by R. E. Butler
“Capture.” It was the lesser of two evils, but not by much.
Several females nodded, and a discussion began. Layla got up and joined Jilly. “Are you unwell, Jillian?”
She hated being called Jillian. “I’m just tired.”
Layla looked at her calmly but suspiciously. “You have not been sleeping well, and you’ve been distracted. Are you feeling a craving for a male?”
Her mind blanked. “What?”
“Sex. You haven’t taken a male since you first shifted at sixteen. There are humans in town who will service you if you have cravings for sex.”
Her stomach tumbled over at the thought of anyone but Fate and Wyked touching her. “I’ll think about it. I just want to go lie down for a while.”
“If you decide you need sex, I’ll have Hannah make the arrangements.”
Jilly nodded and walked out of the front room and to the bedroom she shared with two of the younger females, Claire and Penny.
Instead of changing for bed, she stuffed clothes into her backpack, grabbed her cell and keys, and then stuffed pillows under the blanket on her bed to make it look as though she was sleeping. Opening the window of her first-floor bedroom, she climbed out, walking quickly to her car that was parked on the street in front of the house. She didn’t care if the females found out she was gone. She had no plans to return.
* * * * *
Fate stared into the fire that crackled in the stone-lined pit outside the camper. Wyked was pacing again. Fate had already paced a path around their campsite until his legs ached and his lungs burned. Utterly numb, he was now simply staring into the flames and listening to the crackle of the fire as it licked the wood and destroyed it.
It had been a hell of a long day, and now his cat was going crazy in his head. Prowling and yowling. He wanted to jam sticks into his ears and poke the fucker to shut him up. But he had a feeling that his cat wouldn’t be happy until Jilly was with them. And when he finally did see her again, he would ask her how she’d managed to stay away from them for so long, because he was a basket case.
A twig snapped and he straightened as Wyked spun on his heels. With a soft snarl, Wyked darted off into the darkness and Fate frowned, watching him disappear.
What. The. Fuck?
Then his cat purred and a sweet scent filled the air as Wyked stormed back into the campsite with a sobbing Jilly in his arms.
“Are you hurt?” Fate demanded as he joined them, putting his hands on her arm, desperate for any contact.
She lifted her head from Wyked’s shoulder and hooked her arm around Fate’s neck. “Not now. I was hurting so bad before. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She sobbed and pulled him closer.
Wyked’s voice was deceptively calm as he spoke, “You’re here now, little kitten. That’s all that matters.”
* * * * *
Jilly felt as though she’d died and gone to heaven as Wyked and Fate held her between them. All the twirling emotions settled down inside her, and she could breathe deeply for the first time in a week.
Wyked carried her into what turned out to be their parents’ camper and set her down on a couch. He and Fate sat on either side of her, squeezing close, and both holding one of her hands. Before she’d met them, she would have been scratching and screaming to get away from two males touching her so intimately, but it felt right and she didn’t want to be anywhere but right there between them.
Dionne came out of a back room tying her robe closed. “Jilly! Are you alright?”
“I wasn’t. But I think I am now.”
“Good, honey,” Dionne said. She smiled as her husband Dag joined them.
“You came back,” Dag said.
“I feel like I didn’t have a choice. Being away from Wyked and Fate was making me insane. Now that I’m here, I can’t believe how long I waited. I feel so foolish.”
Wyked’s voice cracked. “Why did you run, kitten?”
She squeezed their hands tightly and told them what she’d been feeling. Terrified of the new emotions. The old memories. The lies upon lies that the females had told her. She really didn’t know what to believe at first, choosing to think of the instant attraction as an anomaly. But each day was worse than the one before, until she couldn’t go five minutes without thinking of them.
“We wanted to come find you, but the blood-sharing seemed so weak,” Fate said.
“Was that my fault? I was denying this.”
“Probably,” Dag said, sitting down in a kitchen chair that he pulled in front of the couch. “But don’t worry. We know what your history is and we understand why you acted the way you did.”
“You do? Because I still don’t really understand. I just knew that I had to come here. Female lions don’t have mates and don’t form family bonds, but all of that feels like lies to me. I couldn’t stop from coming back. Now that I’m here, I’m sorry I left in the first place.”
Dionne sat down in another chair next to Dag. “Hanai is on his way with his books. He’ll help explain things, sweetheart.”
Happiness flooded Jilly as she sat between her mates. They both watched her with a mixture of relief and worry, their hands holding onto hers tightly. She hoped they weren’t worried she was going to take off again, because she had no intention of leaving their sides.
Dag stood and opened the door before Hanai even knocked, and their uncle stepped into the trailer with an armful of books. Dionne and Dag took some of the books and laid them on a long coffee table in front of the couch, and then Dag pulled another chair over for Hanai.
“It’s nice to see you again. Did the tea help your headache?”
Jilly nodded. The packet he had given her when she left on Monday contained tea leaves, and she used the tea when she got home. It eased some of the ache in her head, but hadn’t done anything for the lump in her throat or the tightness around her heart that leaving her mates had done to her.
Mates. Thinking the word — allowing herself to think it and accept it — was so freeing.
Hanai said, “I’m the clan historian. History is my passion, but not human history. I prefer to learn all that I can about the history of shifters. My trailer is full of books I’ve collected over the years. Do you know anything about panthers, Jilly?”
She shook her head.
He smiled. “Panthers are nomads. We form a clan of mostly family groups and travel as we please. Down south for the winter and north for the summer. From one coast to the other, from Canada down to Mexico. The only reason we stop in any one place for an extended period of time is if one of our clan members finds his or her mate. The male or female clan member can choose to stay with the mate after they bond and begin a new clan, or the mate can join our clan. Fate and Wyked have been acting strange since we crossed into Pennsylvania some time ago. It wasn’t until we arrived here that we began to understand they had found a connection to you because we are fairly close to where you live.”
Fate, who had turned slightly so he could look at her, touched her jaw with his fingers. The contact made her shiver. “We would have found you eventually, Jilly. Our kind are hard-wired to naturally gravitate to their mates. Even though we weren’t in charge of the direction the clan traveled, we did suggest coming to the mountains this summer. I think that was our nature wanting us to be close enough to find you.”
She smiled at him. “I don’t care how you got here. I only care that you’re here now and I’m here, too.” Her smile slipped some. “I just don’t understand why we’re mates, though. I was always told that female lions never mated because it was against our ways. That the male lions were meant only for protection and procreation and to raise the next generation. The females were meant to be carriers of the future generations, but always separate from the males, never together in a family unit.”
Fate and Wyked made her want to form a family. Something she hadn’t wanted before.
Hanai nodded solemnly and picked up one of the books from the coffee table. “I think I can explain about yo
ur people, Jilly.” He opened the large, leather-bound book and turned the pages. “When you left on Monday, I went straight to my library to find every book referencing mountain lions that I could. Your kind are fairly unique in the shifter world, Jilly, with males and females who do not form family groups or ever mate together.”
Hanai turned the book around and handed it across the table to her. Because Fate and Wyked wouldn’t let her hands go, they both grabbed the book with their free hands and set it on her lap.
The book felt like it was made of stone and was big enough to cover her entire lap. The pages were yellowed with age. Hanai handed other books to Dionne and Dag and instructed them to find the information about the mountain lions contained within. Wyked tapped the page with his index finger. She glanced at him and he said, “Read, little kitten. It’s important.”
She turned her attention to the book on her lap and began to read.
The goddess of furred beasts, Rhesa the Kind, loved her creations to the depths of her heart. Her home was not in the heavens with the other gods and goddesses, but on Earth where she could spend time with her creations. Lonely, with no other gods or goddesses to speak with, she chose to instill humanity into the mountain lions, gifting them with beauty and compassion and the ability to change form. Her new creations could shape-shift at will, from their human forms to their beast forms, and they worshipped her and loved her, and she loved them.
But all was not well. The female mountain lions grew jealous of the adoration that the males bestowed on the goddess. The jealousy festered and grew, until they rose up together and entreated the human followers of Rhesa to rise up against her and cast her back into the heavens to leave the males alone. But the humans, instead of helping the females, told Rhesa what her females were attempting to do. Rhesa was filled with anger that the females believed she was trying to steal their mates, distraught to learn that the females accused her of vile, disgusting acts with the male lions.
In her rage, she cursed the female mountain lions to forever be blinded to the males of their species. To never know love. To never know their children. To never again form family bonds and live in happiness.
The males begged the goddess for mercy on behalf of their mates, and the goddess, in her wisdom, promised a way for the males to reclaim their mates and make their families whole. The females could be changed back into their natural, loving forms by the sharing of blood through marking. Only a truemate could change his mate into her natural, compassionate form, and the female must desire the marking or she would remain unchanged.
The goddess then changed the claws of the females, tipping them with poison that would hide their true, compassionate nature until it was revealed through blood sharing with a truemate. The generations would be told that any females not cut by the claws of the adult females would be killed, and her blood would be on the heads of the females.
Jilly stared at the last word on the yellowed page, her vision blurring as tears filled her eyes. Wyked and Fate leaned closer, surrounding her, and she struggled to regain her composure. Looking up at their uncle, she said, “I don’t…I don’t understand.”
He blinked slowly, his green eyes filled with so much wisdom she could almost feel the weight of the knowledge he carried in his mind. “I believe, Jilly, that the reason the females of your kind are the way they are is because of an ancient curse.”
“A curse? Gods? Goddesses? Isn’t that stuff just mythology and stories?” She didn’t want to believe in what she’d just read, but she couldn’t deny how right it sounded.
Hanai raised a dark brow. “There is truth in old stories. And the book you hold is very old and a trusted resource.”
Fate stroked his thumb on the top of her hand. “It makes sense, though.”
“Really?” She looked at him.
“Sure. You said that you felt drawn to us immediately even though it went against everything that you’d been taught — not to mix the species, not to want to mate — and you ignored all of that for us when you came back.”
She’d felt as if a veil had been clouding her vision her whole life once Wyked and Fate shared blood with her when they kissed the first time. The veil was gone now, and she had free access to her memories, her life before she left to live with the females, and her emotions that had lain untapped for so long. She frowned. “You didn’t ask me if I wanted to share blood with you. Both of you nicked me when we kissed.”
Hanai said, “It doesn’t say a female had to verbally say yes to mating, only that she had to desire it. According to the boys, they could tell that you wanted them, could feel the connection to your beast even before you understood what it meant. Panthers have very keen senses when it comes to their mates. Almost telepathic.”
Wyked kissed her shoulder. “It’s true. I can tell that you’re really confused.”
Fate reached behind her and smacked Wyked in the back of the head. “Brilliant.”
Jilly giggled. “I am confused, though. How come I’m the only female this is happening to?”
“You want to know why no other females have been mated?” Dag asked.
She nodded.
“Maybe they haven’t found their mates,” Dionne answered.
Hanai agreed. “I think the males are too soft from what I’ve read. They wouldn’t be aggressive like Wyked and Fate were, feeling your desire instead of waiting for you to say it out loud.”
“So even if there were truemates among the pride members, the males aren’t aggressive enough to do anything about it, so things kept going as they did until the pride exploded because the males found truemates in other species,” Jilly said.
Hanai and Dag nodded.
She looked at her twined hands and jerked them free suddenly.
“What’s wrong?” Fate asked.
“It said the females’ claws were tipped with poison. What if it’s on my hands?”
Hanai shook his head and picked up another book from the table. He carefully turned the pages, clearly searching for something. “Here, this is a poem about the curse.” He turned the book towards Jilly and she took it.
“A poem?” she asked.
Hanai shrugged. “People had more time on their hands centuries ago, and poets and songwriters were not uncommon.”
She touched the page with the edge of her finger. “Why don’t my people have these books? Why don’t we know about the curse?”
Dag exhaled slowly and frowned. “I don’t know the answer to that, Jilly. If I’m speculating, then I think that it’s because the females don’t view what they do — the marking — as anything but tradition. They’re blinded to the marking being the cause for the gradual change of the females from loving to callous.”
She turned her attention down to the book in front of her and read out loud:
As punishment for your jealousy, love you’ll know nevermore
To carry on this legacy, or deaths you’ll have to answer for.
Three by three to seal their fate, the hatred of all your males,
Only finding one’s Truemate, will thus remove the veils.
As she finished speaking, the room fell silent for several moments. Then Hanai asked, “Do you remember being marked three separate times?”
She let go of Wyked’s hand and lifted her arm. On the inside of her arm were tiny scars that resembled freckles. “Until I kissed Wyked and Fate, I never thought about these at all, but it’s like parts of my past had been locked up in my mind.”
“It’s probably the poison that shielded you from remembering. If you went right to your dad as a youngster and told him that you had been hurt by three females, he would have known that something strange was going on,” Dionne said.
If she’d remembered that she’d been marked the first time for certain she would have told her dad that they’d hurt her. She could see it so clearly now. How the females lured her away from her class in the park. Before, when her memory was clouded, she remembered that some time had passed but she didn’t
remember what had happened.
Several years later, she was called into the school office and taken into the nurse’s room where three different females from the ones who had first marked her were waiting. The nurse accepted an envelope from one female, what Jilly now suspected was a bribe, and left her alone with them. They marked her, their hands shifting into claws and sinking into her upper arms where her other scars were. She’d felt sluggish, her vision going dim as they held onto her with their claws and told her that she was turning into a perfect female and would soon join them. Like before, she had not remembered who they were at the time or what had happened.
The last marking had been just before she turned sixteen, when she was walking home from school. She’d almost hated her father at that point, but she’d always felt torn about it, as if it wasn’t the right way to feel.
“Things began to change after the first time the females hurt me.”
“How so?” Dag asked.
“I started to resent my dad and my younger brother. I didn’t want to be around my brother or hug my dad.” Tears started to fill her eyes again as she remembered how hard her dad tried to keep her with him. How he struggled to show her love and compassion in the face of what was clearly some kind of supernatural curse.
Hanai said that the females had poisoned her, but they most likely didn’t know why they did it. “Likely, they’re so steeped in tradition that it never occurred to them to question why they do it, only that it must be done.”
One by one, Dionne, Dag, and Hanai shared with her what they had learned about mountain lions from the various books in Hanai’s library. She didn’t understand how her people could be turned so inside-out with a curse from an ancient goddess, but she could not deny that she was different now.
“It’s late,” Dionne said, covering her mouth as she yawned. “Jilly, although you are not mated officially to our sons, you are welcome to share their bed tonight, but only for sleeping.”
She blushed sharply.
Dionne tut-tutted. “Don’t be embarrassed. They’ll explain our mating practices to you, and if you have any questions, we can talk privately tomorrow.” She came around the table and kissed Wyked, Fate, and her on their cheeks.