Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 107

**Blake**

Mum looks from the glass in the sink to the sauce across the bench, then back to me, and I can see the question forming before she even says it.

“Is this something your father should hear?” I look at Charlotte. I don’t know why I do that first. Maybe because she’s the one person in the room who already knows half of what I’m trying to make sense of. Maybe because the second her hand settled on me, all that static under my skin started to settle enough for me to think straight again. Maybe because I trust her answer more than my own right now, she smiles and nods.

Mum follows the look between us and takes in the whole picture in a second. “Alright,” she says gently. “How about we go into the living room?” My eyes drop back to the bench, to the shattered remains of the jar and the sauce dripping off the cupboards and onto the floor. 

“I should clean this up.” Charlotte is already reaching for another tea towel, smiling like she knows exactly what I’m about to do before I do it.

“It’s alright,” she says. “Charlie and I will clean it up.” Charlie, who has been hovering just inside the kitchen doorway with his phone still in one hand, looks up at being volunteered and then shrugs. “Yeah. Sure. Go.”

I let out a breath and wash the last of the sauce from my hands under the tap. “Thanks.”

I head into the living room with Mum, the lamp in the corner throwing a low gold light across the couch and the old rug. Mum sits, folding one leg under her as she waits. I stay standing, and a second later, the back door opens, and Dad comes in from outside. The cold follows him for a moment before the door shuts again behind him. He takes one look at my face and frowns as he comes over. “What happened?”

Mum glances at me. “Blake’s got something to tell us.”

I rub a hand over the back of my neck and look down for half a second before forcing myself to start. “Something’s been different since last night when Charlotte and I bonded. I just…” I exhale hard through my nose. “I don’t know how to explain it without sounding insane.”

“The best you can do is try,” Dad says.

So I do. I tell them about this morning, about feeling the anger outside before the car door slammed, about knowing the punch was coming before the idiot even swung at Theo. I tell them how wrong it felt, how it got under my skin, how I could feel Theo’s anger too once he got hit. I explain it as best I can: it’s not an observation but more internal. Like it is mine, but not. Mum’s brows pull together at that, but Dad’s don’t move. He stands there with his arms folded, listening to every word. Then I tell them about school. About the shove in the hallway and the instinct to get into it and stop it. I tell them about the rink and Theo, and then to top it all off, the jar that I barely touched but exploded like I had some Hulk hands.

I’m not even sure if I’m explaining it right. The words continue to tumble out of me as I try to make them make sense. The longer I talk, the stranger it sounds out loud. By the end of it, I’m pacing in front of the couch, dragging my hand through my hair every few sentences, and feeling like I might be losing my mind. “Oh, and at school,” I say, looking between them both now, “Charlotte asked Shanti if she knew what was happening, and all she got back was that they gave me a gift. That white wolves need a mate who can equal them, or balance them or something.” My eyes cut to Dad. “What the hell does that even mean?”

Dad’s brows have stayed furrowed through the whole thing, and he looks no more enlightened by the end of it than he did at the start. Mum, though, looks thoughtful. I watch her expression change, like a lamp flaring to life behind her eyes. “Wait.” Before either of us can say anything, she’s already on her feet and crossing the room to the bookcase. “You really should have started with the last part first, darling.” She says, her fingers moving straight to the same huge old book she had out with Charlotte the other day. The one full of brittle pages, faded writing, and things none of us fully understood when we first started looking through it. She lifts it down carefully, carries it back to the coffee table, and opens it with both hands.

The pages whisper under her fingers as she flips through them, faster than I would have thought she could with something that old, scanning line after line. Dad steps closer, and I stop pacing. All of our focus is on the sound of those pages turning.

“What are you looking for?” I ask. Her finger drags down one page, then the next, then stops as she taps it twice and looks up.

“Here.”

Charlotte comes to stand beside me, one hand settling on my shoulder, clearly interested to know more about this. I lean into her more than I probably should with both my parents watching, but Christ, I need it. “You know what it is?” I ask. Mum looks up at me again, smiling in that soft, all-knowing way of hers. 

“Not what it is,” she says softly. Then her eyes flick once to the mark at my neck before coming back to my face. “What you are.”

I look down at the page. The words mean nothing to me from this angle. Just old ink and yellow paper and the blur of something I can’t read upside down. Fuck. Would someone tell me already?