Chapter 79 - Why am I here?

EMMA

When I open my eyes, my vision is cast in darkness. For a moment everything is vague and my mind is blank. My throat is dry and a headache simmers behind my eyes.

The sound of dripping water reaches me. There is a chill in the air, but I don’t feel cold. There is a blanket draped over me, but I’m not in a bedroom.

I sit up and I rub my palms into my eyes. I try to remember where I was last and the memories trickle in.

I went to the palace to talk to Hadrian. Gaia was there in his office. She attacked me with her claws and then…

*I don’t remember.*

I lift my hand to my chest, but the wounds are nonexistent. My skin beneath the hem of the t-shirt I’m wearing is smooth.

*Was it all a dream?*

My hand reaches for my necklace, but my neck is bare. I remember the chain breaking.

*It must not be a dream then.*

The fact that my necklace broke, feels like failing the promise I made. My hand lingers on the hollow of my neck when my vision adjusts to the darkness around me.

There is a gleam in front of me as metal shines in the dark. I get up from the hard bed and move to the metal gleam. There is a faint light coming from behind the metal.

“Emma?” The familiar voice of my mother calls me in the dark. “Are you awake?”

My heart picks up pace. It thumbs at a racketing speed and it buzzes in my ears.

“Mom?” My hands connect with the metal bars. The silver is cold beneath my palms. It freezes a way to the nerve endings in my fingers and through the rest of my body. It has me shivering.

I realize where I am. The dungeons.

I look into the passage between the prison cells. Faint sunlight comes from the little holes in the wall. There is nobody around except for the figure sitting on the ground in the cell in front of me.

The barely lit passage shows the shadow of my mother’s features when she lowers the hood obscuring her face.

“What’s going on?”

She watches me with stark blue eyes. “They brought you in here last night.”

I try to look around the little space, but there is nothing more than the three walls around me. “I’m in a prison cell,” I whisper out loud and those are words I never thought that I would say. I always figured I would die before they would lock me up.

“Why am I here?”

“I don’t know sweetie, are you hurt?” There is a downturn in the set of her mouth.

The wounds that I remember are non-existent and there are no other wounds that I notice. “No.”

“Good.” My mother exhales a breath of relief. “Do you still have your necklace?”

I raise my hand to my bare neck. I vividly remember catching the necklace when Gaia attacked me. “No, I think it broke, but I’m not sure.” My memories seem to be tricking me.

“I think so too. That explains a lot.”

“Why?” My grip hardens around the silver bars. “I’ve protected that necklace with my life, but you never told me why.”

I did everything to protect that necklace. I did it because I trusted my mother and it was one of the few things I had left. But now I’m not so sure anymore if I should’ve blindly trusted her.

“It was there to protect you from them.” She growls as footsteps come closer.

The sound travels faintly through the passage. “Emma?” The broad frame of the familiar guard appears in the faint light. His green eyes connect with mine and shock appears on his face.

“Miles? What are you doing here?”

Miles eyes my hands around the silver bars and keeps a safe distance between the two cells. “We're here to protect you, remember?”

I look around, but I don’t see anyone else. “Callum is here too?”

Miles nods. “It was his idea to get your location from Captain Remus. That man is a walking blabbermouth.”

My mother hums as she narrows her eyes at the newcomer. “You’re brave for coming here. If they find out, you’ll be severely punished.”

Miles has a serious look on his face that I’ve never encountered before. He looks more like Callum this way. “We know.”

I’m going crazy with questions running through my mind. I hate being left in the dark and anger threatens to surface. “What is going on? Why am I here?”

Miles avoids looking at me and it has me worried. “You were attacked by Gaia.” Grief and guilt are transforming his face. “I should’ve been there. You were dying, but then you didn’t. You healed.”

So it was really not a dream. More questions appear and my headache intensifies. I rub my temples.

“When you woke up, your eyes…were blue.” Miles carefully proclaims.

I raise an eyebrow at him. This is getting ridiculous. “No, they’re not.”

“Yes, they are.” My mother says and I turn to her with confusion.

“The night of the first attack, seven years ago, I knew they would kill you if they found out. I cast a protection spell and trapped it in your necklace. No werewolf would be able to sense your bloodline and it removed the color from your eyes.”

“What do you mean by you ‘cast a protection spell’?” I reach for the bare spot in the hollow of my neck. I think back to that night. I remember my mother muttering words that I couldn’t understand. I remember the pain that I felt in my chest. “Are you a sorceress?”

My mother is quiet for a while. “Yes.”

The confirmation makes me blow out a slow breath. “Am I?” *Was Hadrian right all along?*

“It’s not something that’s necessarily inherited.” She says with a downcast of her eyes. Neither confirming nor denying.

“But it could?”

She tilts her head to one side. “Only when you have a wolf.”

I wish she would just give me some straight answers for once, but apparently, it isn’t that simple.

I grit my teeth. “Do I?”

“You would sense her presence.”

“Can you hear her voice?” Miles asks and he doesn’t even seem that shocked with the slew of revelations.

There is silence in my mind apart from my own racing thoughts. Definitely not how Hadrian described the presence of Nero. “No.”

“You're half-human. Your wolf is dormant.” My mother explains. “Just like Lucas.”

“How did I heal then?”

“The healing gene in our blood. When your necklace broke it released the spell and it turned your eyes back to blue.”

Miles retrieves a small mirror from his pocket. He lifts the mirror and in the reflection, I see my face with unfamiliar eyes. They’re dark and definitely blue.

“My eyes are blue,” I whisper.

I shake my head, this doesn’t make sense. “But I only remember ever having gray eyes.”

My mother has her lips pressed in a thin line. “It’s part of the spell. Nobody would remember.”

Miles tucks away the mirror in the pocket of his uniform. “There is something else.” He says and his face turns aghast and it sends nerves through my veins.

“What is it?”

“The Alpha King has ordered your execution for sundown today.”

The air is knocked from my lungs as he lands this blow on me. “My what?”

Having blue eyes is reason enough for the Alpha King to order my execution. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

“You healed when you should’ve died. They fear you and see you as a threat.” Miles explains.

His words are muddy through the ring in my ears. My heart pounces as I fear for my own life. Somehow having a set time for my death seems more daunting than jumping in front of the claws of Princess Morana.

“Where is Prince Hadrian in all this?” My mother growls from her cell.

“He won’t talk to anyone and nobody has seen him.”

People fear my blue eyes. *Does Hadrian fear me? Did he run the other way when he realized I was doomed?* So much for being on my side. The Alpha King has definitely succeeded in instilling fear around his kingdom.

I turn my focus to Miles. “Why are you here then?” My voice is harsher than I would like. The pain gives a sharp edge to my voice.

“Because I know you're not what they are calling you.”

I place my head against the silver bars. The cold soothes the headache. “I appreciate you telling me, but it’s not like I can get out of here.”

A surge of fury rolls through my body. It has been building in the background. It burns with the unfairness of it all. “I’m trapped behind these stupid bars.” I kick hard against the silver bar and the metal groans.

Miles’ eyes widen at my outburst. His eyes move from me to the silver bar. “Did you just bend it?”

I look down and there is a definite bend. “I guess.”

“Silver is relatively a weak kind of metal, but highly effective to keep a werewolf in place.” My mother mutters as she eyes the silver bars.

The bars are not very thick, why would they if nobody dares to come near to them?

I hold the bars with two hands and place my foot against the other. I enforce all my strength and the metal groans under the pressure. I kick it several times and the metal starts to bend more. The kink in the bar reinvigorates my efforts. The bars spread wider. Wide enough for me to climb through them.