So, I thought weakly, there might be someone who does know. The only problem… was that it was the previous leader of the Northern Pack. The Alpha who…

I grumbled to myself as I sat back down, leaving the book open on the desk in front of me as I did.

He wouldn’t tell me.

In fact, he wouldn’t tell anyone.

He had that kind of an annoying personality, even while in prison. Everyone in this castle knew that.

Maybe someday he’d crack. Maybe it’s still possible. I should get all of the evidence I have first, shove it in his face, and demand answers.

I shook my head faintly. Something like this, something that one Alpha would mention to the next, to keep the information hidden while also guaranteeing its survival…

He’d have said to the Alpha to take over after him.

He had three daughters.

The way the succession would’ve gone – it meant the oldest would get the next title. And considering how fickle life and death was with wolf shifters, the others in direct line for the title might not even have to do anything underhanded to get it.

The fact that my mind was even going to that was definitely saying something. It was all written down in our history. The Norcell wolves were not the nice ones. You want nice, you go to literally anyone else. Well, at least that was how it was in the past. I considered mother to be nice. I thought I was pretty nice, usually.

The Northern Pack was stopped in that tradition anyway. Though the pack might one day fall to my hands, it would be if my parents thought it was a good choice. Mother was of the Norcell line, just like me, and those who still liked the tradition of the Northern Pack in Norcell hands, without a care to the exact shifter descendent, were still living in the area. It would stop fights before they start if it stayed with a Norcell, even if mom was nominated for the role by all of her buddies after they took down the previous Alpha.

It wasn’t as if there weren’t a lot of us carrying the bloodline, but the one my grandfather, the previous Alpha, would’ve chosen to take over, had he been a better person and not shunned and tortured all of his children, would not have been my mother.

She was second eldest.

It was her half-sister.

My grandmother was actually a witch, making my mother and her twin sister half-witch. The other half was obviously wolf, but…

Who knew if she could even use magic or spells. It wasn’t like we were taught that over here.

And technically, since it was my family… I was also part witch. Just a little. It didn’t make me feel any different.

I knew despite how talented my grandmother might have been, their talents were not something that was entirely inherited. Their power levels could exceed their parents, or not ever come close. They also had specialties, certain affinity to types of spells. Destruction, creation, healing… the list was infinite.

Liala, my grandmother, had an affinity to creation spells.

And though she ended up as the mate to grandfather for 20 years, she wasn’t the first.

He’d had one daughter before that pairing.

My Aunt Miyra, 100% wolf shifter and the eldest of the three, was happily helping her mate in a different pack. Lynn and Josephine were their kids. Technically, if we were to get into it, they’d also be up for the spot of next Northern Alpha if that tradition stayed.

There were a lot of those who had Norcell blood.

Roughly close to half of the people my age that I hung out with, even including Fallyn in that mix… about half were somehow related to a Norcell. Obviously, Fallyn wasn’t.

And–

I tilted my head in surprise. I didn’t even know much about where he came from at all.

I knew a lot about quite a number of people in my so-called social circles, even if they didn’t tell me. But not him. He never said his previous last name, the one he had before he was adopted.

I sat back with a sigh. It was weird. I was almost more frustrated by that than Jade’s story.

Truthfully, if he had shared his last name, I would’ve found out everything related to it. I would’ve combed through books ten times over to find information even vaguely related.

I’d done it before.

Not with him, obviously, but with another friend.

Blackstones.

Jane, my dear friend, and William, her brother who was also my friend… Both came from a tragic history. In the times where the Norcell line flourished, the Blackstone bloodline got significantly smaller. They’d been hunted down and killed, some… sometimes by Norcell shifters themselves.

I’d looked into anything that might help them, anything at all, only to find things that threatened to tear out my heart. All I found was tragedy. Heartbreak. Death.

There was even a note in a book – I stood up to grab it, knowing just the number of pages I needed to move by touch alone, to find it again. I gently turned the final page and reread the words that were there. I’d read them quite a number of times.

In short, Jameson Blackstone was called to go to the Nixtin Cliffs by a guest in the Northern Pack. He complied. And then he never made it back from the trip. He didn’t make it back to his daughter. A search, in a different pack nearby was called, and they found his body leaning up against the side of the cliff, at the very bottom, drained of all blood.

Ten years later, the daughter was killed, found on the boarder of a pack, and her son, just seven years old, had managed to make it to a friendly pack, where his wounds got treated from the same attack.

It was like that, over and over, everywhere, just for Blackstone wolf shifters.

And I decided against telling Jane and William of it. They were already living with the burden of their name. They didn’t need sadness and helplessness piled into the mix.

I put the book back, glancing at Jade’s journal again.

If the witches come to erase any bit of the past with Jade’s name or life mentioned at all, and managed to call it a success without the discovery of this journal, it meant she had to have been somewhere in these other books at one point. They’d come later to clean up, either making the page blank, a part of the page blacked out, or tear the pages out and burn them completely.

I’d seen all sorts of that in those books. If I started at the oldest, there was a crapload of events piled in there. Notes all over the little margins, words squeezed into the gaps between different lines of words… it was a mess. And there was a lot of mess to sort through.

However, if I started more recent, despite the lack of mess, the notes were a little less detailed. Hair color and stature were not mentioned on anyone, not that they were needed in the first place, but there might be just a small detail of the necklace or scratched marks on the bookcase that could lead me to the right time and event.

But, also with starting at the newer ones meant going through more recent history, and there was quite a bit of that.

I sighed. There was no winning on this, was there?

Maybe it would be best to take a break for the night.

I glanced over, seeing the time.

Ah.

Well, maybe I should do that today. It was about time.

I stood, tucking Jade’s journal into the drawer on the desk, closing and putting away the rest of the books for the night before leaving the room.