by Lisa Ladew
The wolf whined again and Ella heard footsteps on the stairs.
Ella winced at the booming voice that cut through her thoughts. Trevor’s voice.
ABSOLUTELY NOT. SHE’S NAKED.
We already saw her, old hoss, when she ran to the refrigerator. Why are you shifted?
Trevor growled deep in his throat and faced the door.
Long story, if you see her again, I’ll kill you both.
Nice. Nice. Kill your own brothers.
Listen to him.
The footsteps faded away and Ella stared out the door, then dropped to her knees again, amazed. “They’re your brothers?”
Trevor swung around to face her, then stretched his neck out and whimpered. She saw his fur ripple, then pull back into his body as his snout shortened and his legs lengthened.
She fell backwards onto her bottom, unable to believe what she was seeing. Here was the transformation from the very beginning, all the way until a naked Trevor knelt on his hands and knees before her.
She touched his skin lightly, tracing the boomerang mark on his left shoulder. He still had it, even as a human. He arched his back when she touched it, looking into her eyes. “You make it burn when you touch it.”
She snatched her hand away. “Sorry.”
He sat next to her on the bare floor, taking her hand in his. “Don’t be sorry. Not ever. Not with me. It’s a good burn. It reminds me who I am and why I am here, and it makes me think you are someone special.”
“What is it?” she whispered, watching as he rubbed her hand along the mark on his shoulder and arched his neck, stretching his chin up to the ceiling like it felt good.
“It’s called a renqua. It’s a piece of the deity who created us. All true shiften have it.”
Ella forgot everything and everyone else in the world. It was as if she had been swallowed into a different dimension, or the pages of a book, but here she was, still in her own world.
“Is that what you are? A shiften?”
“I am a wolfen, which is the subset of shiften who can turn into wolves. We are the protectors of humans.”
“Protectors from…?”
He nodded at the sudden fear in her eyes. “Yes. He is called Khain, among other things, and he is a demon. He wants to kill all humans, and the only thing between him and that goal is the shiften.”
She shrunk back against the bed, a sudden chill making her shiver.
“Come,” he said, pulling her onto the bed, stripping the covers and laying her underneath them, then crossing the room to close the door and return to her.
He lay next to her and stared into her eyes. “You don’t have to be scared. I’m here. My brothers are here. We would tear him apart. He operates mostly through sickness and subterfuge and scorched earth tactics. He is powerful, but so are we. He is sneaky, but we are united.”
Ella’s shaking intensified. The wolven seemed like a great secret, one that warmed her from the inside out, but the fact that they were fighting a demon no one even knew about scared her more than she could put into words. “No one knows?”
Trevor put his arms around her and pulled her close to him under the blankets. “No humans know. We work very hard to keep it that way, so they can feel safe.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Let me ask you a question first.”
She nodded slightly.
“How did you know Trent and Troy were my brothers?”
“I could hear you.” She touched her forehead. “Talking inside my head. You said absolutely not, she’s naked and then someone else said we’ve seen her, why are you shifted? And you said you would kill them if they saw me again and that same voice said kill your brothers, nice, but very sarcastically and almost like he thought it was funny. And then a different voice said listen to him.”
Trevor grinned so wide she almost swooned at how handsome he was. “That was Trent who said listen to him, and Troy the other times.”
“Why are you smiling?”
Trevor sat up in bed, energy coming off of him in waves. “Don’t you see? You can’t possibly be a human. You have to be at least part-shifter, or maybe more, or else you wouldn’t be able to hear our messages to each other. Have you heard us from the very beginning?”
Ella held a hand to her head and tried to remember. “I-I’m not sure. I think I could, but it was fainter then, like I’ve gotten better at it, or stopped fighting it.”
Trevor flipped around and knelt over her, kissing her lightly, making her feel lightheaded. “Don’t fight it. I think it means something.”
“Means something? You really think I could be part shifter?”
He nodded. “Shiften. I do. You would be wolfen.”
“What other kinds of shiften are there?”
His eyes shone. “Bearen, they are the firefighters. And felen. They work by themselves usually. Mercenaries, or doctors sometimes. They also track Khain and do a few other things.”
“Felons?”
“No, felen. F-e-l-e-n.” Big cats, like pumas or mountain lions.”
Ella felt her toes go cold again. “How do you know I’m not one of them?”
Trevor laughed, throwing his head back, then he came forward again and kissed her on the end of her nose. “You can’t be, I wouldn’t be attracted to you if you were.”
“So you can tell I’m part wolf? Smell it or something?”
He frowned. “No, I can’t. But if that part of you is less than half, it’s possible it’s so little I wouldn’t be able to smell it. If it was your grandpa, or your great-grandpa who was the shiften.”
Ella tried to think about her family, but her thoughts were scrambled. Too much information, too fast. She wouldn’t believe any of it if she couldn’t still see Trevor shifting in her mind.
Trevor stared at the wall and bit his lip as if he were trying hard to make a decision. He looked at her. “There’s something else you might be.”
“What?”
He dropped his head onto the pillow next to her and stared hard at her. “I hesitate to even tell you this, but I’m going to need to have someone touch you tomorrow, tell me for sure, and I want you to be ready for it.”
“Touch me?”
Trevor sat up again, like the energy in his body was just too much for him to handle. “I’m not sure if him touching you will tell us anything, but we have to try.” He knelt and stared intensely at her. “This is all new to us. We are operating without a map, without a guidebook, and all we have to go on is a twenty-five-year-old prophecy.”
A prophecy. Again, that sensation of being swallowed into a book rocked her, making her close her eyes. “Prophecy?”
“I have it memorized. We can double check it later, but this is it.”
He sat up straight and his eyes went blank, almost scaring her. His voice fell flat, so just the words were conveyed.
In twenty-five years, half-angel, half-human mates will be discovered living among you.
This is how you will rebuild.
Warriors, all, with names like flora.
Save them from themselves, for they will not know their foreordination.
They will not be bound by shiften law, but their destinies entwine so strongly with their fated mates, that any not mated by their 30th year will be moonstruck. Those who are lost may be dangerous.
A pledged female will have free will that shiften know not. Never forget this or it will cause grave trouble.
Her body may respond to any, until she is mated in a ceremony of her choosing, then she will acknowledge only one male, as he becomes her one true mate, and she, his one true mate. He shall be sworn to her in her life’s purpose, to rebuild the shiften race, so that they may fight the evil Matchitehew and protect the humans from him, until the day he draws his last breath.
Ella held her breath, the words washing over her with meaning she barely understood, pushing away every time she’d ever been teased, ever been rejected by her mother, ever felt like she did not belong in t
his world.
Home.
She was home.
Trevor was her home.
Chapter 29
Boe cowered, breathing shallowly. The air in the Pravus was poison, and although his Father had done something to him to make him be able to live on it, it still hurt him to draw it into his lungs.
Khain The Destroyer, his father, stood in front of him, big arms flexed, powerful hands clenched, awful face tense and angry. “We need more foxen! You have sons and daughters. Call them to me!”
Boe took a deep breath. He was over three hundred years old, but his Father was as old as time, and not to be disobeyed. “Father, I cannot. You must call them yourself. They believe me to be dust.”
Khain paced through the grand palace they lived in, the rounded temples towering over even his head, but his footfalls fell flat and empty in the space, reminding Boe of their lives there. Khain rounded on Boe, his black eyes narrowed, his jagged mouth snarling. “They do not answer. Why would that be?”
Boe tried to make himself as small as possible. “I do not know, father. Maybe the march of time has whittled your connection with them. Perhaps you are still weak from your fight with the angel and they cannot hear you.”
Khain whirled, his expensive suit transforming into black robes, then white robes, then a scarlet red bodysuit. This one scared Boe most of all, as it had no place in any space or time. Khain faced the faded metal enclosure in the middle of the room.
“Or perhaps inbreeding has weakened my line. You know that bitch has a power to draw shiften to her that I could never pull off. Maybe all my sons and daughters have flocked to her.”
Boe said nothing. He would not remind Father that all the daughters were gone, female foxen along with the rest of the shiften. Only males remained.
Ah, but maybe that would cheer Father up. “Father, if you could just wait another fifty years, the shiften will have all begun to grow old and crumble, exactly the way you planned it. There is no need for you to try so hard. The females are gone. The shiften are dying.”
Khain crossed the room with eerie speed, speed that made Boe slightly sick to his stomach. He snatched Boe up by the scruff of his neck and screamed into his face. “Do you not recall the Promised? If even one of them is found, the shiften can rebuild. No one knows how many young the progeny of an angel can have, or how short their gestation! Or what the childhood of a half-shiften, part-angel will look like! We could be facing a new shiften army with powers we’ve never dreamed of in only a few short years.”
Boe nodded his head. His memory was failing him in his old age. He should have died a century ago, but Father kept him alive, somehow. He was ready for the comforting draw of The Light, as even foxen were allowed to retire there, and his mind was trying to beat him there. “Then consume the angel, Father. Consume the angel and take the energy he gives you.”
Khain dropped Boe to the floor, where he landed smartly on hands and feet. “There is nothing in the signs about consuming an angel. True, it will give me energy, but I cannot do it until I’ve mated with at least one Promised, to continue moving the signs forward towards our end goal. That is why I need another Foxen.”
Boe shook, and tried to work out in his mind what should be done. “What about the first Promised? You know where she is.”
Khain turned and shot a stream of fire from his hand out one of the windows, not starting a fire, but putting one out. One that was creeping too close to their home. He paced around the long white balcony that circled the special metal enclosure in the middle of the circular floor. He looked out the windows, shooting fire seemingly randomly, then pausing to walk in close and knock on the enclosure. Boe watched him, thinking him agitated, but then wondering if maybe he was scared of something. Boe had never known his father to be scared of anything, not even his nemesis. Finally Khain spoke and his voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I do not believe I can get to her. She evaded me twice and I know she is with the wolven now. I probably led them right to her.” He clenched his hands into his palms and Boe saw living blood spill to the floor and seek a body. He scrambled backwards.
“You are right then, Sire, we must find another Promised. Let me go into the Ula, I will get you a foxen.”
Khain fixed him with a stare and Boe knew he was going nowhere. “I want the first Promised. The best Promised. The one who is to be queen. Taking her would destroy the shiften as surely as the vahiy will.”
Boe turned the idea over in his mind. “Is there no way to get her away from the wolven? No way to control her? Humans have strong bonds to their families, father, and I’m sure half-humans are no different.”
Khain stared at him and Boe gathered himself to run. No matter how sure the punishment, he could not stay his instincts to try to escape it.
But Khain was not mad. He did not smile, but his dark hair lifted off his head at the ends and he floated above the floor, flying almost to the ceiling in elation.
“I need another foxen,” he growled, and then he disappeared from sight.
Boe sighed and started into his room. Things would be quiet for a while.
He hoped.
Chapter 30
Trevor stared at Ella on the pillow next to him, admiring her quiet, relaxed form and the curve her hip made under the sheet. He felt his cock jump and he averted his eyes quickly. This was not the time. But then she reached forward and touched him lightly, her eyes still closed, her hands feeling their way to his center.
She touched him, stroked him, made him hard, but spoke softly, her words ignoring her hands. “Why do you need these one true mates? Aren’t there female shiften?”
Trevor bucked his hips forward, not wanting her to stop, but unwilling to not answer her. “There were. Khain killed them twenty-eight years ago.”
She did stop the bliss she was giving him with her hands then, opening her eyes in alarm to stare at him. “All of them?”
“Yes,” he said softly.
Her eyes drifted closed again and she continued to stroke him, almost thoughtfully. “You believe I am one of them? The mates?”
He bit his lip in an effort to be able to continue to talk to her while she was touching him. “You could be. You’re the right age. There’s something between us that I can’t deny. But you aren’t named after a plant and you know who your father is, so unless─”
“If I’m one of these mates, am I your mate, meant for you alone?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, the thought that she might not be making him dizzy with fear for the first time since the war camps. She had to be his and his alone. “We don’t know how it works since we haven’t found any yet.”
She opened her eyes again. “None?”
He shook his head, holding his lower lip between his teeth as her palms drug against his sensitive flesh, taking him somewhere good.
She threw her leg over his hip and quietly pushed his cock inside her core, making him gasp and shudder. She felt so good, so right, like she had been made just for him. “My first name is Fern,” she said quietly, her eyes still closed, as she pressed herself onto him. “My mother always hated it and I knew that, so I thought if I made her call me something else she would hate me less. I wouldn’t answer to Fern, even if they spanked me, so finally, they agreed to call me Ella, which is from my middle name, Gabriela.”
Trevor’s normally iron stomach fluttered and his pulse raised. He thrust into his mate, the only mate he wanted, feeling the strong connection between them solidify, become steel.
She opened her eyes halfway and peeked at him. “Sorry.” He tried to tell her not to say that but she rushed on. “I lied to you. I didn’t know my father. I don’t look like him. I don’t think my own mother even knew who he was. In fact, my sister used to tell me that all the time, that I didn’t even have a daddy. She didn’t have one either, but at least she had a picture. I didn’t even have that.”
Ella closed her eyes again and Trevor pulled her close to him, slowing his thrusts for just a
moment and doing his best to kiss her sadness away, then flipping her around, his stomach to her back, and doing his best to distract her from everything that was piled atop her at that moment.
No matter what happened, no matter what Wade told him in the morning, she was his mate, if she would have him.
Chapter 31
Ella woke to the sound of someone’s phone buzzing. Trevor’s. He was already out of the bed and typing away on it. She pulled herself into a sitting position, noting how sore her lower body was. She’d only had sex one other time in her life, a hurry-up-and-get-rid-of-it bid to lose her virginity that she’d never regretted, but always knew had been lacking. Trevor had made her feel every inch of what she had been missing, making her come until her body gave up.
She watched his strong, lean, muscular body move as he paced across the floor, wondering if she dared try to entice him back to bed.
He turned to her. “That’s Wade. He wants us in his office in thirty minutes.”
Ella felt a ripple of fear go up her spine. What if she was tested by Wade, and found lacking? Would Trevor leave her?
She pushed the thought to the side and stood, pulling clothes out of the dresser. “Do we have time for breakfast?” Her eyes went wide. “Oh no, the dogs, we didn’t let them out last night or anything. And all they have to drink from is the water in the cat bowl.”
Trevor chuckled. “Wolves. Don’t worry about them, they’re very resourceful.”
Ella pulled her clothes on quickly. “Wolves? So they are shifters too? Why don’t they ever shift?”
“Shiften,” he said automatically and he looked at the floor.
Ella stepped to him quickly, running her hands up his arms. “What? What’s wrong.”
“They can’t shift. My fault, actually.”
Ella peered up into his face. “How could it possibly be your fault?”
He didn’t speak for a moment, then pushed the story out in a rush. “We were all part of the same litter. Trevor, Troy, me, and our sister Treena. Treena and I were conjoined at the back. It was a big deal for a couple of reasons, one of them being because only one of us could live. We shared certain parts of our circulatory system that one of us had to get most of and the other would almost certainly die during the surgery to separate us, so they had to choose which one. And to make matters worse, there was a prophecy spoken the day we were born that made our parents believe that one of us would be the one to kill Khain, so not only did they have to decide which one of us would live, they had to choose the right one, or the entire race would suffer.”