Poisoned With Love

7.

Of all the places in Inverness, from the deserted lanes of the islands on the lake to the streets that at night lost their noisy daytime charm, Adam K. had chosen an open cafe in the middle of the Victorian Square. It was past the morning hours when the square was already filled with people running in all directions, suddenly becoming a completely unusual meeting place for the stranger who had left a diary on my front porch on my 18th birthday.

A few blocks away, after losing all means of transportation and running my way to the coffee shop, I was just one step away from being randomly run over by a tour bus. I arrived a little late, but already exhausted and upset about the decision to meet a werewolf in the middle of a city square. It wasn't his visit that had made me call the number left on the back of the diary and meet two days later after my birthday, but what I found on the pages written in black ink, too old to belong to anyone alive.

I had already read it a few times before that meeting, a clumsily written tale of a young huntress leading a forbidden double life. Born into a family that put a silver knife in her hand when she was just 9 years old, she fell in love with the one she was sent to kill after she turned 18. Her words were thrown chaotically on the paper, while each page hid the despair of a young woman who did not understand her destiny, but who was ready to run away with the one she had spared. The whole story felt a little dramatic and impossible from the first few pages until I hit the denouement of her story, a bite at the base of the neck that bound her forever to the one she considered her soulmate. I had never heard of that slightly unusual werewolf ritual before, for no hunters' books I had read would acknowledge the human side of those they wanted dead. But it was a natural process, from the moment a werewolf met its mate for the first time.

Maybe they had never spoken to each other until that moment, maybe they hadn't even met, but he knew, from the first sight, the first hearing of the heartbeat of the one or the one who would become his mate forever. He knew they would be bound even after death and only a bite on the neck under the full moon would make that vow permanent. The author of the diary recounted every detail with the precision of someone who had known all her life, although she had been completely unconscious until she met the one who would steal the earth from under her feet. I did not know who or what separated them from the contents of the diary, which ended suddenly, one evening in May, spent in the arms of the one to whom it had become a mate.

As touching and unusual as the story in the pages of the diary seemed, the last lines made me look at it for maybe a few more hours. It was signed almost invisible to the human eye at the end of the page "Layla K.". The same Layla who had grown up in a family of hunters and left that life behind for her soul mate, a werewolf named Samuel Kirigan, would become Layla Barrow years later. The same Layla Barrow would lose her life on the porch of her house, killed by a plot hatched by Maeve and the Kirigan pack. The same Layla was my mother. 

"Layla K?"

I spoke breathlessly as I approached the one table that seemed torn from the bustling market landscape. The young man dressed in a black shirt, generously open at the base of the neck and who seemed to adapt to the landscape only through the lens of the coffee mug in front of him, was waiting at the table in the corner silently, reading a book without much interest in what was happening around him. The scene looked like something out of a painting you'd find in an old English house. My arrival caught his attention suddenly, but the slow movement with which he dropped the book on the table and looked up would break any lingering doubt. Adam dominated the entire chaos around him with slow but sure gestures. He then looked down at the journal that was still shaking in my right hand from the effort I had put into getting to that meeting in the first place. I would never have met a werewolf who had spared my life twice and never given me the certainty that he would do it again. But I wanted to understand at that moment why he had a diary and a pendant of my mother's, which he had suddenly brought into my life after months of just getting used to the thought that I had lost her.