by Kari Gregg
“I don’t know what he thought. We talked about the seer’s visions and you as little as possible.” Jamie’s shoulders slumped. “I wouldn’t talk to him.”
“The seer was your mother, Jamie, and she went to her death knowing you hadn’t forgiven her. She spoke the prophecy that would save your life by giving you hope and the promise of another tomorrow with me, knowing you would from then on be lost to her. She loved you that much.”
“Your father loves you that much too and there isn’t much time for him. Days. Hours maybe, who knows. He should’ve joined your mother long ago, but he’s held on longer than anyone should because the only thing he had left to give you was a period to mourn before...”
“You.” Jamie flashed a tight smile.
“Yes. Before me.”
“I was born in shifted form, as a wolf, under the super moon. I didn’t see the world through my human eyes until the moon waxed and waned again. Did you know that?”
“I did.”
“If I’d been born a century ago, even a few decades before, they would’ve sworn I was cursed and left me to die.”
“Shifters are a superstitious lot.” Kenneth sighed. “You weren’t cursed, Jamie.”
“Aren’t I?”
Kenneth shook his head. “What you are...is extraordinary. Your pack had never experienced a wolf like you and handled it badly. They see that now, understood it even before Ian died. You need to stop punishing them for it, for your sake as much as theirs.”
Jamie swallowed the lump lodging in his throat. “I don’t know how.”
“Try.” Kenneth clasped his shoulder and squeezed. “You’ve talked to Ian. Now go talk to your dad.”
“We’ll argue.” Jamie wrinkled his nose. “We always fight.”
“No, you misunderstand me. Talk to your Da like you talk with your Ian.”
Jamie blinked at him. “What?”
Steeling his spine, Jamie squared his shoulders and reached for the door of Da’s den a few hours later. “Kenneth said I should talk to you like I talk to Ian,” he said after he walked inside. Walked in and then froze. He couldn’t make himself move farther into the cabin, near where his father lay like a dried-out husk in his hospital bed, alien in the territory.
So frightening.
Da glanced at him, setting aside papers he’d been studying. He calmly removed glasses from the bridge of his nose, another sign of how sick he truly was. Shifters didn’t wear glasses, only humans. He folded the glasses with care and placed them in a hard case, setting them as well as the papers aside on a bedside table cluttered with pill bottles. “You still talk to Ian?” Da asked, finally ready to focus his attention from work to his son.
“You’d know better than most. Your people follow me to Bitter Creek often enough,” Jamie grumbled.
“I was afraid for you. We all were. Are.” The corner of Da’s lips curved as he pushed himself up to sit straighter on the bed. “They’re your people too.”
Jamie snorted. “They’re Kenneth’s people more than they’re mine at this point.”
“True.” Da chortled. “They’re his more than mine too, but that’s as it should be.”
No. It wasn’t right, wasn’t proper. Da shouldn’t be dying by inches in a hospital bed. Jamie shouldn’t have been exiled Between. The friends and family he grew up with shouldn’t have become strangers to him, untrustworthy and suspect. Kenneth shouldn’t have crossed the country to find a mate who still loved another, for that matter. None of this was as it should be.
It just was. Life in all its ugly unfairness, the disappointments and hurts. “Why did you wait years to send for me?” Jamie asked, even though he’d already guessed the answer.
Da tipped his chin at the medical debris keeping him alive. “I couldn’t. Not after Ian. Not when you’d know in your heart what seeing the ravages of my cancer would mean for you. But that isn’t why you came here, son.” He nodded once, decisively. “Go ahead. Ask me”
He swallowed, though the spit had dried up in his mouth. “Don’t.”
“Ask.”
Da had never been one to ease the way. That much hadn’t changed. Jamie rocked on his feet, his toes in his moccasins digging into the aged floorboards while he plucked up his nerve. “What did she say? She must’ve known something.” Jamie gulped. “About him.”
Da’s shoulders slumped. “Your mother’s gift was powerful. She saw a lot.”
Jamie didn’t trust much, but the reliability of his mother’s sight, he had never questioned. He stepped forward, a little closer. Stiffened his spine and braced, as if preparing to take a blow to his body. Then gulped. “Will he die?” he finally mumbled, mouth dry.
His father blew out a long, slow breath. “That isn’t how the sight works.”
Jamie knew how it worked, but he also knew he couldn’t take one more moment of fearful uncertainty. “Lisa then. He’s to be the new alpha. She must have sensed something about him?”
“You lost Ian. I lost your mother and I won’t hang on much longer.” His father, as always, saw right through him. “Everybody dies, Jamie.”
“Having lost Mom, could you do it twice? Would you?”
Da curled his pale, almost bloodless lips as his gaze assessed the damage disease had inflicted on his body, his frame gaunt, hair gone, his skin as thin and frail as tissue paper. “I don’t believe the Goddess will give me that chance, do you?”
Pale and shaking, Jamie fidgeted. “I can’t go through it again,” he finally managed.
“Can’t or won’t? There are no guarantees, boy. Everybody rolls the dice.”
“Everybody isn’t expected to roll them twice.”
“You will, though. Your mother saw that. Your sister has too. You haven’t yet, but you will tie with him soon.”
“Maybe.” Jamie’s stomach knotted.
“You’re ripening, kiddo. It’s only the start. You were slow to ripen with Ian too. Early, true, but it happened so slowly we didn’t notice until it was too late. I can scent the ripening on you from here, even over the sickness. Your body is waking to him. Only a matter of time. He will be alpha. You’re right. There’s no stopping the biology driving that. Mating is more than tying, though. What about Kenneth? What about him? Did you ever think of how difficult this has been for him? He tracks his mate, only to find his destiny suicidal and crazed with grief for another? He’s waited years for you. Years. Aching for you, yet knowing in his heart you still belonged to someone else. Everything about you tells him that you are his, that you were each born to fit perfectly, and you couldn’t stand to be near him.”
“I still can barely stand being with him.” Jamie rocked back on his feet, emotions he could deal with swirling inside him in a crazy tumult. “What if he leaves me too? What if he dies?”
“Ah.” Da smiled. “But what if he doesn’t?”
Jamie returned to the den he shared with Ian. To think, but also to pack. His father was right. Once the biological process had triggered, nothing would stop ripening. He would tie with Kenneth by the next full moon. The instincts that drove mating was too compelling and their circumstances too dire to make waiting wise. How Kenneth had managed not touching him and claiming Jamie as his mate for two years was a testament of Kenneth’s strength of will, his patience, the hard core of compassion that would make him an exemplary alpha. “He waited two years for me and you didn’t last three days.” He patted the earth covering Ian’s final remains, the grass crisp and dry in the sun. “He’s so different, Ian.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t talk to him here.”
Shuddering, Jamie threaded his fingers into the green spears. “I talk to him everywhere.” Stomach roiling, he glanced up at his new mate. “I feel him better in the pass to Bitter Creek, though.”
“Lisa told me that you visited your dad again, said it went better this time than the last, but she didn’t think you should be alone.” Kenneth dropped to a loose crouch, fingers dangling between his bent knees. He eyed J
amie warily. “What are you doing here, Jamie?”
Jamie glanced away from Kenneth’s penetrating stare. “Packing.”
Kenneth froze. “What?”
Daring to peek, Jamie checked that the shock in his voice was genuine and judging by Kenneth’s slack-jawed gaping, the man was legitimately floored. His sister and Kenneth both believed Jamie would fall apart after meeting with Da and he couldn’t blame them. Jamie’s recent behavior hadn’t shown much emotional perseverance and fortitude, but Jamie hadn’t withstood shunning and two years of merciless grief because he was fragile. “I don’t have much,” he said, stiffening his spine, “but what I have, I intend to keep.”
“You’re moving in.” His mate blinked at him. “Not for the night. Permanently.”
He jerked his shoulders in an awkward shrug and pushed to his feet. “It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?” He walked to the door of the den he’d shared with Ian and pushed it wide to march inside. He grabbed an old wood box by the fireplace and dumped kindling out of it and into a neat pile by the hearth. Feeling more confident than he had in unbearably long that this, at least, was the right path, he started grabbing stuff to fling into the box. His few books, the tools he used to carve bone and make beads, his snow boots, all of it went into the box. Kenneth’s dark shape soon filled the door. “Want help?”
Fighting off his discomfort at Kenneth handling his things. Ian’s things, Jamie shook his head. “What’ll happen to this place? Once I’m gone.”
“Devon asked to tend his brother’s grave in your stead.”
“Devon has children.” Jamie stilled, his heart thumping. “Living Between is a challenge for adults, but putting kids through it—"
“Bitter Creek agreed to move our borders. We’ll gain this meadow in exchange for an equal area of forest to the north.” Kenneth grimaced. “After you and Ian built your den, no one used this part of the Between for trading or negotiating anyway and their alpha wanted the land reclaimed for use as much as I did.”
Kenneth didn’t have to tell him both packs avoided his meadow as much as practicable because they believed his doomed relationship with Ian had cursed the land with Jamie’s grief. None of them had ever understood the happy years he and Ian had shared, nor grasped that the love they’d nurtured had been more than worth the difficulties and the agony of Ian’s loss. Only Devon had. Devon, who had risked his alpha’s wrath by trading with Ian and Jamie, hunting with them during their years of solitude. Ian’s brother had seen how the lack of pack support hadn’t split Ian and Jamie apart, but had knitted them closer together, made their relationship stronger. Better.
The rest of the packs saw only the pain and hardship.
Devon had seen their joy.
Jamie swallowed the knot lodging in his throat. “I’m glad Ian’s den...where he’s buried...will go to his kin.”
“Devon would never deny you anything. You’ll be able to come back. Whenever you want.”
But as Jamie quickly gathered his things, he knew.
This was it. For him. For Kenneth. For the pack they would lead together.
He’d fought it, struggled against his second fate, but that war had increasingly cost Jamie. Desperately clinging to his old love would embitter him and truly poison the meadow where Ian if not Jamie had realized had only ever been a temporary sanctuary. Here, Ian had loved him thoroughly. He and Jamie had needed nothing else, not their families or their pack, only each other, but Ian was gone. Jamie had mourned him and would grieve for his beloved first mate until his final breath, but if he’d decided to survive Ian’s death, Jamie needed to get on with living. Ian would’ve expected no less of him and Kenneth deserved better than a hollow shadow of a mate. Jamie must find the strength to hope, to move forward.
For Jamie, there was no going back.
Chapter Nine
ONE OF THE pack kids came to fetch Kenneth to fix a stuck water pump. Jamie returned alone to Kenneth’s den with his things. Fortunately, he didn’t have much and was able to carry his stuff without the extra pair of hands to aid hauling it. Kenneth had already retrieved Jamie’s second set of clothes and Jamie left most of his household items for Ian’s brother. He only took a few personal effects: a chess set he and Ian spent an entire winter whittling, their scant collection of books, a few pictures, Jamie’s best knife, his other carving tools, and some dyes that’d been steeping. Shifters lived minimally by human standards, but even for shifters, he and Ian had been poor. That ugly reality had not improved after Ian’s death, once Jamie’s trade goods had dropped to simply what he alone produced.
When he reached Kenneth’s den, his nose told him Kenneth was still dealing with the water pump disaster at Natalie’s. Jamie settled the crate on the porch floor, side-eyeing a beautiful ceramic bowl left on a bench lining the wall beside Kenneth’s front door. The offering must have been from his sister. She had inherited their mother’s gifts as pack seer, but had been trained by Momma to take over providing the pack with pottery as well. Lisa had surpassed their mother’s talent with ceramics and produced the prettiest pots, urns...everything useful, but with a lighter, decorative touch missing from their mother’s work because his sister was more adept with glazes.
This piece was a round bowl as wide as Jamie’s chest. It boasted a mottled blue glaze and an intricate design of twisted ivy around the rim. Jamie had carved the bowls he and Ian had used from wood and although he’d added decorative flourishes to make the best of their bad circumstances, his work didn’t compare. He’d possibly never seen, much less owned, anything remotely as exquisite. Even the wealthier families in the pack couldn’t afford an item so precious. Something like this would’ve been saved to trade with humans for the solar panels that outfitted dens and other products that were easier to bring into the territory from human cities rather than manufacture them at home.
Why had Lisa left it on Kenneth’s front porch?
When Jamie solved the mystery and realized what the bowl represented, his stomach gave a sick lurch. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. All he could do was clutch the bowl to his chest, the sudden explosion of grief making a liar of him and his determination to leave his painful past behind him to start anew. The agony nigh crippled him.
Until Kenneth emerged from the surrounding trees, that is, and Jamie discovered he wasn’t as paralyzed by his pain as he’d believed. Digging his heels into the floorboards, he sprang toward the woods on the opposite side of Kenneth’s yard.
Gift in hand, he sprinted. Blindly. Mindlessly. He didn’t think about where he was running to or what he sought to escape. He could hardly hold or retain a thought, relying instead on instinct, but his feet had had years to learn his path. Recognizing the landmarks leading toward Bitter Creek and where Ian had died magnified the hurt.
The crash of leaves and broken twigs behind him assured him that Kenneth followed.
Jamie couldn’t outrun him.
He didn’t even want to.
No matter how the gift gutted him, he couldn’t take it to Bitter Creek, either, couldn’t share this with the trace of Ian he pretended lingered there.
Halfway to the mountain pass, he slowed and dropped to his knees in the forest, where the earth began to grow rocky. He couldn’t cry. He refused to cry. He’d sworn he wouldn’t ever cry again. He knelt in the dirt, trembling, fighting for his breath as he cradled the damn bowl to him while he fought to hang onto whatever composure he hadn’t yet abandoned.
Kenneth circled around him and approached Jamie from the front. He crouched deliberate inches away. “Your sister has been working and reworking that piece for a couple of years, since I arrived in the territory. To make sure it was perfect.”
“Mating gift,” Jamie panted.
“More presents will appear now that Lisa’s made her overture. From every family in the pack and, because I’m to be alpha, from neighboring packs too.” Kenneth said. “You’re no stranger to our traditions. You knew this would happen.”
“I—I forgot,” Jamie stuttered. “With handling the mess with Da, dealing with Lisa and the new prophecy…I didn’t think about it.” Hadn’t wanted to think about what mating Kenneth meant on a practical level. He squeezed his eyes shut, the hurt at losing Ian almost as fresh and new as it’d been the day Ian had bled to death in the mountains. “We never had any mating gifts, Ian and me. Not one. Damn near froze to death the first winter because we barely had time to put up walls and a roof on our den. We had a quilt Momma had discarded years ago that we’d snuck up to the mountain pass as boys, but that’s all, a tattered and threadbare quilt and pelts from the game we hunted.” He opened his eyes, which were dry. They blazed with anger in equal measures with his hurt. “They acted like our mating was a tragedy,” he said, tone scathing.
“You were young and they were afraid for you. They loved you both.”
“They loved us so much they drove us out. My own parents.” He pushed the bowl at Kenneth. “My sister.” Then he snatched the bowl back, cradling it back against his chest. “You came to Burnt Fork after Ian died.”
Kenneth winged up an eyebrow at the abrupt change in subject. “A few days after, yes.”
Overwhelmed by his grief, Jamie didn’t recall much about those first few excruciating days without Ian and thanked the Goddess every day for that lack. He didn’t want to remember the emptiness of a missing heartbeat his senses had grown accustomed to sharing with his mate, the endless hours without the brush of Ian’s hands or the warmth of his smile. As time passed and Ian’s scent began to fade from their den, Jamie had screamed himself hoarse, needing that memory of Ian more than ever. He’d longed to die without it. He’d needed to reconnect with the beloved he’d lost, a link he could only find in their secret place, high up in the mountains, but the kids had refused him. Fearful at what he might do, the pack hadn’t let him go.
Jamie shivered. “I was...”
“A mess,” Kenneth diplomatically finished.