[Carmen]Later that night, I woke up thirsty. It was rare for that to happen, but I figured it was a new place and the air here was different from the air back home. Perhaps I just didn’t react well to it. I found my robe and put it on, tying it at the waist, before I went to find water. I didn’t remember there being a cup in the bathroom, so I went to the kitchen. Using my magic to see, I managed to get there without bumping into anything. It didn’t take long to find a cup and get myself a cold glass of water. It felt like I was wilting before, but the water perked me right up. I drained the glass, then filled it again to take with me. “I thought I might find you here,” Maia said from behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin. She was quiet. It was hard to sneak up on a werewolf, especially one with my sensitive hearing. Turning, I clutched the glass of water, not wanting to drop it or give away that she startled me. She moved toward me and got herself a glass of water as well. I moved out of her way. “Were you looking for me?” I asked. “Your bedroom door was open a crack when I went past. I realized that you weren’t in there and figured you must have needed a drink. I can’t seem to manage to make it a whole night without water, too, but that is because my father was a water spirit. Living on land is a difficult experience for some of us who are descended from a water spirit,” she explained. “I… I had another question for you, but I didn’t know if it was okay to ask….” She sighed a little. “You want to know about your father, don’t you? It felt like you were holding something back tonight. I can answer your questions to the best of my ability, but I may not have all of the answers you seek. Come, let’s sit at the counter and we can talk.” We went to the counter and climbed onto the stools there. I set my glass of water down and clasped my hands together. I hoped she would have some of the answers, at least. I needed to know if he was going to come after me again and I wanted an idea of when and how, so we could be prepared. “You are at odds with yourself because of how your father has acted. You remember him as loving, if a little overprotective, but, in the last half of this year, he showed himself to be more hateful than you ever expected. You love him still, don’t you?” she asked. “I do. He’s still my father. I can’t just cut off the feelings I’ve had for him my entire life. My father will always be my father,” I admitted. “It can be hard to realize someone isn’t what you believed them to be. I understand. What do you wish to know?” “Is he planning to come after me again? The last time he came to the office and made a huge scene outside of it when he couldn’t find the entrance. Will he ever accept Rock and me? Is there hope that he could change?” I asked. Maia took my hand and held it in her own. I closed my eyes and thought about my father. The sound of his voice and what he was like before I met Rock. The father I remembered having before he changed. “Carmen, you have to understand a few things before I can tell you the answers to that. The most important of which is that magic is wild. It can never be tamed, even if it acts like it. Magic must be treated with respect. “Your family didn’t treat the magic given to them with the respect they should have. When your grandparents didn’t repay us, it started getting upset. Magic understands its power and importance. It took a lot of magic to continue the Beta line in your family. “That magic gave a second generation the chance to do right. It allowed your brother to be born a Beta and for you to be the payment required for it. When your father refused to give you to us, the magic started corrupting. The goddess protected your brother by telling the magic to leave him unharmed in return for him being unable to procreate until both you accepted your fae mate and your brother accepted your relationship,” Maia told me. “Mike always accepted my relationship with Rock. He never pushed back, he only wanted to make sure I was safe.” “Yes, and the goddess gave him a way to reestablish the Beta line in your blood. She gave him an Alpha blood mate to reignite it if he could accept you. The corruption in your father grew, though. The magic pushed him to be worse than he should have been,” she explained. “Your father never should have tried to destroy your relationship with Rock. I like to believe he would have accepted you if the magic wasn’t twisting his mind.” I nodded. “So my father probably wouldn’t have tried to make me leave Rock and he wouldn’t have tried to marry me off to a werewolf who wasn’t my mate. I don’t understand the corruption, though. What was the magic trying to do with that?”Maia took a deep breath and my senses were filled with new information. I could see a world with magic swirling around it. The vision zoomed in to a mountain meadow with wildflowers, boulders, trees, and a stream running through it. I didn’t know how I knew it was magic swirling around in the air, but I did. A butterfly fluttered onto a flower and the magic swirled, creating a small woman with butterfly wings. She reached down to the earth and touched a mouse that crawled on the ground. The magic swirled again and a young man, about her height, stood where the mouse had been. They raced off through the meadow, her flying and him running behind. The magic swirled more and one of the boulders came to life, roaring in a terrifying way. The same happened to a tree. Then people started to form. They looked like they were made of the different elements. They all danced together in the meadow as more started to form. This was the creation of the fae. I never knew the history, but something told me in the places where the magic swirled strongly, it created more fae peoples. I watched as they spread out to explore the world and created more. “Long ago, the Earth was covered in magic. Gods and goddesses watched over the people there and guided them, but two were stronger and superior to the others. Our goddess saw the magic create life unlike she had ever imagined. So different from the creations of the other god. “The magic was untamed and created what it wanted. She vowed to protect the creations of magic, great and small,” Maia murmured. I saw the magic swirl around a man sleeping next to a wolf he had tamed. The magic swirled around them and the two beings became one. The creation of the first werewolf, maybe? No one really knew how we came to be. “Light magic, dark magic, wild, unfiltered magic, all of it gave life to the creatures the goddess called hers. When the magic of the world faded, the goddess shunted as much as she could into the secondary world of the fae realm, which had previously only been a grid of magic pathways. It became a whole new world for the fae to live in.“Some of the realms faded away. The realm of the dark elves was one of these. Once there was an underground world where they lived with the support of the underworld gods, but as those gods lost power and faded, so too did this realm. The goddess needed a place where her people could be protected. “There is still magic in this world, but it is no longer the world of magic it used to be. Only the original fae remember the world as it once was. We mortal fae have never known it beyond visits to the fae realm. We may never know it again, but the world has stabilized. This is the doing of the goddess. “She and her assistants, other goddesses who lost power and joined her in hopes of not fading away, watch over all of the magical creatures in both the human realm and the fae realm. They cannot control magic, though, only bargain with it.” The idea of the goddess not being able to control something was a little frightening. Especially something as mischievous as magic. Who knows what kinds of things the magic could decide to do?“What does this have to do with my father?” I asked. “The goddess gave her people freewill, because they were partially made of magic and magic cannot be controlled. It can be guided and will sometimes choose what is right over what is fun. Fun for magic is not necessarily fun for those affected. “Your grandfather used his freewill to select someone outside of the goddess’ plan to marry. He put an end to your family’s Beta line, not her. Then he blamed her for it. He sought magic to give him the power he had tossed away. “Sadiyah was more than willing to give that magic, but she needed a payment and picked the one that the magic guided her to. A child for us to share and teach the ways of the seer. The magic wanted to add a werewolf line to the blood of the fae. It didn’t have the strength, so it made this demand.” “So she didn’t pick it herself?” I asked. “No, but she loved it. As we don’t have a male mate, we cannot have children and all of us have wanted one. Seers are a special species of elf that lives twice as long as other elves. We are one of the longest-lived species of the fae.  “As such, we find pleasure in things that take a lifetime or more to appreciate. You have given us back part of that by permitting us to be godparents to one of your children. Them, their children, and their grandchildren will all be part of our family. “Sorry, I’m getting off topic. The magic in your father began corrupting from the moment he refused to give you up. Even after your grandparents died, the corruption grew. I can only see it now, we had no idea about it before. But there is good news.“According to what I can now see, the magic has been removed. This is not something a fae could do. All I can see is a darkness feeding on the magic in him.” I saw my father in the forest. He was begging someone to save me from the monster that was hurting me. What I saw when the vision cleared was a fearsome dark beast. It loomed over him and was terrifying. After he agreed to whatever it was telling him, the darkness enveloped him like a large, dark mouth. He screamed as it devoured the magic in him. My eyes filled with tears, but there was nothing I could do to stop seeing it. There was no closing my eyes against it. Once it was done, the vision went away. What had he invoked in the search for something to free me from my mate bond? Was there something else that was going to come after me now? “The darkness tricked him into accepting a deal that would leave you with Rock and allow it to feed on the corrupted fae magic. There are two paths your father can take from here. “First, and the most hopeful, is the path of redemption. As the corruption in your father’s body starts to normalize, he may realize that he was truly the one harming you. He was the monster, not your mate. “Second, is the path of darkness. If he holds on to the corruption and lets it fester inside of him, he will never redeem himself. He would rather die than accept your life path. This can only lead to his death. If he chooses to embrace the remaining corruption of his mind and heart, then I see him doing something that will cause him to die,” Maia told me. I shook my head. I didn’t want my father to die. He wasn’t a bad guy, but I didn’t know how tightly he could hold on to this corruption. Quietly, I prayed to the goddess to help him back to her path and protect him. He needed her more than he realized and I didn’t want him to lose his life for something that wasn’t truly his fault. “Is there anything I can do to help him?” I asked. Maia sighed. “I’m afraid not, Carmen. This is your father’s battle. He gave up his life because of this corruption. He has no mate bond to guide his heart. This much I can see. He has to make this decision for himself. If you come across him, I don’t know that you should trust him. “I will talk to Orella about your training and see if she would be willing to try teaching you how to read the corruption in a person’s soul. It may not work. You might be unable to see it, but I have hope that you will see and be capable of reading it.” “Maia, I appreciate you being willing to check it for me. I want my father to be healthy and come back to us, but I will hold off on that if it means protecting my mate and my own life…. I should get back to bed,” I said. “You should. Go on, Carmen. We can talk more in the morning. If you like, no one has to know what I saw,” she replied. “No. I need to tell Rock. He should know that we still need to be wary of what my father might do.”She helped me off of the stool and I went back to the bedroom. I set my water on the nightstand and took off my robe, then slid into bed next to Rock. Seeming to sense me, he reached out and pulled me to him, letting my head rest on his chest. I breathed him in and closed my eyes. There were still questions, even though I had all the answers I could handle for the night. I would tell Rock in the morning and we would work together to figure out what it meant and where to go from here.