"You remind me so much of her. Your mother was quite lovely, but I'm sure you were old enough to remember her?" Lena was pouring them tea in the comfortably appointed sitting room that she had seated them in half an hour after convincing them to spend the day sleeping in the spare bedroom in her home.

"I was old enough," Alice nodded, her eyes taking in the room eagerly. The first thing that she had noticed when she had walked through the door was that there was a photograph on the mantle that showed her mother with this woman who she had never heard about before. 

They were standing side by side, grinning widely, their arms draped across each other's shoulders as if they were the best of friends. They looked so young in the photo, although this woman's hair was already entirely grey, which Alice thought, would have made her at least a little older than her mother if she were still alive.

"That's Constance and I when we were right out of high school. We went backpacking together that summer before she found her mate. I think she secretly hoped I would end up having a werewolf mate, or something like that, so I would come down and stay with the pack. Maybe I kind of hoped that too. It didn't seem like a bad idea back then, the idea of having close family that was always there for you, no matter what. Like my coven would be if they hadn't mostly been wiped out." Lena sighed, running a hand through her hair before turning away from the photograph. "But that is a story for another day. Because you do not have time to hear the entire history of my friendship with your mother. You two need rest. So I'll give you the highlights."

"You two went to highschool together?" Alice interrupted, still surprised that they were the same age. She knew that her mother had gone to a normal public school back in Texas, but it was still hard to imagine her mother getting up and leaving her pack's lands every day. The idea was just so foreign.

"We did." Lena smiled at the memory. "We even drove in together most days. I had a Volkswagen Beetle. The thing stalled out half the time. Sometimes we had to start it on a hill and get it rolling before the engine would turn over. And we'd have to roll down the windows, even when it was frozen to keep our breath from fogging them up. But it was mine and it got us where we needed to go."

"She was so happy when she met your father. And honestly anything that took her away from your grandma was good for her, in my opinion. Constance didn't want to be a Luna. Or at least she didn't want to be the sort of Luna that your grandmother pictured her being. No offense intended your grandmother if the two of you are close, but she wanted Connie to be a miniature copy of herself and your momma just wasn't born to be that at all."

"But you're human." The words that she'd been dying to say finally escaped from between Alice's lips. "How did you know? Why did you know?"

"Not quite human." Fin opened his mouth, answering before Lena had a chance to. The grey haired woman smiled in his direction. "You can tell that her magic has dyed her hair grey earlier than it should have. It'll be white soon, won't it?" He asked, vaguely remembering reading that somewhere in a book in his father's library long ago.

"Depending on how often I use certain types of power directly, yes. If I stick to my herbs and potions then no. I only ever planned on being a kitchen witch and a midwife. But plans change and when your mother died a great many of my plans changed." Lena inclined her head to one side. "I made bargains and promises along the way that I shouldn't have made. Good intentions aren't everything you know. I wish I'd learned that when I was your age."

Lena shook her head, looking down at her hands as she set her own tea cup down on the well worn coffee table in the middle of the small, cozy room. "Alpha Cadman is an evil man. He has always craved power above all else. He's attracted to it like a moth to a flame. And instead of his urges settling as he's gotten older as I'd hoped they might, honestly it was the only real hope that I've had, they seem to have grown more intense."

"You know where he is." It wasn't a question. It was a statement and Alice turned to look at her mate in shock. She opened her mouth to ask him how he could suggest something so impossible, and to apologize to this woman who her instincts told her they could trust, only to see that Lena was staring down at her hands again as she nodded.

"That is, among other reasons, why I need your help. I believe Alice has a right to know the truth about her mother, yes. But I also think that you two might be Luna Emery's best chance at getting out of that cabin alive."

Alice gripped the tea cup she was holding so hard that for a moment she was afraid it might break. With shaking hands she set it down on the small coffee table and tucked her trembling palms under the backs of her legs to force them to be still.

"You know where she is?"

"If I tell you, and you go, just the two of you, he'll kill you, and take her. You have to know that he's obsessed with her just the way he was with her mother." She looked straight at Fin as she said the words. "He never had Constance and I think he transferred the obsession on to you, Alice. Or maybe it was already growing before she died. Because he'd already begun to ask about you all the time. I know it frightened her. She was already talking about sending you to stay with her mother, which honestly was the last thing she wanted. But she was that frightened of him."

"I'm even afraid that he's so far gone that he might kill the both of you. It's unpredictable, what happens when he's in that state, between man and wolf. And I don't know if you've begun to suspect yet how strong he is."

"Much stronger than a normal wolf? That's what all the stories say, isn't it?" Alice stood up and began to pace the length of the room. She couldn't stay still any longer. She had a horrible feeling that she knew where the story she was being told was headed and she didn't really want to hear the ending, but she knew that she needed to or she would always wonder if her imaginings were better or worse than the truth.

"There were never any rogues." Lena said the words in a rush before leaning forward and pressing her hands against her face as if she couldn't bear to witness their reaction to what she had revealed. She had kept the secret for too long and it had eaten away at her. "It was always only him. He wanted her. He wanted to kill his mate and your father. Your father suspected how much he wanted to take Constance as his own. Your dad told a few of his friends, and his sister and her mate, along with quite a number of the warriors who were willing to stand with him."

"Of course they were close enough to Alpha Cadman to see that he'd been acting erratically." Tears were running down Lena's face now as she spoke and now and then she paused in her telling of the story to take in a ragged breath. "Kate was at her grandparents' house when he killed his wife. He'd planned that out carefully. He had to get rid of her first. He believed she was standing in the way of his future. He didn't think that Kate was a particularly strong pup. He'd watched you two playing together and you were always running faster than she was and climbing higher. You beat her at every field day event at school. You beat everyone, even the boys."

"This isn't your fault. I need to say that right off. None of it is. He's a mad man." Lena shook her head when she saw Alice's expression. "He would have found a reason to reject his Goddess-given mate anyways. He was just looking for excuses. And he was always a little too interested in you. Even then. It made your mother uneasy. And then he approached her with his proposal. He wanted her to become his Luna. Of course she rejected him. Over and over again. He must have asked her a dozen times."

"Then he went to your father. He offered him money. A hundred thousand dollars. Your father refused. He was furious. Your mother had told him about the offers, of course. And when Alpha Cadman began to speak of rogues that no one else had seen, he became even more suspicious."

"Cadman had been his best friend, at one time. But now, your mother told me in our daily phone conversations, he knew he could no longer trust him. That's when he began to speak with the other warriors about his concerns. And when that night unfolded and he attacked your father many sided with you dad."

"Unfortunately there was no way that they could stand against a half shifted Alpha who was already in the state he had let himself slip into. He was no longer human or wolf. He was something else altogether. He was a monster, no longer courting madness. He had lost himself to it. There were still families on that side of the Pack Land that hadn't made it to the bunker. Many were running to their cars or trying to make it on foot. He killed everything that moved."

"But what about my mother?" Alice shook her head, confused. "You said he wanted her. Was he so out of his mind that he killed her accidentally?"

Lena had been staring down at the floor but she raised her head, her face wet with tears and met Alice's eyes. "No. Despite the fact that he was barely recognizable he still knew her. At the end of it all, when he'd killed everyone else he went to her. He tried to take her. She had a choice. He tried to mark her. And when she resisted he broke her neck."

They sat in silence for another ten minutes before Fin finally spoke.

"There's just one thing that I don't understand. Why hasn't he gone mad? Wolves who do what he's done usually go mad within months, not years. They almost always die before a single year is up. But he's been living as an Alpha for a decade and no one figured this out. How is this even possible? It doesn't make sense."

"You're right, it doesn't, Alpha. Except that I've been helping him all along. I've been making a medication that he takes every week without fail that keeps his demons at bay. Mostly. Without me he would have died not long after the attack. I guess I'm the missing piece of the puzzle. And I guess that makes me almost as guilty as he is." 

A/N- I hope you are enjoying this story! If you are I'd love it if you'd comment and click that little star button to vote for it.

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