Sapphire watched her mate closely. This wasn’t fair. She usually felt like everything was falling in around her. But what she felt now made anything she ever felt before like nothing at all. She wished Ivory was here so she could make her explore whatever was in that nasty hole. Sapphire didn’t want Magnus anywhere near that hole. The images on the walls in there were more than enough. They should take this knowledge and get out of here. Find some kind of information on this thing and come back prepared. But no one did that. They were just going on. Planning to climb into the bowels of some long forgotten, condemned world. Where nothing good could live. If that was a nature spirit, it was of death, destruction, and decay. Nothing could produce life and love from that. Sapphire had to agree with April. This couldn’t be the sentience behind the town. The town was full of love, light, and life. This was decay and death. Blood and gore made up its basis. It had to, and

Ivory watched the devastation pass by as the vehicles slowly made their way up. This didn’t look like the home she’d left just a few days ago. It looked like it’d been in a war, or abandoned for a hundred years. Broken windows, and burned buildings, even trees were in different places. Grass and weeds were almost waist high and looked like they’d not seen any care or maintenance in years. It was unreal. If she didn’t believe in magic, this would have changed her mind. “This can’t be. There’s no way. Even magic can’t do this so quickly. Can it?” “I’m afraid that, yes, it can. Especially natural magic that’s on some kind of timer or trigger without intelligence behind it with a conscious moral sense.” “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” “I mean in a moral sense of the damage it’s causing. Loss of life, environmental damage, and all that. But it’s running amuck on nature logic. Death isn’t an end. It’s the end of one thing to make way for the next.

Sapphire and Ivory sat in her office drinking coffee for a little bit before Ivory gathered up enough courage to speak to Sapphire. “If my mother was the reason we hate each other, does that mean in another life we might have been friends?” Ivory wasn’t sure if she was ready to apologize to Sapphire for the years of emotional and physical torture, she put her through.” “I don’t know. If you weren’t so self absorbed and demanding, maybe. It’s hard to tell, really. Your mother tried with all her might to make you into a shifter version of herself. Now I don’t mean this as a slight against you, but she was pretty successful. She pulled so many tricks with us, I’m not sure either of us knows who we truly are.” “You really think that?” “We’ll see, won’t we, now that we know she’s gone and can no longer influence us directly? I know that her influence made someone lock my abilities away so I couldn’t use them. Whoever did that seemed to know a wa

Ivory couldn’t find out what happened to Cliff or Xavier. Those two and their buddies were missing in action. They’d been at the fight, but they weren’t among the dead there or on the Vagas Moon Pack territory. Ran assumed they went rogue after the battle and were in the wind. Ivory wasn’t so sure. Cliff was a jerk, but he wasn’t a very bright one. It took days to find any trace of them. Sadly, that trace was a campsite out in the middle of nowhere. Sadly, whoever they joined up with at the end was more than evil and stronger than them. They’d survived only to end up being hunted by a human with more money than brains. If they read correctly, the evidence. She was scared now. What if they were wrong and Cliff came back for revenge? Ivory couldn’t tell Ran what she’d done. Snubbing Cliff after her father turned rescinded his favour. Cliff came to her for help, and she deliberately messed up his plans to get back into her father’s favour. It hadn’t

April couldn’t believe what she was about to do. Normally, anything to do with blood magic was off limits. Well, usually that’s because the magic would cause get harm to the person or persons involved. In this case, she’d risk the disapproval and any punishment. Which would be laughable when she showed the council of elders what they would have to do to break the curse. From what little she could understand of the magic used in the treaties, and resulting events. No one before her cared about the limits that were placed long ago on how magic could be used. When someone called North America a Wild and Lawless Land. It wasn’t just the humans that were wild and lawless. Those that practiced magic were too. Doing things in the middle of nowhere that they couldn’t anywhere else. Even now, they uncovered places like this occasionally. Places that the locals would call, better left alone and untouched. In this case, if April was correct. The page with their b