Chapter 78: Teach Me

Azura’s POV

The silence in the room had not moved.

Genevieve was still looking at me with nothing ready behind her eyes, and Torin was still standing where he was, and the words he dropped were still sitting in the air between all of us like they had decided they lived there now and were not going anywhere.

I looked at Torin.

"His mother," I said it to Genevieve first, then turned to him. "Why don’t we go and meet her? If she hid the book then she knows where it is. She can help us understand what we are dealing with."

Torin looked at me.

He did not answer right away. His eyes dropped to the floor, and he stood there quietly for a moment, and this quiet was completely different from his usual one. His usual quiet was easy. Relaxed. The quiet of someone who had simply chosen not to speak yet and was comfortable with that choice.

This was not that.

"It is not that simple," he said.

"Why not?" I said. "She hid the book. Which means she knew exactly where it was. She is your mother. Can she not just tell us where it is?"

Torin looked up at me slowly.

Something in his face changed. Just slightly. Just enough.

"She passed away," he said. "A long time ago."

I went completely still.

Every question I had just pushed forward came back and sat against me all at once. I looked at his face and I saw it there behind his eyes, not fresh pain, not something bleeding, just something old and worn smooth by years of being carried around quietly. The kind of thing a person learned to live beside without being swallowed by it.

"I am sorry," I said. "I did not know."

"It is okay." Simple. Steady. "It has been a long time."

I looked at him and I did not say anything else because there was nothing useful left to say. I just held it. The weight of having pushed the way I did without knowing what I was pushing toward. Without knowing there was something fragile on the other side of it.

He did not make me feel bad about it. That almost made it worse.

The room sat quiet for a moment.

Then Torin walked toward me. He looked at my face and something easy came back into his expression, not forced or performed, just his natural way of lifting the air in a room when it got too heavy for people to breathe in comfortably.

"No matter what you are," he said, looking at me, "I am still by your side." He paused just long enough. "You are still my favourite girl."

I scoffed. The sound came out before I could decide whether to let it. "Thank you, Torin."

He winked at me. One slow deliberate wink that managed to be both completely sincere and entirely ridiculous at the same time. Then he turned toward Genevieve.

"See you later, aunt."

Genevieve did not respond. She did not look up. She did not shift or blink or give any sign that she had heard a single word. She was somewhere deep inside her own thoughts and Torin’s voice had simply not made it through to wherever she was.

Torin looked at her for a second. He did not try again. He understood something in that stillness of hers, something the rest of us were still catching up to, and he nodded once to himself and walked out without another word.

The door clicked shut behind him.

The room felt heavier without him in it. He had a way of doing that without anyone noticing until he was gone. Taking some of the weight with him when he left and leaving the rest of it feeling more concentrated than before.

I stood there for a moment looking at Genevieve.

She had not moved. She was still sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes somewhere on the floor in front of her and whatever she was thinking about had her completely.

I walked over and sat down beside her.

I tapped her arm gently. Just once.

She looked up. Her eyes came back slowly, like someone returning from a long distance, and then she was present again, looking at me, back in the room.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked.

She looked at me for a moment before she spoke.

"I forgot the most important thing," she said.

I frowned. "Is it connected to the book?"

She shook her head.

"The blue pearls," she said. "The ones that were inside the boys."

I looked at her and waited.

She straightened slightly. When Genevieve did that it meant she had been turning something over carefully and had finally decided exactly how to put it down in front of you.

"They were parasites," she said. "Designed to attach to a host. Once attached they fed on the life force of whoever they were inside. That is what aged the boys. That is what pushed their bodies forward the way it did."

I stared at her. My stomach had gone cold somewhere in the middle of that sentence.

"If we had been too late?" I asked.

"They would have bonded permanently to the boys." She paused. "At that point removing them would have killed them. There would have been no way to separate what was the parasite from what was the boy anymore."

"But we found them in time," I said. I needed to say it out loud. Needed to hear it confirmed.

"Yes," she said. "That is why they recovered."

A silence settled between us.

Genevieve looked at her hands in her lap. Her fingers were very still. Something moved across her face, small and quiet, and she pressed her lips together for a moment before she spoke again.

"I just hope that whatever they put inside the boys is not inside Amanda."

My chest pulled tight so fast I felt it in my throat.

"Why?" I asked.

She looked at me directly. Not the soft careful look she used when she was trying to protect someone from something. The straight look. The one that meant she was going to tell me exactly what was true whether it was comfortable or not.

"Because if it is," she said, "by now it would have already bonded completely with her. Her wolf. Her soul. Everything that makes Amanda who she is would have the parasite woven through it."

I held very still.

"What does that mean for getting it out?" I asked.

"It means that separating it from her now would put her life at serious risk," she said. "The longer a parasite like this stays inside a host the deeper it roots. With the boys, we caught it before it finished. With Amanda." She stopped. "I do not know how far along it is."

"There has to be another way," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "A way to remove it without losing her. There has to be."

"There is a way," Genevieve said carefully. "A method to save the host even after full bonding. But whether it can work depends on things I do not know yet. Things I cannot know until we find her."

"So there is still hope."

She did not answer immediately. She held my gaze, and her expression did not give me the yes I needed, nor did it give me a no either.

Then she reached for the cloth bundle sitting on the surface nearby. The one she had brought in when she arrived. She pulled something out from inside it and held it up carefully between two fingers.

A small fragment. Dark and irregular and wrong-looking in a way that did not have a simple explanation. It was the kind of wrong that you felt before you understood it. Something in the body that recognized it before the mind caught up.

She turned it slowly.

I watched her hands.

"This is a piece of what was inside the boys," she said. "I kept it to study."

"What is it made of?"

She looked at it for a moment longer. Then she looked at me.

"Black magic," she replied. Her voice dropped slightly, not for dramatic effect, just because the words themselves seemed to require less air around them. "Magic that was buried for a reason. Forbidden long before either of us existed. The kind that was locked away because the things it could do to living beings were considered too dangerous to exist in the world."

She set the fragment down carefully and looked up at me.

"Whoever is doing this is not ordinary," she said. "This level of craft, this level of power, it should not be possible for one person to hold."

The room went quiet.

My mind went back to the forest without asking for my permission. To the woman stepping out through the bushes with her gown torn at the side and her eyes burning bright with anger.

To the way she had stood there completely unbothered by all of us, like we were mildly inconvenient at most. To the laugh that came out of her when the ground started shaking and the Borne began pouring from the trees.

To the way she had simply snapped her fingers.

And vanished.

Who was she?

Where did someone like that come from? Where did that kind of power come from, and who gave it to her, and why did she want children? What was any of this actually for?

I did not have a single answer. I just had her face and her laugh and the feeling of being completely helpless while the ground shook beneath my feet.

My hand went to my hair without me deciding to. I grabbed it, just held it, just needed something to hold onto for a second while everything moved around inside my head.

Then I let go.

I sat up straight, and I looked at Genevieve, and I made a decision.

"Teach me," I said.

She looked at me. "What?"

"My power." I held her gaze and kept my voice even. "Whatever is sealed inside me. Whatever I have been carrying without knowing it. Teach me how to use it. Teach me how to control it. I want to know what I am actually capable of."

Genevieve was quiet. She looked at me with something in her expression that was not quite hesitation but lived right beside it.

"I would have started a long time ago," she said. "But I don’t know what we were dealing with. I still do not fully know what is inside you or what it can do."

"Then we find out," I said. "Together. Whatever it takes."

"It is not that simple," she said. "To train something you do not understand is dangerous. If your power opens fully before we know its nature, before we know what it responds to or what it is connected to." She stopped. "It could do more damage than good."

"So we figure out what it is first," I said. "How?"

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, "We use what we have."

"Which is what?"

"Two things," she said. "That is all we have right now. Two things that belong to you and came from the people who knew you before any of this."

"The journal," I muttered.

"Exactly." She paused. Her eyes moved from my face down to my neck. To the pendant resting there against my skin. "And that."

I looked down at it instinctively.

I could not see it properly from this angle but I could feel it. Warm the way it always was, heavier somehow than something that small should feel, sitting against my chest as if it had always known something I did not.

I had not worn it my whole life. Only since I entered this pack. But months of carrying it against my skin had made it feel older than that. Like it had been waiting for me long before I ever knew it existed.

I had pressed my fingers against it in every difficult moment without knowing why. It had glowed in Genevieve’s hidden room and turned the walls blood red and whispered something only I could hear.

And I still do not know what it meant.

I looked at it and I thought about Amanda. About where she was right now and what was happening inside her and whether whatever was in there had already gone too deep to pull back out cleanly.

I thought about Leo asking when they were going back to see the other children. About Ethan staring at his hands on the bed like they were strangers.

I thought about the woman in the forest laughing.

Something settled in my chest. Quiet and certain and not moving.

I did not know what I was yet. I did not know what first and last meant for my life, or what the pendant held, or what the journal was going to show me when we finally opened it properly.

But whoever that woman was. Whoever was standing behind her, giving her that kind of power, sending her into forests with parasites designed for children.

If anything happened to Amanda.

They would not survive me finding out.