17. The Crystal of the Moon
Tony
I left Lucy in bed with Matt. The little brat pulled her closer to him and curled around her as if I wouldn’t be coming back.
“If you’re about to take a call right now, you’re going to make me sad.”
I scoffed and looked at Matt as I slid into a pair of pants. “No. I’m just going to look something up. I’ll be back.”
Matt hummed and cuddled closer to Lucy. “More cuddles for me.”
I shook my head and resisted the urge to kick him before leaving the room as quietly as possible. I could hear the next patrol shift getting ready to start as I headed down the hall to my room. I went through the bedroom to the small study attached to it and pulled the book on our family.
The bookshelf shifted aside, revealing an old staircase. It led to the attic. I hadn’t been up there in ages. I don’t think Matt had ever been up there, but I knew that if there were any ancestors about why Lucy couldn’t shift if she couldn’t shift, they had to be up there.
I grabbed a flashlight, turned it on, and headed upstairs. The air was stale, and a little dusty, so I opened the window and went looking through the journals.
Most of them just talked about previous alphas fighting with other alphas and other things that didn’t matter. There were a few records on twins that I set aside before I finally reached something that looked right.
It was a journal about someone in the family. Her name was gone from the records, but the alpha at the time was sure to record enough about what had happened to her.
“She couldn’t shift for a long time, but we figured out why,” I read. “Hybrids, half-werewolves, are not gifted with the same strength. They are more human. Thus, their wolf side does not surface naturally. She often said that she felt nothing like the stirring of her wolf or the instincts that help us survive.
“Even after she learned to shift, her senses were dulled by comparison, but she could at least function as a member of the pack.”
I frowned and kept flipping. The alpha talked about all the things she could and couldn’t do, but most of it had nothing to do with what I needed to figure out. I knew that Lucy would be able to have children, and even though they would technically be hybrids, they would be children of alphas and just as strong as any werewolf.
Finally, I reached the right section.
“She needed to borrow the power of the Moon Goddess to shift.” I frowned. What did that mean?
All werewolves borrow power from the Moon Goddess. It was why we are strongest under the full moon. The more I read, the more I didn’t understand. I went looking for another book when I found a historical record that looked older than most of the things in the attic.
“The first of us were bound to her light,” I read. “The only power we had was what she graced us with under her light. When she shined brightest, she gave us the power to shift.”
I grinned and glanced outside. It would be a few more days before the next full moon, but if this was right, then, at the least, she would be able to shift under the full moon.
I was about to close the book when something on the page caught my eye.
“Except for her.” I frowned and skimmed the page. “Except for she who was closest to the Goddess and given the Crystal of the Moon.”
I licked my lips. The phrase was familiar. I remembered it from a story from when I was a kid. The Crystal of the Moon was supposed to be some sort of piece of jewelry, a necklace, I think. It was supposed to give the wearer a boost in power.
“She alone could shift at will. She was the Goddess’ body on Earth.”
I bit my lip. I had never imagined that the Moon Goddess, as we knew her to be, was once just empowered by a necklace. If we could find that necklace, then we could have at least something like Moon Goddess again.
I left the book on the table and went searching for newer books and any mention I could find of the necklace. There were several mentions, but right around the time of the fall of the White Moon Pack, the records stopped mentioning it.
The record stated that the Moon Goddess had been meant to be buried with it, but they had never found it or her body.
I slumped into the seat, looking through the pages, though I knew the story.
A long time ago, we were one pack under one alpha and one luna, the Moon Goddess at the time. No one could be sure how or why we split, just that we first split into three packs: Blue Moon, Black Moon, and Blood Moon. Some time down the line, the Blue Moon Pack had an internal disagreement.
One side, the line of our family, was the strongest, and they wanted to use their power against the other packs to unify us all again. The other side, the line that became the White Moon Pack, advocated peace. The arguments went on and on until finally, the leader of the peaceful side took his followers and left the Blue Moon Pack.
Although the White Moon Pack hadn’t been large, each member had been skilled in witchcraft. Each person's strength had been comparable to that of an army. I had a feeling that it was because they had the Crystal of the Moon. Officially, it was their devotion to the Goddess and their desire for all of the new packs to get along that had protected them for as long as it had.
After the split, the Blue Moon Pack gradually declined because our need for battle was too strong. We fought so much that we stopped having children so our pack shrunk. We had to move our pack into the human world. The White Moon Pack, on the other hand, lived in seclusion in the mountains.
I stopped on a page. It looked like it was a piece of another journal tucked in between the pages.
“When the White Moon Pack went into seclusion, I hid the Crystal of the Moon. Within it is sealed a part of the Moon Goddess’ power. When she returns to this world, she will be able to awaken all of her power with it.”
I sat back. That sounded like the Crystal of the Moon was somewhere. And I bet that whoever had attacked the White Moon Pack had it.
I had to find out where it was. We had to get it back somehow.
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