"You came to talk of the attack? Not about my son?" Her tone held hints of mild displeasure, but I couldn't be sure.
I was unsuccessful at keeping the surprised look off of my face. Anna's eyes seemed to analyze every single facial twitch. Something about her gaze made me feel as if I were an auction item being appraised.
I chose my next words carefully. "Why did you think I was coming here about your son?"
"I thought maybe you'd discovered that he was your tether, but I suppose he's not."
"My-my tether? What the hell is that?"
She clicked her tongue. "Oh dear, someone has done a horrible job training you, haven't they?"
She stood from her place on the pillow to shuffle through some of the belongings on a wooden desk. I was too confused to answer so I just watched her. She returned a moment later with an old cloth-bound notebook in her hands. When she handed it to me I felt a rush of static through my fingernails and into my bones. It was power. Whatever I was holding in my hands was pure and undiluted power. I wanted to drop it, but I couldn't.
"What is this? What is a 'tether?'"
"That," she said motioning to the book and lighting some incense in the center of the tent, "is called the Codex of Whispers."
I glared at the book in my hands. It was barely a book, more like a pamphlet or a notebook. "Pretty pretentious name for something so small."
Anna's mouth formed a straight line. She obviously didn't think I was very funny.
"That pretentious book is one of the first journals from your kind," she explained and I shrunk. "They were called Whisperers, you know, the daemons because they were in tune with the spiritual energy of the ley lines that spoke to them in whispers. The sensations, they said, were like feathered touches."
"Mine don't feel like whispers," I mumbled. "It feels like someone is yelling in my ear or dragging me into a pit."
Anna's smile turned patronizing as she looked down on me. Her clothing, while neutral colored, still radiated a type of authority- or perhaps it was the woman wearing it who had assumed authority. She wore a crisp white shirt that billowed as she walked and khaki dungarees that ended just above her bare feet. Auburn hair was cut above her ears making her face seem more severe and her features more pointed.
"From what I've heard, you're stronger than most so that's to be expected," she crossed her arms. "It's also why you need to find your tether."
I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. "You still haven't explained what that is!"
Her eyes were quick to narrow at my reaction and I took two deep breaths before folding my hands in my lap. I was sick of not having answers. However, yelling at a super-powerful alpha wouldn't get me anywhere. At least, not with this alpha.
"Please, I'm desperate to know. I feel like someone told me the basics of swimming in a classroom and then dumped me in the middle of a riptide. I've got no idea what I'm doing and nobody seems to have any answers on why I can do the things I can do."
Anna must have sensed the turmoil in my words because her face softened. She took the seat directly across from me. Her eyes were sharp.
"You feel like your drowning?"
I looked at my hands. "Y-yeah, it's like I know I'm drowning, and I know I shouldn't take a breath because I'll let all of this water- this bad stuff in, but I can't help it. I have to. I have to breathe it in."
My voice shook toward the end and my hands were twisting in my lap.
And I sink further and further every time I open my mouth, I added silently in my head.
Anna didn't interrupt or offer up any response. She only watched me with mild, intellectual interest.
I continued because I couldn't stop.
"I feel the darkness around me, choking me, and it's gotten worse since I've gotten here. I feel the death of your people like an anchor on my foot pulling me. There's no escape from it, either. I feel it in my dreams. This...abyss surrounds me and sometimes I see glimpses of a light that I need to get to. But I can't."
"That," Anna interrupted. "Is your tether."
My head shot up. "What is? The light?"
"Yes. As you said, the death of my people is serving as an anchor to you and you will always feel it. Destruction, death, darkness it's one half of the coin that daemons are constantly flipping."
She put her hand on mine and I almost coiled back at the sensitive gesture. I felt and saw nothing, however, from her touch. Her mind and her feelings were guarded. The white noise was off-putting as I didn't have to struggle through resisting the infiltration of her mind- off-putting but not unwelcome.
"What's the other side?" I asked quietly.
"Your tether. It's the thing or the person who pulls you back up to the surface of the water. It's the rope you cling to, the ladder you climb to resist the darkness."
I thought for a moment about what she said before I could react. Something to pull me out of the darkness- or someone. My brain wandered to someone in particular but I stopped myself before wandering too far. The rational part of me refused to go down that road, but the part of me- the part I barely understood, the one connected to the ley lines- told me otherwise.
"Do I get to choose who or what it is that pulls me back up?"
She let out a raspy laugh. "Unfortunately, nothing is that easy. All I can say is that I'm relieved that Gray is not yours."
"Why?"
Anna stood and wandered to the side of her tent where incense was burning. She lit one end of the stick and watched it burn, the flames reflected in her eyes.
"Wolves and daemons are two creatures that thrive off of the energy of the ley lines. When one is tethered to the other it creates an imbalance in energy and power. Werewolves are dark creatures, they can hardly help lead a daemon into the light."
My heart sank for reasons I wasn't interested in looking into.
"Just look at those boys you so love," she continued, "They're orphans now because of a tether made between a wolf and a daemon."
I stood then, my feet stumbling on the pillows thinking of the Joy boys and their parents. She simply raised an eyebrow, unconcerned. Anna Denvers was a woman with little facial expressions but an overwhelming, stifling presence.
"So even a tether can't save all daemons?"
She met my gaze. "No...especially when their tether is murdered."
"Hunters," I spat.
To my surprise, Anna laughed. There was no humor in the laugh but something about the action set me off. When I cocked my head, she simply shook her head in response. Tucker had said hunters killed his mother.
"I expected you to be smarter than this."
The realization hit me as I finally understood what she was implying. I felt the air leave my lungs. Anger, sadness, fear. All of them were present in my next words.
"You think Owein killed his own sister?"
Anna nodded.
"What?" I croaked.
"Owein's attacks have been going on a lot longer than anybody is willing to recognize. My pack won't go to war with him, his pack won't rise against him. He's trying to take over, and no one is willing to stop him. So he keeps attacking. He keeps killing."
Her voice lowered and mine came as almost a whisper. "Why?"
"The same reason an Alpha does anything. Power. The more you have the more you want."
To her, the explanation seemed substantial enough. To me, however, it didn't feel right.
She began pacing around the tent and my anxiety rose with every step she took. She was circling me, like a vulture ready to nose dive toward destruction. My discomfort was growing the more she was speaking. Her tone was beginning to shift and something didn't feel right. My neck craned to watch her movement, she would not see me afraid.
"Speaking from experience, Anna?"
"Perhaps."
The predatory grin on her face was unmistakable. I swallowed painfully. All I had to do was yell and Tucker and Ben would burst in the tent, but she would stop talking and I still had questions.
"You want a war, don't you?"
She stopped pacing. "Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you want retribution on the man that isn't just killing your people, but kidnapping them and doing God knows what to them? Sometimes evil is the only response to evil."
I blinked and stepped back a little. The killing I knew about, but the kidnapping? Not so much.
"Didn't know that, did you?" she seethed. "This man that you live with, this man that your friends follow, this man is a killer and a monster. Messages need to be sent."
Something clicked.
"Owein wouldn't hurt someone from his own pack. Not when he's trying to take over. But you would..." My voice threatened to falter, "You had Elias hunted, didn't you?"
She was quiet for a moment and my breath hitched as I waited for the answer. Then, she nodded.
"How else could we get his pack to wake up and look at the monster in front of them? I knew he was working with hunters, but how could I get his own pack to believe me? Owein is capable of terrible things, but nobody cared until you thought he hurt one of your precious Joys."
She was stepping closer to me now, and I could only back up so far. Her eyes were flashing between the normal green and the color of her wolf's eyes. A dark, all-encompassing violet. Rage seeped from her pores and I smelled it mixing with the incense. I swallowed and put my hands up as a barrier between the two of us.
"You have to listen to me, we didn't know what was happening to your pack. The Joys didn't know, but coming after a child was not the right thing to do."
She scowled. "I'd do it again if I had to. You have a brother, don't you? A human one? Owein wouldn't want anything to happen to his future step-son, right?"
I bristled at her thinly disguised threat.
"They would've helped you fight back. I would've helped you, but now you've made us enemies, and if you think I won't tell everyone what you did-"
An inhuman sound escaped her throat as she closed the distance between us quickly, her hand clasping around my throat. I felt pure and undiluted strength resonating from her hand as she spat the words at me.
"I do not take kindly to threats. Especially from weak little psychics."
I couldn't even scream out. Tucker's name bubbled up on my lips and Anna's hand squeezed tighter around my throat, killing any words that tried to escape. My hands scratched at her arms, her face, anything I could reach. Nothing deterred her and my vision was beginning to be blurred by little black dots.
I felt anger surge through her hand and into my throat. All of her sporadic emotions flitted in front of me like tastes and smells. Like with Tucker, I reveled in the strength behind the hand and it seeped into me.
I shut my eyes and was plunged into darkness.
Breathing was impossible so I focused on the energy that surged under my feet in this darkness I was wandering in. Different sounds surrounded me, something that seemed like voices, and more that seemed like screams. Piercing wails sounded like melodies around me. Then I saw it.
The tree was in the center of the abyss. And I saw the lines.
The different lines of magic that traced back to a different soul spiraled out from the tree-like veins. I maneuvered my way through the maze of strings that were ablaze in all different colors. I found my own string burning a bright gold and pulled on it a little. The light seemed to be fading, but when my fingers touched it I still felt a blazing heat.
Anna's hand tightened on my throat but I barely felt it as I walked along my own ley line. It shimmered in the darkness of my mind and was fading quickly as another red line crossed it. I took the foreign line in my hand and lifted it up to my eye to see. I recoiled a little as the screams got louder and I felt the vision and the tree become slightly blurred. I figured I didn't have much time. But a hollow voice told me what I needed to do. I lifted the line and inspected it closely.
Then, I bent it.
The pressure on my neck loosened and then was completely gone. I opened my eyes as a strangled cry escaped the alpha lying on the ground. She was gripping her head in pain, writhing at some unforeseen force that crippled her. Numbly, I watched the powerful woman seize back and forth on the ground. Power surged through my fingertips.
I reveled in her pain, liking that the power flowed through me. A hunger in my belly made me pull tighter on the line, twisting it to my will and bending Anna's strength to my own. My eyes saw nothing but her face contorted in agony and my ears heard nothing but the sound of her screams. Distantly, I heard mumblings of something else.
Then, like a rush of cold water, I was jolted out of my trance as someone shook my shoulders. I was shocked into releasing the line and Anna's pain ceased completely. She lay gasping on the ground.
"Lou!" The person shook me desperately. "Eloise, answer me. Answer me!"
I turned my head to look into familiar brown eyes and gasped as the dark sensation left me. His palms cupped my cheeks as he inspected my face.
Tucker was looking at me with a strange expression on his face. I couldn't place it. He looked between me and Anna as if wondering what question to ask.
His brown eyes were soft, comforting and I wanted to melt into them. One of his thumbs gently stroked my cheek as he scoured my face for some kind of answer.
"Are you alright?"
No, I thought.
Instead, I nodded and turned my head to the side. I couldn't meet his eyes. He seemed to understand and removed his hands from my cheeks.
"What the hell happened in here?" came Ben's voice from behind me.
I turned then and saw that Anna's four guards, Gray, Ben, and Tucker had all come running in at the sounds of her screaming. What a strange scene that must have looked like. The high schooler standing over the writhing alpha.
I wondered if they could see the darkness or if that was just inside me.
Anna gasped from the floor as she managed to pull herself up to her hands and knees. The look she shot me was a mix of fear and absolute rage. Tucker noticed and took a step in front of me, crossing his arm in front of my body as if to create some sort of barrier. He still thought I needed protection.
"Y-you bitch! Get that monster away from me. Kill her!" she commanded wildly.
Nobody in the tent moved. The four guards were still in shock from seeing their alpha in immense pain. Gray, Ben, and Tucker also had no intention of moving toward me. They all seemed wary of me. Well, besides Tucker.
I pushed the werewolf boy away from me and stepped toward the alpha. "You really think that's the best idea, Anna?"
She flinched away from me almost involuntarily.
"After all," I continued. "You've seen what I can do."
My eyes narrowed on her face and I knelt down beside her breathless form. She sneered at me, and I had to give her props. Despite the fear she now had, her anger was much more obvious.
She began to speak but I held up my hand.
"You don't speak anymore. Do you understand?" I whispered, so no one could hear. "The next time you come after one of my friends, I will make sure you feel that pain every moment of every day for the rest of your miserable existence."
With one last look, I stood and walked to the exit. Tucker and Ben trailed behind me, unsure of what to say or what to do.
Then, I turned.
"By the way, evil doesn't beat out evil. When you finally figure that out, give me a call. We'd be happy to have an ally."
And I left.