Page 75 of Wolf Cursed
“What happened?” I asked.
“A spell had been cast on that spot. One that only affected our pack. The hexerei leaders claimed it wasn’t them. That it had been cast the night before.”
“Like a trap?”
He nodded. “And we all walked right into it.”
“What did the spell do?”
“Untethered us from our alpha. One by one, until every wolf in our pack was removed from the bond. At first, that’s all we knew. It took time to understand the full ramifications of that untethering.”
“Kai said the curse makes it impossible to find your mate,” I said.
“That’s one of the little surprises, yes. Took us years to figure it out too.” His expression darkened. “Whoever cast that curse wanted to prevent us from forming a mate-bond, which is sacred to wolves. It also makes us stronger as a pack, but more importantly, finding our mate settles our wolves in a way nothing else can.”
“Not even an alpha?” I asked.
“Being tethered to an alpha is different. An alpha would, at least, have the strength to focus our beasts. Without either of those, our pack is wild. Basically, we’re at the mercy of our baser instincts. If our wolf gets angry, we don’t have control over the way that anger shows itself.”
“You mean like bar fights and hunting me down in the middle of Main Street in broad daylight?”
“Silas will be dealt with for his aggression,” he said, his expression flashing with a dark rage. For some reason, that made me feel better.
“So, what does all this have to do with my tattoo?”
“From what we know of the hexerei’s abilities, every spell has a counterbalance. If you use magic to create something, somewhere at the same time, magic is created with the ability to uncreate it. Nature’s balance, I guess. And it’s absolute. Like universal law. We never knew what that counterbalance would look like, but we knew it had to be out there.”
“And now you think I’m it?”
“That mark you wear on your skin is the symbol of our pack. The mark of the alpha who was torn from us.”
Okay, that did seem a little concrete. Damn.
“And the alpha in question was my father.”
He nodded.
I had to ask the question out loud or it would always hang between us. “Do you think my dad had something to do with it? The curse, I mean? If he ran right after…”
“I don’t know,” Oscar answered, and the look in his eye told me he’d asked himself that question many times.
We stood in silence for a moment.
“Why curse you this way?” I asked finally. “I mean, why unsettle or untether you at all? Why not attack you outright for whatever hate they had against the pack?”
“Apparently, destroying us wasn’t good enough,” he said grimly. “They wanted to make sure we destroyed ourselves.”
Chapter Sixteen
Oscar’s story answered so many questions for me. It also raised several more. A lifetime of living on the run, and here it was: My dad had been an alpha—right up until the day he’d fled his own pack. Had he seen them as the threat, or was he running from something else? The hexerei, maybe? I gritted my teeth in frustration. For every answer I got, another question rose in its place.
“So, wait, if my dad was the alpha, he knew about the curse and the hexerei. Why would he keep it a secret from me? Why not come back here and let me help the pack like I’m clearly meant to do?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask him myself.”
Memories of my father washed over me in grief-filled waves. All of the lies, the running—and he’d been running from his own people. The ones who needed him most.
I didn’t want to hate him, but it was becoming harder and harder.
