Chapter 100 AURORA

I followed his gaze and looked at the scar on my chest. It had looked like a circle with faded black veins branching off of it. Now, some of those veins had turned black again, but they were interspersed with patches of silver. Like whatever was in me had tried to reawaken and was still alive in me, but it was blocked, somehow.

The dream. The iridescent light. I looked at my palm. Had that second voice I’d heard somehow healed me just as the shadows were about to take me back? I touched the scar. The blackened parts of it burned to the touch, but it was all contained, somehow, by the patches of silver. I swallowed, trembling all over again.

Dane touched the scar, as well. I wanted to stop him, remembering how the evil light had reached for him. But when I lifted my hand, he met my gaze, determined. “We’re in this together. Blue Ridge and High Alpine, and you and me.”

I nodded and dropped my hand so he could press his fingers lightly against the spot. When nothing happened, I sighed in relief.

“We’ll figure this out,” he said, fingers still gently pressed to the spot just below my collarbone where the scar sat. “But first, we have to find our children.”

It was barely dawn when I’d woken from the dream, but Dane and I both knew there wouldn’t be any more sleep for us. We got up, dressed, and joined the search. Dane tried to get me to eat, but I couldn’t.

So much was happening, and it all went back to the search for the relic. Part of me begged to give it up. If we’d never gotten into this in the first place, Tristan and Seraphina would be safe. But another, deeper part of me knew, whether or not I had chosen to come back to Georgia on my own, I couldn’t escape this. Those dreamlike memories of my life in Broken Forest proved that.

Dane and I had gone into this thinking we were in control, but we were just pawns on a gameboard that forces beyond us had been moving since we were born. Maybe even before then.

It was time to stop reacting. We had to figure all of this out. Only then could we take control of the game and win. Ann Reed might have cried about how hard it all was. She might have given up. But Aurora DeVere would not. Aurora didn’t lose.

With my children at stake, and Dane–who my feelings were growing dangerously strong for once again–I couldn’t afford to lose.

Trajan had been heading up the search, and Dane and I took his report. They’d found the children’s scent and Mrs. Jamison’s. It led them to the western edge of pack territory, to a rest stop on a busy highway. Then it disappeared.

“That’s not the direction we thought they’d go,” I said. After all, Broken Forest was east of us, not west. “But it could be that whoever took them is trying to throw us off. In a car it would be easy enough to double back.”

Trajan nodded. “What concerns me is that there was no other scent. Only Mary Jamison and the children.”

Dane frowned. “The nanny was new, wasn’t she?”

Anger surged in me. “No. She was my nanny. She raised me for as long as I could remember until the Reeds dismissed her when I was…” I shook my head. The exact memories were fuzzy. I only knew she’d been there when I was a child and then wasn’t there anymore when I was a teen.

“Your memories aren’t always clear,” Dane said carefully. “I’m not questioning you, but I am asking, are you certain this is the same woman?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then are you certain she wouldn’t have betrayed you?” Dane asked. This time, his voice was gentle.

I bared my teeth. “Are you certain your grandfather wouldn’t have betrayed you?” I shot back. “He raised you the same way she raised me.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t an employee of someone we knew for certain was evil. Whoever Mrs. Jamison is, she willingly worked for the Reeds. She watched what they put you through all those years. Did she ever once try to save you? Ever try to get you away? Ever stop a punishment from happening?”

“I…”

I froze.

I hadn’t thought about it that way. My feelings for her were still the feelings of a child. She hadn’t ever hurt me like all the other adults; therefore she had been kind and good.

As a child, it had never occurred to me that she should have tried to stop it, that there was any option for either of us that might include her taking me away.

The realization made it feel like the world was falling out from under me. “No,” I whispered. “She didn’t.”