Page 27 of Eternal

“You have questions,” her dad said.

She nodded and took a seat next to him. Ashton and Duncan remained standing, far away from her. She bit her lip when it became evident that being even one step too close to her seemed to hurt them. She saw the look in their eyes when she had tried to step closer when they were in the bedroom. She was hurting them and she wasn’t even aware that she was doing that.

“If you know the story about Wulfric and Elissa, you know the story about Isidora Graves too,” Harold pointed to the book her alphas had gifted her with. It had been carefully displayed on a coffee table. She treasured that book.

A cloying panic gripped her. The name Isidora Graves promoted all her disquiet to levels of massive uneasiness. Why would someone she didn’t know, who existed a thousand years ago, have this bizarre effect on her? From the moment Brogan, the wolf-beast had addressed her as such, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with her even though she pretended otherwise.

“Isidora Graves is your ancestor, Farren.”

The quietness with which her father delivered his words contradicted the devastating way in which she received them.

“What?” she asked softly.

“Isidora Graves, the witch responsible for bringing about the birth of an entire species of wolf-shifters is your ancestor.” Her father paused and blew out a breath before he continued.

“After a long bout of vengeance and hate, she married a man named Harold Kinsley, and so began generations and generations of Kinsleys, all with the witch’s blood running through them. The previous generations of Kinsleys were blissfully unaware of the connection, but not me. No. I was the one who dug up things that maybe should have remained buried, but I couldn’t stop myself any more than I could make myself stop breathing.”

He sipped from a glass of water then continued. The whole gesture made him so endearing to her. He was her dad and she was going to take care of him for the rest of both their lives and she was going to protect him from all the demons that seemed to follow him around.

“You see, once Wulfric claimed Elissa as his mate, as his omega, and they lived with the rest of the pack, Isidora found them. She became obsessed with Wulfric and he in turn shunned her advances. She became livid with jealousy. She didn’t understand the wolf’s way, that when he chose his mate, she was his for life and he was hers for life. Elissa was his mate. The reason he drank the potion was so he could become a man and he could claim her as his.

“But Isidora had failed to realize the wolf way, which is something destined, fated, eternal. Not prepared to give up, as Isidora believed that Wulfric the shifter was her invention and he should love her as his mistress, she tried to concoct spell after spell to break the bond between Wulfric and Elissa. She failed.

“But then Isidora decided if she became a female wolf-shifter then Wulfric would choose her, so she drank the potions she made from Wulfric’s blood and Elissa’s blood. She sealed it with more spells which she cast upon herself and nothing worked. She couldn’t shift, and at the point of her giving up at her lowest, darkest moment, when she was preparing herself to be taken away into oblivion because she couldn’t live without Wulfric loving her, that was when she met Harold Moses Kinsley, her husband, who loved her despite her erratic craziness.” He smiled as he said that.

“So you see, Farren, as a Kinsley you already had the origin blood in your system. Alas, while it may have skipped generations and generations of Kinsleys, the pure fascination and the unadulterated need to become a wolf-shifter—the same thing that led Isidora to lose her best friend Elissa—inflicted me. I wanted to be a wolf-shifter and I would have done every experiment possible. I would have tested anything. It is an expensive want to have and so I sold my expertise to government agencies, promising to deliver on one thing, but all the time working on how I would break through the witch blood in my veins so I could transform into a wolf.

“The closest I got was the serum I gave you. The one where you could calm a wolf enough to get close to him, for him to trust you. That was as far as I got.”

“But how did I become that way, in the dungeon?” Farren asked.

“You have wolf blood in you. You have the blood of a fair maiden in you. And you have a witch’s blood in you. During my absence from your life, Farren, and I’m sorry—I thought you would be safer without me. But during that time I figured a way to trigger all three parts of the DNA inside you.

“When I met Gracen, I knew I could entrust her, even unknowingly on her part, with the task of getting to you. When you met, even the slightest touch would have transferred specks of that trigger DNA to you.”

“Why?” Ashton asked, his voice laced with anger.

“Because all my life I have wanted to be a wolf-shifter, and since I could never, I swore I would protect every single wolf shifter in the universe. If I didn’t do anything, didn’t trigger the blood sources in Farren, the war with the Remnants would see the entire species of wolf-shifters vanquished from the universe. But I had to save them. I have to save you,” he said looking up at Ashton and Duncan.

“When I gave Farren the serum when she was fourteen years old, it was also a means to protect her. It was written that a future war against the vampires and the witches would bring darkness to the world as we know it. But I knew the wolf shifters would take her in when that future war broke out. As a Kinsley, she is as much an enemy to the vampire clan as a wolf-shifter. “I’m saying that Zadimus, King of Goian, was a vampire. Elissa wasn’t his biological daughter. His wife couldn’t bear him children, she was a mere civilian, you see. But Zadimus did not know that and he believed Elissa was his daughter.

“She was perfectly human, born to a farmer and his wife and given up to Zadimus wife in exchange for gold. But that is beside the point. Zadimus hated Isidora for it was she who brought him down when she tricked him out of the robotic army he wanted to fashion by brainwashing little boy children. But in saving the village, Isidora also created Zadimus’ most dangerous enemies, the wolf shifters.

“I have historical accounts of generations of Kinsleys presumably murdered in their sleep, but I know there were murdered by vampires. The hunt for Kinsley witches stopped for a bit. But the war is back on. And the vampires are stronger than ever.” His pace picked up now, more urgency to his voice. Farren had tried her hardest to keep track of what he was saying but there were so many elements to the story.

She was a witch. Her ancestor was Isidora Graves. When Brogan had called her Isidora, he hadn’t been losing his mind. She either looked similar to her ancestor or he could smell her. She had brushed aside that bit of information even though it had bothered her on some subconscious level since their return from the forest. Still, what could she have done with that information? Nothing, because only one man had all the answers, her father, and he had chosen this moment to divulge her secrets.

“Why is Farren poisonous to us?” Duncan asked, and just like Ashton his voice was strained and tightly controlled as if given an outlet they would both revert to their beastly sides.

A growing fear covered her now. The look in her father’s eye was filled with fear and remorse.

“Isidora had tried for many years to cast a spell on Zadimus and she failed each time, which meant he wasn’t the mere mortal she believed him to be. One day she got a vial of his blood, and when she couldn’t find anything wrong with it, she drank it.”

Farren stopped breathing.

“You see, my darling daughter Farren… not only do you have the blood of a wolf, a fair maiden, and a witch within your veins. You also have the blood of a vampire.”

Farren shot up from the seat next to her father. She curled her hand around her nape, pacing the floor, shaking her head. At once she felt dirty and unwholesome.

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