The blood leaking from my palms made it difficult to climb the nearly nine-hundred-year-old cypress tree. Not only that, splinters riddled my fingers and hands as I worked my way up the trunk. Good thing I wore climbing shoes. I was never planning to climb the tree, but when I laid my hands on the trunk, something was revealed to me confirming that this was the tree they found Damon in after his fall.

A shiny object was stuck between some of the branches nearly twelve feet up the trunk. I lost my footing and almost fell. I dug my nails into the wood using some of my wolf's strength. Thunder cracked somewhere in the distance but judging from the lightning that hit the ground thereafter I had another thirty minutes before rain fall. If I focused, I could reach the object.

When I looked down at the ground at how far I'd come, a dizzy spell took me. At the thought of falling to my death, the contents of my lunch rolled around in my belly and I became nauseous. Bile rose in my throat.

"Please God, don't let me fall," I said.

I looked away from the ground and refocused on my target. I could see it clearly now. It was a rusted knife, handmade with steel and rawhide. I climbed higher, ignoring the signs of bad weather on the horizon until I reached the knife. I tugged it free of the branch and vines that had held it captive all this time. As soon as it was released, a vision came to me of Damon Caedmon on the mountain, holding that very same knife in his hand. And suddenly I was in the vision too. It was as if I was looking through Damon's eyes. At Priestess Shanhah.

She used her magic to subdue him, holding him frozen to the spot. Or maybe it was the arrow that her men had put into his heart. Blood poured from the wound in his gut on the ground he was standing on.

"Why are you doing this?" Damon asked.

"The blood of the Alpha flows through your veins."

"Of course it does, witch!" He held the knife suspended in mid-air but he couldn't move. Shanhah was more powerful than he realized. Than they all had realized.

"A Caedmon Alpha's blood is pure and filled with magic."

"What do you want with my blood?"

"From Caedmon blood and from wolf's blood, the first Alpha was converted. Now from Alpha's blood, I'll bring about a new race who'll serve me."

"You stupid bitch!" Damon spat.

Shanhah cocked her head to one said. "No, this isn't stupid. This is the will of my goddess. The One. The All."

I was knocked out of the vision when I lost my grip on the trunk.

I sprained my arm trying to grasp for a low hanging branch and cried out, but the limb couldn't hold my weight. It broke and my body fell like a waft in the wind.

I saw a vision of my brother being thrown from the mountain with the handmade knife in his fist and falling to his death.

Or maybe it was me.

I was falling…with the knife in my hand.

When I hit the ground, the wind was knocked right out of me and then—