I awake from another night of awful sleep, feeling angrier than ever. Last night I had dreamt of everything that he had done to her.
I have never wanted a woman as much as I have wanted her. It is easy sometimes to forget which feelings were his and which were mine, but now that she is out of my reach, I miss her. I want her back.
The moment she drops the bracelet with the bloodstone attached into the water, I feel it. The magical runes carved into it tell me that it is on its way. I had begun to doubt that she would do it, but she has kept her promise.
I had thought that sending the dupe-bloodstone with her would bring an end to my dreams and visions of him. But the images of them together last night are seared into my brain. My whole life the dupe-bloodstone has connected me to him in this way. My only hope is once I have the real bloodstone, the visions will stop. I need them to stop.
The dupe-bloodstone is the only thing left to me from my former life. I doubt my mother would have let me keep it had she known about the visions, or that it would show me the truth of who I was. It had shown me all of the sweet and terrible moments of Aeron’s life.
It had shown me my uncle taking me from my crib and throwing me into the sea to drown. I saw it like it was my own memory, and yet it can’t have been. I was too young.
I have often wondered if that was why the dupe-bloodstone had been made. To absorb some of the pain and nightmares from the real bloodstone, and make its burden easier on the bearer. Maybe it absorbed memories too. Maybe that was why my uncle had thrown it away along with me, wanting to be rid of all evidence of his guilt.
Unfortunately for him, the ocean had not swallowed me whole.
My mother had called me a gift. She had longed for a child for years but never been able to have one. The ocean had brought me to her. She had adopted me and raised me as her own.
And now the ocean is bringing her another gift. It is bringing me away to pay her back for all that she has sacrificed to raise me.
I drive to the shore, not far from the marina where I last saw Lola. The sun is high in the sky and it is past noon by the time the bracelet washes up on the beach.
Finally holding it in my hands feels surreal. I do not take the real bloodstone out of the hidden recess. Part of me feels that touch it will make me want it for myself.
I cannot wait to see my mother’s face when I give it to her. I sense that she will give it to the prince as a wedding gift, and he will use it to strengthen the power of the angelli. Then we’ll see if they still call me traitor.
Always the others have treated me as an outsider when all I had wanted was to be part of the pack. The clan. Nothing will change me from a werewolf into an angelus. But perhaps this will finally make me Dane Cersiis instead of Dane Balthazar.
I drive straight to Cersiis Palace. I find my mother taking lunch alone on her balcony, as is her habit. Her face breaks into a smile when she sees me, and she wraps me in her warm embrace.
“If I had known you were coming, I would have ordered more food,” she says, preparing a plate of her own delicately spiced pastries for me.
“I’ve missed you, mama.”
“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” she chides. “You should have come earlier. The preparations for your cousin’s bride-choosing ceremony are almost done.” She hands me the plate.
“I’m not hungry, mama.”
“Nonsense. You’re looking so thin. And disheveled.” She smooths a few strands of my hair. “Where have you been?”
“Getting you the best gift,” I say, mischievously.
“Oh really?” she says, amused. “Have you brought me a daughter-in-law?”
I roll my eyes. “I should have known this wedding stuff would put marriage on your mind. You know I’m not the marrying kind. Even if I did meet the right girl…”
I keep my eyes on the table. If anyone can tell what is on my mind, it is her.
She sighs. “You never tried hard enough. Always dating, and never choosing any of them. Those poor girls. You know I only want you to be happy.”
“And I want you to be happy. Which is why I’ve brought you this.”
I hand her a gift box. She opens it and takes the bracelet out.
She shoots me a quizzical look. She turns it over in her hands as she reads the runes on it. She quickly figures out what it is, and her clever fingers work the mechanism. The bloodstone amulet springs free of its hidden recess. It takes her a second to realize what it is.
She drops it, as if burned.
It lands on the table. She pushes her chair away from it. I can hear her heart racing. It has the rhythm of fear.
“It isn’t yours,” she says, so faintly I can barely hear the words. Her face is white.
“It’s the real bloodstone, mama. I wanted you to have it.”
“What have you done?” she says, her voice rising.
This is not the reaction that I expected. I struggle to keep my voice calm. “I took it from them. They never deserved it.”
“It wasn’t yours to take!”
“How can you say that?” I snarl, rising from my chair. “Its power should have been mine. He stole it from me. You kept the truth from me! How could you?”
“How did you find out?” she says, her voice shaking.
She doesn’t even deny it. This infuriates me.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I should have found out from you. Instead I’ve been dreaming of him my whole life. When I was little I thought he was me. That I was dreaming of myself in a better life. That I had the most wonderful uncle. That I had an entire pack who adored me.”
“Oh, my son. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why? So you could put a stop to it?”
“It was to protect you!”
“I’m a grown man. I don’t need your protection.”
“You don’t even know what you’ve done! You don’t know what the bloodstone is.”
“Everyone knows the legend of the bloodstone. Balthazar wanted power for himself. He tricked a mage to get it.”
“And look what happened to him!”
“It seems to me that he got exactly what he wanted. It was his twin who suffered nightmares from wearing the stone. It was his twin who weakened as the stone took his life force and gave it to Balthazar. It was his twin who killed himself.”
“And how did the twin die?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“He took off the bloodstone.”
“So?”
“The bearer of the bloodstone can never take it off. The price of removing it is death.”
The blood drains from my face. “What?”
She nods. “Oh, my son. What have you done…”
I sink into my chair. All my life I told myself that I hated him. The brother who was living my life. The brother who got to stay home. But I never hated him. Not really.
“He’s not dead,” I whisper. “He can’t be.”
She reaches for me, but I shrug her off. “Why did you never tell me?” I shout.
“You were supposed to know nothing of your origins to protect you. If your uncle knew you were alive, nothing would have stopped him from trying to kill you again. He only ever saw you as a threat.”
Hearing her say it makes it more real somehow. The snatches of visions and memories that I’d had before had been like water. They had slipped through my fingers every time I tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“So it’s true?” I say “He really did kill my father – his own brother? He killed my father’s best friend? And me?”
“He did not wish to pass his power on to you once you were born. A parent will always love their child most. We had always feared what would happen if your uncle refused to relinquish his power to a new generation.”
“I was a baby. He could have stayed the alpha.”
“Until when? Until you grew old enough to challenge him? The bloodstone’s power would have meant you’d win.”
“I wouldn’t have killed my uncle.”
“He wasn’t the sort of man to understand that. He had always been so jealous. Your father had a big heart. He had grown too close to his best friend. And oh how he loved your mother. Geoffre must have felt threatened for years. None of us dreamed he would kill them all.”
“And you kept it from me.”
“I never wanted it to hurt you, my son. What purpose would it have served?”
“You knew, and you let him get away with it!”
She looks stricken. “A council of elders met. It was decided that so long as the Balthazar’s continued to fulfil their duty towards the keystone, it was not our place to intercede. And I had you to think about.”
Suddenly I rise to my feet. Lola! How she will hate me now. She will think that I knew about this, that I meant kill him.
And then an even worse realization comes to me.
How arrogantly I sent her into the worst kind of danger. They will know that she took it, and they will kill her for it.
