Shadowmated, p.3
Shadowmated, page 3
He was right that Finnegan’s skin showed absolutely no signs of tanning, not even as much as you’d expect to get crossing the sidewalk daily from house to car beneath the Texas sun. “You think he really was a prisoner?” I murmured. “Did you ask him outright?”
Away from the smoke, Orion would have been able to smell a lie on Finnegan’s breath. Which, apparently, was a moot point. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Of course he didn’t. I glared at the not-quite-human who was stroking Celeste’s palm while the pair considered their halved tattoos.
“You don’t trust him,” Orion observed.
“I’m having a hard time separating my concern for someone I care deeply about from what I actually think of Finnegan.” I wouldn’t have been so honest around anyone else, but Orion never made me regret sharing weaknesses. Sure enough, he graced me with an empathic hum, giving me space to continue if I wanted to. “You have less skin in the game,” I added after a moment. “Do you think he was a prisoner?”
“Not so sure I have less skin in the game.” Orion’s eyes became pools of darkness in which stars glimmered. “Finnegan’s glib,” he added. “Charming.”
“Sounds like you don’t trust him either.”
“I’m having a hard time separating my concern for someone I care deeply about from what I actually think of Finnegan.”
Before I could fully process the way Orion had turned my words back on me, the waitress showed up with a tray full of plates. “Chocolate overload and meat lover’s platter,” she said, sliding the indicated meals in front of me and Orion. “And peanut butter pancakes…and peanut butter pancakes.”
The pair of identical dishes landed in front of Celeste and Finnegan, who smiled at each other with such gooeyness that the weird not-breakfast in front of me turned even less appetizing than it had looked a moment before. I scraped a mountain of whipped cream off the top with my fork, hoping to find something underneath less likely to result in a sugar crash.
No such luck.
“Need anything else?” the waitress asked, and I got the distinct impression she was grading us on our choices. By her standards, Celeste and Finnegan were ready to elope while Orion and I might as well be on the worst blind date ever.
“No.” Orion’s voice was curter than usual. Even his tacked-on “Thank you” didn’t entirely soften the effect as he picked up a strip of bacon, turned it over, then set it down again.
“Not hungry?” I asked, eying the glistening morsel of deliciousness.
“Orion only eats pastured meat,” Celeste explained, although how she could know that when I didn’t was beyond me. “And El hates dessert for breakfast,” she added for Orion’s benefit. The whole time she was schooling us, her gaze never left Finnegan’s.
“Sorry,” Orion and I both told each other, the words emerging simultaneously. At least our apologies meshed.
We were swapping plates, Orion carefully keeping his fingers clear of mine, when Vega blew in like a storm cloud. She strode past the waitress with a lip-freezing glare and was soon looming above all of us. “Let’s see it,” she demanded.
Celeste and Finnegan’s hands rose in tandem above their pancakes, wrists facing outward. The mirror-image tattoos seemed to ripple under the fluorescent lights and Vega’s already grim expression turned grimmer. Her fingers clenched down on my shoulder hard.
It wasn’t a warning, but rather a giving and receiving of strength. Apparently, the ominous feeling I got from Celeste’s gooey eyes had a basis in reality.
“Get up,” my aunt told us. “We’re not discussing this here.”
There was a park not far from the pancake house where sprinklers moistened the air and allowed the growth of trees and shrubs. It was nothing like the desert where I’d first heard the rhyme about the half-glyph, but a children’s playground off in one corner boasted a large sandpit in its center. Vega led us directly toward that slightly desert-like portion of the park, toeing off her shoes and waiting for us all to do the same.
She didn’t speak the words I’d requested immediately however. Instead, she asked me, “You’re sure you want this?”
Vega embodied the desert in many ways. She was tough and strong, wrinkles baking typical beauty out of her skin. Despite that, over the past month, she’d become beautiful to me.
We shared a pack bond and had hunted together. She’d given me a home, had helped me form friendships with her clan mates. And she’d eased me into understanding what it meant to be a wolf, glossing over the ways my unconventional upbringing made things that seemed self-explanatory to most shifters odd and confusing to me.
Now, though, we seemed to have stepped back in time to when we first met. When my part in imprisoning Vega’s pack had hung heavy between us. When my aunt hadn’t bothered relinquishing her name—let alone the fact we were related—for a good long while.
“Information?” I answered carefully, trying to understand why her question felt so loaded. “Yes, I want information.”
Vega shook her head and her subsequent words reminded me far too much of what Gabi had told me back when I thought my erstwhile mentor was on my side. “This isn’t merely information,” Vega bit out. “Speaking words of power will set events into motion, events upon which you can’t turn back the clock.”
“But you’ve told me this already. Where the glyphs lie halved…”
Vega’s hand slapped over my mouth, stinging my skin and stopping the words before I could continue. “I haven’t,” she countered. “I spoke two lines that everyone in my pack already knew at a time when the events forecast had already come to pass. Then it was safe. Now, it’s not.”
Up until this point, the conversation had involved me and Vega only, even though everyone else was right there beside us. Celeste and Finnegan had become lost in each other’s eyes again and Orion was quite adept at giving me space to fight my own battles.
That space eroded as Orion advanced, removing Vega’s hand from my face with gentle firmness. His skin grazed my skin in the process, but I didn’t shiver with pleasure. Instead, I felt like a bone being fought over as the air around me turned spicy with alpha dominance, half from him and half from her.
Orion growled out a wordless admonition and, after a moment, Vega replied: “Point taken.” Then, turning away from her fellow alpha in what I was pretty sure was a werewolf slight, she addressed me again. “I don’t know the rest but I’ll ask the desert to give me the words if you want them. First though, take a moment to think it through. Make sure you’re deciding with your head.”
My head, not my heart? Or my head, not my libido?
I glanced at Orion, but he’d settled back onto his heels. He was once again giving me space to fight my own battles.
And the answer felt clear. I needed to know what was going on with my sister so I could keep her safe.
“Tell me,” I demanded of my aunt.
With an effort, we captured Celeste and Finnegan’s attention then spaced ourselves inside the sandbox in an arrangement mandated by Vega. Two couples facing each other in a diamond, me between Celeste and Finnegan and directly across from Orion.
Outside our little grouping, Vega waited until the night turned quiet. Then she spoke words that were deeply familiar but that I’d never experienced quite like this.
“Beneath the silver moon, matebrand shall unite…”
The moonlit sky above us had been clear one moment earlier. But now, clouds appeared out of nowhere and darkness deepened. Only the distant glow of a streetlight allowed me to make out Orion’s silhouette while, to Celeste and Finnegan, our surroundings likely appeared pitch dark.
“Forged in love and lore, woken in the night.”
The slow cadence of Vega’s recitation matched the bite of sand now flinging itself against my ankles. I glanced down…and saw myself, or a shadowy version thereof, coalescing out of sand particles. I was hunting peccaries in lupine form. Quite literally running into Orion.
Sparkles of incipient matebrand rose between the miniature, sandy versions of ourselves. Beside me, Celeste started speaking then snapped her teeth back together around the first word. Somehow, we all knew now wasn’t the time to interrupt.
“Woven ancient runes,” Vega continued, “two hearts beat as one.”
For a moment, I could feel the fullness of the matebrand that had once been. The sand at knee-level transitioned into a swirling mass of symbols I remembered far too well while, across from me, Orion’s eyes reflected the glowing magic.
Even though we were an arm’s length apart, I could feel him hugging me close. Warmth suffused me. Safety. Unity.
I relaxed in a way I hadn’t for weeks. In a way I seldom had before meeting Orion.
This was right. This was…
“Tattoos turn to stone, matebrand’s path undone.”
My tattooed arm went abruptly numb and I hissed despite myself. Emptiness sliced through me, emptiness I remembered far too well from the day Orion broke our mate bond. The loss was as strong now as it had been a month earlier. Stronger maybe, since I knew Orion better. Knew what I’d given up without even attempting to cling on.
I was alone. My throat tightened.
Across the sand, Orion leaned forward as if he wanted to take my pain away. He couldn’t, of course. What was broken would remain broken, for now at least. And we needed to stay focused, because the important part was coming, the part relating to Celeste.
“Where the glyphs lie halved, null shall overlay.”
Sure enough, the swirling sand formed the exact same symbols that were inked into Celeste and Finnegan’s wrists. Glowing half-moons of aerial debris rotated until it became obvious how the key of one might fit into the lock of the other.
The sandy symbols clicked together. The numbness in my arm turned to ice.
I peered down, expecting my tattoos to be moving or glowing. They weren’t. Instead, they were fading. Disappearing into my skin like snow receding in the face of spring sunshine.
Then Vega spoke a new line. One that filled me with dread because it suggested that, once again, my relationship with Orion wasn’t going to be decided rationally between the pair of us. That it would instead be forced into a shape we hadn’t chosen by an outside power.
“Sister matebrand formed on the fifty-second day.”
No image in the sand. Instead, a moon not far past full pushed out of the clouds above us. Ink on my arm reappeared, looking just like it had before I stepped into the sandbox. Unmoving but also deeply black, unfaded.
Whatever the poem forecast, it hadn’t happened yet. Hadn’t happened but would if I didn’t find a way to halt upcoming events within—I ran the math quickly in my head—four short days.
Chapter 5
Along with the final line of the poem came a feeling that someone had sunk a hook into my gut pulling me west. Not a surprise since that was the direction of Orion’s territory, Vega’s territory, and the outpack. Plus, I had a germ of an idea for deciphering the poetry, an idea that would require me to travel in that exact direction…
But there was nothing I could do about any of it that night. Or, rather, that morning. Because dawn was already softening the air around us by the time Orion’s patrolling pack mates reported Council operatives dangerously close to our location. The burned-out basement had riled them up like a nest of ants fighting back against an anteater, and the city wasn’t large enough for us to avoid their search parties indefinitely.
Still, we lingered, arguing our way to a reluctant consensus. Celeste would return home to Julius. She hadn’t wanted to. Had intended to stick by Finnegan, especially after Orion offered to house the near-stranger. And while I’d been itching to get my sister away from the Council ever since learning about their dark side, nothing about Celeste’s slapdash plan passed the sniff test.
“You can’t just abandon your class.”
“It’s summer vacation.”
I should have known that. Still… “Julius will move heaven and earth to find you if you disappear.”
“I’ll call him.” Even though she was ostensibly speaking to me, Celeste’s gaze never parted from Finnegan’s.
“And tell him what? That you’ve realized he’s involved in caging shifter children? Any potential leads will dry up immediately. We’ll never get them out if we tip off the Council.”
It was an underhanded move on my part, focusing on the still entirely hypothetical kids. But it worked. Well, it worked after we got a second report of Council operatives even closer than they’d been ten minutes earlier. And after Vega reluctantly granted permission for Finnegan to take refuge in our pack instead of Orion’s.
“You’ll be responsible for his actions,” my alpha warned me. Then, before Orion could say what he clearly wanted to—that he would join us and keep an eye on Finnegan—she bit out, “No.”
Which meant, half an hour of evasive maneuvers, one plane ride, then an hour’s drive later, I still wasn’t following that hook in my gut, which now told me to travel north. Instead, I was leading a shifter who couldn’t shift and who I didn’t trust back toward the subadult housing unit where I’d promised my sister he’d be safely looked after.
Vega had parked in front of her home then left us to walk through the blazing desert emptiness together, and I should have realized what was coming. After all, my gut had been twisting ominous warning for hours, telling me that I’d forgotten something critical. Meanwhile, the adobe house we were walking toward was well past the center of the pack’s main housing cluster, off on its own where raucous parties wouldn’t disturb the peace of light sleepers…or where ambushers could lie in wait without worrying about pesky passersby disturbing their attack.
But lack of sleep made me single-minded, and I couldn’t stop turning that last line of the poem over and over in my head. “Sister matebrand formed on the fifty-second day.” Did that mean my matebrand to Orion would recreate itself without our permission? Or was sister meant more literally? Was Celeste in danger of creating a matebrand with Finnegan? Would the half-glyphs merge into a magical tether like the one I was working so hard to steer clear of?
What I needed was the opportunity to dig for more snippets of poetry clarifying what was going on. Vega had said her pack only knew the beginning of the prophecy; the rest, shared within that sand box, had been channeled directly out of the desert itself. Similarly, Orion had shaken his head when I asked if his clan might be privy to extra information. But didn’t it stand to reason that some other pack might know what those two did not?
Beyond Orion and Vega, there were three alphas whose territories butted up against the unclaimed desert we called the outpack. Orion’s friend Prince was one, but his pack was newly formed and none of its members were native to the desert. Which left two clans with a possible heritage related to the halved glyphs, where additional poetry might be known related to the sister matebrand.
The connection felt unbearably tenuous until I realized that both of those packs were located in the same direction the hook in my gut indicated. North. Yes, that was definitely the thread to tug.
Lost in thought, I barely registered Finnegan’s growing unease as we approached the housing unit. Shadows lay sharp across the otherwise empty sand, the sun so bright it hurt to open my eyes fully. At this point in the afternoon, everything smart was hiding from the pounding heat, so the desert around us lay eerily quiet.
Like my new clan mates, I’d learned to nap through the hottest hours since moving in with Vega. Which made life more bearable…but wouldn’t our siestas create the perfect opportunity for the Council to attack, especially in this isolated location? Or for power-hungry neighbors to invade?
That’s when I saw it. A wolf crouched in the sharp-edged shadow cast by the housing unit. Just one wolf there, but the intentness of the beast’s gaze made me spin in time to catch two more barreling toward us with fangs bared.
Forget the hook tugging me north. I needed to focus on the here and now.
They surrounded us in a blur of fur and snarls. No, that’s not quite right, they split me and Finnegan apart then fixated upon him as he stumbled backward, his eyes widening with fear.
Which is when I recognized their scents. Two males I was intimately familiar with due to living amid their messes. Plus Hailey, the only female who shared a house with us.
This wasn’t an attack. It was a werewolf-style hazing. Part greeting, part test.
Not that Finnegan could handle either facet even as well as I had a month ago. “Guys, stop it!” I demanded, trying to thrust myself between Nash and Sterling.
Neither relinquished so much as a millimeter of space. Instead, they pressed in closer, snapping their teeth just shy of Finnegan’s skin. His back was up against the wall already or he would have retreated further. He had no way of knowing this was more teasing than anything else.
“I mean it!” I continued, but Hailey was the only one who shifted upward to join me in humanity, completely ignoring her nakedness the way werewolves were prone to do.
“Don’t be a party pooper,” she admonished, speaking to me rather than to the guys.
“A party is generally enjoyed by everyone, not just by the hosts,” I rebutted, trying and failing to angle myself between the snarling wolves and the man I’d promised my sister I’d protect.
And, to my surprise, Finnegan stopped trying to press himself into the adobe wall at that point. In fact, he even went so far as to join in the banter. “You have to admit, things are getting rather hairy around here.”
The terrible pun turned out to be exactly the right thing to say. Nash, our resident punster, ceased his attack and shifted upwards so he could laugh, something that wasn’t really possible lupine. Then he tacked on a few words amid his chortles: “Hairy. Nice one.”
Despite his jovial tone, Nash’s slap on Finnegan’s back was far rougher than was appropriate among humans. For werewolves figuring out a dominance rank, however, it was exactly right.
