Daughter Dearest...Why Is There A Werewolf In Your Bed...?

I looked up at my mother for a few seconds before I sighed and explained everything. Her face showed disappointment when I told her about going into the town without a guard, but I could have sworn I saw a few smiles when I spoke of hurting James. But when I got to the ceremony she seemed frightened and I paused.

“So that symbol was on the ground?”

I nodded. My mother got this far-off look in her eyes and she stayed silent for a while. I bit my lip and waited as my mother thought, the look on her face scared me. It seemed like she had no hope, or she knew that there might be no hope.

Before Ava had blown up one of the walls of the hide-out, I had realized that the symbol James had overlooked bound my soul to Cian’s. If I got hurt, he got hurt. It didn’t work the other way around because it was my energy that had brought him back from death. I was his root to this world of the living, his tie that kept him from slipping back in to the netherworld.

“Only your father, myself and Shylah will know of this. Don’t speak of it again unless we tell you to.”

I nodded and let my mother help me from the bed.

“So, you like Miles.” It was a statement. I grimaced.

“No, I’m just...grateful that he saved me.”

“Mmhmm...” Damn the all knowing mmhmm...

I walked into my father’s office and was instantly embraced.

“Why Blaise, I didn’t know you cared,” I smiled. He laughed.

“Foolish little sister, going into the town by herself. God, I forget how naive you are sometimes...”

I grinned widely and pushed him off. “What are you doing now?”

My brother looked at me for a moment, “I am now the ambassador for our kingdom. Think of it as stage two of my training. Now I deal with things outside of the kingdom so that Dad can stay here and keep home base under control.”

“Wow, how long will you go without pissing anyone off and starting a new war?”

He frowned at me for a moment before laughing, “Well at least your brain isn’t damaged, in fact I think that it has improved dramatically since I last saw you. Doubt it will last.”

My mouth dropped open before I gave an incredulous bark of laughter and hitting his arm.

“That’s enough, you two. Blaise, I need to speak with your sister alone.” My father’s voice sounded a little weary.

Blaise looked over his shoulder and nodded, before giving my arm a little punch and jogging out of the room.

I turned back and was able to see my father sitting behind his desk looking up at me with a relieved look on his face. He waved me forward with one hand and motioned for me to sit in a chair in front of his desk. I sat without hesitation.

He looked at the papers on his desk for a while, gathering his thoughts. He inhaled deeply and let it out in a rush, then he looked up at me. His eyes were all business, but the way he held himself was as if he didn’t want to do something. His mouth was in a thin line and his shoulders were not in their usual proud position.

I became a little uneasy when I noticed this. I quickly looked around the study, taking in the sights of the place I had always run into if Blaise had been unscrupulous. In other words, I had been a tattletale when I was younger. I smiled minutely as the thought crossed my mind. I had really changed.

“You obviously know who Cian is.”

I looked back at my father, who refused to look me in the eyes, settling for looking over my shoulder at the door behind me. His face was determined to tell me whatever he had to say. My gaze never wavered as he continued to speak.

“What you do not know is why the Thousand Year war really started.”

Confusion flooded my mind. I knew what everyone else knew. That Cian had started it somehow. Even though it had been stricken from the records, the ones who had been in the war had told the few who asked about it those very words, “The old alpha, Cian, was the cause.”

“Your mother is not of this world.”

Where was he going with this? All he was telling me was snippets of random facts that were scaring me in the way that nothing was what it seemed.

“Your mother was born on the blue moon, I had been chased there by an unruly lycan and your mother witnessed me killing it. She fainted soon after and I took her with me. I couldn’t have her running around her world saying that she had seen one of us...but on the other hand she reminded me of someone I had been with years before. It turned out that your mother was that woman’s reincarnation.

“Your mother she had been Shylah’s sister and I had been married to her in that time. My greatest friend was Cian. That was before he...”

I kept staring at him, “Why are you telling me this now?”

That was when he looked me directly in the eyes. His gaze was pained and some of the words had to struggle to get out,

“Because Cian...killed you mother in her first life, I declared war on him soon after. I was furious at him, I didn’t mourn properly and I couldn’t control my rage anymore. His actions had initiated the Thousand Year war, but I was the one to make it official. I was the one who made so many sacrifice their lives to kill the people loyal to the one who had murdered her. I wanted to make him suffer the way I couldn’t.

“Five hundred years later, your mother was once again reincarnated here, in this world. Cian found her before I had known she existed and made her fall in love with him and...I was the one to end her second life. She had jumped in front of Cian as I was about to kill him in battle. What she was doing there, I’ll never know.

“Then I found your mother now and, well, together we found out what Cian had really wanted with her. She has untapped power that Cian wanted to use. In her first life, he was afraid of it so he used the fact that I was in a rage at the moment and that she was trying to calm me down, as a way to get into a scuffle and stab her “accidentally.

“When I had ended her second life, Cian was furious, I had taken the power away from him, but it was then that he had to put up a facade, as if he didn’t know anything about the war. Before your mother had died she had placed a charm on his memories because she thought he was weeping for her sake. He had broken it and couldn’t let anyone notice, they would be suspicious.

“When I brought your mother back in this life, he tried to do the same thing, but he didn’t take into consideration how your mother was different from her past lives. Your mother did what she had to do after he revealed the truth....she killed Cian and we agreed that we would never let anyone know what everything was really about: The power that your mother has, but doesn’t know how to use.

“She is still learning how to control the power she knows of from your aunt, but she doesn’t know everything.”

The silence that followed seemed like he was waiting for my reaction, seeing if he should go on, but I said nothing. It was still sinking in.

The war had been about Cian killing my mother and all of those battles had really been to see who got my mother? If Cian had gotten her then he possibly could have annihilated the entire vampire race and taken over the entire world. Cliche, but true. It was a scary thought on how close he had been.

After all these years people believed that it was just a difference in opinions? I guess it would be better that way because who knew what other whack job was out there, someone who wanted power and didn’t care who got hurt as long as he got it.

I opened my mouth to talk, but it was dry. I closed it, licked my lips, and tried again.

“But Cian is back now.”

He looked at me for a moment. I realized that I hadn’t continued my explanation to mother.

A loud cracking noise pulled me out of my reverie and brought my attention to my father’s desk. In his hands he held a piece of the desk.

“Cian is...back?” I looked back up to my father’s face. It was blank. No emotion, just nothing. It scared more than the time I had tripped Blaise and he landed in a pile of wood chips when we were kids.

I nodded. I decided that it was best to continue the story. I told him about the rest of the ceremony, leaving out the fact that I had a seizure, and skipped to the room where I was tied down to the chair.

My father sat there for a minute before he stood up, walked out of the office, and turned down the right corridor– to the conference room.