“What do our families have to do with each other at
all
?”
“My father tried to vouch for her, because she was pregnant with his child.”
No.
“I told you my mother was a wolf.”
No.
“She had wandered Packless and violent through the country for centuries, never changing from her wolf form. Either she didn’t want to, or after a while she didn’t remember how. She came across my Family by accident. My father was her mate. The call brought her through the change and allowed her wolf to step back.”
I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to know this. But no matter how much my entire being was screaming inside my brain at him to stop, he kept going. Daddy sat back and just watched me. I didn’t know if I wanted him to prevent me from hurting Jake until I calmed down, or to take me far away from this.
“At that time, there was not the prejudice among my Family that there is now. They held no fault for my father for falling in love. They welcomed her into the Family with open arms. Wolf or not. Then your father saw them.”
Daddy spoke, breaking into the horrible story Jake was telling. He put the words into existence that I wanted the least of all. “She was pregnant. I had to have her death. The wolf in me, the Alpha, would settle for no less. Amber, I couldn’t kill an unborn child. No matter the origins. So the treaty came into being.”
Both of them took turns beating my hope of escaping that horrible part of my life into the ground. The treaty was basically a bargain. Daddy let the woman, Jake’s mother, live long enough to give birth. He let her say goodbye to the child she was given the opportunity to have.
Jake was alive because my father hadn’t killed his mother. If my father had found and killed the woman even six months earlier, my mate wouldn’t exist. I was mated to the son of my sire. I’d had sex with the spawn of the wolf who killed my mother and sister. No matter how I aligned the words in my brain, they didn’t seem right. It couldn’t be right.
My back hit the heavy wooden door. I had been walking backwards toward it without thought. When Daddy spoke again, I was surprised that the words penetrated the muck banging around my skull.
“I had vowed to destroy anyone standing in my way of her, but if they declined retaliation and guaranteed your safety in particular, I—or my wolf—would have been content with her death alone. The vampires were irrelevant to my logic then.
“Amber, the wolf could not allow her life to continue, but there was still enough human in me to think ahead. Your safety was worth the fight that went on inside me.”
“You knew all of this. You both did, and nobody told me. You let the mating bond happen without telling me your mother was the one who killed my mother. The one that tore my sister’s skin from her body and took my humanity forever. You knew.”
Jake took a step toward me but held up his hands as I flattened myself against the door further. “Amber, I have tried to talk to you about this. You didn’t want to hear it.”
“And now I know
why
!”
“You just agreed to turn for me,” Jake said.
Daddy flinched at his sentence.
My skin was crawling. I opened the door.
“Amber, wait.”
They were Jake’s words, but Daddy grabbed his arm. They gave each other some manly Alpha stares, and before they could untangle their eyes, I was gone. I let my wolf take me. I needed her to. I ran.
Chapter Eleven
I lost myself in my wolf. I didn’t want to think about what I had learned. There was so much at stake. Stake…vampire…get it? When my wolf takes over, there’s a delicious lack of completely rational thought, but sarcasm carries across the line from girl to wolf.
The trees created a canopy above me. Enclosed in their shelter, I was high with the utter lack of ideas going on in my brain.
Maybe I could bond better with Vampire Barbie now.
A symphony of birds was better than any iPod in my ears. There was nothing that could take me away like being a wolf.
Rabbit!
A glorious white ball of fur bounded past me, and I took chase. My jaw stretched wide as I neared. Just as I was about to grab the tasty little thing, I was thrown to the ground. I rolled. I growled. I snapped. It was all useless.
The teeth gripping my throat and pushing my head to the ground in a submissive stance held firm. I recognized the black fur of the paws on either side of my face, and there was no way I could fight against the sexy smell of my mate.
No matter what the circumstances, I couldn’t stop my body from responding. I shifted. When he followed me in change, he held my shoulders down. Heavy breaths beat against my skin. His mouth dislodged from my neck. His eyes switched from the were-gold to the vampy-gray.
“You left.”
I couldn’t talk. I didn’t know what to say. This was why the wolf form was so great. I wasn’t expected to behave. I wasn’t expected to use manners. I was expected to piss in the woods.
“Were you coming back?”
I didn’t really want to deal with this. Silence was easier than speech. I started to shift under him.
“NO. YOU WILL STAY HUMAN.” His voice ripped the change away from my body. A Protector vampire and
an Alpha werewolf.
Wonderful
. I scrambled to my feet as a human.
“You know the mate of an Alpha has power too, right? Just because you don’t have a Pack doesn’t mean you get to take all that big bad frustration out on me.”
“You need to stay here and talk to me. I deserve that.”
“And what do I deserve, Jake Meyers? Huh? Do I deserve to be ripped from my home? Do I deserve to go through another turning? I lose my momma, I lose my humanity, and now I lose myself—part of my were—and possibly my life. And all this at the hands of my mate, who just happens to be the son of the woman who took the first two things from me. I deserve this? Because really Jake…I don’t want to believe I do.”
We were still naked. Jake didn’t seem to care. Maybe the wolf part of him truly was gaining ground.
“I did not say you deserved any of this. That does not mean it isn’t happening. We have to go before my Family tomorrow. Unless you have changed your mind?”
I gripped my scalp and pulled at my hair. I welcomed the pain. The pain was real. I could control it. “I don’t know. I think my brain shut down.”
“You know. Your wolf knows. You are
mine
. Our connection hasn’t changed. You just have another piece of the puzzle. You know what has been kept from you. Although after talking to your father, I wonder how much of that was withheld and how much you just pushed away so you didn’t have to see it.”
That stopped the pacing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your father told me there were plenty of meetings that involved the treaty. When our fathers ended up in the same territory, don’t you think they knew? Don’t you think he would have warned his Pack? How could you miss so many important things? Did you not care?”
“Of course I cared! But…”
“But what? You did not want the responsibility? Because it looks like you are pretty good at running. Is that what you did?”
“I don’t want the responsibility! I don’t want this! I didn’t want to become a werewolf! And now I’m the fucking Alpha’s daughter! Now I get the mating call. Again, not my choice. I have had everything decided for me, and now I have two ways to go. I don’t want to get pushed into anything else that changes my life all over again. I don’t know that I can cope with this.”
The problem with epic meltdowns is that they are very draining. All the anger I was feeling was still there, but frustration, exhaustion, sadness and doubt started to leak through the cracks. Basically, I was a fucking mess that I didn’t know how to fix. I took a breath before I kept going. “Maybe I’m not strong enough. Maybe I’m not strong enough for the turning. Maybe I’m not strong enough to be the Alpha’s daughter, and maybe I’m not strong enough to be the Protector’s mate.”
His eyes softened at my tantrum. It deflated me a bit when he didn’t fight back, but once my mouth starts going, it’s kind of hard to stop.
“Snark is not a real strength, no matter how I try and pretend it is. I’m not strong enough for all this.” I broke eye contact as I let my palms fall to slap against my thighs.
“You are. You had the strength to take me in. It was foolishness to try and stay away from me, but even keeping your distance when the mating call was between us took intense strength. I was going out of my mind, and you still had a sense of yourself.”
“That wasn’t strength, Jake. You were coming into your wolf. I ran you into a pillar to knock you out. Although that was kind of funny.”
He pulled me toward him and held me close. His skin was so warm. I gripped his shoulders and rubbed beneath his chin. He used the leverage to hold my head there.
I was surrounded by him, and my body hummed beneath his touch. Yet another thing that was taken from me. I had never been lost to someone the way I was to him—and I loved it, but I never got the choice. We didn’t date. I never got to take him home to Daddy and hope he liked him. Because we were mates. Our wolves chose. I pushed away, and he let me.
“Amber, I don’t know how to show you that I am sure of this. We are supposed to walk together. You know both sides—human and supernatural. You have humanity left in your heart. We will never be that couple walking down the street with nothing to worry about. But we have a greater life ahead of us. We get to share in the magic in a way that no one on this planet can.”
I snorted. “So I get to have magic. Great. We still don’t know if this magic will work. We don’t know if I can turn. We don’t know if I can survive it. And I don’t even know if I want it.”
“What do you want, Amber? Just tell me, and we will work toward it together.”
The forest floor felt warm beneath my toes. The sun was setting and the air was chilled, but the ground still held the heat of day. Little bits of plant debris stuck to the bottom of my feet. I could feel it. There was magic. And I could feel the earth’s memory of us all. Too bad it would always remember me being a chickenshit. I dug my toes in and tried to kick that little bit away.
“I wish I knew. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to find a wolf in the Pack that Daddy approved of and be content.”
“Would you have ever been able to settle for content?”
Wow. Now there was a good question.
“Here is the way I see it. Frankly, I am a selfish ass who wants his mate by his side, but you have the power here, Amber. If you join my Family—and I don’t think we would have been drawn together if joining my Family were impossible—if you join us, I will welcome you into that Family. If you want to run away with me, I will do it. If you decide to run
from
me? Well, you have proven you can do that too, but I think I have proven that I will find you as well.”
He took a breath he didn’t need, to slow it down. Was he trying not to scare me away? Didn’t he know that whenever he spoke I didn’t know if I could breathe, let alone move?
“I love you, Amber. You deserve to capture everything you want in this new life you have. I just want to know whether you will condemn me to a life of suffering for the action of a woman I never even knew.”
“Touché.”
“I give a big long emotional speech and that is what I get?”
I loved messing with his head. He leaned against a nearby tree. He leaned a little harder, and the trunk groaned beneath him.
“And me. You get me.”
“Now that is a deal I will take.” He smiled. Love oozed from every pore of him.
I hoped I was enough to deserve it. And I hoped I was enough to survive it.
Chapter Twelve
A small cabin in a big glorious forest was not the place to hold a confined meeting with three wolves, a hybrid and a vampire. The energy pulsing around all of us was harsh and made my wolf pace. My wolf was a big part of me, and I had given her room to run and then brought her back into the stress of this whole mess. There is a reason the instinct is called fight or flight. She wanted to get on with the fight, or just plain run.
Even when sitting, my feet tapped and kicked against the worn boards covering the floor. I put more than a few extra scuffmarks in it. Luckily the rest of the crew had a bit more patience than me, or the sounds from all of us fidgeting would have drowned out any attempt at conversation.
When the talk turned to me, it became a supernatural intervention.
Let’s all let Amber know she’s being a wuss and repeat the message multiple times in case she has brain damage.
At least they let me get some clothes on before critiquing my coping skills.
This was not the type of family togetherness that a girl dreams of when she chooses a mate. There should be lots of sweaty sex and then happily bringing him into the Pack, and lots more sweaty sex. At least we had the sex part down.
The parts that weren’t working out for me so well were the major points. Accept the things you cannot change. Work toward the new goal. Let go of the fact that your mate is the boogieman. Love your mate and…well, at least I had that part down.
Yeah
. Love your mate. He was more than pheromones now.
Doc, Daddy and Vampire Barbie were getting a bit too cozy for me to look at them while they talked. Staying away from Meyers vampires only applied to me, apparently. Before Daddy and Doc could finish the game of “let’s see who can lean in to the blonde chick the closest,” I looked to Jake.
He was close, but didn’t smother. He left his hand out next to him. He was there if I wanted him, but didn’t push. He was strong for us, not just dominant over me. Maybe this was why no other wolf had worked out. I got two men in one really hot body this way.
Barbie cleared her throat and both Daddy and Doc eased back. I smiled. They were pushy guys. It was really funny to watch them get schooled by a little blonde bloodsucker.
I really needed to call the chick Shelly. Especially since we were talking about how to turn me into one of the bloodsuckers as well. Vamp-in-laws should stick together.