Page 63 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“The price is understanding,” he says. “And it starts a long way back from your own life.”

“Then start.”

“Before there was a wolf or vampire, dragon, fae or angel,” he says, “there was one people. One kind of creature, and every one of them carried all of it at once. The same body took a wolf’s shape, lived on blood, put up wings and breathed fire, healed a wound by laying a hand on it, stepped from one world into the next. None of it was divided up. Everything any of you can do now, one of them could do in a single afternoon.”

I stand there in the grass with a knife on my belt and a fence to finish.

“What does ancient history have to do with a debt I agreed to in your chamber?”

“That one nature went to war with itself.” He says it calmly, the same way he’s said the rest. “It came close enough to finishing the job that the ones who lived through it never wanted anything like it standing again. When it ended, the survivors were sealed away. What was left of that single nature got divided up, the pieces scattered into new worlds, separate ones, sealed off from each other.”

He waits. “Drakoria. Doria. Blood Moon. Every realm you have a name for. Each one is a piece of the same thing.”

“There’s more,” he says. “Everyone carried into those new worlds had the memory of ever being one thing stripped out of them. The record of what was done got buried where nobody would find it. Every court, every throne standing today was built on top of that, by people who had no idea what they were standing on.”

“None of that is something I can do anything about.”

“There’s a piece of that old work still running,” he says. “An instinct bred into an entire vampire bloodline to keep it from ever reaching outside itself. Every vampire alive carries it. Every one of them believes it’s their own good sense.”

I start working out how I’m going to tell Dane - tonight, not in the morning. Get it in front of him, Callum and Nova so it stops being a man standing in a field at dusk and turns into work we can do.

“You’re trying to make this something you can prepare the pack against,” Samuel says.

“That’s my job.”

“It’s bigger than anything you can ready them for.”

He comes a step closer to the fence. “The people who did all of this built locks to hold it in place,” he says. “Death was one of them.”

I look up at that. “In the world before, death worked differently. It came and went. It was never permanent, not the version you’ve lived with your entire life. They made it permanent on purpose when they built the new order. One more lock, holding the pieces where they’d been put.”

He lets that sit. “When the Council gave Harper her soul back,” he says, “we broke it.”

I set my hand on the top rail.

“Breaking one of them weakens every other one at once,” he says. “Faelan has spent centuries hunting for an opening like that. He knew the moment it happened. He has been working the crack wider ever since. He’s close enough now that this can’t wait for a better night.”

“What does any of that have to do with me?”

“It was never a private bargain for one life,” Samuel says. “Your love wasn’t useful to us in some general way, Ben. It was the specific thing that crack required. Love willing to break itself completely.”

“You’re telling me you needed it.”

“We needed to know it existed. The only way to know was to make you prove it.”

The sun’s gone from the ridge.

“The Ascent was built hard,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Built that hard on purpose.”

“Yes.” He holds my eyes. “Tuned to take everything from anyone who tried it, so that nothing except the real thing would survive the climb. We had to be certain it was in you. The only way to find out was to let it come very near to killing you.”

I take a step back and there’s nowhere to go. The fence stops me. “So I paid a debt the world owed,” I say. “And nobody told me that’s what I was doing.”

“Yes.”