The Alpha's Forbidden Grimoire

chapter 5: The First Healing

Elara's POV

I couldn't sleep in the Luna quarters.

How could I? Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the smoking hole in the dining hall floor where my broth had eaten through stone. I saw Seraphina's face when Kade lifted her off her feet by her throat. I saw Kade pushing his plate toward me under the table like a guilty boy.

At midnight, someone knocked. Not Liam's soft knock. An Alpha knock. The kind that says open or I will break the hinges.

I opened it because I was a prisoner, not a guest.

Kade stood there in only sweatpants, bare-chested, breathing like he'd run ten miles. The black veins were worse in the dark. They started over his heart - a black, rotten knot that pulsed like a second, diseased heart. From there they crawled like dead roots up his neck to his jaw, down his arms. His skin around them was grey. Sweating. Feverish.

The guards behind him stared straight ahead, like they'd been ordered not to look inside the Luna's bedroom. Like they knew they'd die if they saw their Alpha like this - weak.

"The pain," he rasped, his voice stripped of all that cold Alpha arrogance. Just agony now. "It gets worse at night. Seer said... if you touch it, your magic will see it. Do it."

I stepped back. "You want me to touch you?"

"I want you to break what your kind did to me," he snapped, and then doubled over, his claws punching out and gouging deep lines into the doorframe. Black blood dripped from his nose. The same black blood my grandmother's books described when a blood curse finally reaches the heart.

He was going to die in my doorway.

"Get inside," I hissed, grabbing his burning arm before the guards saw. The second my skin touched his, the Grimoire tattoos on my arms - dormant since the fire - exploded with light. Blue-white moonlight racing from my wrists to my shoulders.

He stared at my glowing arms, gold eyes wide with disgust. "Witch light."

"Your mother's light," I shot back before I could stop myself.

His face twisted. Pure, old hate. "Don't you dare talk about her. She did this. She spelled my father into marrying her, killed his true fated mate, and then cursed us when he finally punished her for it. Witches don't love, Elara. They take. Just like you're going to take payment for this."

That was what he believed. That his mother was a monster who stole his father with a love spell.

I wanted to scream that Lyra was the only Luna who ever brought honey cakes to the Crowe children, but I didn't. Let him hate his mother. It was easier to hate him back.

I knelt in front of him as he collapsed onto the edge of the bed - his mother's bed - and hovered my hand over the black knot.

"My grandmother said a Blood Witch curse feeds on the bloodline," I whispered. "The more you hate your own blood, the faster it rots. No wonder you're dying so fast, Kade. You hate half of what you are."

He grabbed my wrist, hard. "Touch it. Or I will drag you to the cells and let Seraphina finish her poison job."

I slammed my palm flat over the knot.

The world didn't explode. It imploded.

Kade's POV

Her hand was ice. Then it was the hottest fire I had ever felt.

For four months, the rot had been cold inside my veins. Spreading, numb, dead. Nothing helped. Not shifting, not wolfsbane, not drinking until I couldn't stand.

Her touch was a brand. She burned straight through my chest and into the knot my mother left me.

I roared, my back arching off the bed, claws shredding my mother's silk sheets. The guards outside flinched but didn't move - Alpha order to not look.

I expected to see my mother's face. Smiling, triumphant, as her curse killed me.

I didn't. I saw only black. Endless black rot, and whispers. Hundreds of whispers in my father's voice, in my mother's voice, saying one thing: rotten blood, rotten blood.

And then - her.

Elara's magic wasn't gentle. It was furious. Blue light shot from her palm into my chest, fighting the black. Her tattoos were no longer just on her arms - they were crawling up MY chest, glowing gold now - my wolf's gold - battling the black veins.

For the first time in three years, the knot over my heart shrank. Just a centimeter. A sickening wet pop, like a blister bursting.

The pain... lessened. I could take a full breath without tasting grave dirt.

"Don't -" I choked out, my other hand flying up to grip her wrist, not to pull her away but to keep her there. "Don't let go."

Her eyes were solid white, glowing. Blood ran from her nose, but it floated in the air between us, red and bright. Her Grimoire was reading me, tasting how deep my mother's hate went.

"It's feeding on your own self-hate," she whispered, her voice echoing, not her own. "You hate your mother's blood in you so much, you're letting it kill you. You have to stop -"

"I can't," I snarled, but it was true. I hated the witch blood in me. Every day I looked in the mirror and saw her black hair, her witch eyes in mine. My father told me she spelled him, trapped him, killed his true mate Anya. How could I not hate her?

Her magic pulled harder. The black knot fought back, sending a lash of black energy up her arm.

Elara screamed.

The bond - the cursed mate bond I had been trying to choke all day - snapped wide open. I felt everything. Her terror of me, her grief for her twelve-year-old sister Mara who burned, her loneliness in that bookstore, her stubborn pride. And under it all, a thread of heat she hated, aimed at me. My wolf drank it in.

Vargr, silent for months, howled so loud my skull split: MATE. YOU HURT MATE. STOP.

The magic snapped like an overstretched chain.

Elara flew backwards and hit the vanity. The floating blood dropped. Her tattoos went dark instantly. She slumped, unconscious, blood still dripping from her nose, her skin ice cold.

I was across the room before I thought. I caught her before her head cracked open.

Too cold. Too pale. Pulse thready. My curse had fed on her because I let her take too much.

"No. No no no," I muttered, shaking her. Real panic - something I hadn't felt since I was nineteen watching the Crowe house burn and pretending I didn't care - clawed up my throat. "Elara! Witch, wake up!"

She didn't.

I did the one thing my father told me never to do. The thing that makes a werewolf bound to a witch forever.

I bit my wrist. Black and red blood welled - my cursed blood - and pressed it to her lips.

"Drink," I ordered, my voice broken. "That's an Alpha order, damn you, drink and live."

Her lips parted on a whimper. My blood went into her mouth, and her tattoos flared weakly blue again. A blood exchange. Sacred. Forbidden between wolf and witch. If the Elders saw, they'd kill us both.

Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused, looking right through me.

She lifted a shaking hand and touched my chest again, right where the knot had shrunk.

"You hate her," she whispered deliriously. "You really hate your own mother. Even though she gave you life."

"She cursed me," I said, my bloody wrist still at her mouth.

"She cursed your father," she mumbled, then her eyes rolled back and she went fully unconscious in my arms.

Behind me, I heard a gasp.

Seraphina stood in the doorway. Somehow out of the cells. Flanked by two of her loyal she-wolves. She was staring at the scene - me shirtless, bleeding from the wrist, holding a half-conscious witch in the Luna's bed, our blood mixing on the floor, my mother's sheets torn.

Her face went from shock to pure, murderous understanding.

"You gave her your blood," she whispered, staring at my wrist at Elara's mouth. "You blood-bound yourself to a Crowe witch. For a girl whose family your father burned."

She smiled then. A terrible, triumphant smile.

"Wait until the Elders hear about this, Alpha. Wait until they hear you put a witch in your mother's bed and fed her your blood."

Elara was dead weight in my arms.

And I knew, in that second, I had just given Seraphina the weapon to finally kill her.