“You can’t see him.”
I knew the words were coming, I could see it on his face, but still… Was I bleeding to death right now? He’d dangled all the hopes in the world before me and then tore them away.
“Why? Please. Forget the bet. I will submit to you if you allow me to see my father.” I was begging, yep, and I had no fucking regrets about it.
Everything in my life changed when my dad chose to attack the alpha, and I needed to know why. I needed the closure. And I mainly needed to know if I could once again freely love the man who’d raised me but who’d also ruined my life.
I had so many needs. It was a fire fueling my every thought and action.
“Please, Shadow.”
For the briefest, minutest of seconds, it almost looked like he regretted his next words. “There’s no way for the living to converse with the dead. It doesn’t work like that.”
My wolf howled and a choked sob escaped my lips. “I hate you,” I choked out in anger. “I know there’s a way. You just don’t want to help me.”
“I could kill you and then you’d have all the conversations you wanted?” he snapped back. “The living cannot converse with the dead.”
“And yet somehow you did,” I raged at him, trying to wrench myself away. “You heard him use my nickname, so that means unless you’re dead, it’s possible.”
His face was inches from mine. A harsh breath of air crashed against my lips, and I inhaled his intoxicating scent.
“Listen closely, pup,” he said in a rumble of annoyance. “I straddle the line between life and death. The shadows all do. If you learn how to touch the shadow world again, maybe, just maybe, you’ll have the same ability as me to step into the afterlife. But until then…” He shoved me back so hard, my chair scraped across the ground and I ended up many feet from him. “Until then, don’t fucking question me.”
Damn him. Why was it always like this? Push and pull, hot and cold, life and death. We could never find our balance, and maybe there was no balance between us… Maybe we were both yin, with too much darkness in our souls.
Shadow stood, his expression once again neutral as he looked down at me. Usually, this positioning would have me scrambling to my feet, so I was at least attempting not to submit, but I couldn’t move. I’d been knocked down, the breath stolen from my lungs.
“You have thirteen more days,” he said as he turned and left the room, taking his energy and power with him.
I sank deeper into my chair, white-knuckling the side of the table. My dad was here. Just down the hall from where I stood. But which door was it? Should I just go open each and every one of them until I found the realm of death?
Popping to my feet, I rushed toward the library, only to crash fully into Shadow, who’d clearly been waiting for me. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me up with no effort at all, so I was being held completely at his mercy. “So predictable, little wolf,” he purred. “You didn’t even give me enough time to make it out of the library.”
I snarled at him, fighting… fighting as hard as I ever had before. “Why were you waiting for me?”
He grinned and I threw my head back and howled at the top of my lungs. A familiar howl that I’d produced when my mate had rejected me. The howl that had knocked the shifters down and let me touch the Shadow Realm.
My vision doubled over as nausea rose, ready to erupt like a volcano. “That’s it,” Shadow said, sounding far too pleased. “Build from this, Mera. Build a path you can follow.”
Ignoring him, I let my wolf out, attacking him as soon as I was partly shifted. When we bit down on his neck, there was a jerking resistance, our fangs finding no traction at all. We couldn’t pierce his skin; the beast was too strong for me.
“You’re wasting time,” he snapped at me, unconcerned by my attempt to kill him. “You need to open the door to the Shadow Realm.”
Door.
When my wolf wiggled to get down, he set me on my feet, and we took off as fast as we could toward the door. My wolf vision was doubled as well, turning everything more shadowy than normal.
Thankfully, the library was empty of its regular visitors, so we had a clear path, with only a Shadow Beast on my tail. Literal wolf tail as it was. This time, in our double vision, there didn’t appear to be any resident of the Shadow Realm close by to touch, or maybe it was harder to reach the realm from the library? Odd, since the doorway was actually here, and now in our view.
Unlike the last time I’d looked upon it, there was an obvious smoke coating the entire door today, looking a lot like Inky. It wasn’t the same, though—we sensed the difference. Inky was relatively positive energy, while whatever coated the door had been pulled from the depths of hell.
A hell energy my wolf did not want to touch. We shied away, but Shadow was having none of that, pressing in behind us, using his will to propel us forward.
A whimper escaped when our nose touched a puffy tendril of darkness that had escaped the mass. It recoiled, as did we, but once again, our backtracking was blocked by a giant asshole.
Shadow was not going to let us hide from a chance to break the seal on his land. As my wolf’s body was shoved forward, the smoke wrapped around us, insidious and cold, and I had the brief thought that I really should have pushed harder for answers about this world.
Especially why it had been blocked in the first place.
Warnings were there for a reason, and we should have heeded them. Because I had the sneaking suspicion that opening the Shadow Realm might prove to be the one thing that destroyed us all.
