Winter Wolves Series
Cursed Wolf Chapter 7

After locking up the shop, Luna made her way up to the apartment above the store with pastries and tea in hand. She felt happy to have met some friends in Selkie already. Rebecca had been kind and welcoming. Being next door to River and her bakery was a godsend. She couldn't believe she'd been so lucky.

The bookstore was strange, though. She thought about all the weird things on the shelves downstairs as she sat down in the green velvet armchair opposite the fireplace. The oracle cards of wolves popped into her mind.

A shiver went down her spine as she opened the white box River had given her. A delicious flaky ham and cheese croissant sat inside, with another cream puff for dessert. Luna smiled and took a bite.

She was still hungry after the long trip, even with a small lunch on the boat and a bite in the bakery next door. She gladly ate the croissant and drank her tea. This time it was a soothing herbal blend.

She stashed the cream puff in the fridge, which was blessedly clean. Luckily for her, it seemed as though Louisa's apartment had been attended to after her passing.

She looked around again, stepping into each room. There was a large living room and dining room area. With tons of healthy plants and a big window looking out on the street.

There was a rather large bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a shower. A large master bedroom and a slightly smaller room that looked to be storage for books and apothecary items.

Luna had no background in herbs and potions, but she hoped that she could learn what she needed to run New Moon as soon as possible.

The sheets and blankets on the bed in the master bedroom were fresh and folded on the new looking mattress.

Luna made the bed, feeling strange about sleeping in a dead woman's room. Had Louisa died here? She didn't want to think about it.

I died in the woods.

Luna gasped, dropping the handmade quilt on the ground. Goosebumps rose on her flesh and the hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

What was happening? Was she losing her mind? She'd eaten. It couldn't be low blood sugar. Was she simply tired from the trip or was she hearing things?

She shook her head and scrubbed her face. She really needed to rest. After finishing the bed, she searched the kitchen for a bottle of wine. If there was one thing you needed after traveling two thousand miles and hearing disembodied voices, it was a glass of wine.

She found a bottle of California merlot and filled a carved crystal glass she found in the dark wood cabinets. With wine and cream puff in hand, she climbed into the comfortable soft bed and found the TV remote on the end table.

With a sigh of contentment, she turned on the TV and found Louisa had cable and every streaming service known to humankind. Suddenly, this trip felt like a luxury vacation.

She sipped the sweet wine and nibbled on her cream puff while exploring all the options she had available. After turning on a movie she'd desperately wanted to watch but couldn't afford back in California, she settled down into the blankets.

For the first time in she couldn't remember how long, her muscles relaxed, and the tension left her shoulders. The wine was delicious and so was the pastry. The movie was oh so entertaining and yummy.

She had a wonderful business and apartment to live in. Her life was almost complete. The only thing missing was...

She thought about the wolves and River's talk about mate.com. Luna looked at her phone and bit her lip. Was she ready to start dating again after Gavin? She groaned and rolled her eyes. She didn't want to think about him. At this point, she was glad that he was gone. If she had meant so little to him, good riddance.

Luna noticed a large, heavy, bound journal on the bedside table and picked it up. A fancy fountain pen rolled out of the page and the book opened to where Louisa had left off.

She pursed her lips, her curiosity warring with her ethical code. Was it wrong to read someone's diary after they were gone or was it honoring them?

She paused the movie on TV and let her eyes focus on the elegantly scrawled longhand. There were only a few words on the page.

"She will be their only hope."

The wolves on the cards flashed through her mind. And the picture of the alpha loomed large behind her eyelids. The image sank into her stomach and butterflies burst all around it.

She sucked in a breath and flipped back a few pages. As she read Louisa's diary, it became clear that her grandmother was expecting to pass away.

Louisa used words like coven, craft, and fate. Luna gulped, not sure if her grandmother was crazy or if there was something else going on in Selkie, Alaska besides a larger than normal percentage of shifters.

She set down the journal, not sure she could take any more. If what she read was true, magic and witches existed, and Louisa believed that Luna was one of them.

All the women in their family line had the gift. Even her mother had it, despite leaving with a man like her dad. It was something Louisa had always regretted, not being able to protect her daughter from the wrong idea about romance. But he'd been handsome and a ticket out of Selkie for the young, adventurous woman. She'd gotten her dream of going to California. But unfortunately, it had also been the end of her.

As clearly as Louisa could see the signs, she couldn't have prevented it any more than she could prevent her own death.

Luna paced the room. The TV screen paused with the face of a man and woman looking longingly into each other's eyes.

Not only had her grandmother been some kind of psychic, she was also a witch who crafted magical spells with herbs. Louisa had expected Luna to finish the potion she'd been working on before she died.

Luna picked up the journal again and reread the pages about the potion. It was brewing in the pantry, but Louisa wasn't sure if it was complete.

"But what was it for?" Luna asked and kept reading.

Something is coming. A curse so great and deep, even my magic may not be able to fight it.

Luisa had known she would die before it was done, and Luna would have to carry on after her. Luna groaned in agitation. She set the journal on the table beside her grandmother's fancy pen. Perhaps this was all the ramblings of an elderly woman with failing mental clarity.

But that couldn't be the case. Louisa's writing was perfectly lucid. In fact, her writing was as clear and concise as some of the best scholarly works Luna had ever read. Luna didn't believe the woman's mental faculties had been impaired.

Be that as it may, magic just did not exist. That being said, people had believed the same thing about dragons and shifters before them. It had been decades since shifters had come out to the public, and now they were just an ordinary part of life. Could she believe that something like magic was just sitting under human's noses, and they hadn't noticed it?

She couldn't think about it anymore tonight. She needed to get back to her wine, film, and bed. No more of this curse breaking nonsense.

She climbed under the covers and un-paused her movie. As the couple embraced and kissed on screen, her heart thumped in her chest. She wished that everything made sense in her beautiful new life. But as lovely and amazing as it all was, there were massive unanswered questions hanging over her like a lead weight.

She picked up her phone while the hero picked up the heroine and rode off on his horse with her into the sunset.

She tapped over to mate.com and began to sign up for a membership and made a quick profile. She answered the introductory questionnaire and waited for her matches to load.

The first man came up on the screen. Beside him was a percentage. The sexy beast with black hair and blue eyes was an eighty-five percent match.

Luna bit her lip. These men were beyond hot. She scrolled down, past the ninety percent match, past the ninety-seven percent match. Each one seemed buffer and sexier than the last.

Finally, at the bottom of the page, she found her one hundred percent match-her fated mate.

Luna dropped the phone and covered her mouth with a gasp. The man was a god. Massive shoulders, cunning blue eyes, and a shock of blond hair swept back over his head and cropped short at the sides.

His profile name was Cursed Wolf. Luna shook her head. This was too strange for words. She remembered her conversation with River about fate.

If anything had ever felt like fate in her entire life, this moment definitely did.