“Blackstone,” I muttered. Lifting my head, I met Minnie’s gaze. “That’s why they wanted my blood, William’s blood. Dad’s. It would break the seal.”

She nodded, agreeing with my words.

“But that’s not the only way to break it.” She took a breath as I held mine, waiting on her words. “Just like if every Blackstone descendent died, it would also break the seal… However, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Her brows furrowed and she pursed her lips. Some of her dark hair slipped over her shoulder silently. “They knew the beast would someday get freed.”

“What do you mean?”

“A prophecy was formed as they sealed the cage,” she explained. “It carved itself in the rock – only witches and those with the Blackstone bloodline can even read it.”

“What does it say?”

Minnie held up a finger, only to notice a smudge of chocolate, which she quickly licked off.

“Only one thing can stop it,” she told us with certainty.

“What is it?”

Collectively, we all leaned forward, wanting to know what the key was. Minnie’s eyes jumped around to all of us. She shook her head, eyes widening in bafflement.

“It doesn’t say what, it just says one thing.”

She stuffed a marshmallow in her mouth the second she was done speaking.

“What else does it say?” Lee asked as he handed me a bundle of marshmallow chocolatey goodness that Jo passed our way.

Minnie snagged a drink from the bottle she’d kept stuffed between her thighs like a cupholder before continuing. She shook her head and cleared her throat, only to alarmingly nonchalantly bring up death.

“That the one who releases it will die.”

It was then we exchanged glances. The smore was half-eaten in my hand, nearly forgotten. Those words could mean a multitude of things. It was Will’s blood that was taken, but he looked fine, even after it had been used, so it wasn’t him the words referred to. But Myrus, on the other hand, had died. Maybe it was him that the prophecy was referring to? That even though he was already dying, it just sped up the process a bit?

“That the claws and teeth of a wolf will not harm it,” Minnie continued. I looked back at her, popping the remainder of the smore into my mouth and lightly dusting the crumbs on my fingers off on my pants. “That he must remember who he is, or the trees will be painted with blood and fire.” She looked down, uninterested in her own doomsday type of words, until she perked up again. “Oh! And, that he is a shifter of his own kind.”

She appeared as if she hadn’t even fully understood the gravity of her words. Like trees painted in fire and blood? Really? That wasn’t–

“Right. Sounds fun.” The words came from Lee’s mouth, in a dead monotone that I understood. I was feeling that too. Gently, I squeezed his hand once. Without looking, he squeezed mine back in the same manner. It was only after that, that I felt a sense of calm come over me. The tension was just a little less than it had been a moment before.

“Shifter. So, he has a human form?” Will reiterated.

“If he remembers how to change back.” Lynn added in.

Now that was a thought.

“Remember who he is?” I muttered.

Why would he need to remember who he is?

Had he forgotten?

Forgotten how to shift? Forgotten his own name?

Well, maybe the better question was how he managed to forget himself. For some reason, with hearing all this about how witches were meddling and whatnot, all I could come up with was that someone used spells or magic in order to make him forget.

“Do all shifters have mates?” Jo tapped the box of graham crackers on her lap. “Maybe that’s the ‘one thing’ that can stop him!”

“Who is his mate? You?” Lynn joked, sticking her tongue out at Jo.

“No, I’m just saying.” Jo nudged her shoulder with an added eye roll. Lynn laughed lightly until Jo threw a hand in her hair, ruffling it up.

“Hey!”

“Serves you right.”

This time, Lynn rolled her eyes, patting her head with her hands as if she could fix the mess her twin had made. Will tapped her hands lightly and got to work untangling the mess. He peeked over at Minnie as he did so.

“Did the High Witch tell you anything else?” he asked.

“That he’s royalty. The crowned prince, who wanted out of an arranged pairing.”

“Pairing? Like someone was choosing his mate for him?” I asked, appalled.

“Yes.”

One word. Just one. The worst possible answer to that question.

A chill settled upon my body as everyone else voiced their clear disgust at the notion. I stayed silent, a thought returning to my head. I glanced at my phone as Minnie explained the situation the poor shifter had been in.

“The arrangement was to settle a new division between two high powers, one in Asia, the other in Europe. Unite the families.”

“Wait. So, the other in the arranged pair… would’ve been a witch, right?”

“Correct.”

Oh…

But wouldn’t that be a bad thing?

I looked over at Minnie. We brought a witch with us. Will he be mad a witch showed up, even if she wasn’t the one in the original pairing?

I didn’t think on it for very long as the other thoughts circling my head won out. There was something I’d been requested to ask, and though everyone was here, it wasn’t as if this was completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

The topic of bonds, that is, mate bonds.

“Minnie?”

She turned to look at me with a curious expression.

“What is it?”

Everyone went silent as I gathered the courage to actually voice it aloud.

“You seem to know more about us wolf shifters than we do sometimes… even though we are wolf shifters too,” I said, going for the mildly lighthearted opening. The resulting chuckles and small laughs were expected. “I wanted to ask an odd question,” I added as things settled again.

“Sure. I’ll do my best to answer.”

“If a… bond is… like a mate bond, right?” I wasn’t sure how to explain it. It was a pretty foreign concept to me, as I’d never really considered it was possible. “Uh… if someone were, say, ugh, forced into making it, what kind of – I mean, would there be any side effects?”

I could feel the alertness of our little group jump up to another level. But most of all, there was a hole being seared into my face, coming from my right side. I glanced over to find Lee looking startled by my question. Discreetly, I shook my head once and mouthed a few words to him. He sat back in his chair a bit more comfortably, rubbing a circle with his thumb on the back of my hand, no longer boring holes into my face with an intense gaze.

Minnie, after a moment of thinking it over, gave me a strange look.

“Jane, what’s this all about?”

“It’s not about me. It’s someone else.” She says quietly. “They didn’t know they had a bond until it was broken.”

“What?!”

“Who?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t about to say explicitly where the request had come from. Focused, I waited on Minnie’s reply.

“Well… it’s tough to say. The one who was forced, was the one who was marked, right?”

She said that like it was obvious. But it wasn’t. I bit my lip and held back a groan. Well, an explanation was going to be necessary for this answer.

“No.”

Everyone stared at me with wide eyes. A piece of chocolate fell out of Will’s hand from where he was sitting next to me. Minnie’s face fell into a state of contemplation.

“What do you mean?”

“They don’t have a mark on them. The – the…” I sighed. I really wasn’t sure how to go about saying this. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to bring it up. “Hypothetical situation. So, person number one uses their twin abilities… like a secondary ability that is related to mind control or manipulation? And they took over the remaining wolf part of person number two while they’re knocked out cold.”

“Okay? And then…?”

This was where it got a bit complicated.

“Then they have person two mark… person three and subsequently… force person two to finish the bond, while they’re still unconscious?”

The crackling of the fire filled the silence as I pursed my lips and gazed down at the ground.

“That’s a very… specific situation, Jane.”

“It is.”

Minnie took a deep breath before responding further. “Well, the main part of bonds is that they’re aware and consent even subconsciously to it.” She gestured with her hands as she spoke. “Say, in an arranged pairing, if they give in to the way things are, letting the arrangement happen and not fighting it, even if they don’t particularly like the person, it would be different from if they were actively fighting it, even inside their minds, and still had to go through with it.” She tilted her head, focused. “So, given that situation you suggested, it’s likely that the person who has no recollection of it… they either can’t really feel any special connection to the one they marked, or they have conscious feelings that want to repel the person, sometimes coming out physically like nausea and vomiting – at least while the bond is active.”

It was like what he’d described, at least in part. The repulsive feelings.

“What if… they found their true mate while in a bond like that?”

“They’d still feel at least a minor connection to their true mate.”

“Even with the bond still in place.”

Minnie nodded. “It shows, just, it’s faded, so to speak. It wouldn’t be as strong. Mainly, that would be due to the fact that they don’t recognize the other bond that has been made. They’re unconsciously seeking out another better connection.” Her gaze narrowed as she stared at me. “There’s something else you want to ask.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a bit at the perceptiveness she had at times like this. “Yeah. So, in this hypothetical–”

Will held out a hand and stopped me.

“Are you just saying hypothetical for your own benefit? We’ve all figured out it isn’t hypothetical.”

I shot him a no-nonsense look and shrugged.

“It is for my benefit, just so you know. So, hypothetically…” I turned to look back at Minnie. “The marked one dies. The unknowing party would feel the bond break, right?”

“Yes. It would be just as painful as any normal bond breaking.”

There was one thing of all of this that I just didn’t get.

“Why might someone want to force a bond like that?” Even without knowing the consequences, it seemed ridiculous to be bound to someone who didn’t want to be there.

As I said those words, asked that question, a silence fell over us all again. It seemed it wasn’t just me. Not one of us could begin to contemplate why someone would go to such lengths for something that was bound to turn sour.

“They likely didn’t want to lose the person they chose,” called a calm voice across from me. “To anyone. Possessive and obsessive.”

To say we weren’t concerned would be a lie. One of the only two people here that wasn’t in a relationship had said those very words aloud. Seeing our startled gazes, she sighed.

“What? Look, I read more fictional books than anyone here right now,” Jo said, shaking her head. “But I think there are little truths to those stories. Sometimes people don’t learn the basics of rules, like consent. They think they need to take, to capture what’s theirs, no matter what. They get all – all crazy and riled up about what they think they have ownership over.”

After Jo’s words that made a bit too much sense for my liking, the topics slowly drifted into safer areas, like home and Lynn’s failed attempt at a garden. I mean, how do you get the wrong seeds planted in the wrong areas?

When we had a moment later, as we dispersed from the doused coals of the fire, Lee put a light hand atop my shoulder.

“Those questions about bonds earlier. Were they about…”

I nodded and his eyes widened.

“She…”

“She was marked. I saw it.”

“Then it was by…” his words fell off again, like he didn’t want to say the names aloud. He mouthed the name and I pursed my lips as I nodded again.

“He said he didn’t feel it.”

“Damn.”

“Around the same time she died, he… Kat said he was shouting in pain.”

Lee looked down, shaking his head slowly.

“Do they know?”

“I never mentioned it to anyone until now,” I confessed. “Well… I’m pretty sure he figured it out, though. He asked me if I could bring it up to Minnie for clarification.”

“How’d he know to ask Minnie?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure how he’d come to that conclusion either, to be honest. It wouldn’t have been my first pick of the people I knew. All I had was the little bit of information he’d told me.

“He said that witches knew more about bonds. I’m not sure where he found that out, but that’s what he told me.”

“Crazy world.”

He held out his hand to me and I took it without hesitation. There would never come a day in which I wouldn’t reach for him.

“Definitely.”