Chapter 7 THE MOTHER'S TRUTH

Isabel's POV

I woke to the smell of pine and woodsmoke, my head pounding like someone had taken a hammer to my skull. For a disorienting moment, I thought I was back in the forest after my banishment, broken and alone. Then memory flooded back with cruel clarity and I jerked upright, reaching instinctively for abilities I wasn't sure how to control.

"Easy," a familiar voice said, and my heart stopped.

My mother sat across from me in a wooden chair, older than I remembered but unmistakably her. The silver-blonde hair we shared was streaked with white now and pulled back in a practical braid. Her violet eyes, mirrors of my own, held twenty years of survival and secrets.

"Mom?" The word came out broken, childlike.

"Hello, little one," Elara said softly. "I'm sorry it took so long."

I looked around wildly, taking in the small cabin with its rough-hewn furniture and shelves lined with books in languages I couldn't identify. Through the window, I saw snow-capped mountains and forest stretching endlessly. We were far from the motel, far from any territory I recognized.

"Where are we? How did I get here? The council's operative, she said…" My voice caught. "She said my father died screaming my name."

Pain flashed across Elara's face, raw and ancient. "Morgana always did have a gift for cruelty. Your father's last words were actually a binding spell that protected you from council detection for twenty-four years. It killed him, but it kept you safe until you were strong enough to survive what's coming."

I tried to process this, tried to reconcile the father I'd never known with the man who'd sacrificed everything for a daughter he'd barely met. "I don't understand any of this. How am I here? Where are Logan and Kael and Lysander?"

"Alive, as far as I know," Elara said. "I've been monitoring your situation since the ceremony. When I sensed council operatives moving on your location, I triggered an emergency extraction. Old magic, the kind that predates their covenant. They'll regroup and come looking for you, but it bought us time."

"Time for what?"

"To teach you the truth about what you are," Elara said. She stood and moved to the window, her posture carrying a strength I'd never seen when I was a child. "The council didn't just suppress omega power, Isabel. They inverted it. Omegas were never meant to be weak. We were pack leaders, using emotional resonance and collective consciousness to guide our people. Alphas provided protection and physical strength, but they deferred to omega wisdom in all matters of importance."

The words resonated with something deep inside me, an ancestral memory or genetic knowledge that felt both foreign and utterly true. "Then what happened? How did it change?"

"A group of Alphas eight hundred years ago made a deal with creatures from beyond our world," Elara said, her voice hard. "Beings of pure dominance and hierarchy who fed on subjugation. The Alphas wanted power and were willing to trade our natural order for it. The Dominance Covenant wasn't just a spell. It was a bargain with something ancient and hungry."

My stomach turned. "What kind of creatures?"

"The kind that exists in the spaces between thought and reality. The kind that human folklore calls demons, though that's not quite accurate. They're older and stranger than any human concept." Elara turned back to face me, and I saw fear in her eyes for the first time. "The council serves these beings, feeding them through the pack bond system. Every time an Alpha dominates an Omega, every time someone submits to hierarchical power, it generates energy these creatures consume. That's why they'll never willingly let the system change. They're addicted to the power it provides."

I stood on shaking legs, my mind reeling. "And I'm supposed to fight that? I'm one person. I can barely control the abilities I have."

"You're not one person," Elara said gently. "You're the daughter of Dominic Ashford and Elara Summers, a hybrid of two bloodlines that should never have mixed. Your existence breaks every rule the council established. You can access both Alpha strength and Omega wisdom without being bound by either designation's limitations."

She crossed to a shelf and pulled down a worn leather journal, its pages yellowed with age. "Your father kept records of his investigation into the council. He discovered that hybrid births were once common, producing individuals who could lead without dominating and protect without submitting. The council systematically eliminated hybrids for seven hundred years until everyone forgot we'd ever existed."

I took the journal with trembling hands, opening to pages covered in handwriting that somehow felt familiar despite never having seen it before. My father's words described the omega culling in clinical detail and documented disappearances, suspicious deaths, and carefully orchestrated accidents that eliminated anyone with hybrid markers.

"How many?" I asked, my throat tight.

"At least three thousand over the centuries," Elara said. "Your father found records suggesting the actual number is much higher, maybe ten thousand or more. The council was thorough."

Rage built in my chest, clean and burning. All those lives, all that potential, snuffed out because it threatened a system built on oppression and supernatural parasitism. I thought about the eighty omegas I'd found missing from recent records and realized they were just the visible edge of something vast and terrible.

"You said you've been monitoring my situation," I said slowly. "That means you knew about the ceremony. You knew Logan rejected me. Why didn't you intervene?"

Elara's expression crumpled with guilt. "Because the rejection had to happen. The fated bond would have prevented your awakening. You needed to be severed from pack structures completely, needed to experience the full weight of isolation and abandonment. Only in that extremity could your hybrid nature emerge. I hated every moment of it, but it was necessary."

"You let me suffer because it was necessary," I repeated, the words tasting like ash. "Just like Logan rejected me because it was necessary. Just like Kael manipulated me because it was necessary. Everyone in my life has hurt me for my own good, is that it?"

"Yes," Elara said simply, and the honesty was somehow worse than any lie. "We've all made choices that wounded you because the alternative was your death or worse, your transformation into a weapon the council could wield. I'm not asking for forgiveness, Isabel. I'm asking you to survive long enough to make your own choices about what happens next."

I wanted to scream, to rage, to reject everything she was telling me. But underneath the anger was a terrible understanding. They'd seen me as a chess piece because that's what I'd been in this cosmic game, a potential threat to an eight-hundred-year-old power structure that wouldn't hesitate to eliminate me.

"The woman who attacked us," I said. "Morgana. She said the council has questions. What do they want from me?"

"They want to know if you can be controlled or if you need to be destroyed," Elara said. "Hybrids are unpredictable. Some became incredible leaders who genuinely served their people. Others were corrupted by their power and became tyrants worse than any Alpha. The council doesn't know which you'll be."

"What if I don't want to be either? What if I just want to live a normal life?"

"That option died the moment your abilities awakened," Elara said, not unkindly. "The council knows what you are now. Even if you hide, even if you suppress your abilities, they'll hunt you until you're dead. Your only choice is whether you fight back or accept your fate."

I thought about the omegas at the warehouse, the people Kael had gathered who'd been rejected and abandoned by the system. I thought about all the lives destroyed by the hierarchy, all the potential crushed under the weight of artificial dominance. And I thought about my father, who'd died protecting a daughter he'd never watched grow up.

"Teach me," I said. "Everything. I need to know how to use what I am."

Relief and determination crossed Elara's face in equal measure. "It won't be easy. Omega abilities require emotional vulnerability, complete openness to feeling everything around you. Most people spend their lives building walls to protect themselves. You'll have to tear yours down."

"I don't have walls anymore," I said bitterly. "Logan and the rejection made sure of that."

"Actually, you've built new ones," Elara said, watching me with unsettling perception. "Around your rage and your pain. You're using anger as armor, which is understandable but ultimately limiting. To access your full abilities, you have to feel everything, joy and agony, love and hate, hope and despair, all of it simultaneously without barriers."

She moved to stand in front of me, placing her hands on my shoulders. "Close your eyes. Breathe. Now reach out with your awareness and tell me what I'm feeling."

I did as instructed, letting my newly awakened senses extend outward. Elara's emotions hit me like a tidal wave and I gasped at the intensity. Love, fierce and overwhelming, mixed with guilt so profound it felt like drowning. Pride in who I'd become tangled with shame for the choices she'd made. Fear for my future battled with hope that I might survive what was coming.

"It's too much," I said, trying to pull back.

"You can handle it," Elara said firmly. "Don't retreat, sit with intensity, let it move through you without trying to control it."

I forced myself to stay open, to feel the full weight of her emotional landscape. Gradually, the overwhelming sensation began to organize itself into something coherent. I could sense not just what she felt but why, could trace the roots of her guilt back to the moment she'd been forced to leave me, could feel how every choice since then had been about protecting me even when it meant breaking both our hearts.

"I can feel your history," I whispered, awed and terrified by the intimacy of it. "Everything you've carried."

"That's the first level of omega ability," Elara said. "Emotional resonance. You can sense others' feelings with accuracy that makes lying impossible. But there are deeper levels. With practice, you can influence emotions, creating calm in chaos or inspiring courage in the terrified. At the highest levels, you can temporarily forge bonds between people, letting them share strength and understanding."

She released my shoulders and stepped back. "The council fears this most of all. An omega who can unite disparate groups into genuine collective action, not through domination but through shared purpose. That's how we led before the covenant. That's what they've spent eight centuries preventing."

A knock on the cabin door made us both freeze, Elara's hand moved to a knife at her belt and I reached for abilities I barely understood.

"It's me," Kael's voice called through the door. "And before you attack, I brought Marcus and some answers you're going to want to hear."

Elara and I exchanged glances. She nodded slightly and moved to open the door, keeping the knife ready.

Kael stood on the threshold, looking exhausted and worried. Behind him, Marcus Chen carried a heavy pack and wore an expression of grim determination.

"How did you find us?" I demanded.

"Your mother's extraction spell left a magical signature I could track," Marcus said, moving into the cabin with the familiarity of someone who'd been here before. "Which means the council can track it too. We have maybe six hours before they locate this position."

"Then we'd better work fast," Elara said. "Marcus, did you bring what I asked?"

"All of it," Marcus confirmed, setting down the pack. "And some disturbing new information. Lysander's been arrested by his own pack. They're holding him for treason."

My mind raced. "Logan wouldn't arrest his own father."

"Logan didn't," Marcus said quietly. "The arrest was ordered by Seraphina Blackwood, acting under authority granted by the Primordial Council. She claims Lysander was attempting to aid a hybrid enemy of supernatural society. The trial begins in three days."

Kael's jaw clenched. "It's a trap. They want Isabel to attempt a rescue so they can capture her in the open."

"Probably," Marcus agreed. "But it's also an opportunity. Lysander knows more about council operations than anyone still living. If we can get him out and get him talking, we might finally understand the full scope of what we're fighting."

I looked at my mother, seeing my own conflict reflected in her face. Lysander had ordered her banishment, and had participated in the system that destroyed countless lives. But he'd also tried to warn me at the ceremony and according to Logan, had been working against the council for years.

"We save him," I said, surprised by my own certainty. "Not because he deserves it, but because we need what he knows."

"And because walking into an obvious trap and surviving sends a message," Kael added with a savage grin. "Shows them you're not some frightened omega to be hunted."

Elara shook her head. "Isabel's not ready. Six hours of training won't prepare her for direct confrontation with council operatives."

"Then we don't give them direct confrontation," Marcus said, pulling papers from his pack and spreading them on the table. "We do what Isabel does best. We research, we plan, and we exploit every weakness in their system."

I moved to the table, studying the documents Marcus had brought. Pack layouts, security protocols, magical ward configurations. Everything we'd need to stage an impossible rescue.

"This is insane," I said. "We're three people and a newly awakened hybrid who doesn't know how to use her abilities. They have centuries of experience and resources we can't match."

"Four people," a new voice said from the doorway, and my heart lurched.

Logan stood there, battered and bleeding but alive. "Five if you count my father, who's been sending me intelligence from his cell using methods the council doesn't know he possesses."

He looked at me with such raw emotion that it hurt to hold his gaze. "I know you have every reason not to trust me. I know I destroyed something precious when I rejected you. But Isabel, I need you to believe that everything I did was to keep you alive long enough to become what you are now. And if you'll let me, I'd like to help make sure you stay alive to see what happens next."

Kael moved to stand beside me, his posture protective and possessive. The two half-brothers regarded each other with complicated history written across their faces.

"This is a disaster," I said, but I couldn't keep the tremor from my voice. Six hours ago, I'd been unconscious and captured. Now I was planning a prison break with my estranged mother, the mate who rejected me, the half-brother who manipulated me, and a mentor who'd kept secrets for decades.

"It's a beginning," Elara corrected. "The council expects you to hide or run. Instead, we're going to show them what happens when a hybrid stops playing by their rules."

Thunder rumbled outside and rain began to fall, matching the storm building in my chest. In three days, Lysander would face trial and I would either prove I could challenge the council or die trying.

The choice had been made the moment I decided to stop being a victim and start being something the world had forgotten to fear.