last Hope

Putting Our Heads Together

Daniel

    *Three days later*

It’s been a few days since Lily was taken and no has been able to track her down yet. No one even knows where to start. However, I’ve had a bad feeling ever since she vanished. It’s almost a familiar feeling but I can’t quite place it. 

“I should’ve known. I should have never left her alone!” Luca has been like this since Lily went missing. I can’t say that I haven’t felt the same guilt but… 

“Luca, you couldn’t have known she would be taken. No one saw this coming.” He’s starting to get on my nerves. 

It really doesn’t make any sense, no one even saw her with our Dad when he left. He would’ve had to have had someone helping him and he also would have had to have been planning on doing this for a while. 

I just don’t get it, he hurt Lily almost every day so what's the point in taking her away. Because she’s the oldest? Because she’s a girl? Maybe it's because she’s shifting age. I don’t know, it seems more like something Mom would do. She seemed to go after Lily a lot when we were young. 

Wait a minute. 

“That’s it!”

Luca

“That’s it!” Daniel shoots up all of a sudden and rushes over to me. 

“It has to be our Mom.” He says when he’s in front of me. 

“Your Mom?” I questioned, giving him a look telling him to further explain. 

“Our Mom went after Lily a lot when we were kids. I never really understood why but she did.” I give him a look telling him I am still confused and starting to get pissed again. 

He takes a step away from me and looks down, bowing his head. I could tell Leo was starting to take over again and my Alpha blood was starting to boil over, and so could he. 

‘I’m getting impatient not being able to be with our mate, or understand what he’s trying to tell us!’ I took a second to calm down and get Leo under control again before telling him to continue. 

He hesitates for a second but continues. “The only way Dad could have gotten Lily away and stayed hidden would be by using magic. Our Mother is a Witch and doing something like this wouldn’t really surprise me. I just can’t believe it took me this long to realize she might be involved.” 

“But then why would they leave you and Andrew? They are your parents after all, I would think they would take you to when they left.” 

“Well…” He looks away as if trying to think of a reason. 

“Our parents never really acted much like ‘parents’. Lily pretty much raised us after moving away from the pack.” 

I think back to when Lily and I were talking about her past the day she had been taken. 

“She mentioned that.” He looks at me like I've grown another head. 

“She told you?” 

“Yeah?” It was my turn to look at him with a confused expression. Again! 

“I’m just surprised. You two must be really close for her to have told you about what happened after we left. She hasn’t really talked to anyone except me and Andrew in the last ten years, and even that was still pretty limited.” 

“Really?”

“Yeah, she’s more like a Mom to Andrew and I than our actual Mother.” I was a little surprised. I knew she had to take care of them, but I didn’t realize that it was that extreme. She made it seem like it was no big deal when she was telling me about it. 

“Our Mom was always trying to control her, and after we had moved from the pack Lily never trusted our parents again and hated them for what they did. She was so sad that she was forced to leave the pack, and especially because she had to leave you. I even heard her call out for you in her sleep when we were younger.” 

“She did?” It makes me happy to know that she missed me so much, but I wish she wouldn’t have had to go through that in the first place. I was devastated when my Dad told me they weren’t coming back the day after they had left the pack. I even stopped talking to everyone for a few weeks. I just hid out in our treehouse by myself. 

“Ya, she did. When we were young I would go in her room when I got scared and didn’t want to be alone. She called out for you all the time, usually crying before I would wake her up. It always scared me to see her like that, she always seemed so strong. It just wasn’t right to see her in that state.” 

Finally understanding the relationship between Lily and her brothers, or at least Daniel, made me feel relieved in a way knowing she at least had them. But it made me sad at the same time. She never should have had to be that strong, not when she was so young. 

    Leo chimes in all of the sudden. ‘We need to find her before something bad happens. If her Mom is involved we may never see her again if we don’t find her in time.’ 

    ‘Agreed.’

Putting our heads together we come to the conclusion that we would need a Witch if we wanted to find Lily. Luckily, our pack has a few Witches that are allies and they were willing to help. 

Finally, we were able to track her down a few hours later. Turns out Lily’s Mom is a bit more powerful than we initially thought, but we got a location. They had taken Lily about three hours outside of the pack's territory. It should only take about an hour in my wolf form though, maybe half an hour. I left as soon as we had the location, shifting mid-jump out the door in the direction of my missing mate. 

“Hold on Lily. I’m coming.”