Page 47 of Her Reborn Mate

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The task that lay ahead of me was not easy by any means. The added restriction of the time made it an almost impossible feat. Will was slipping. As of right now, he was just unconscious, being monitored by Dr. Morris himself, who had assured me that he’d oversee Will and make sure that he was kept in a stable condition while I went off to find the ingredients for the potion.

A single road led to the foot of the mountains. I stood at the end of that road, staring up at the winding path that twisted along the length of the mountain. In my hand, I held a jar, hoping to catch the frost of the mountain in it. In my pocket, I had a pouch in which I’d put the stellarum.

“You’ve got this,” I whispered to myself, daunted by the task that lay ahead of me. But the fear of anticipation was nothing compared to the terror that prevailed in the knowledge that if I failed, Will would most certainly die.

I would not let my mate die.

And so I trekked and hiked up to the mountain as surefootedly as I could, occasionally slipping, frequently stopping myself from falling down its steep steps. I did not know for how long I climbed. All I could focus on was the step ahead of me. Luckily, I did not have to climb to the top of the mountain, which would have been impossible without the right gear and training, to find a batch of stellarum growing along the mountainside. I plucked them out and bagged them, then hiked further till the first frost appeared ahead of me. I put fistfuls of it in the jar, then began my descent.

On the way back to the commune, I stopped at the flower shop and bought the yarrow and the moon dew.

But my real trial began when I sat down alone in my house to prepare the potion. The instructions were exceedingly difficult. A single misstep, a slight miscalculation, would result in failure.

I could not risk failure.

Chapter 20: Will

I did not know where I was, for this was no place to be. This was a space within my mind. It took me a short time to realize that I was deeply unconscious and was wandering about the uncharted lands of my subconscious. Right in front of me was my old home, the one I had grown up in. The German farmlands spread beyond in the background. Cows mooed, and roosters crowed. The grass blades blew with the wind. I stared at my reflection and found a boy staring back. I had forgotten what I had looked like when I was a kid—Meek little Wilhelm Grimm with muddy brown hair and freckles across his nose. I was wearing shorts and a plaid shirt with suspenders and a little bow. My boots were black, and so were my socks that went up to my knees. I was crying. Ah. This was a memory I had hidden deep within my mind. It was not a pleasant memory. I only had to turn around to be reminded why. Behind me, the village burned. All the cottages were smoldering wreckages, the dirt paths charred by the bombs that had fallen from above.

There were no people around.

“Mama!” I called out. It was twice as painful, knowing the fate that had befallen my parents at the end of the First World War. Even still, I could not weather the sorrow that befell my dream child self as I walked up to my cottage, hoping to find my mother inside. On Sundays, she baked the most perfect pies and served them with cream and syrup. Today was a Sunday. It did not matter that our village had been bombed. She’d make the pies, and I’d eat them with Fred and dad.

I opened the door, and instead of stepping into my childhood home, I stepped into the basement where I had been imprisoned for decades without ever seeing sunlight. Yet another glimpse at my reflection in a mirror surface showed me that this time around, I was not a child anymore but a grown man in his late twenties. I bore on my face and my body the signs of the torture that Edward had inflicted. The second I thought of the man, he appeared from the shadows, sneering at me, holding a syringe in his hand.

“How fares your life now that you’ve escaped from me, Will? Are you any better off than when you were when I found you?” He asked.

Enraged, I reached out to attack him, but the moment my fist touched his body, his body turned into smoke, causing me to topple and lose my balance.

I fell face-first and landed in a pool of water that had accumulated on the deck of my ship. I saw my face in the water. It was the face of a young man who was fleeing war. Around me were my pack members, all of them tending to the ship as we traveled across the sea to America. I was soaking wet. I had to get below deck and dry myself, naturally.

When I went below deck, Ariana sat there calmly, completely unperturbed by the fact that there was a storm in the sea and the ship was on the verge of sinking.

“Ariana,” I said, realizing that this was more than just a vision this time around. It was a revelation. In real life, when we had traveled from Germany to America, Ariana had hidden in the cupboard under the deck when the storm had come. She had been way too young back then too.

This Ariana, the one in my vision, was a middle-aged woman who looked quite tranquil and at peace with the life she had lived. I blinked, and suddenly we were not under the deck of the ship but standing in the afterlife plain, in pristine whiteness, just her and I.

“You look well, Will,” she said.

“And you look happy. Is that how you were after I disappeared?” I asked.

“The entire pack mourned and thought you dead,” Ariana said. “But after a while, all of us went back to living our lives, including me. I bonded with my actual mate, Will. I lived a life of love and plenty. We had a child. I was satisfied. And you know what I wasn’t? Do not take this the wrong way, but I was never in love with you, just as you were never in love with me. It was circumstantial infatuation on your end, an illusion, nothing more.”

“I see that now. Every day, I realize it more so. I fell in love with Alexis, and the things that I have felt with her, I never felt for you or anyone else. She is my true love, the woman I desire, my fated mate. You and I were never in love, and it took me a long time to understand that. And that is okay. I was young, ambitious, and foolish. The man that I am now is not the man I was back then,” I said.

“You talk with maturity now, Will. There is depth to your words and your perception. Know that all of us, your pack members, loved you like a family member. What you felt for me was not love but kinship. It was a different sort of bond, a familial bond. And I will always cherish you for it. But your true place lies with Alexis. Treat her well. She is my family, after all,” she said.

“As she is mine,” I said, and let the scene dissolve all around me, not knowing what was happening. Ariana disappeared from view, as did the afterlife plain, and now I was just standing in total darkness, thrashing against the blind waves that bound my body.

“Alexis!” I called out loudly. Now, I was not in any vision any longer. I was on the brink of life and death. In front of me, there was the light at the end of the tunnel, beckoning. Behind me, there was the world that I was going to leave.

If I left now, I would never be able to forgive myself.

I blinked, and there I was back again, in front of my childhood home, calling out for my mama, a little boy once again.

“Mama!”

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