“Have I mentioned yet this morning that I love you?” Jase was apparently admiring her power play as much as he was.
“What’s it going to be, Joshua?” She squeezed his ankle. “Are you willing to let me in?”
He’d never projected his thoughts to anyone before, but he figured it was just like projecting your voice. He took a deep breath and then thought with as much clarity and force as he could, “I’m an ally, Stella Polaris. You can trust me.”
“Did you just call me the North Star?”
Jase cocked an eyebrow. “Since you didn’t ask me to forcefully remove his limbs from his body, I’m guessing that experiment went well?”
“Oh yeah. He’s good people,” she said with a wave of her hand like it was a foregone conclusion. “What did you mean by Stella Polaris?”
Taking Talley’s word as to Joshua’s standing as a non-enemy as gospel, Jase crashed back against the wall, no longer battle ready. “Stella Polaris? What does Paul McCartney’s daughter have to do with anything?”
“Stella Polaris is Latin. It means ‘pole star’, which for us, is the North Star,” Talley calmly explained to Jase. “And Joshua acted like it was my name. It had the timbre of something meaningful.”
His thoughts had a timbre? And Talley could tell what it meant? Joshua realized he might be underestimating the scope of Talley’s power, which he already knew to be considerable.
“It’s not a name, but a position. The Stella Polaris. The Brightest Star. The Ruler of the Seers. A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, the Stella Polaris was a position equal to that of the Alpha Female.” He didn’t have to explain to them that this was a time when the Alpha Female wasn’t a Seer herself. From all the information he’d gathered from his sources, Jase and Talley knew exactly what, and who, the true Alpha Female was. Many people thought the two of them had turned their back on her when she had faced off with Sarvarna and Stefan, but Joshua’s gut told him they were doing what they could to protect her. It had only taken a few nights’ worth of surveillance to be proven correct.
“How does an Immortal know about stuff the Alpha Pack will kill to keep secret?” Jase asked.
“Well, it helps that I can’t be killed.” Not that they hadn’t tried. He still felt queasy when anyone mentioned Rome, and he had developed a pathological fear of the Bee Gees. “It’s taken a lot of digging, and I don’t have anything even close to resembling the full picture, but there are a group of nuns in Chile who have existed for hundreds of years. They claim to be the descendants of great Seers, and they worship the Stella Polaris in the way other orders worship the Virgin Mary. They pray incessantly for her return. When I visited them, they said a Future Seer in Canada wrote to them and proclaimed the Stella Polaris was once again walking the earth. The Future Seer talked about great changes coming to the world of Shifters and Seers, and said the Stella Polaris would be part of the rebellion, bringing equality back to her people.”
“And this letter named Talley specifically?”
“No, but it did mention that the Stella Polaris was born on a windy March night and referred to her as having dual Sights for her positions in dual packs.” Joshua rubbed his chin. “Which pack do you think gets credit for your visions?” he as Talley. “If you ask me, that’s a Matthew’s talent. The Hagans seem more like get-inside-your-head kind of people.”
Talley looked a little shell-shocked. “I was born in March.”
Joshua tapped the side of his nose. “Right you are.”
While Talley seemed to be handling the news in the same way she might handle having a nightly news correspondent tell her aliens had just landed in New York City, Jase seemed to find the fact that she was a long-lost supernatural deity fairly normal. “Did this letter say anything else?” he asked while Talley had a staring contest with the wall.
“Well,” Joshua said, “it did mention one person by name - Liam Cole.”
“Is that why you want to find him? Because you want to be part of the rebellion?” Talley asked, snapping out of her trance.
“Or because you want to stop it?” Jase added on.
“If he can bring down the Alpha Pack, then I will swear my eternal allegiance to Liam Cole,” Joshua said. “And when I say ‘eternal’ allegiance, I mean eternal. I don’t die, and neither do my loyalties.”
“Why the Alphas?” Talley’s hand squeezed his ankle slightly as if she didn’t fully expect him to answer her question truthfully without the reminder that she would know if he lied. “Shifters and Immortals stay so far out of each other’s politics that most of us don’t even believe you guys exist. Honestly, even though they accused Scout of being a Thaumaturgic, I’m not entirely sure the Alphas themselves believe in you.”
“Her name was Evelyn Marie Northcutt.” It was as if saying her name conjured her ghost. He had purposefully not thought of the specifics of her in years, yet with those three words every detail of her was called to mind as if his memory refused to let go despite his strong desire to forget and escape the pain thinking about her brought. “She was the most beautiful girl in Asheville, North Carolina. Her eyes were a kaleidoscope of colors and there were more freckles on her skin than stars in the sky.” I’m just tracing the constellations, he told her as his fingers tickled across her bare skin. “And she was talented. There wasn’t an instrument she couldn’t play, and her voice was enough to make grown men cry. For reasons that never made sense to anyone, including my parents, she agreed to marry me.”
Talley’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. “She was a Shifter.”
“No, not a Shifter. Evey was a Seer.” He hadn’t known until he’d been drowning his grief in the infinite supply of moonshine he'd lifted from his parents’ storage building. Benjamin had found him literally face-down in a ditch just outside the city limits. Once he was hosed down and sober, Benjamin explained how the world wasn’t quite as cut-and-dry as most people suspected. He told him about what Evelyn really was and why she was murdered. And then he’d offered Joshua the chance to make it right. Joshua didn’t even think about it. He just accepted the offer and spent every day since in his quest to destroy the Alpha Pack. “Did you know that once you’ve been claimed by a Shifter there is no going back?” he asked Talley. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a fifty year old man who has tried to grope you ever since you turned twelve and grew breasts or not. If he wants you and the Pack Leader accepts his claim, you’re his. And if you refuse to be with him and he finds out you’ve gone and given yourself away to some local boy you fell in love with, he can petition the Alpha Pack to have you punished.” Joshua had found her a little over an hour after he they had finished whipping her. By then, it was too late. He’d tried, loading her into his car and driving like a bat out of hell into town, but she was dead by the time they found a doctor.