~ISSA
I stayed awake all night as I remembered the past.
I occasionally glanced at Yulia as she slept. With what she was going to do tomorrow, she needed all the rest she could get.
I still could not believe that I had agreed to let her go behind the enemy lines, but there was no other way to get the answers we needed.
“You are going to regret refusing us Issa, just you wait,” Davina’s voice echoed in my head as I flashed back to when we were young, before she had been appointed the position of the Dean of Canis Academy.
She had been so angry when I had coldly rebuffed her when she told me that the school board wanted me to join its rank after graduation. It had been a long time ago.
Deucalion had joined without hesitation. It was there that he had found his mate, and it was the reason why his daughter Leia could never be expelled whenever she broke the rules and regulations of the school.
Then the war started. Humans, werewolves and witches alike had been caught in the crossfire. An old god of the dark wanted to be revived and many people had been sacrificed because of that.
I had lost my father and mother to the war. The only good thing that happened was that Yulia had been rescued by Marianna and I when she was a baby. We had but killed a lot of witches that day. I could see it vividly.
I could still taste the blood of the last witch with her sacrificial knife raised over Yulia as she wailed on an old vine covered altar with ancient markings drawn across the floor. I had hurled myself in my Lycan form at the witch before she stabbed the toddler and ripped out the witch’s throat severing her head from her neck.
I had vehemently refused it when Marianna had chosen to adopt Yulia right on the spot.
“She is special, Issa, I can feel it,” She had told me.
“She is the reason for a lot of deaths,” I spat angrily.
“Then why don’t you end her now?” Marianna asked calmly as she stretched out the baby to me. She had stopped crying.
“Gladly, our father and mother died because of her, anyway,” I said and morphed my hand into claws.
But when I got closer, when I looked into Yulia’s baby eyes, when those innocent silver-grey eyes met mine, I could not even move. I could not bring myself to kill her. It was like an invincible force had taken away my will to cause her harm.
“Keep her away from me,” I said and left Marianna on the battlefield littered with the dismembered corpses of witches.
It was the last time I had seen my sister and Yulia.
Now that same rescued toddler was my mate.
Fate indeed had a cruel way of doing things. I sighed and gently got up from the bed so I did not wake Yulia.
I cursed silently as my phone rang, destroying the calm ambience in the room. I silenced it and left the room gently closing the door behind me.
It was the detective. I answered.
“You were right,” Jamal said.
“About what?”
“There are body parts missing,” Jamal replied. “A heart from one werewolf, a pair of eyes from another werewolf, the human had his brain removed.”
“They are building a vessel for the god,” I said.
“You mean the god has no physical form and thirty-nine bodies are going to give him one?” Jamal asked in disbelief.
“Thirty-eight actually, Yulia’s part is different,” I said.
“And what part is her death going to play?” Jamal asked.
I did not like the way he asked the question.
“I am not sure,” I answered as calmly as I could.
“Is there a pattern of people they use for this sacrifice?” Jamal asked.
“I do not know,” I replied with a weary sigh. “That part we have to find out for ourselves,” I added.
“For someone who witnessed it first hand, there seems to be a lot that you do not know,” Jamal said.
I was getting irritated the more I spoke to him.
“For a highly decorated detective, I seem to know more than you, which makes me wonder how you got the job in the first place,” I fired back.
“Good morning, Issa, if I have any more questions, I will call you,” he said.
“And if I want answers from your investigations, I will call you,” I replied and ended the call.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
I was about to turn and enter the room but another call came in. It was Miles.
“Where have you been?” I demanded in a tight voice.
“Is that worry, I hear in your voice, boss?” Miles asked. I held back a frustrated sigh. He was never serious, even in the face of death.
“Tell me you found something,” I said.
“Oh, I found more than something,” he said. “Someone is digging up the old sacrificial sites, you know, the one where people were drained of their blood and their organs removed, those sites?
“Why?”
“I believe they want to start the war all over again, boss and they are not even trying to hide, they have also employed humans and you would not believe this but these humans are almost as strong as the werewolves,” he said.
“Enhancements,” I said.
“What?” Miles asked, and I could hear the confusion in his voice.
“The witches are giving the humans magic potions to make them stronger and faster, to even the playing ground,” I told him.
Miles went quiet for a while. “Shit, this is getting serious,” he said after a while.
“When did it ever stop?” I asked.
“We need to stop whatever they are planning to do and fast,” Miles said.
“Stay undercover and find out more,” I told him.
“You got it boss.”
As soon as I ended the call, Duke’s call came in. I needed a break.
“Family dinner, my place, bring your niece,” he said and cut the call.
I knew that it was not a request. I knew that Leia must have told him about what happened to her with Yulia. Deucalion was a high-ranking member of The Canis Board.
Things were going according to plan.