The Elemental Mate

Xander POV

I stand outside our bedroom doorway as I keep my eyes on my mate. She has barely moved from the window sill for the past week.

She barely eats. She doesn't move. She won't even talk.

I’m losing her and I don’t know how to save her from herself.

“How is she doing?” Amara asks me as she walks up to the open door. She releases a sigh as her eyes connect with Aurora’s form, “Nevermind.”

“She’s not eating and I can’t get her to talk to me. She won’t even say a word through our matelink,” my voice is barely a whisper. Every day she sits there, my heart breaks even more. I can feel her pain hollowing her from the inside out and I know I can’t stop it.

“Why didn’t she allow us to wait? She forced herself to rush through saying good-bye before even fully having accepted her mother’s death. We could have given her more time.”

“No, we couldn’t have. The longer a witch’s body is left, the more likely they will be trapped on this plane, unable to move on to the afterlife. Forever haunted,” she says, a sad look entering her eyes,

“She had to perform the funeral rites immediately. Didn't she tell you about her father?” she asks me.

“Yeah. I saw it.”

“Did you see what happened after?” I shook my head no in answer, “No one found them until two days after he was dead. He was left without rites for so long, having died so violently, we got to him too late. She wasn’t able to be there when they gave him his rites, so she didn’t get a chance to say good-bye but she knows that the rites didn’t work. His soul is trapped here for eternity.”

We stood there in silence after that as she allowed me to take the information in. She lost her father and instead of allowing him to move on, he was cursed.

I'm starting to understand her withdrawal of emotions she showed last week. It was the only way she could be able to make sure her mother didn't suffer the same fate as her father.

"It's going to take time before she gets back to who she was before," Amara tells me, “She lost her mom. She just needs time to accept that reality.”

“I know that. I can feel her pain and I know how much this is hurting her, but she won’t talk to me about it. She won’t let me help her.”

“She’s not going to,” Amara says very straight forward.

“Thanks,” I snap at her, not able to help myself. I already have Kai yelling in my head to find a way to help her, and whining about how we are completely useless right now. I don’t need to be reminded by Amara too.

“I don’t mean that she doesn’t want to or that you aren’t going to be able to help. She needs you now more than ever and just you being close to her helps, Xander,” Amara says softly to me, before explaining more, “She physically can’t talk to you. She can’t talk to anyone. Not yet.”

“What do you mean?

“She’s in a witch’s mourning,” she says as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. When I clearly don’t catch on, she starts talking again, “When a family member dies, a witch must spend a week in complete silence, grieving for the one we lost. We are not allowed to mutter a single word.”

“Why?” I ask the confusion still clear in my tone.

“Witches are emotional creatures by design. Everything we do is rooted in our emotions, especially magic. Before the mourning was law, witches who practiced after a loss lost control.”

“What could have happened that was so bad that it became law that you were not allowed to speak?”

“In the middle of the 14th century, a witch named Marvel lost her child to witch hunters. She lost control and released the black death upon Europe, killing fifty million people,” her tone one of a reprimand.

I stood there shocked as I let that sink in. Wolf law was about protecting the packs and our people from humans and other supernaturals. But every new law or rule I discovered about the witches seemed to be in place to protect everyone else from them.

“She’s been sitting there for a week already. When does she get to come back?” I ask her, wanting more than anything for my mate to come back to me.

Amara takes a deep breath as she tries to come up with the right words to tell me, but the second her eyes connect with mine, she snaps her mouth shut. I watch as she makes a decision, her entire stature solidifying on the choice.

“Her times up.”

Pushing past me, she walks straight into the bedroom and up to Aurora’s solemn form. She doesn’t say a word, not a single sound. Amara just stares at Aurora’s side, keeping her expression stone.

“It’s time,” Amara says.

It takes only a moment before Aurora’s head turns and stares back at her. They both stare, having a silent conversation.

A few minutes pass before Aurora nods her head. She moves and stands up, turning into the room.

I stand straighter as I move across the door’s threshold and right up to my mate. When her eyes connect with mine, I watch as she pushes all her emotions into herself, the same way she did in the woods.

“Aurora,” I say softly, wanting to hear her voice just once.

I don’t think I ever expected what her words were going to be.

“I’m going to kill Iris.”