Souls Entwined

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen
Elle's POV

Travelling through the ghost town, I noticed signs posted on the windows of the shops. Counting the ones that weren't shut was easier – only two.

A lone man walked the streets with a dog tethered to a leash, sniffing the ground leisurely. He watched us, his head turning on a swivel point to follow our cars. The dog didn't look up once.

We drove past a house with a shabby sign that read "Mirium's School for at-Home Learning". I remembered Conner telling me that most kids were homeschooled, and many members of the pack opened their doors for combined learning.

It was a Thursday, but the lights were dimmed, and the curtains were drawn. Not a sound came from the house.

Behind me, I could hear Conner's foot rattling against the floor. Unsettled even before we'd seen the town sign, he hadn't stopped moving for over ten minutes. Using his reflection in the side-view mirror, I watched him. His gaze shifted, on edge. Never once looking out the window, he kept his shoulder turned to the town that used to be his home.

I didn't want to ask questions while other ears pried into every word shared. So our trip had been doused in silence, suffocating and burning in our ears. Rylan had only tried once more to show me the files, but I refused again, even as he laid the files in view.

I would give Kaden another chance to show me the files before accepting Rylan's insistence. It wouldn't make things whole again but it would be a start.

The car slowed, crawling up the driveway to a packhouse not too dissimilar to the one back home. Time seemed to go too quickly for how far we had made it up the drive. Fallyn had to stop every few centimetres as people darted across the road, fanning around Kaden's car.

'Are they all here for him?'

'Who else?'

I met Fallyn's stare, the stupidity of the question forcing a blush to my cheeks. Of course, Kaden's first visit would bring the town to its knees.

'How?'

Fallyn's gaze scanned the crowd as Conner took post by my door, and Rylan saught out Kaden in the swarming masses. 'How what?' She asked, never once breaking her line of sight with the crowd.

'There are so many people. How do they do it?' I tried to count the people in the crowd, but the waves moved so quickly that it was impossible to keep track. 'Well,' I sighed when Fallyn still didn't answer, 'historically, packs were never more than a hundred members—the philosophy of a pack is about loyalty and strong relationships.'

'And most packs aren't since having so many members is rare. But for those packs, they are the most vulnerable.' Fallyn followed a woman walking through the crowd, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. 'When the wars started, thousands of packs lost their alpha lineage, but the truth was that was nothing compared to the hundreds of packs brought to their knees, completely wiped from our history books. What could have been solved by the Goddess announcing a new alpha for the packs who had lost their leaders was not that simple. Despite being able to grant sovereignty, she did not. There was a truth in the circumstances she saw before anyone else.'

It was as if Fallyn was reading from a textbook, but her voice was sombre as she recounted the history that wasn't in any books. A version of this history was taught in schools, but it was a history mandated by humans and admitting fault was not something we did well.

'Stronger as one, the Goddess decided that packs should band together and form into Civitas Magna. And so packs who had lost their alphas found new alphas and new communities to belong to.