The Prophecy Read online

  “I don’t care what your prophecy says,” I said. “I am not marrying my own brother or doing . . . that with him. Ever. Ew!”

  My father gave Sebastian a hard look but spoke directly to me. “You cannot take everything quite so literally, Sarah.”

  Now that I thought about it, there was something vaguely familiar about the marrying and producing offspring part of the prophecy. And then it occurred to me that it sounded a lot like the Conditional Blessing issued by Katori the day Shyla saved me.

  “We need your help,” Sebastian said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “My help?”

  “Not just your help. Caleb’s, too.”

  I took a gulp of my tea, wincing as it burned my throat. “Good luck convincing Caleb to help you. He only just found out that the man he thought is his father really isn’t. And he probably thinks you don’t want him anyway,” I added.

  “Why would he think that?” my father said, genuinely confused.

  I splayed my hands. “Charley came to you once, before my mother died. Isn’t that right?”

  He nodded. “Yes, that is correct,” he said slowly, as though trying to put the pieces together himself.

  “Why?” I asked, even though Sebastian had told me this much already before. I wanted to hear it from my father now.

  “I hadn’t seen Charlene in years. She came with the boy—with Caleb. He was maybe eleven or twelve. It was the first time I’d ever seen him, but she refused to let me go to him. I only saw him from a distance. I’ve never known what, if anything, she told him about me. But it was clear she was using him as a pawn to get to me, and I couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t love her.”

  “Not even for the sake of her son, as well as yours?”

  “I refused to betray my love for your mother. I will never love another woman the way I loved her. And I refused to let her manipulate me or Caleb.”

  Sebastian rolled his eyes and jerked his thumb at my father. “He’s a martyr, this one.”

  My father turned a hard glare on him. “Giving up the child, or children,” he said, turning his gaze to me, “that you love is the ultimate sacrifice. If I thought accepting Charlene into my life was best for Caleb, I would have done so long ago. But I killed a woman. I couldn’t let either of you be near me, no matter how much I wanted you. I’m dangerous.”

  So that’s what it really boiled down to. My own people had been saying all along that he was a monster. What’s sad was he believed it himself.

  I reached out and touched the back of his clasped hands. He looked down at my hand on his and closed his eyes. “You’re not dangerous. It was an accident,” I insisted.

  He shook his head. “It was a tragedy that could have been prevented.” He waved his hand, dislodging my grasp. “Regardless, I knew that Caleb was better off with his mother and her people.”

  “But don’t you see how he could think that you just didn’t want him?”

  My father nodded. “I do now.”

  “For years I wondered what you might be like,” I said.

  He looked at me then, a terrible sadness in his eyes. “And are you disappointed?”

  I searched his face and at last shook my head. “Not at all.” He looked down and I saw the muscles of his throat work as he swallowed.

  “The fire,” I said, which made him look up again. “A man named Victor Hunt might have been the one to set it, but I don’t think he was acting alone.”

  “You suspect Charlene,” he said with a frankness that at once told me he’d considered the same thing at some point over the years.

  I nodded. “You do, too?”

  He took a deep breath. “I thought, but I didn’t want to believe. It’s just more death on my hands.”

  I started at that. “On your hands? But you’re not responsible for the fire. You didn’t kill my mother and grandparents.”

  “I might as well have struck the match. Had I not turned Charlene away—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, more firmly this time.

  Sebastian cleared his throat impatiently. “Enough about whose fault it is or isn’t. The prophecy. What are we going to do about that?”

  In all the talk about Charley and her evil-doings, I’d completely forgotten about the prophecy. “All right. Tell me more about it,” I said. “What does it say?”

  “It’s an old prophecy, told to children from the time they are in their crib,” my father said.

  “Like a bedtime story,” Sebastian put in.

  “I never thought it was real, and I certainly didn’t think I would have any involvement in it,” my father said. “The prophecy claimed a child of a wolf would be reborn with great powers.”

  “Not born, but reborn?”

  I thought back to this past summer when I’d been lying on my deathbed with a raging fever. Shyla had breathed new life into me, and passed on her powers. Sebastian and my father listened with rapt attention as I related those few awful days when I thought I was going to die.

  “So you really think that Caleb and I represent the Sun and Moon and that we are the keys to breaking the curse?”

  They looked at each other and then back at me, answering in unison, “Definitely.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Does the prophecy say how to break the curse, or exactly what we need to do?” I stabbed my fork into a plate of steaming scrambled eggs and shoved them in my mouth, manners completely forgotten for the moment. I hadn’t eaten anything at all that morning, and I was beyond starving.

  “The prophecy speaks of the marriage between the Sun and the Moon and the birth of a new tribe,” Sebastian said. He bit the corner off a piece of toast dripping with melted butter. “That’s all.”

  I stopped chewing and stared at him. “That can’t be all. There has to be more to it than that.”

  He pointed his toast in my direction and said, “Fine. Consider it the condensed version. But that’s all I’ve got.”

  I took a tentative bite from a small dish of grits—a food I’d heard of but never actually tried before—and dug my spoon deeper into the hot ground corn when I decided it wasn’t so bad. The consistency was a bit like polenta, which Meg cooked often.

  “It’s better with shredded cheddar on top,” Sebastian said with a nod at this southern delicacy.

  “I’ll remember that next time,” I said, hoping there might really be a next time. I barely knew my uncle and father, but I wasn’t ready for this brief encounter to be a one-time thing.

  “We know the prophecy isn’t referring to an actual marriage,” my father said. “So it must be referring to the magic with which your Spirit Leader, Katori, has blessed you both; a magic that Caleb was born with and one that you inherited. A powerful magic kept safe within the souls of all who were entrusted with it before you.”

  Sebastian stared at him, his fork poised in the air. “Very insightful, big brother.”

  “How do you know so much about Katori and the Spirit Keepers?” I asked my father.

  “We might come from different tribes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear. That doesn’t mean we don’t take the time to learn.”

  I swallowed another bite of grits and pushed the dish aside, suddenly not very hungry anymore. “Do you think that this was, you know, destined to happen?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand why things happen the way they do,” he said. “The way of things are often beyond our understanding. But I have to believe that your gifts, and Caleb’s, were not meant to be wasted.”

  I spread my hands. “Okay. So now what?”

  “I would like to talk to Caleb,” he said promptly. “Then maybe we’ll know what to do next.”

  But somehow I didn’t think figuring out what to do next was going to be as simple as sitting around and just talking about it. For one, I didn’t have a clue about how we were supposed to remove the curse. For another, I didn’t think Charley would be too thrilled to have Lucas anywhere in the vicinity of her son.

 
I was just about to open my mouth to say I would talk to Caleb first and ease him into the whole thing when my father interrupted my thoughts. “You can ride with me,” he said.

  “Ride with you? Where are we going?”

  He rose from his seat and looked down at me. “To meet my son, of course.”

  At first, the drive home was unbearably awkward. I had tried to weasel my way on the back of Sebastian’s motorcycle, despite the gray, chilly day. After all, frozen limbs seemed a lot more preferable than being trapped alone in a car with a man I’d known for just a few short hours.

  “Give him this moment,” Sebastian had said to me in an undertone, placing his hands firmly on my shoulders and steering me in the direction of the car. “He will not ask it of you, but I will.”

  I was deeply mortified and too shy to say anything for several miles. And whether out of respect for my feelings or because he felt the same way, my father didn’t utter a word himself.

  But then I began to relax and notice certain things about my father that further cemented him in my mind as a mortal man and not some mythological beast; like how he drove a Subaru, and how he kept the inside of his car impeccable except for a lone Trident gum wrapper on the floor by my feet. There was a handful of spare change in the cup holder of the middle console, which jangled with the constant vibration of the car.

  Judging by his collection of CDs—which included the likes of DeVotchKa and Edward Sharpe and The Black Keys—he had eclectic tastes. I ran a finger down the spine of one of the plastic cases, remembering. My mother had always bucked popular trends. She’d nearly flipped when my birthday wish-list one year included Kelly Clarkson’s debut album. I laughed at the memory of her feigned shock and heartfelt claim that I couldn’t be her daughter; no way.

  My father glanced at me, smiling hesitantly. “What’s so funny?”

  But it was my memory, and my memory alone, and I wasn’t prepared to share. “Nothing. I was just thinking about something. It’s not important.”

  Instead, I touched the wolf pendant hanging from his rearview mirror and set it swinging with a flick of my finger. The sun glinted off the small gray body, catching in the folds and crevices of its pewter fur.

  “A little ironic, don’t you think?” I asked.

  His eyes flicked to the pendant. “Your mother gave that to me,” he said in his soft tenor.

  “Oh.”

  I returned my hand to my lap, feeling that I had somehow violated one of his memories of her. What had they been like together, back then?

  “You can have it if you like,” he said, but somewhat reluctantly I thought.

  I shook my head, although I would have liked nothing more than to clasp the thin leather cord around my neck and feel a physical reminder of my mother’s presence there, against my heart for always.

  “No. It belongs to you.”

  I resumed staring out the passenger-side window, our conversation exhausted for the time being. After a few minutes, my father broke the silence with a deliberate clearing of his throat.

  “Sarah, I was hoping we could use this time alone to talk.”

  I shrugged, still not looking at him. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Well, aren’t there questions you have, things you want to know?”

  The trouble was I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin. My blood pulsed with curiosity, and yet a part of me felt I had no right to pry into his personal life, whether we shared the same DNA or not. But he had extended the invitation, and I grabbed it.

  “There is one thing I’ve been wondering about.”

  “Just one thing?” he said. His voice was light now, trying to make a joke of it.

  I turned to him, fixing him with a glare. “If you never loved Charley in the first place, how could you . . . you know . . . Caleb?”

  Caleb’s name came out in a whisper, and at first I wasn’t sure if he had heard me. But then his grip on the steering wheel tightened; the only outward betrayal of his emotions.

  “Love and sex are not always mutually exclusive.” He glanced at me and gave me what I considered a very parental look. “Although, for you, I hope they will be.”

  I was only too relieved when he turned his eyes back to the road before the full heat of embarrassment made its way from my neck to my cheeks.

  “That’s not a real answer,” I mumbled, in disbelief that he had actually said that to me. He’d been absent from my life for the past seventeen years, so where did he get off trying to lecture me about the dos and don’ts of my love life?

  “Charlene was fun and exciting,” he went on. “And beautiful. We were both young and impulsive.” He glanced at me again. “It happened just the one time.”

  “I hear once is all it takes,” I said, partly out of anger, and partly to cover up my own lingering embarrassment.

  He glanced at me again in surprise and then roared with laughter. “Indeed, sometimes it is,” he said, still chuckling. After a few moments he turned serious once more.

  “Charlene and I . . . it happened before I even met your mother.” He sighed then, in memory. “We fell for each other hard and fast, your mother and I. And once Charlene discovered I had feelings for Melody, she stopped coming around. I didn’t even know about the pregnancy, or Caleb, until later.”

  “She never told you she was pregnant?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “And what would you have done if she had?”

  “I don’t know,” my father said, very quietly.

  “You don’t know?” I wanted to believe my father was an honorable man, but his answer sounded less than compelling.

  “I found out Charlene was pregnant only when Melody told me she’d married a man named Nathan Moon. Very suddenly, too. I assumed, we all assumed, that the child was his. Charlene was very—”

  “Promiscuous?” I supplied.

  The corner of his mouth pulled up in a grin. “I was going to say friendly and outgoing. It wasn’t exactly a surprise to me that she married and started a family at such a young age.”

  “But I don’t understand why she would keep the pregnancy a secret from you or, worse, pass the baby off as someone else’s.”

  My father’s shoulders rose and fell. “I suppose it was safer to say he belonged to another man—a man from her own tribe, I mean—than to admit her involvement with me.” He turned to me then. “Your mother took a great risk herself. Had the tribe found out about us—”

  “But they did find out,” I said, more angrily than I’d meant to. “That night, when you stormed the Katori reservation and my mother proclaimed her love for you. That moment changed everything for my family.”

  The words hung suspended in the air, echoing with accusation. I could only imagine how they must sound to him. But I couldn’t have taken them back, even had wanted to. And I wasn’t sure I did.

  “I am sorry, Sarah. I never meant for anyone to get hurt. ”

  “No,” I whispered, with a soft exhalation of air. “I don’t suppose you did.”

  I leaned back in my seat then and kept my eyes trained on Sebastian’s motorcycle in the lane just ahead of us. I counted slowly to ten, letting the tension dissipate before finally summoning the nerve to ask my next question.

  “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “You know, becoming a wolf every night?”

  My father gave me a brief look, but not so brief that I missed the surprise evident in his eyes. He took a very deep, very loud breath. “It’s a prison I cannot escape.”

  I shuddered involuntarily. “It sounds terrible.”

  He nodded. “It is. My life is not truly my own. It is not something I want my own son to experience.”

  My fingers on the arm rest tightened as I sat up straighter in my seat. Caleb having to endure the change himself had never occurred to me. “Caleb is half Manaquay and half Katori. Do you really think the curse will affect him, too?”

 
; My father’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “I don’t know. It could. The change typically happens once the males of our tribe reach maturity. But like you said, Caleb is not full-blood Manaquay. There are so many unknowns.”

  “Does Charley have any idea what could happen to him?”

  “She knows. When Charlene told me that Caleb was mine, I asked her to tell him what she knew of my people. I begged her to tell him the truth.”

  “But she didn’t,” I said. “Caleb had no idea that Nathan Moon wasn’t his real father until last night.” And last night seemed like a long, long time ago.

  My father’s brow creased and he shook his head. “I can’t believe she never told him.”

  “Can’t you?” The question was rhetorical, and my father didn’t answer. “Caleb was totally shocked when he found out. Can’t say that I blame him,” I muttered.

  “But why?” my father said, more to himself than to me. “Why would she keep something so important from him?”

  I could only guess why, and I felt sick when I considered the depths of Charley’s vengefulness. My father had broken Charley’s heart by denying her once. Years later, when she discovered that Caleb possessed a powerful magic within him, she’d gone to my father. Surely he could love her, if only for the sake of their son. But he had denied her again and, as punishment, she had denied Caleb the opportunity of ever knowing his real father, as well as the truth about his heritage.

  My father spoke then, his words bold and vehement. “I cannot allow the change to happen to Caleb.”

  “Well you can’t exactly stop it if it’s going to happen,” I pointed out.

  “The change can be stopped, Sarah.”

  “The prophecy,” I said with some impatience. “Yes, I know. But the question is how can it be stopped? We still don’t know that much.”

  “Are you prepared to do whatever is necessary in order to change many lives?”

  I stared at him. Not for the first time, I wondered how I’d got saddled with this responsibility. Why me? Would there ever be a time when my life would be relatively uncomplicated again, when all I had to worry about was Katie Cunningham and Jasmine, and what shade of lip gloss to buy?