My palms were clammy as they closed around the doorhandle to Emeli's room, my hear pumping erratically in my chest. I was more nervous to face Emeli then I had been with the two pack alpha's, and that was saying something, considering in this situation, she was just a teenage girl, not two strong, powerful alpha males. All I wanted to do was turn tail and run. What if she hated me? What if she wanted nothing more to do with me now that she knew about James? It was really possible, not just a thought.

But if I had learnt anything from the past couple of months, facing her sooner rather then later was a good motto to go by right now.

Twisting the door handle, I stepped into the dark room, the atmosphere sad and heavy in the dim blackness of Emeli's room. I shut the door behind me gently, the click as it slid closed far too loud to my ears.

"Em?" I whispered, shuffling over to her bed, my eyes already going wolf to see in the darkness of the room. "Are you awake?"

Silence met my ears, and I was almost ready to turn and sneak back out when a small voice spoke up from under the covers.

"I'm awake."

Breathing out a small sigh, I cautiously walked over to the bed, for the first time in my life not entirely sure what to do around Emeli, my best friend. I'd known the girl for years, seen her through the good, the bad, and the ugly. She knew me more about me than I did. 

And now I wasn't sure how to talk to her.

It was funny how things could change so quickly. 

"Can I sit?" I berated myself when my voice came out nervous. A small movement of shuffling underneath the covers later, Emeli nodded in the darkness, and I let out a small sigh, sitting gingerly at the end of her bed. 

The silence was suffocating. Like a hand was covering my mouth and I couldn't claw it away, no matter how hard I tried.

"Don't try and sugarcoat it." Emeli spoke eventually, making me jump at the sound of her voice. I shook my head, trying to slow the fast beat of my heart. "I just...don't."

"Where do you want me to start?" I asked slowly, my eyes focusing in on the left side of her face that was visible from under the covers. Her hair was knotted in a messy bun, her skin paler than normal. 

"From the beginning. Please." 

Breathing out a shaky breath, I nodded. "Okay. You remember the day you met James? Wait, of course you do." I shook my head from the stupidity of my comment. "Anyway, I had thought he was completely normal then, I did. I was so estatic that you had found your mate. You two seemed like the perfect match." 

Emeli moved, her eyes closing. I bit my lip, trying to figure out how to continue. 

"The first sign of him not being quite so...innocent, was one morning when Max and I had gotten to school early and he was outside on the phone. He was being really aggressive, and even brought up some things relating to me. We didn't think anything more of it, thinking it was a coincidence." 

"But it wasn't." Emeli whispered. 

"No. Stange things started to happen, I discovered that I was an Ether, and then I started to get chased. Remember? It wasn't for a while that we finally figured out it was James." 

Emeli's breath came out in a shaky sigh. "Why didn't you say anything at this point?" 

The pain in her voice was almost unbearable. I gulped down the lump in my throat, hoping that she would understand after all of this. Praying she would.

"We couldn't. You were his mate, and I wanted to really badly. But he would have figured out we knew."

"So you think that keeping it from me was the best thing to do?" 

"Well, yes." I winced. "Em, you have to believe me when I say that it was extremely hard at the start. We didn't want to believe that it was him, because we knew how it would make you feel-"

"But you don't, Katie." The surge of anger in her voice should have surprised me, but I had been waiting for it ever since I entered her room. "You don't, because you have your mate. He is here and he isn't evil and mine is and there is nothing I can do about that. Nothing. If anything, I know how you felt at the start, with Kade's rejection, but you don't know how I feel right now. You don't." 

Well, I couldn't argue with her. Emeli was right in every sense. I didn't know what it was like to have my mate, and then have him gone. I didn't know what it was like, finding out that you weren't actually that important to him after all, because he still picked his own path over yours. I didn't know what it felt like to be used by the one person who was meant for me.

"Continue with your story." She said quietly, and with a heavy heart and tight throat, I opened my mouth again.

"He was a part of an organisation that has a sole purpose of killing off all Ether bloodlines throughout the world. He was a spy, sent here to kill me." 

"What happened after the school incident?" Emeli asked again, not moving anything else but her mouth.

"He had someone with him, he called him Samuel. This guy knocked out everyone else, and he took me to a clearing in the woods. He was going to kill me, and he knocked me out." I shuddered, remembering the scene."Levi carried you back here when they woke up. The others tried to find us, and I was so afraid they wouldn't. But they did, and they arrived before I could wake up. Somehow, I knew they were there." 

"How?" 

I was still trying to figure that out. I sensed Kade immediately, remembering the relief I felt when I had been lying on the slightly damp grass at his presence. Something else happened though, something that made me fully aware to everything happening around me, even though I had been knocked cold by James.

My body had grown hot, from my chest outwards. It had almost gotten unbearable, the heat. 

And then I heard her voice, the soft accent of my great, great, great grandmother. She was in my head, whispering. Still, stay still. 

I could feel her, her presence around me, lapping at the heat with cold water. She was soothing me. Surrounding me in calm.

Until she was suddenly in my body, the feeling of two in one filling my subconcious and creating the overwhelming emotion of sharing a body with another. 

She was inside of me, using my body to get her message across. 

"Savour the gift, or release the curse." I remembered her saying, the swelling and rightness of her words connecting with me, with my wolf. Filling us both with the incredible sense of wholeness and belonging. I remembered her feelings of joy at my reaction to her presence. The little whisper of tenderness across my body, before she did something I never would have thought could happen. 

She moved us, straight up until we were standing, and then, like someone pulling an object apart, she separated from me, her body appearing right in front of me, bathed in light and an etheral sense of power. My great, great, great grandmother stood right in front of me, the smile on her face full of love and joy. Hello, my beauty, she had whispered, holding my eye contact as she lowered something heavy and cold into my hand. Looking down, I realised it was a sword, her hand wrapped around the handle just below mine. 

The memory of striking James with the sword pulled me back into the room, my mind focusing back on Emeli. "My great, great, great grandmother helped me. She...she entered me. We shared a body." I said again in wonder. 

"She helped me."

"Helped you do what?" Emeli had grown tense, I could sense it down our mind link. She was closed off from my thoughts, though, sheilding herself from me. I gulped. "Katie, who stabbed him?" 

I didn't want to answer. I almost couldn't speak around my tongue. Yes, James had tried to kill me. Yes, he was deranged and dangerous and a lunatic, but he was still Emeli's mate.

I had commited the biggest betrayal in harming her mate. And I had to face up to that consequence. 

"Me." 

I sounded choked, strained. Emeli withdrawed completely, her legs even moving away from me underneath her covers, and that's when the enormaty of what had just transpired in the woods settled hit me. 

I was nearly killed, and instead I stabbed Emeli's mate, before he disappeared into some place none of us knew, not knowing if he survived or not.

The pain in my chest at the physical sight of Emeli's withdrawal from me started to close around my heart. She was hurting, broken, confused and pained beyond belief, and I had done my part in making her feel like that. 

"Em, I'm so sorry-"

"Don't." She whispered, the smell of tears in the room. "Please, don't do that right now." 

"You're my best friend, Em." I tried again slowly. "One of the most important people to me in the whole world. Remember that, okay? If there had been any other way..."

"I want to be alone." 

"Can I just-"

"Katie, please. Leave me alone."

And that's when my heart started to crack again at the thought of losing this girl. This incredible, beautiful, loyal girl, who had stuck by my side for my entire life. Who had been through the ups and downs with me, always managing to find the bright side to everything.

And now I felt as though I was losing her. The longer she lay in her bed, withdrawing herself, the more sure I was that nothing was going to be the same with us again.

That was the biggest heartbreak.

"Okay." I whispered, feeling my own tears start a slow trail down my cheeks. "Okay."

My feet had never felt heavier once I was outside of her door. The pounding of my heart, the wetness of my cheeks, they all contributed to the fact that I had hurt one of the most amazing people in my life, and there was no recovering from that. 

Emeli was going to suffer from this for a long, long time. She was now without a mate, and could very easily lose her wolf because of this. The feeling of numbness would consume her. She will become half of herself, and if that wasn't painful enough, then she would have to go day to day in the pack, watching other couples mate, find their own happiness. She would be forever known as the girl with no mate. The constant knowledge of this was going to kill her. 

The pity she would get. The whispers. It would absolutely kill her. 

And I felt so responsible for doing this to her. 

Savour the gift, or release the curse. 

I was starting to wonder if there was a gift to any of this, at all. 

* * * * 

Holy baloney, it's been a while. I'm so sorry it's taken me literally months to upload! Things got busy, and this story sort of was laid to the side for FAR longer than anticipated, but it's back! Almost finished, too, but back. 

Thank you for whoever has been waiting for the updates, you guys are the greatest and I'm so sorry it's taken me this long! Hopefully they will come a little faster from now on! 

Let me know what you thought of this chappie, it was a pretty heavy one :( 

x