our conversation exhausted for
the time being. After a few minutes, my father broke the silence with a
deliberate clearing of his throat.

“Sarah,
I was hoping we could use this time alone to talk.”

I
shrugged, still not looking at him. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Well,
aren’t there questions you have, things you want to know?”

The
trouble was I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin. My blood
pulsed with curiosity, and yet a part of me felt I had no right to pry into his
personal life, whether we shared the same DNA or not. But he had extended the
invitation, and I grabbed it.

“There
is one thing I’ve been wondering about.”

“Just
one thing?” he said. His voice was light now, trying to make a joke of it.

I
turned to him, fixing him with a glare. “If you never loved Charley in the
first place, how could you . . .
you know . . .
Caleb?”

Caleb’s
name came out in a whisper, and at first I wasn’t sure if he had heard me. But
then his grip on the steering wheel tightened; the only outward betrayal of his
emotions.

“Love
and sex are not always mutually exclusive.” He glanced at me and gave me what I
considered a very parental look. “Although, for you, I hope they will be.”

I was
only too relieved when he turned his eyes back to the road before the full heat
of embarrassment made its way from my neck to my cheeks.

“That’s
not a real answer,” I mumbled, in disbelief that he had actually said that to
me. He’d been absent from my life for the past seventeen years, so where did he
get off trying to lecture me about the dos and don’ts of my love life?

“Charlene
was fun and exciting,” he went on. “And beautiful. We were both young and
impulsive.” He glanced at me again. “It happened just the one time.”

“I hear
once is all it takes,” I said, partly out of anger, and partly to cover up my
own lingering embarrassment.

He
glanced at me again in surprise and then roared with laughter. “Indeed,
sometimes it is,” he said, still chuckling. After a few moments he turned
serious once more.

“Charlene
and I . . . it happened before I even met your mother.” He sighed then, in
memory. “We fell for each other hard and fast, your mother and I. And once
Charlene discovered I had feelings for Melody, she stopped coming around. I
didn’t even know about the pregnancy, or Caleb, until later.”

“She
never told you she was pregnant?”

He
shook his head. “No.”

“And what
would you have done if she had?”

“I
don’t know,” my father said, very quietly.

“You
don’t know?” I wanted to believe my father was an honorable man, but his answer
sounded less than compelling.

“I
found out Charlene was pregnant only when Melody told me she’d married a man
named Nathan Moon. Very suddenly, too. I assumed, we
all
assumed, that
the child was his. Charlene was very—”

“Promiscuous?”
I supplied.

The
corner of his mouth pulled up in a grin. “I was going to say friendly and
outgoing. It wasn’t exactly a surprise to me that she married and started a
family at such a young age.”

“But I
don’t understand why she would keep the pregnancy a secret from you or, worse,
pass the baby off as someone else’s.”

My
father’s shoulders rose and fell. “I suppose it was safer to say he belonged to
another man—a man from her own tribe, I mean—than to admit her involvement with
me.” He turned to me then. “Your mother took a great risk herself. Had the
tribe found out about us—”

“But
they
did
find out,” I said, more angrily than I’d meant to. “That night,
when you stormed the Katori reservation and my mother proclaimed her love for
you. That moment changed
everything
for my family.”

The
words hung suspended in the air, echoing with accusation. I could only imagine
how they must sound to him. But I couldn’t have taken them back, even had wanted
to. And I wasn’t sure I did.

“I am
sorry, Sarah. I never meant for anyone to get hurt. ”

“No,” I
whispered, with a soft exhalation of air. “I don’t suppose you did.”

I leaned
back in my seat then and kept my eyes trained on Sebastian’s motorcycle in the
lane just ahead of us. I counted slowly to ten, letting the tension dissipate before
finally summoning the nerve to ask my next question.