Kyran Pov
I went back to my room after Freda fell asleep and immediately went to look at my shoulder in the mirror. The bite was not healing as it should. Normal bites started closing within hours for wolves. This one looked exactly the same as when it happened.
Worse than that, the skin around the bite had turned dark. Almost black. And the shape was too clean. Too deliberate. I had seen marks like this before in old books about mate bonds.
"This is a mate scar," I said out loud to my empty room.
My stomach dropped. Mate scars only appeared when someone claimed you as theirs. When the bond between two wolves was being formed or solidified. But Freda was not my mate. She was Urdon's mate. This should not be possible.
I needed to understand what was happening. I grabbed my meditation candles and sat down in the corner of my room. I lit them one by one and closed my eyes. Then I forced myself to slip into the spiritual realm.
It was dangerous to go there too often. The realm could trap you if you were not careful. But I needed answers, and this was the only place I could get them.
The realm appeared around me slowly. Everything was dark and foggy and freezing cold. My breath came out in white clouds even though I did not technically have a body here.
Yolande was waiting for me. She stood in the center of the fog, smiling like she had been expecting me.
"Hello, Kyran," she said. "Back so soon. You must really be desperate for answers."
"What did you do to Freda?" I demanded. "Why did her bite leave a mate scar on me?"
"I did nothing," Yolande said and started walking in a slow circle around me. "The curse did exactly what it was designed to do. It creates imbalance and feeds on broken bonds."
"Explain," I said.
"Your Alpha loves his Luna more than she loves him," Yolande said. "The bond between them is one sided. Damaged. Freda cannot fully return his love because the curse blocks her ability to feel it properly. So the bond is unbalanced."
"What does that have to do with me?" I asked.
"Everything," Yolande said and stopped walking. She looked at me with her glowing, dead eyes. "The curse hates imbalance. It wants to correct it. So it pushes the rejected Luna toward someone new. Someone who can balance the scales. In this case, it is pushing Freda toward you."
"That is insane," I said. "I am not her mate. I do not want to be her mate."
"What you want does not matter," Yolande said. "The curse does not care about anyone's wants. It only cares about revenge. The more Urdon pushes Freda away, the stronger the pull toward you becomes. Eventually, the mate bond will shift completely, and you will be bound to her instead."
"How do I stop it?" I said.
Yolande smiled wider. "There is only one way to break the pull before it becomes permanent. Urdon must reject Freda completely before the full moon. If he speaks the words of rejection and severs the mate bond with his own voice, then the curse will release her."
"If he rejects her, the bond will break forever," I said. "That could kill her. It could kill both of them."
"Maybe," Yolande said with a shrug like she did not care at all. "But if he does not reject her, then she will become yours, and Urdon will go mad from losing his mate to his closest friend. Either way, someone suffers. That is the entire point of a curse."
"You are evil," I said.
"I am dead," Yolande said. "Evil is for the living. I am just balancing the scales for what your pack did to me. They took everything from me. My mate. My sister. My life. Now I take everything from them."
The realm started fading. I could feel myself being pulled back to the physical world. Yolande's smile was the last thing I saw before everything went dark.
I woke up gasping in my room. Sweat covered my whole body, and my hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold them still. I looked at the mate scar on my shoulder and felt sick.
I had to make Urdon reject Freda just a little bit. Not completely. Just enough to weaken the curse's pull on her. It was a terrible plan. The worst plan I had ever come up with. But if I did nothing, then Freda would be bound to me instead of Urdon, and the entire pack structure would collapse.
The problem was that I had no idea how to make Urdon reject his own mate without destroying them both. And I hated myself for even considering it.
I reached into my boot and pulled out the moonstone. It glowed softly in my hand and hummed with power. This stone was supposed to trap Yolande's spirit during the ritual. It was the only weapon I had against her.
But Yolande had already warned me. If I used the stone during the ritual, she would make Rex cut his own throat first. She would kill him before I could save him.
"What am I supposed to do?" I whispered.
The moonstone did not answer. It just kept glowing and humming like it was waiting for me to figure it out on my own.
I had six days until the new moon. Six days until I could attempt the ritual to save Rex. Six days to somehow weaken the curse without getting everyone killed in the process.
I put the stone back in my boot and lay down on my bed. The mate scar on my shoulder throbbed with its own heartbeat. I could feel it getting stronger. The pull toward Freda was already there in the back of my mind. A whisper telling me to go to her. To protect her. To claim her fully.
"No," I said out loud. "She is not mine. She will never be mine."