48. A Deal With The Devil

**MAEVE**

I was floating.
I was neither on the earth nor heaven.
I did not know who I was or what I was - a soul or a human being?
No matter how hard I tried to suck in the breath, I realized that I had no strength whatsoever. No heart, np pulse, no lungs, or physical ability to control my organs. A thick veil of darkness surrounded me.
Did I die?
Was this reincarnation? It seemed like I have traded a form of life to walk on the land for another. There was no sense of touch or feel. Sometimes, it felt like someone dropped me into the middle of the ocean, while at times, there was nothing but an endless blue sky above my head.
Why could I not remember my name?
I had a name…for sure. A life, a lover and friends…I was convinced. Yet the more I tried to remember, the faster everything disappeared. An unnamed, unclaimed speak lost in the global vastness. I was adrift and unwanted.

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**XANDER**

My heart froze into a block of ice. Stone cold. It was difficult to breathe, see or feel anything other than Maeve.
Scrambling into the dark, I gathered my clothes and slipped into my pants while putting Maeve into my t-shirt. Even though the dawn was approaching fast, the forest was still shroud in foggy mist and darkness.
“Maeve! Maeve! Maeve!”
No matter how much I shook her body, she remained unstirred. One possibility raced through my brain, but repeatedly I assured myself that it was not possible. There’s fucking no way. Not a bloody chance in hell.
I was not losing her.
Stopping her up in my arms, I rushed towards the pack house. There were some murmurs and gasps around as I carried her into our room, but nobody dared to rush inside except for Blaize.
“What happened, Xander?”
“I don’t know!” I croaked and raked a hand through my hair in desperation. There was someone at the door, one of the Omegas, as I quickly instructed, “Get the Asas, now!”
In a couple of long strides, Blaize went ahead and shut the door slightly and then turned back to me. “Can…we probably need experienced doctors. Doctors who are well trained to treat the humans.”
For a couple of beats, I could only shake my head. “This mark on her neck is not a human bite,” I gritted out. “Do you realise that?”
“I know, I know,” I tried, hoping it would calm me down. But I was already far down the way to my own hell.
“She has no pulse,” I stuttered, checking her vitals for the hundredth time. “The heartbeat is there, but it is too faint.”
“She has no colour too,” Blaize added faintly.
It was bad. I could feel in my bones that she was in pain. Ironically, Maeve was already marked and mated under the full moon. She might not have been a werewolf to establish the eternal bond with me, but my wolf could feel her distress.
It could feel that his mate was slipping away into oblivion.
Fates, this punishment is worse than death itself.
A loud knock resonated, snapping me out of my misery as Blaize reached for the door again.
“Esmeralda!” I exclaimed when I saw her rushed inside the room. Her gaze landed on Maeve as she reached out to check her temperature.
“I came as soon as I heard.” Esmeralda pulled her brows for a second before looking up at me quizzically. “Xander, she’s just asleep. You have marked her.”
The fresh, moon-shaped bite mark on her neck was pretty evident as she did not bother to frame it as a question.
I nodded. “One moment, she was fine and breathing well and in the next, she collapsed.”
Esmeralda touched Maeve’s hand and sighed. “There’s only one way she would wake up and that is through magic. The werewolf venom that you have injected inside of her must have clashed with her psychic blood. We need a shaman who can perform the magic.”
Blaize and I exchanged a look of horror. And because I was too stunned to speak, my brother voiced my words in his way. “Bringing in a shaman means exposing her truth. Are we ready for that?”
In truth, I was not ready for anything. All I wanted was Maeve, and I was prepared to turn the world upside down for her.
“I don’t care, I don’t fucking care!” I roared. “But I am not going to let her die.”
Let the consequences be damned.
I turned to Esmeralda. “Do whatever it takes. Bring in a witch, warlock or a shaman, but I need my mate back. I need her back at any cost.”


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**MAEVE**

There was fire around me. Everything was ablaze, licked by the giant flames. And I was standing in the middle of it.
The screams and shrieks of the men, women, and children resonated and saturated the air with their desperate cry for help. And yet I could not move.
I was neither burnt nor perished, despite standing in the middle of it.
I did not remember how long I was suffering in limbo until everything stopped. It was like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope. For the first part, I felt numb. I was simply an inconsequential speck floating around and unwanted.
As sighted and settled, wanting to concentrate my thoughts, my mind would keep clocking me out as if I had slept, even within this dark dimension.
“Open your eyes, please…”
I heard his voice first and then felt his touch.
It exploded through the darkness. Like a neon light full of blinding brightness…an unknown end. A flash of us in the forest, in the beach accustomed to my eyes as I slowly recalled his name.
*Xander*.

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*Suddenly there was silence - complete and absolute silence and void of light.
Is this what death feels like? Did I really die?
“Maeve…”
Someone whispered the word, and it rang with such familiarity that I could not express. And then it dawned on me - it was my name!
It was my identity! My soul leaped with joy, final being able to break through the chain of numbness, vagueness, and amnesia.
“Maeve, open your eyes and look at me,” said a voice. A voice that was so serene, so beautiful that I had no words to describe it. But I still could not bring myself to open my eyes.
I wanted to, but I could not.
“You need to see where you are, Maeve,” crooned the voice once again as I forced my eyelids open with steel determination. What greeted my sight was indescribable.
The thick veil of darkness cracked through, and a blinding flash of golden light shone around with magnificence. It was only then did I realize that I was lying on the grass while my body was curled into a fetal position.
A soft touch on my arm startled as I adjusted my vision.
“Where am I? What is this place?”
The very same hand slowly helped me onto my feet and steadied. It was the first time that I saw the face of this woman. This ethereal woman with a crown made of small flowers on her head and a silk gown wrapped over her body. She might not have been adorned with diamonds and rubies, but she still carried herself with a graceful gait.
“This is where it started several years ago…the place where I was born,” she reminisced with a flare of pain in her eyes and a wry smile on her trembling lips. “My sisters and brothers were born. And this is where they perished away…with no fault of theirs.”
I froze. **She was one of the twin sisters, either Arietta or Ametrine. And everything that has Esmeralda described was right**.
My gaze wandered around, frantically trying to remember the early life of the twin sisters and the village where they lived in. And remarkably so, the place looked ancient. It was like I had time traveled several years back.
My head snapped back to the woman beside me. “Who are you?” I asked, half in dread and half in shock.
She only smiled. “You know me who I am, Maeve. I know you can feel me, just like I can feel the pain of my family.”
Her eyes dragged towards a small hut, which was now nothing but a side of ash and debris.
“I don’t understand…”
“I know what you felt all these years. Watching other people suffer endlessly and feeling their pain. It broke you from within, collapsed your strength until you had to be strong. Stronger than everyone else.”
**It was difficult to catch her uncanny words, but I was more than sure that it was Ametrine when I saw the fire in her eyes. Only she could garner so much sadness and hatred that resulted in something dark…something dangerous.**
“Come, let me show you something,” she beseeched and clamped a hand over my wrist. In the flash of a second, the world around us disappeared, and I found myself inside the small room lit with lamps.
It looked like the middle of the night as a sharp shriek tore my eyes away from the window. A woman was lying on the bed, with her legs sprawled and thrashing from side to side. Beside her was a few other women, sitting between her legs.
“What do you see?” Ametrine whispered in my ears.
“A childbirth.”
“Yes. The birth of my youngest sister, Selene.”
Our conversation was interrupted by a loud wail of a newborn child.
“Isn’t she the most beautiful one, Maeve?” she whispered in awe.
“The name of the moon goddess…” I breathed, the memories flooding back to my mind. Eirlys had narrated to me that the Moon Goddess was called Selene, according to Greek Mythology.
“Yes, she was born on a beautiful full moon night like this and what a beauty she was,” Ametrine praised. A deep sense of pride and happiness glossed over her features as she described the beauty of her youngest sister. “Her hair like white gold, her eyes were a pair of dreamy grey orbs,” she detailed. “And her skin glowed like an ivory pearl. I wondered if there was a beauty in the realm of heaven and earth to match hers.”
“Is that why she was named Selene?” I asked, recalling that Selene, the Moon Goddess was an unmatchable beauty herself.
“Yes,” she affirmed and added, “And also because she had a small birthmark. A crescent moon mark. My father thought it would be appropriate to name her after the Moon Goddess of the Greeks.”
The women in scarfs cooed to the infant and wrapped her in a white cloth. By now, the mother was exhausted with all the pain, but her eyes shone like a diamond in the dimmed lighting. The happiness she reflected as she held her daughter in her arms for the first time was unparalleled.
“She is beautiful, truly,” I remarked.
Ametrine sighed beside me and tried to look out of the window with a pensive expression. “Selene did not deserve to die that night.”
I understood her pain and anger, but she was still human when she conceived of revenge.
“Neither did the villagers several years later. They were innocents and you killed their families and descendants. What kind of a justice is that?” I countered.
“It is my justice, my vengeance.,” she prided. “They killed my sister, my brother and my parents!” The water in her eyes was gone, replaced by a glorious fire. “If it was upto to these men and women, they would have burnt me and my sister as well.”
I slowly shook my head, condemning her act. “Two wrongs don't make a right, Ametrine.”
“Doesn’t it?” she challenged with a vicious smirk. Her eyes twinkled and then narrowed into slits. “How would you feel if someone threatens the one you love? How would you feel if they tried to take it away from you?”
“I will fight, no doubt about it. But I will not be cruel.”
Ametrine broke into a fit of laughter as if the thought was absolutely foolish. “My dear, you sound just like my sister Arietta. Unfortunately, your soul is like mine - wild and chaotic. One who loves the danger a bit too much.”
“I am nothing like you,” I spat. There was not a single cell in my body, capable of such violence.
“Is it so? Please, tell me, what made you fall for a beast then? Why would you unleash your wrath against Janelle of the Fire Hound Pack? Why would you light the Council on fire when she threatened to take him away from you?”
Horror seeped into my mind like molten lava. The fire incident at the Council…it was not possible! It could not be me!
“No. No. No.” I chanted again and again with no avail.
“You can deny all you want but the blue fire of wrath comes from our blood,” Ametrine supplied. “We did not tell you to channel your rage because you did yourself. The blood in your veins only gave the power. The rest was all you, my dear, Maeve.”
I shoved her hand off me and took a few angry steps back. “You are lying!”
“Am I?” She smiled once again, as calm as a sea. “How did everyone else get hurt in the fire but not you? How did you walk through the flames unscathed?”
The world started spinning on its axis, or it was just me being disoriented by her words. Either way, it was not good. I knew what she was saying was right because it made sense.
My clothes burnt, yet my skin did not. Was it really me? But how is that possible? How could you start a fire like that?
“I…I…”
Ametrine stepped forward, bracketing her palm around my face. “You, my dear, is as beautiful as you are wild. And you have nothing to apologise for,” she pacified.
I looked around the small hut, covered in the foggy mist. “Where are we? And how did you find me?”
“When a werewolf marks his mate, the venom spreads through her system and connects her with the realm of the Moon Goddess,” she explained. “But you are no werewolf, my dear. You are one of us - the ever powerful one who created the world of supernaturals.”
“Am I dead?” I asked. Is that why Xander did not want to mate with me?
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “You can never be dead, Maeve. You are in my realm. The one my sister has created is a hell for me, for both of us. But she would rather choose to suffer than reunite with our family or go back to the land of living.”
I tried to piece the story narrated by Esmeralda in my head, recalling the tiniest of details. “The limbo?” I whispered in shock.
“Yes, the limbo.” A dark shadow fell across her face. “The pit between earth and heaven or hell.” Clearly, it seemed like Ametrine’s hell. But I had to get out soon.
“What do you want, Ametrine?” I asked. Clearly, she ambushed my thoughts for a reason.
With a determined nod, she took my hand and dragged me out of the house. Outside, it was morning again and seemed like we have traveled a few more years ahead. She took my hand and directed me behind the house where a portion was bracketed was the fence.
“Do you see her now? She is all grown up and smiling.”
Sure enough, when I lifted my eyes, there was a little girl. She was moving fast with her tiny feet, wandering around the garden full of colorful flowers and fruits.
Ametrine wistfully gazed down at her sister, Selene. “I have often taken her to pick up the flowers and the berry fruits. Selene loves the garden a bit too much. Every time she fell sick, I would place a bowl full of wild flowers by her bedside so that she would not miss it.”
The pain in her voice was too much. It felt like she was more close to her little sister, Selene, than with her twin.
“I am sorry, Ametrine. I am extremely sorry for your loss. I can only imagine what you and your sister must have gone through.”
She smiled, although it did not reach her eyes. “If there was one lesson immortality had taught me, is that time never heals. You might get immune to the pain, but the sting remains forever. No amount of happiness would ever wipe away the tears. But I also learnt something from the tears as well. They carry your emotions, your pain, your ache and everything else that you can never unburden yourself from. Which is why I have stored mine.”
“What?” I asked dumbstruck.
“Every day I cried for my sister, I saved a drop. And this is the elixir I used to create the wolves that you are so in love with. They were beasts, my beasts, because I made them. I became strong, powerful and invincible.”
“You created them for your own vendetta,” I reasoned.
“Yes, I did,” she confessed nonchalantly. “And because I am their creator and not the Moon Goddess they worship, I still want them to survive. I don’t want the wolves to disappear from the face of the earth. They are the most amazing creatures I have seen - strong and united.”
There was something in her eyes that made me afraid. “What do you want from me, Ametrine?” I whispered, even though I did not want to know the answer. Her intentions, so far, were nothing but wicked.
Her lips parted in a full, malicious smile. “I want to make a **deal** with you.”*

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***I know the chapter was a little long, but I hope you have enjoyed reading the story so far. I undertsand that it is heavy with details and ancint past, so at any point if you feel that I have rushed the storyline, PLEASE, PLEASE let me know. I hevaily depend on the comments/critiques of my readers. Thank you!***