27. Deep In My Heart

**MAEVE**

All the while, Esmeralda was talking, my world spun around me. Yet I felt motionless and unmoving. Every atom was still screaming inside my head and wanting to be set free. I wanted to scream, too. At myself. At the fate. Towards the world, that was so unfair to me. I felt like an echo of myself.
“I am not ready, Xander. I can’t do this,” I told Xander once we were given some privacy. My breath came in shaky pants as I was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“Maeve, I understand that. But we are running out of time. The moment Janelle would blabber out, we would have to fight the defense. Is it not better that I tell the pack myself?”
*And expose myself to the rest of the shifter wolves?*
Oh, no.
“I need some time to think. I need to be alone,” I whispered.
“Okay.” Xander was about to walk out of the room when I stopped him. “I meant alone and somewhere soothing. I need some open air.”
Instantly, his defensive walls were up. He was about to dismiss the idea but finally decided against it.
“Okay, love. If that is what you want,” he murmured and kissed my forehead before granting me the alone time I badly needed to sort out my head.
I walked to the same lakeside where I sat beside Xander the first time he had shifted before me. Even though I did not tell him where I was going, I had known him enough to know he was somewhere around. The thought of leaving me alone would probably split him in half, and hence it was out of the question for me.
Moreover, I felt him - in the air, in every staggered breath and in the whispers carried away by the wind. Xander loved me in his strange, eccentric, and wolfish sort of ways. But I did not know if I was ready to take the plunge yet. I was barely coming to terms with reality, and when Esmeralda appeared. And everything went for a toss. Fate was decided centuries ago, and the man who has my heart was a wolf.
At a distance, the setting sun has lit the sky on fire and set the top of the tall trees ablaze. I simply sat there, watching the soft waves of the lake. For the longest time, I waited for my mind to settle and for my head to get clearer.
The absence broke when I heard leaves’ soft crunching and the awareness that I was not along even more. The apparent presence ticked my instincts, and I turned around. Esmeralda approached in quiet stalking steps and yet made no effort to make her presence secretive. In fact, I could go on a length to say that she wanted me to know she was around.
“You seem to be still grappling about the reality of your situation,” she commented, coming to sit over at the nearest rock. Her eyes were still trained on the sparkling water like she was entranced by it.
“A couple of months ago, I was worried if I’d actually belonged to the category of normal, if I had enough friends or a normal dating life,” I said. There was no regret in my tone, but I couldn’t identify the chaos either. “And then a gust of wind hits my life and changes forever.”
It was neither a horror story nor a fairy tale. It was a supernatural saga, one that did not agree with me.
A soft, secretive smile carved upon her face and made the laugh lines more prominent. For the first time since she made her presence felt, her gaze slid over to me. “Did it ever occur to you that you were not meant to be in the category of normal? That you were destined for greater and better things? One that is written in stars somewhere above the sky.” As if to accentuate, her eyes scanned the endless sky above us and then swooped down on me.
“Poetic,” I remarked with a slight shrug. “But that’s not how my world works. I just wanted to…survive.” Yes, it was the simplest thing I could ask for.
Esmeralda shook her head slowly, keeping up the same smile. “There’s a saying in my world, ‘Only those who can survive the flames, can be purified by fire. The rest of them just burn.’ You were chosen for a great suffering and even greater power. What you make of it depends on you.”
“How could you say that with such certainty?” I asked automatically. Yes, by its history, she has her magical powers, but the conviction in her voice felt uncanny.
“Every psychic who is born has parts of Arietta and Ametrine inside her. The good and bad. The yin and yang,” she clarified.
A shiver danced down my back. The history of the twin sisters and their visions were something too close to home. Ironically, I have been looking for the answers all my life, and when I have some, I dreaded them to the core.
*Be careful what you wish for*.
“What about the other psychics like me who were born in every century?” I quizzed. Questions piled on one another like a heap of rocks and burdened me down.
“Only two were chased till date and the rest were never found. Which is why it is an unending pursuit of power.”
A fleeting thought crossed my mind. “If you don’t mind me asking, you are a witch too. Why did you choose to help me?” I asked.
Esmeralda smiled, but this time it was nothing but the sadness reflecting on her features. Her gaze dragged back to the lake as if a visit to her memory lane was painful. “I have given up being a witch a long time ago,” she reminisced with a heavy heart. “Not because I was shunned from the community, but because I loved someone very dearly.”
“I don’t understand…” I whispered.
Esmeralda sighed. “My mate found me when I was sixteen and needless to say, I was very much in love with him. I did not know if it was fate or my heart, but I was drawn to him in ways I could not explain. Like the gravity of the ocean and moon playing against my heart.” She paused, swallowing the lump in her throat as her voice dropped a few octaves. “One day, death came for him. It was too early and neither one of us was ready. I have never been afraid of dying. But the thought of him dying made my heart bleeds. What do you do when the most priceless element of your life is being taken away? You make a bargain.”
My brows pulled together in confusion. “A bargain?”
“Yes, a bargain,” she echoed as she nodded. “Even though I was mated to a shifter wolf and bore his pups in my womb, I was still carrying the blood of the witches in my veins. My mother was a witch, and my father was a warlock. By that same ancient blood and the limited power of magic, I summoned the spirits and traded my powers for my mate’s life. For a witch who gives up her power, it is a shameful act. Not only you are shunned by the community, you are punished as well.”
She pulled up the long cape sleeves of her dress in silence and revealed a line of scar still visible in the wee hours of the dusk. It stretched across her both arms and barely faded. The monstrosity almost chilled my blood as gulped.
“Did they…” I stuttered, my gaze jumping up and down her wounds. “Did your people do this to you?”
Esmeralda acquiesced as if it was normal for her to endure the agony. “Penance is a necessary reformation that one has to go through in my world. Tell you what Maeve, I could go through many flagellations if it meant that I could save my mate. I did it for Lucian and I’d a thousand times more.”
It was not her words that moved through me but the passion with which she expressed herself. At that point, she was no longer the ageless woman or mysterious one with the supernatural tale – Esmeralda was simply a lover with a heart full of undying love. The same intensity I have seen in Xander.
“And did you save him?” I murmured skeptically.
“Yes,” Esmeralda acquiesced. “At the cost of magic, I brought him back to life. We lived for another fifty years until the Goddess took him away. But he has given me a memory to last a lifetime.”
“How long…I mean…witches are still immortal?”
“No,” she corrected. “But we do have an extended life span for about two hundred years until our spirits leave the body.”
“Xander loves you, Maeve,” she said. “And I can see the same love in your eyes for him. It has nothing to do with my supernatural powers. I know it because I have been loved the same way once upon a time.”
It was my turn to *sigh*. “I don’t know if I am strong enough to face his family or his pack. What if they hate me because I am human?” I asked concernedly.
Esmeralda gave me a wide, knowing smile. “Then Xander will make sure that they love you because you are his one, true mate.”
Deep in my heart, at every corner of my insecure brain, I knew it. I knew Xander cared for me, and he loved passionately enough to protect me against the entire world. *I just needed to be good enough for him*.

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