After Agrips’s description of what he knew about ancients, the entirety of the hall was booked with silence. No one said a word. There was a hush in the atmosphere, so much so that if a pin would drop, the sound was bound to echo.
To start with, Anthony sat with his mouth hung open. After hearing Agrip’s explanation, he now understood that the stories of heroes past that his mother had regaled him with during bed time were not altogether false.
Those beings had existed, still existed, and he was actually lucky to meet them facially. As a matter of fact, they had been right in front of him the whole time. To think his pack and he, had assigned the name vampires to them, those detestable disgusting creatures? Oh god, it seemed that this period, his pack was cocooned in making a lot of mistakes, starting with Emma.
He could now see why he had always felt a thread of connection with the mouthy redhead. She was his little cousin, and he hadn’t been able to protect her, nor had he been able to protect Freya. Wouldn’t Sheila be disappointed with him? Wouldn’t his mother be?
Anthony’s thoughts were not totally far apart from the thoughts that ransacked the minds of the people in the large room. They kept faulting themselves for being so gullible and stupid. They all had the looks and expression of shame mixed with awe and repentance. The only people that were exempted from the emotional plague were the group of seven with Sheila.
The first person to break this chain of silence was still Agrip, and this time around, his voice was tainted with a mixture of anger and disbelief, in the direction of Derek, who was taken aback as Agrip called out his name sharply, a far cry form the awe laden voice from before.
“Did I hear correctly that you had rejected your mate? Emma? Sheila’s daughter? Why in the world will you do that?” Agrip questioned, placing his hands on his waist, not minding that he looked like an agitated house wife asking for upkeep allowance for the household.
His granddaughter Ava, who has been cutting glances with Julius noticed it especially after the latter smiled at the stance, and stealthily, she pinched the offending left hand which sagged and rested on the Agrip’s hips.
He turned and stared at his granddaughter, who just shrugged her shoulders before looking ahead.
Derek sighed, bit his lower lip and looked around him, taking in the many eyes trained on him, none of them entirely pleasant.
Even though the people had played a part in his chasing away Emma, they defaulted themselves by thinking that they hadn’t known that she had been his mate.
Derek opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, not knowing what to say. He couldn’t blame his father or the pack for the wrong decision he had made. He was eighteen years old now, and was a full fledged man. He should learn to bear his own faults and not to push them to anyone.
But just as he was about to open his mouth and talk about his foolishness in letting a gem leave his grasp, his father, Peter, beat him to it.
“Forgive Derek. I had been the one to push him to reject Emma. Worse, I had known that they were mates. But I had thought she was human, something I count stupid now, seeing that I had been there when the phantom had come for her-a phantom wouldn’t come for a human, Leonarya wouldn’t be after a mere human-but I had….” He was still saying, when Sheila interrupted him, her beautiful green eyes widening with curiosity.
“Did you just say phantom? A phantom attacked Emma? How? Where did a phantom meet her? How did a phantom come into the pack unnoticed?” Sheila threw off the questions, without waiting for replies for each previous one.
“It was my fault.” Maya started.
She had been silent since the meeting started, moreso of the fact that she was in awe of what was going on around her, and that her opinion hadn’t been required all this while, or more likely because she had had nothing to contribute, and didn’t know a thing of what the term ancient was.
She hadn’t even heard of the term in the passing like Anthony had. All she had heard as bedtime stories from her father was his quest for power and his desire to rule his own pack.
Sheila turned and stared at the blond girl with blue eyes. She remembered the little girl who had stuck to her knees when the latter was two, and smiled. She hadn’t noticed her until now. The girl had been her favorite little girl in the pack.
“Maya, how have you been?” She asked, sidelining for a second that the latter had mentioned that she was the one at fault for making a phantom locate Emma.
“I’m fine, Aunt Sheila.” Maya replied with a false smile, wondering if the woman would look at her with the same fondness if she came to find out that she had been one of the ways by which her father had destroyed the pack. She was aware that Sheila didn’t even know that the pack was not together anymore.
Well, it was only time that would take. She would surely find out. Maya didn’t think that the fondness would be there again.
“It’s been a while, my dear.” Sheila said, crossing the short distance between them, and hugging Maya to herself, aware as her ears, ever sensitive, picked up the conversations that were going on amongst the people.
It turns out that Maya together with her family had betrayed and divided the pack.
Sheila sighed sadly, as she disengaged from the hug slowly. She didn’t believe that Maya could be that evil. The little girl that she had remembered was a ball of goodness.
Could it be that she had been tainted by the ambitions of her father? Could Arnold have passed on his crazed quest for power to his daughter?
Yes, she has always been of the opinion that Arold wasn’t to be trusted, but Peter had always despised her opinions of his brother. She wondered what he thought about the Arnold now, and what Maya was still doing here if she was a traitor.
“I am not my father.” Maya responded, a sheen of tears clouding her eyes, daunting the ugly resentment that had been building in Sheila at that moment.