Page 51 of Curvy Alpha Bride
A few seconds pass, and my adrenaline doesn’t fade. My mind starts to race as I begin to calculate a way out of here.
“Xavier, we’ve come to explain,” Aunt Serra says.
I turn to look at her, and all the elders are there, even though Ivan and Hector look rough from standing guard all night.
“I read my father’s journals,” I answer, letting go of Finnah. “So, I know what we’re up against.”
“No, son, you don’t,” Finnah says, grabbing my hands. “It doesn’t matter what my brother wrote in those journals. It couldn’t have explained the full horror of it.”
“It was horrible enough,” I say. “And I know I have to get Mabel out of here.”
“If you think that, then you know nothing,” Serra says, her voice harsh. “We cannot let it take a luna. It would be better to kill her now than let the witch have her.”
“Excuse me?” I blurt, turning to face my aunt. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Xavier,” Finnah implores, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Please, don’t. Let us explain. None of us wants harm to come to Mabel—or anyone. But we have a responsibility to the rest of the Range.”
“How many out there do you love?” Rhiannon asks. “How many do you call friends and family? If you try to take Mabel out of here, you risk dooming them all.”
“Alright,” I say with a sigh. “I’m ready to listen. Tell me what you know.”
“The witch’s name is Ivarra,” Serra says. “When the town was founded, she was only a young woman, but a very powerful witch. We only have legends to go on, a few very brief town logs, so I don’t know how much of this is true.”
“Does it matter?”
Serra shakes her head. “Not really. But she has been here since the first days when the Range was settled. You know time doesn’t work the same here as it does in the human world.”
“I know it intellectually,” I answer, shrugging. “Not from experience.”
Serra makes a dismissive gesture. “I won’t waste time on too much detail. Ivarra was a young witch, powerful and beautiful. She fell for an alpha, but he did not love her in return. He married another wolf, and they became our first sacred pair. On their wedding night, she used her magic to kill the luna and drained the alpha’s power until he became her slave.”
“Fucking hell,” I mutter.
“As I said, this may be embellished, or even made up. For all we know, she’s an ice demon that crawled out of the glaciers further north. The fact is, our first luna was killed by her, and our alpha enslaved. He was a husk of a man, a shell, and he did all her bidding. She tried to take over the town.”
Serra pauses to look out over the lake, and it looks like there are a hundred years of weariness in her stare.
“Her powers were growing,” she continued. “Consuming the luna was an act of rage and revenge, but it flooded her with power. She only intended to enslave the alpha to make him her own, but she fed on his energy as well and became drunk on it. She decided the town wasn’t enough. She wanted the whole Range.”
“I’m assuming the point of this story is that she was defeated?” I ask hopefully.
Serra shakes her head. “Not defeated. Ivarra had the alpha bring her every young woman in the town, and she beganto eat them, one by one. Her powers increased, and she set her sights on devouring every luna and young woman in the Range. There is no telling what she could have done if she got out of this valley. She might have even made it to the human world.”
I suppress a shudder. “So, what happened?”
Serra looks away, swallowing hard. “Ivarra was holed up in a cave at the base of the mountain with the girls and the alpha. The pack went after her to get their daughters back. At first, the alpha fought them, but at some point, he regained his senses and managed to spear Ivarra through the heart. The pack fled with the young women, and Ivarra consumed the alpha, regaining her strength, but not becoming powerful enough to go after them.”
Finnah puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s just a story.”
“It feels like a true one,” I say.
“From then on, we never let anyone travel far from the town lines. Occasionally, she would grab an unwary girl, so we strengthened our rules even further. Young women from the Eyrie sometimes hunted close to our territory, and they were taken, too. Our ancestors lived in fear that these kills would give Ivarra enough strength to attack, but it didn’t happen. Her activities would briefly increase, then stop, so it was assumed that she hadn’t fed enough to take on the whole pack.”
“And you went underground,” I realize. “You put your rules in place to starve her, keep her weak. And after she got my mother, you all went underground.”
“Those were days of terror, my boy,” Ivan says. “You have no idea. We really believed the witch had enough power to breach the valley. It was almost a relief when she kept hovering over the town, night after night, trying to get into the bunkers. It meant she was still contained.”
“My father thought he stopped her,” I mutter. “He thought she was dead.”
