Chapter 227

I turned away from my grandmother and stepped back to my body. I looked at her over my shoulder. “What should I do?”

She smiled. “Wrap your hand around the chain. It can’t hurt you any more than it already has. And follow it to the end. Find out who is hurting you, find out their intention, and save your wolves.” She looked towards my body. “You don’t have long. They are already so very weak.”

“I’m afraid,” I whispered, and her smile was subdued, but firm.

“I know. And that’s perfectly fine, but don’t let fear stop you from doing something necessary. Don’t let your fear hold you back from who you were meant to be.”

Her words repeated in my mind as I stepped up to my body on the ground. “Okay.” I grabbed my hand around the chain and started walking. The chain in my hand thrummed. I could feel the intent in its black links.

Whoever cast this hex was intent on one thing: killing my wolf. They would have succeeded if I had only one, but I had two, and thankfully they supported each other until I realized something was wrong.

It took me entirely too long to realize the truth, though. I needed to be more in tune with myself in the future. I couldn’t neglect my power or my wolves like I had.

I shook my head when I realized I was too focused on everything else—school, training, my friends, and Rowan. Everything else that should have taken a back seat to my wolves, the very beings created to share my soul with, had slipped between my fingers while I focused on the things around me.

But maybe that was a piece of the spell as well. I felt a jolt go through the chain as I realized I was right. This spell attacked my wolf, but also made the mind shift away when thinking about the wolf, so that it wouldn’t be caught before it was too late.

Whoever is attacking me is smart. It feels like the cleaving, but different. Maybe they changed it or added onto the spell. Either way, I’ll follow it back until I find out who it is!

I walked through the world all the while staying apart from it. The streets blurred as I hurried past. Something in my chest was burning, and as I grew closer to the other end of the chain, the more the pain in my chest increased.

The chain veered off, and I followed—through the trees that grew familiar, into a clearing I had seen before, a clearing that sent chills down my spine. No one should be here. This ground was sacred.

The chain yanked me past the grounds where I found my power, the place I met my grandmother, and out the other side. I was near my father’s pack grounds, and the thought made my insides clench.

The chain, which I had been following, had taken control. I was sucked past the pack grounds and further down the hill. I tried to release the chain, but my hand was stuck to it, as if the chain was taking me the rest of the way because it knew I would turn away.

I felt the ground shift, the light darken, and the air thicken as I realized where we were headed. I remembered my father telling me as a child to stay away from the dead caves, but the chain yanked me towards them. I felt the ground crumble beneath my feet, and rocks shift as I stumbled to keep up with the pull of the chain. The dead were the only ones supposed to be here, a place that my father said was haunted by our ancestors, a place where we used to lay our dead before it was corrupted by something dark, something unknown.

A call went out, deep from within a cave, and my blood froze. This wasn’t a normal call. This was from some beast deep inside the walls. I felt the ground tremble with it. This place was my death.

But the chain yanked me inside, and the darkness closed around me.

Chapter 227

My panic peaked, and I yanked my hand back from the links in my hands, but it wouldn’t release me. I nearly cried out when my grandmother’s words came back to me: “Don’t let fear hold you back.” Like she knew I would panic, she knew I would fear this place, and she was trying to tell me to stay calm and keep my head.

So I took a deep breath and allowed the chain to pull me deeper and deeper into the caves—the caves I was warned to stay away from, the caves that have been haunted for thousands of years.

I stayed tight to the chain, pulling me deeper until a light sprang up in the distance. The closer I went, the brighter it became, until I found myself right outside the ring of light. “What the fuck?”