Chapter 495: Viola!

At her words, Sebastian stopped walking. His ears perked forward, and he turned his large head toward her, giving her his full attention as though he sensed she was about to tell him something grave. For a moment, he felt his chest tighten as Sebastian couldn’t help but become more negative lately, that every little thing made him think of the worst.

"What is it? Are there complications about the pregnancy that you haven’t told me yet? Does it have anything to do with the vomiting? Do you want to rest before we proceed?" came his questions, making Cyan roll her eyes while Viola laughed from the inside.

’He sure runs miles of negativity,’ Cyan remarked, but Viola was quick to assure her husband.

"None of that. Now listen to me. It’s about your twin brother," she said.

Sebastian froze, his paws coming to a complete stop beneath him. His ears shifted back as he stared at her. "Alex. He isn’t responding to me, even though I felt this morning that he is still alive, but I don’t know for how long."

Viola moved closer to him. "Well, I just want to tell you not to worry about his health anymore, because my sister cured him, and she goes to see him sometimes. Now the only thing left is for you to bring him back here and make things right with your brother about Natalie’s death. He deserves to know..." She trailed off at the look in his silver eyes.

Coming into this pack to see where her parents had been before seemed like a way to bring out things and fix matters that had been left pending in their lives. Just like how they had talked about where to live, she thought Sebastian needed to include his brother in their future too, but the look in his eyes was confusing her.

Viola began to speak again, but Sebastian stepped closer and pressed his large body against hers. He lowered his head beneath her neck and rested it against her side, burying his muzzle into the fur along her ribs as he hugged her in the only way their wolf forms allowed.

Sebastian had no words to express the feeling that came over him at her words. Alex was out of danger, and he could finally fix their relationship and make things right with his brother.

"Thank you," he told her sincerely, another grave burden lifted off him by her.

"Don’t thank me. It was Ivy’s doing, and she did it without my asking. How about we invite her over for dinner when you let Alex out? We can have a family dinner."

"That sounds like a plan."

The couple made the plan and then resumed their tour of the Mooncreek territory, with Viola looking around and trying to picture her mother walking down these roads and her father coming to save her when she was in trouble that one time.

She couldn’t help but picture it exactly as she had seen it in her mother’s memories.

"It used to be such a beautiful place, Seb. Do you think we could ever rebuild it?" She asked, following him toward one particular building still standing in the middle of the grounds.

"Maybe not every part of it, some of the ground’s grown too fragile to hold a structure again, but there’s still solid ground here too. Even if no one lives here, we can rebuild parts of it, just to preserve the memory. Like this one building here, the one Gilbert had people construct to hold his family’s history, everything he managed to gather after the flood." Sebastian said, pressing his paw against a panel that opened the door of the only building left fully intact and was kept in memory of the Alpha’s family.

Gilbert had collected everything he could find that belonged to his family and kept it here years later after the flood. Since he and Viola were related, Sebastian thought she might find pictures and other memories of her family, especially her mother, since Mooncreek was known to keep records containing pictures of every single person who had joined their pack. She could keep them as memories of her family and one day show them to their children.

But as Sebastian stepped forward to enter, he realized his wife hadn’t followed. She’d stopped short, staring at the building with a distant, unsettled look, and she was already taking small steps backward.

"What’s wrong?" Sebastian asked, and her voice came back to him, thin with fear.

"I don’t know. Cyan doesn’t want to go in. There’s something in there we shouldn’t touch. Cyan’s afraid of it..."

Sebastian, who had stopped right at the threshold between the inside and outside, immediately stepped back out, but his wife kept backing away, her wolf’s body low to the ground as fear took over every instinct in her. Her ears were pinned flat against her head, her tail tucked tightly between her legs, and her paws shifted backward with each step as though every part of her was screaming at her to get as far away from the building as possible.

"Then let’s get out of here," he told her.

But almost as soon as the words left his mouth, the ground began to tremble. Thick, fog-like smoke rose from the cracks in the earth, quickly spreading between them and cutting him off from her completely.

"Viola!" he called, his voice tense as he squinted through the smoke, but he couldn’t make out anything at all. The darkness within it seemed to swallow even the faintest outline, and a prickling sense of danger crawled over him. Frustration and fear flared inside him as he broke into a run toward the last direction he had seen her go, forced to move blindly through the suffocating smoke.

"Seb..." Came her voice, sounding distant, farther away than it should have been, and it made his chest tighten. He tried to track her by scent, but it was no use, the smoke had grown hot and thick, almost like steam rising off boiling water.

Cursing under his breath, Sebastian leapt up onto a boulder from a collapsed building and scrambled to the top, trying to spot his wife, and soon caught sight of her in the thickest part of the smoke, turning in circles as though she’d lost all sense of direction.

"Viola!" he called, and she looked up at him.

The moment their eyes met, the smoke began to thin, slowly curling away from them before sinking back into the cracks in the earth. As the last wisps disappeared and the ground became visible again, Sebastian’s eyes fell on the exact spot where she stood, and his expression immediately turned sharply anxious.

"Don’t move, love! You’re standing right in the middle of the most fragile ground here."