She’d felt this way once before.

When the boy died.

When the second-coming was decimated in his youth.

Her hands balled into fists, her nails digging into her palms to the point where the hardened tips scored the plump flesh, drawing beads of blood that began to turn her sweat-slick skin bright red.

The priestess twisted around, peered down at the corpse that lay in state in the backroom of her gris-gris shop in the center of New Orleans’ French Quarter, and pressed her bleeding palm to where the boy’s heart once lay.

“We will avenge you,” she whispered, her voice ragged with grief. “You will yet make the Father proud.”

As the blood seeped into the ragged pit at the center of his chest, the boy’s eyelids slowly lifted, revealing blackened eyes that belonged to no human.

But then, this child wasn’t human.

He was a shifter born, Father bred.

His destiny had changed, but the end goal would remain the same.

The Priestess of la Secte Rouge would see to that.

Seven

Cade

The second the book collided with Grace, no longer in the shape of a tome that was worthy of Uncle Ethan's library, but disintegrated into the tiniest of particles, I knew it was the book.

I'd come across the legend of it before, and even though I hadn't had the chance to see it up close and personal like Grace had, where we were, what had happened, who my mate was, it all confirmed something to me.

It was the Mother's Lore.

I had just never heard of it reacting the way it had, and never disappearing into a person.

It popped up through the annals of time, guiding the Mother's people in a way that required a deity’s steerage. When a decision needed to be made that required the prompting of a goddess, the book appeared.

And once that decision was made, it disappeared.

Like it had never existed.

In my own family, I had a feeling it had been pivotal. My uncles’ mother had learned of a ‘rite’ where sacrificing herself would lead to her son gaining a mate, his pack, in turn, would gain an omega. Along the way, she'd been given a second chance, and we all knew that the big she-wolf that protected Aunt Sabina, whose pups guided her children, one of whom followed Knight around as a constant companion, was that same mother–Merinda.

I wasn’t like Knight, and this was proof I wasn’t like Grace either. For different reasons.

I got the feeling no one was like Grace, and this entire scenario seemed to be why. We’d known she was born to be different, and we’d known we were destined to stay by her side as she did whatever the Mother planned for her. But this was a thousand times more than what I’d anticipated, and as a kumiho, even an unawakened one, I knew to anticipate a lot.

My mother and father weren’t like regular parents. Sure, they’d held me as I slept when I awoke with a bad dream as a child, and they fed me and sheltered me, loved me more than most parents were capable of. But they treated me as an equal.

To them, I wasn’t a child.

I was a partner in a future we were building together.

The kumiho were enchanted beasts, destined to know too much. To be the world’s Wikipedia, except we didn’t come with a website that had a nifty search engine.

What we knew, remained secret.

Usually even from an unawakened kumiho.

My father, as a teenager, had been kept in the dark about his future, about what he’d inherit, but that had led to him treating me differently. Breaking with tradition. Something that had infuriated my grandfather to no end. To this day, eleven years after the first time my father shared something with me that I should only learn upon my ascension, he and my grandparents weren’t on speaking terms.

They lived in their suite of rooms in the packhouse, keeping to themselves aside from when it came down to pack events, and maintained a distance from my parents.

They softened around me, but not entirely. I remembered warm hugs from my grandmother, the soft pat of a hand to the back of my neck when my grandfather was pleased with something I’d done.

Now, there was just formality. Politeness.

It was aided by the fact we didn’t live in the Choi packhouse. We stayed with Knight’s family, because Grace reacted poorly when we were separated, and me and Knight didn’t fare much better. Not that he’d admit that.

Tonight’s mess was proof of that.

It was hard to be patient with him, hard when I was younger than my cousin and somehow saw and knew more than he did, but I knew casting blame, shifting guilt, would only make it harder for Grace.

She needed us.

What she didn’t need was us at each other’s throats, even if it started with my protecting her mate bond with Knight. She could never know what he’d done with that bitch Ashley. It would devastate her. Destroy her trust. Who could blame her either?

I’d vowed to always tell my mate the truth, but in this instance, the truth would harm her, and I wasn’t about to allow that to happen. I’d just keep an eye on Knight, be his conscience, because in front of me, I had proof that Grace was different.

Knowing it and seeing it were two separate things entirely, and seeing it was believing.

Maybe even that fuckwit, Knight, recognized it too.

Now wasn’t the time to huff at his idiocy, I’d done that earlier after we’d settled Grace into bed after her episode, but watching her amid the ground of Nevaehai, I felt like thumbing my nose at him. If we’d been in a scene from Romeo & Juliet, I would have done. As it stood, the idiot didn’t even know that was an insult.

“Grace?” Knight rasped, breaking into my thoughts. “Where did the book go?”

I turned to him, and jolted at the sight of his eyes. Grabbing him by the shoulder, I forcibly dragged him nearer to me and stared at them even as he tried to bat me away.

“He’s been touched by the Mother, Cade,” Grace intoned softly, her voice like hers but not. “Just as you have, as I have, and as Daniel has.” Her smile was calm, serene, unlike Grace too. “Our purpose is just beginning.”

“That sounds like something from the beginning of a horror movie,” Knight muttered, before he finally karate-chopped my wrist to break my hold on him. “What’s wrong with my eyes anyway?”

“They’re golden,” I said dryly, watching as his head whipped around to gape at me.

“Huh?”

“Golden.”

“He’s special,” Grace said.

“He’s certainly fucking something,” I grumbled under my breath, earning a distracted glower from my cousin.

His uneasiness was twofold. Sure, he’d just learned that he had golden eyes when normally he didn’t, but more than that, he was scared I’d be indiscreet, and he was only scared because he’d been an idiot.

Because I was no idiot, I wasn’t going to say a damn thing but if it kept him on a leash, I was fine with that.

“Is there something wrong with my eyes?” he asked warily. “Why are they—”

“Golden?” I prompted.

“Because we’re in Nevaehai. This is our true home.”

The tone of her voice was starting to make me prickle with discomfort.

Grace was standing here. Looking at me. Talking to me. But it wasn’t her.